The Wolf Age (33 page)

When the song ended, the First Wolf nominated her intended, Rokhlenu, as gnyrrand to carry the pack's green-and-gold banner to the city, in war and peace. There was no need for a formal vote; the nomination passed with howling acclamations, and Rokhlenu leapt up on the rostrum next to his intended, the outlier pack's first candidate to the city government.

Wuinlendhono proposed that they elect four more candidates: five was a magic number; five was the number of limbs every person possessed (two legs, two arms, and a tail); five would be the number of treaty packs if they were successful.

The motion carried nearly as readily as Rokhlenu's election, and they spent much of the remaining night proposing and debating various nominees.

A water snake with bright wise eyes was listening to it all through the floorboards of the marketplace.

He noted the manifestation of a many-legged spidery form with a woman's face.

"Death," he signified, acknowledging his colleague.

"Wisdom," signified the other.

"Is this part of your mysterious plan?" the snake wondered.

"I am done with plans," Death signified. "Now we ride the torrent to the end that awaits all things-as we ever did, no matter what your visualizations tell you."

"Everything that has a beginning has an end," Wisdom acknowledged. "But there is a time before the end that matters."

"No. Only the end matters."

Wisdom uttered a talic distortion as intense as he was capable of. he rejected her premise.

Death was amused. "You should be careful, Wisdom. Ulugarriu is somewhere nearby. You may reveal your own presence."

"Do you sense that Ulugarriu is here?"

"Imprecisely. My visualization implies that Ulugarriu will at least monitor these events somehow. But the werewolf can mask itself from my direct perception, and my visualizations cannot fully comprehend it."

"Nor mine. I don't see why."

"If you did, your visualization would comprehend it. There is another thing my visualization does not comprehend-perhaps yours does."

"What?"

"There is a bond between those two werewolves-the leaders. I forget their names."

"Love could explain it to you, perhaps," Wisdom signified, referring to the Strange God of that name. "I don't fully understand it either," he continued. "It troubles my visualizations-it is neither in my scope of being, nor can exist without it."

"I feel the same way," Death mused. "Unfortunately, Love does not readily signify to me, anymore. Our presences intermingle confusingly when we manifest in adjoining space-time."

"We have grown too deeply into our divine natures, perhaps," Wisdom mused. "Do you ever regret undertaking apotheosis?" he asked impulsively. "I sometimes wish I had waited a while longer, lived as a man a while longer."

"I do not regret," Death said slowly. "I do not remember. I do not wait. They are inconsistent with my godhood."

They weren't inconsistent with Wisdom, and he indicated so with a talic distortion, the symbolic equivalent of a sigh. But she had already ceased to manifest herself.

Wisdom was left behind troubled in the wake of Death, as usual. He spent some time observing Death's random factor in this nexus, the man named Morlock.

Morlock was not interested in the jubilation or debate of the tumultuous political meeting of the werewolves. He was not paying any attention to it at all. He sat folding strange shapes and setting them adrift in the dark waters of his mind. Those waters were dark to Wisdom, anyway: his visualization could not embrace them. They savored to him of death, of love, of hate, of loyalty, of grief, and other gods and phenomena that Wisdom could not even name.

Wisdom considered this locus of space-time, which both he and Death had come to observe. There was noise. There was howling. There were hopes and fears and anger. There was a man dreaming of bright things with a dark mind. Somewhere, felt but not seen, was the presence of the werewolf maker, Ulugarriu.

Was this locus really part of the god-destroying torrent that Death had signified of and seemed to welcome? He did not know. And he wanted to know.

It is the nature of wisdom to be aware of its limits and always struggle against them. The god Wisdom necessarily shared this nature. He took hold of space-time and twisted it around himself, directing his manifestation far away, toward the end of the world.

The moment after the wise-eyed snake disappeared, the water where he had been manifest was caught up in a net woven of glass, light and certain heretical opinions.

"May ghosts gnaw on the scaly cunning tail-without-a-body!" Ulugarriu spluttered, surfacing in the dark water, still wearing the day shape. "I missed him!"

The werewolf maker looked ruefully at the empty dripping net that had been woven to catch a god-then grinned a narrow, long wolvish grin, not wholly displeased, not wholly hostile. Ulugarriu liked a cunning opponent, and for that reason, if for no other, was a happy werewolf these nights.

his is the way the world ends: a wrinkled lip of blue stone protruding against an unending bitter void. That's the northern end, anyway.

Wisdom was tired of being a snake and wove a new manifestation of himself: a skeletal machine with shining crystalline spikes for eyes. It appeared between one instant and another atop the wreckage that had once been the anchor for the Soul Bridge, spanning the gap between this world-Wisdom's world, the only world in which he was allowed to be Wisdom-and another world entirely.

His presence occurred there on a morning when/where he visualized Death would be otherwise occupied.

The northern landscape was a marshy yellow wasteland, scattered with the decaying corpses of frost behemoths and ice jackals and other beasts who could only thrive in the bitter cold of the world's northern edge. But now the cold was gone, even in high winter, and the animals were dead, except for those that could burrow underground to find deep-hidden layers of frost and estivate there through the long deadly thaw.

The Strange Gods had killed this place, or their weapon against the werewolves had, creating the cruelly warm weather that devastated the oncethriving north. Wisdom had killed it, in a way. He hated that.

Death had brought the weapon to the Strange Gods; Death and her allies (especially Stupidity) had persuaded them to unleash it, binding themselves not to interfere with its course. Ulugarriu had foiled the weapon so far; the war between the gods and the werewolves was a long grinding stalemate. And now Death had escaped from the pact she herself had proposed, leaving the rest of the Strange Gods captive in it-and again Stupidity had been her ally. Now Death was excited, afraid, busy. She was up to something, and Wisdom (also afraid) needed to know what.

That was the need that brought him here. Wisdom's visualizations did not embrace where or how Death had acquired the instrument that was poisoning the north with heat. One possible explanation was that the instrument itself was not of the world, but from outside it.

As Wisdom stood on the anchor of the long-shattered Soul Bridge, he felt an alien presence. A set of unfamiliar symbols impressed themselves on his awareness.

He sensed nothing via his manifestation, nor was this part of his visualization. Somehow, this alien presence was speaking directly to his awareness.

It was what he had hoped for. He patiently signified a nonrandom pattern.

A new set of symbols impressed itself on him.

He signified a nonrandom pattern that followed logically from the previous one.

Time passed as Wisdom and the stranger exchanged symbologies: days, bright calls and dark calls, a month.

In the end he could not only understand the stranger but see it: it had acquired a fine layer of grit and moisture over its presence in the world. Wisdom detected a degree of increasing materiality, also, although he did not signal this to his conversational partner; he guessed it would consider the remark impolite.

Finally, Wisdom was able to ask, "Why are you here? We thought the Soul Bridge had been severed."

The response: "Why is not how. How: the Soul Bridge has been severed, but is not the only way to traverse the gulf. The-one-you-would-call-I will not discuss this further."

"And the why?"

"The implicature of events suggested to the-ones-you-would-call-us that a single instrument would be insufficient for your purposes. Do you wish another?"

"And will you-?"

"The-ones-you-would-call-us-"

"I not only would; I do. Will you supply another instrument?"

"If you require it."

"Why?"

"It furthers the interests of those-you-would-call-us."

"You have interests?" Wisdom wondered.

"Yes."

Wisdom pondered this. The entities on the far side of the broken Soul Bridge were hostile to all life that partook of materiality.

His visualizations were enriched-so much richer now than before. They were darker, though, much darker. He thought of Death and was sad.

"Your structure is elegant indeed," the alien remarked.

"Thank you."

"Innumerable nodes of force concatenate in your being in patterns clearly rational yet difficult to predict in a finite set of dimensions."

"Thank you."

"Yet there is an inelegant cluster of being that seems not to be fully patterned. It changes, but with earthy sluggishness. It is almost organic in its soft inflexibility."

"Thank you."

"If the-one-you-would-call-I understand this thrice-used symbol, you have used it with a slightly different import each time."

"You may well have understood it, then."

"Those-you-would-call-we can integrate the unpatterned to your patterning."

"No."

"It would be more elegant. You would process symbols more efficiently."

"No."

"You should not refuse. Elegance is better than inelegance. Pattern is better than unpattern. Efficiency is better than inefficiency."

"Efficiency cannot be calculated without reference to purpose."

"Conceded."

"Reduction of my unpattern to pattern would be contrary to my purpose. I believe the irregularities you refer to constitute my individual self. Sustaining that self as long as possible is at least one of my purposes."