Beyond the Farthest Suns (18 page)

“A decoy,” Plass said.

“Worse,” Rasp said. “The gate at the Redoubt is twisting probabilities, sweeping world-lines within the Way to such an extreme … The residue of realities that never were and never could be are being deposited.”

“Murmurs in the Way's sleep, nightmares in our unhistory,” Karn said. For once, the twins seemed completely subdued, even disturbed. “I don't see how we can function if we're incorporated into such a sweep.”

“So what is this?” Olmy asked, pointing to the smears of destroyed highways, cities, bands between the ghosts of gates.

“A bad future,” Karn said. “Maybe what will happen if we fail.”

“But these patterns aren't like human construction,” Plass observed. “No human city planner would lay out such a map. Nor does it match anything we know about the Jarts.”

Olmy looked more closely, frowning in concentration. “If someone else had created the Way,” he said, “maybe this would be their ruins, the rubble of their failure.”

Karn gave a nervous laugh. “Wonderful!” she said. “All we could have hoped for! If we open a gate here, what could possibly happen?”

Plass grabbed Olmy's arm. “Put it in our transmitted record. Tell the Hexamon this part of the Way must be forbidden.
No gates should be opened here, ever!”

“Why not?” Karn said. “Think what could be learned. The new domains!”

“I agree with Ser Plass,” Rasp said. “It's possible there are worse alternatives than finding a universe of pure order.” She let go of her clavicle and grabbed her head. “Even touching our instruments here causes pain. We are useless … any gate we open would consume us more quickly than the gate at the Redoubt! You
must
agree, sister!”

Karn was stubborn. “I don't see it,” she said. “I simply don't. I think this could be very interesting. Fascinating, even.”

Plass sighed. “This is the box that Konrad Korzenowski has opened for us,” she said for Olmy's benefit. “Spoiled genius children drawn to evil like insects to a corpse.”

“I thought evil was related to disorder,” Olmy said.

“Already, you know better,” Plass rejoined.

Rasp turned her eyes on Olmy and Plass, eyes narrow and full of uncomfortable speculation.

Olmy reached out and grasped Rasp's clavicle to keep it from bumping into the flawship bulkheads. Karn took charge of the instrument indignantly and thrust it back at her sister. “You forget your responsibility,” she chided. “We can fear this mission, or we can engage it with joy and spirit,” she said. “Cowering does none of us any good.”

“You're right, sister, about that at least,” Rasp said. She returned her clavicle to its box and straightened her clothing, then used a cloth to wipe her face. “We are, after all, going to a place where we have always gone, and always will go.”

“It's what happens when we get there that is always changing,” Karn said.

Plass's face turned livid with her disagreement. “My husband never returns the same way, in the same condition,” she said. “How many hells does he experience?”

“One for each of him,” Rasp said. “Only one. It is different husbands who return.”

Though there had never been such this far along the Way, Olmy saw the scattered wreckage of Jart fortifications, demolished, dead and empty. Beyond them lay a region where the Way was covered with winding black and red bands of sand, an immense serpentine desert; also unknown.

Olmy felt a spark of something reviving, if not a wish for life, then an appreciation of what extraordinary sights his life had brought him. On Lamarckia, he had seen the most extraordinary variations on biology. Here, near the Redoubt, it was reality itself subject to its own flux, its own denial.

Plass was transfixed. “The next visitors, if any, will see something completely different,” she said. “We've been caught up in a sweeping world-line of the Way, not necessarily our own.”

“I would never have believed it possible,” Rasp said, and Karn reluctantly agreed. “This is not the physics we were taught.”

“It can make any physics it wishes,” Plass said. “Any reality. It has all the energy it needs. And it's captured, analyzed, and transformed any number of human minds, from any number of universes, to teach it our variations.”

“Yet it knows only unity,” Karn said, taking hold of Plass's shoulder.

The older woman did not seem to mind. “It knows no will stronger than its own,” she said. “Yet it may divide its will into illusory units. If it is a mind, and if it is a tyrant …” Plass pointed to the winding sands, stretching for thousands of kilometers beneath them. “This is a moment of calm, of steady concentration. If my memories are correct, if what my husband's returning self … selves … tell me, is correct, it is usually much more frantic. Much more inventive. And much more liberated from any sort of self-control.”

Karn made a sour face and placed her hands on the bars of her clavicle. She rubbed the grips as her face tensed with concentration. “I feel it. There is still a lesion …”

Rasp took hold of her own instrument and went into her own state. “It
is
still there,” she agreed. “And it
is
bad. It floats above the Way, very near the flaw. From below, it must look like some sort of bale star …”

They passed through a fine bluish mist that rose from the northern end of the desert. The flawship made a faint belling sound. The mist passed behind.

“There,” Plass said. “No mistaking it!”

The gate pushed through the Way by Issa Danna had expanded and risen above the floor, just as Rasp and Karn had felt in their instruments. Now, at a distance of a hundred kilometers, they could see the spherical lesion clearly. It did indeed resemble a dark sun—or a chancre. A glow of pigeon's blood flicked around it, the red of rubies and enchantment.

The black center, less than the width of a fingertip at this distance, perversely seemed to fill Olmy's field of vision. His young body decided it was time to be very reluctant to proceed. He swallowed and brought this fear under control, biting his cheek until blood flowed.

The flawship lurched. Its voice told Olmy, “We have received an instructional beacon. There is a place held by humans less than ten kilometers away. They say they will guide us to safety.”

“It's still there!” Plass said.

They all looked down through the flawship's transparent nose, away from the lurid pink of the flaw, through layers of blue and green haze wrapped around the Way—down twenty-five kilometers to a single dark, gleaming steel point in the center of a rough, rolling land.

The Redoubt lay in the shadow of the lesion, surrounded by a penumbral twilight suffused with the flickering ruby of the lesion's halo.

“I can feel the whipping hairs of other world-lines,” Karn and Rasp said together. Olmy glanced back and saw their clavicles touching sphere to sphere. The spheres crackled and clacked. Karn twisted her instrument toward Olmy so that he could see the display. A long list of domain “constants”—pi, Planck's constant, others—varied with a regular humming in the flawship hull. “Nothing is stable out there!”

Olmy glanced at the message sent from the Redoubt. It provided navigation instructions for their flawship's landing craft; how to disengage from the flawship, descend, undergo examination, and be taken into the pyramid. The message concluded, “We will determine whether you are illusions or aberrations. If you are from our origin, we will welcome you. It is too late to return now. Abandon your flawship before it approaches any closer to the allthing. Whoever sent you has committed you to our own endless imprisonment.”

The ghastly light cast a fitful, abbatoir glow on their faces.

“Cheerful enough,” Olmy said.

“We have always gone there,” Rasp said quietly.

“I have to agree,” Plass said. “We have no other place to go.”

They tracted aft to the lander's hatch and climbed into the small, arrowhead-shaped craft. Its interior welcomed them by fitting to their forms, providing couches, instruments, tailored to their bodies. Plass sat beside Olmy in the cockpit, Rasp and Karn directly behind them.

Olmy disengaged from the flawship and locked the lander onto the pyramid's beacon. They dropped from the flawship.

The landscape steadily grew in the broad cockpit window.

Plass's face crumpled like a child's about to break into tears. “Star, fate and pneuma, be kind. There!” She pointed in helpless dread, equally horrified and fascinated “I see the opener's head.”

On a low, broad rise in the shadowed land surrounding the Redoubt, a huge dark head rose like an upright mountain, its skin like gray stone, one eye turned toward the south, the other watching over the territory before the nearest face of the pyramid. This watchful eye was easily a hundred meters wide and glowed a dismal sea green, throwing a long beam through the thick twisted ropes of mist.

Plass's voice became shrill. “Oh Star and Fate …”

The landscape around the Redoubt rippled beneath the swirling rays of rotating world-lines, spreading like hair from the black center of the lesion, changing the land a little with each pass, shifting the bizarre landmarks a few dozen meters this way or that, increasing them in size, reducing them.

Olmy could never have imagined such a place. The Redoubt sat within a child's nightmare of disembodied human limbs, painted over the hills like trees, their fingers grasping and releasing spasmodically.

At the top of one hill stood a kind of castle made of blocks of green glass, with a single huge door and window. Within the door stood a figure—a statue, perhaps—several hundred meters high, vaguely human, nodding its head steadily, idiotically, as the lander passed over. Hundreds of much smaller figures, gigantic nevertheless, milled in a kind of pen before the castle, their red and black shadows flowing like capes in the lee of the constant wind of changing probabilities. Olmy thought they might be huge dogs, or tailless lizards, but Plass pointed and said, “My husband told me about an assistant to Issa Danna named Ram Chako … Forced to run on all fours.”

The giant in the castle door slowly raised its huge hand, and the massive lizards scrambled over each other to pour through an open portal into the castle's central yard. They leaped up as the lander passed overhead, as if they would snap it out of the air with their hideous jaws.

Olmy's head throbbed. He could not bring himself out of a conviction that none of this could be real; indeed, there was no necessity for it to
be
real in any sense his mind or body understood.

For their part, Rasp and Karn had lost all their earlier bravado and clung to each other, their clavicles floating on tethers wrapped around their wrists.

The lurid red glare of the halo flowed like blood into the cabin as the lander rotated to present points of contact for traction fields from the Redoubt. Olmy instructed the ship to present a wide-angle view of the Redoubt and the land, and this view revolved slowly around them, filling the lander's cramped interior.

The perverse variety seemed to never end. Something had dissected not only a human body, or many bodies, and wreaked hideous distortions on its parts, but had done the same with human thoughts and desires, planting the results here and there throughout with no obvious design, like a garden for stupid demons.

Within the low valley—as described by the female visitant—a large blue-skinned woman, the equal of the figure in the doorway of the castle, crouched near a cradle within which churned hundreds of naked humans. She slowly dropped her hand into the cauldron of flesh and stirred, and her hair sprayed out from her head with a sullen cometary glow, casting everything in a syrupy green luminosity.

“Mother of geometries,” Karn muttered, and hid her eyes.

Olmy could not turn away, but everything in him wanted to go to sleep, to
die
, rather than to acknowledge what they were seeing.

Plass saw his distress. Somehow she took strength from the incomprehensible view. “It does not need to make sense,” she said with the tone of a chiding schoolteacher. “It's supported by infinite energy and a monolithic, mindless will. There is nothing new here, nothing—”

“I'm not asking that it make sense,” Olmy said. “I need to know what's behind it.”

“A sufficient force, channeled properly, can create anything a mind can imagine—” Karn began.

“More than any mind will imagine. Not a mind like our minds,” Rasp restated. “A unity, not a
mind
at all.”

For a moment, Olmy's anger lashed and he wanted to shout his frustration, but he took a deep breath and folded his arms where he floated in tracting restraints, and said to Plass, “A mind that has no goals? If there's pure order here—”

Karn broke in, her voice high and sweet, singing. “Think of the dimensions of order. There is mere arrangement, the lowest form of order, without motive or direction. Next comes self-making, when order can convert resources into more of itself, propagating order. Then comes creation, self-making by reshaping matter into something new. But when creation stalls, when there is no mind, just force, it becomes mere elaboration, an endless spiral of rearrangement of what has been created. What do we see down there? Empty elaboration. Nothing new. And certainly no understanding.”

“She shows some wisdom,” Plass acknowledged grudgingly. “But the allthing still must exist.”

“And all this … elaboration?” Olmy asked.

“Spoiled by deathlessness,” Plass said, “by never-ending supplies of resources. Never freshened by the new, at its core. Order without death, art without critic or renewal, the final mind of a universe where only riches exist, only joy is possible, never knowing disappointment.”

The lander shuddered again and again as they dropped toward the pyramid. Its inertial control systems could not cope with the sweeping rays of different world-lines.