Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (33 page)

Nothing one at peace in no past all completed no returning.

Point.

One makes possible all.

I see. Buddha, do not leave your student bound.

The eye is shrinking, closing, its gorgeous bloody flare dimming. It is pierced by a white needle visible behind the small dark center.

Small large no matter no time

Do not go. Take us with

Am your father/mother/food

loved raised living longing no return

my own ghost

8

Ry Ornis, the tall insect-thin master, smiled down on him. Olmy saw many of the master opener, like an avatar of an ancient god. All the different masters merged.

They were surrounded by a glassy tent and a slow breeze cooled his face. Ry Ornis had wrapped him in a rescue field where he fell, carrying safe cool air to replenish what his worksuit could no longer provide.

Olmy rediscovered scattered rivers of memory and bathed his ancient feet there. He swallowed once. The eye, the lesion, had shut forever. “It's gone,” he said.

Ry Ornis nodded. “It's done.”

“I can never tell anybody,” Olmy realized out loud.

“You can never tell anybody.”

“We robbed and ate to live. To be born.”

Ry Ornis held his fingers to his lips, his face spectral in a new light from the south. A huge grin was spreading around half the Way, a gorgeous brilliant electric light. “The ring gate. A cirque,” the gate opener said, glancing over his shoulder. “Rasp and Karn, my students, have done well. We've done what we came here to do, and we saved the Way, as well. Not bad, eh, Ser Olmy?”

Olmy reached up to grab the gate opener, perhaps to strangle him. Ry Ornis had moved, however.

Olmy turned away, swallowed a second time against a competing dryness. There had been no need to complete the ring gate. The unfinished cirque had done its job and drained the final wasted remnants of the lesion, forcing a closure.

As they watched, the cirque shrank. The grin became a smile became an all-knowing serene curve, then collapsed to a point, and the point dimmed on distant rippled sands.

“I think the twins are a little disappointed they can't finish the cirque. But it's wonderful,” Ry Ornis enthused, and performed a small dance on the black obsidian of the valley floor. “They are truly masters now! When I am tried and convicted, they will take my place!”

The Way remained. Rolling his head to one side, Olmy could not see the Redoubt.

“Where's the pyramid?” he asked hoarsely.

“Enoch has her wish,” Ry Ornis said, and shaded his eyes with one hand.

Plass, Enoch, the allthing.

Plass had seen her own ghost.

To east and west, the ruined mountains and their statues remained, rejected, discarded. No dream, no hallucination.

He had been used again. No matter. For an endless instant, like any gate opener, only more so, he had merged with the eye of the Buddha.

9

“The Infinite Hexamon Nexus does not approve of risky experiments that cannot be documented or explained. How many were deceived, Master Ry Ornis?”

“All, myself included.”

“Yet you maintain this was done out of necessity?”

“All of it. The utmost necessity.”

“Will this ever be necessary again? Answer honestly; the trust between us has worn very thin!”

“Never again.”

“How do you explain that one universe, one domain, must feed on another in order to be born?”

“I don't. We were compelled. That is all I know.”

“Could it have gone badly?”

“Of course. As it is, in our clumsiness and ignorance, we have condemned all our ancestors to live with unexplainable presences, ghosts of past and future. A kind of afterbirth.”

“You are smiling, Master Gate Opener. This is intolerable!"

“It is all I can do, Sers.”

“For your disobedience and arrogance, what punishment do you choose, Master Ry Ornis?”

“Sers of the Nexus. This I swear. I will put down my clavicle from this time forward, and never know the grace again.”

—Sentencing Phase of Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, “On the Advisability of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order”

Tracting through the weightless forest of the Wald in the rebuilt Axis Nader, reaching out to the trees to push or grab roots and branches, half-flying and half-climbing, in his mind's river-wide eye, Olmy Ap Sennen returned to Lamarckia, where he had once nearly died of old age, and retrieved a package he had left there, tied in neat pieces of mat-paper. His wives and children had kept it safe for him, and now they returned it. There was much smiling and laughter, then saying of farewells, last of all a farewell to his sons, whom he had left behind. Occupants of a different land, another life.

As they faded, in his mind's eye, he opened the package they had given to him and greedily swallowed the wonderful contents.

His soul.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Previously released as BEAR'S FANTASIES

Copyright © 2004 by Greg Bear

Introduction copyright © 2004 by Greg Bear

“Webster” appeared in ALTERNITIES, edited by David Gerrold. Copyright © 1973 by Greg Bear.

“The White Horse Child,” copyright ©; 1979 by Terry Carr for
Universe 9
.

“Richie by the Sea” originally published in
New Terrors 2
, edited by Ramsey Campbell. Copyright © 1980 by Greg Bear.

“Sleepside Story” was originally published by Cheap Street Press in a limited edition in 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Greg Bear.

“Dead Run” appeared in
Omni
. Copyright © 1985 by Greg Bear. • “The Visitation” appeared in
Omni
. Copyright © 1987 by Greg Bear.

“Through Road No Whither” appeared in
Far Frontier
, edited by Jerry Pournelle and Jim Baen. Copyright © 1985 by Greg Bear.

“Petra” copyright © 1981 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. for
Omni
.

“The Way of All Ghosts” copyright © 1999 by Greg Bear. Originally published in
Far Horizons
, edited by Robert Silverberg.

ISBN: 978-1-4976-0777-4

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