The Last Legends of Earth Read online

  The Last Legends of Earth

  A. A. Attanasio

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

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  The Highly Acclaimed Radix Tetrad by A. A. Attansio

  Radix

  In Other Worlds

  Arc of the Dream

  The Last Legends of Earth

  Available at stores and at http://www.PPickings.com

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  The Last Legends of Earth copyright © 1989, 2009 A. A. Attanasio. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-61242-012-7

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-421-7

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  Second Edition

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

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  for those who will be

  ***

  "Of the great things which are to be found among us,

  the Being of Nothingness is the greatest."

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  ***

  Contents

  FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

  TRACTATE OF A TIMEFREE, SPACELIKE DOMAIN

  IF ZERO COULD SHUT ITS MOUTH [1492 DOROR]

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 4000 PRE-DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  COSMOGONY

  AGE OF LIGHT

  URGRUND

  GENITRIX

  LOD AND SAOR

  ZŌTL

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2500 PRE-DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  THE TRYL AGE

  TRACES

  PRIMEVAL WORLDS

  PAGES FROM THE BOOK OF NOTHING

  THE ORACLES

  THE BODY OF LIGHT

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1500 PRE-DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  AGE OF KNIVES

  RAS MENTIS

  CAGE OF FREEDOM

  ECHOES IN THE TIME-WELL

  ORDO VALA

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 500 PRE-DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  THE AGE OF THE CRYSTAL MIND

  THE MAGUS OF CENDRE

  THE MASK IS STRANGE, HOWEVER LIKE

  THE SAGAS

  THE FOUNDATION OF DOROR

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1 DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  IEUANC 751

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 500 DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  AGE OF DOMINION

  FRUIT OF THE STORM-TREE

  THE FUGITIVE LORDS OF HELL

  LORYN

  TORSO BEFORE THE CAVE OF RIDDLES

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1500 DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  THE RUST AGE

  SWORD’S WANDERINGS IN CHALCO

  NIGHT OF TIME

  GLYPH ASTRA (ANNALS OF THE OVERWORLD)

  THE GHOST THAT HATCHED HIS

  HAVOC AS HE FLEW

  DREAM IS THE TRANSPARENCY OF DEATH

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2500 DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  AGE OF PHANTOMS

  IN THE SEVENTH AGE

  FIRE’S COLD THOUGHTS

  GHOST WORLDS

  VALDËMIRAËN

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 3500 DOROR ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  HOME IN THE NIGHTMARE

  ###################

  Foreword to the Second Edition

  Word and world—legends and Earth. The title began there, six words scrawled on a dream pad in high school, developed into a literary theory in college, and shaped around a narrative strategy that has since sustained my way as a writer:

  The word is precise, the world a majestic mystery—and writers straddle the space between.

  In this sense, creative writing is threshold power. The precision of word confronting the mystery of world marks the brink beyond which we need wings.

  But the angels of writers have no wings. They have shoulders, and they put them into budging us toward a tar pit of dreams.

  Stories rise like fumes from that black pit. Writers breathe them in and write them down—or fall into the pit trying. Down there, writing is just a sticky mess.

  Tar is black—but it’s not ink. We wrestle angels to stay out of that pit. When we fall, no one hears our cries. Creative writing is an encounter with huge silence.

  This deeper silence is the imaginary, the not-there. Kafka (in Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and The True Way) says about the art of fiction, “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given.”

  We share a covenant with silence—and as readers and writers, we agree to accomplish the negative. The Last Legends of Earth keeps faith with this covenant, presenting our human drama as an artifact of an alien archeological dig two billion years after our sun has burned out. Chapters span epochs, posing humanity—full of self-importance and energetic explanations—skittering atop silence adroit as a water bug.

  Individual character, culture and human identity flatten before the inexorable change that we call time. Sun and moon, calipers of eternity, measure out our days and months. Looking back over eons of evolution, recognizing that an astonishing 99% of species that formerly existed are extinct, all existence feels like negligence. The Last Legends of Earth matches this obliterating reality to the destruction and salvation we find inside ourselves.

  We evolved to manipulate the facticity of the world. Yet, the word goes beyond human possibilities. Reader and writer come together to accomplish the negative, to occupy an alternative to the present. In this threshold instant called reading, we bridge the gap of now and never. The neverness of fiction, what never happened, happens now.

  A. A. Attanasio

  Kohelepelepe, Hawai’i

  2008

  The Last Legends of Earth

  Tractate of a Timefree, Spacelike Domain

  Originally titled simply Utility Manual, The Book of Horizons, popularly known as the Glyph Astra, received its vulgar title from references to the “star carvings” (Greek: astron, glyphe) allegedly revealed to the Strong Mother in kakta trance. These “carvings” in actuality offer eidetic images of probability patterns in the Overworld, that timefree, spacelike domain inside lynks (hypertubes). The Book of Horizons exists to orient people to the complexities of the Overworld—but first, the people must find themselves within the worlds. The anonymous tractate that opens Utility Manual is meant to place us among the horizons not only of the worlds but of the Overworld. It can be found in most early editions from the Age of Knives and is traditionally assumed to have been written by the Strong Mother herself.

  *

  This chapter is for those people who remember Earth. The first thing you have to know is that your memories a
re real. Your certainty that you have lived before in a very different place than where you are now is not a delusion.

  Earth actually did exist, long ago. The swirl of stars that fills the night sky is the galaxy where we lived. Remember the Sun? It was a star in that galaxy. Two billion years ago, it died and incinerated the Earth. This happened long after human life had become extinct. The Sun’s convulsive death cast the hot debris of the Earth into the void’s cold darkness, where it drifted, mixing with the gas clouds of space.

  A few thousand years ago, an intelligent being from a reality we had never suspected found our dust. For its own alien purposes and by its own strange science, that intelligent being read in our dust the cryptarch of our lives (the fossilized DNA sealed in pebbles of the shattered Earth by the heat of the exploding Sun). From our cryptarch, the alien created us again. And not just our bodies. You remember Earth, because this alien intelligence retrieved your consciousness from the vacuum, where the wavepattern of light emitted by your brain had been expanding at the speed of light since you died.

  The alien that regenerated you is not God, nor even a god. The experience of being reborn in adult form out of the ground, cauled in a birthsack that grew with us in the loam, seems miraculous—but only until you understand that this has been accomplished with sophisticated and impersonal machinery. All the forests and jungles, all the multitudes of animals from every era of life on Earth, all the dinosaur herds, whales, and even bacteria and viruses, are products of a machine. The alien that operates this vast machine is a mortal being, albeit one whose timespan is enormously longer than ours. It is known variously as Gai, the Rimstalker, World Maker, and World Eater. By whatever name you call it, this being is an alien, inhuman and indifferent to human affairs. It is not interested in you, though you may think that it is, because – as you will find – you do not age as quickly here as you did on Earth or as quickly as your fellow humans who were born of parents in these worlds. This is not because the alien favors you; it is a side effect of the regeneration process. The alien is not a spiritual being. Many lives have been lost disputing this issue. The truth is, this entity regenerated you to serve as bait for yet another alien intelligence, its enemy, a species of sapient, winged spiders called zōtl. Zōtl eat people. See “Tactics” under zōtl in the index for effective ways of avoiding and defending yourself against these cunning, lethal creatures.

  Your life belongs to you. You owe no debt to the being that roused you to this second life. Neither must you expect this being to guide you or benefit you in any way. It will not. You must find your own way now. This manual is designed to help you understand and survive any of the fifteen worlds as well as the Overworld itself, wherever you may find yourself.

  Unlike the Earth, which evolved out of cosmic gases by natural processes over billions of years, these worlds are artificial and constructed swiftly. The being that regenerated you made these planets, the swarms of planetesimals, asteroids, and comets, and our two suns: the black hole Saor and the radiant star Lod, which is really not a star but a machine.

  Eight of the worlds orbit Lod, six orbit Saor, and one orbits both.

  The group of Lod planets is called Doror; they are bright, temperate, and tropical worlds.

  The Saor planetary group is called Chalco; these are twilit and nocturnal worlds, most warmed by thermal vents.

  The lone planet that orbits both Doror and Chalco is called Know-Where-to-Go, and is mostly a night world except for its brief transit of Doror once every thousand years. Each complete circuit of Know-Where-to-Go defines an age. There have been four ages as of this edition. We are in the Fifth Age, commonly called the Age of Dominion.

  Two more ages are anticipated before Chalco-Doror completes its alien mission and the being that created these worlds then destroys them.

  That these worlds will collapse is true and not at all the apocalyptic madness the Saor-priests decry. Those who would have you believe that these worlds are eternal serve the spiders, who, indeed, desire to preserve Chalco-Doror that they may feed on us indefinitely. Do not despair that this bounty of new Earths is doomed; rather, rejoice that humanity’s suffering, caught between two feuding alien powers, will end.

  About time measurement: All the major planets have spin-rates of twenty-three to twenty-five hours, but only the orbit of Nabu in Chalco approximates the 365-day orbit of Earth during the human epoch. Nabu-years, which this manual uses to measure time, are constant enough for calendrical purposes. The other planets have varying orbit times. Refer to the ephemerides in the appendix for the local time standards of the planet where you are located. The ephemerides also provide data and stellar sighting techniques to help you determine which planet you are on.

  The animals and plants that you do not recognize are from areas and times of Earth other than those you knew— or they are distortions. For unknown reasons, the alien mind that reads the cryptarch of Earthlife often takes liberties when expressing physical forms. Mutations and variations are common, new species more rare. A partial catalogue of the most common distorts is listed in the appendix.

  All fifteen planets and forty of the largest planetesimals are connected to each other and to the Overworld by lynks. We never had lynks on Earth; more about them can be found in the appendix marked Overworld. Briefly, what you need to know is that a lynk is a portal that joins two distant regions in a way that allows a traveler to go from one to the other instantly, even across large interplanetary distances.

  There are three different kinds of lynks. Those created by the being who made these worlds are called natural lynks and are indistinguishable from apparently natural formations like rock fissures, caves, and sinkholes; few of these lynks have been mapped.

  Those that belong to the zōtl are rectangular structures about ten meters high and twenty wide, seemingly made of scarlet stone and sometimes referred to as redrock dolmens; these connect with the kingdom of the spiders and should never be entered, since the zōtl will consume you in the most horrific way.

  The third variety of lynks is the most prevalent: The tall silver arches (five to twenty-five meters high) that exist on all the planets are the functional remains of the Tryl, creatures of superior intellect originally regenerated by Gai now extinct. The Tryl lynks are sometimes rigged by the spiders to convey travelers to the zōtl’s nest worlds; so do not enter any lynk until its destination has been confirmed by trained lynk wanderers (notably the Ordo Vala, who have produced this manual and whose nearest enclaves are listed at the front and in the index).

  The lynk danger of which you should be most aware is that lynks are continuously active and can be entered inadvertently. Many lynks are hidden by the landscape, overgrown by vegetation, embedded in the ground. At various times in history, the zōtl have hidden lynks on all planets to trap people. Many such traps remain active. Never enter an unknown cave or crawlhole without first tossing an object ahead to see or hear whether the portal is a lynk.

  In each of the Tryl lynks there is a globe, a map of the Overworld. Often in the past the globe has been erroneously identified as a spirit being to be worshipped. The image of a brightly mottled sphere suspended in a field of total blackness seems holy to many of us, and all the more so since the object cannot be touched or even approached, only beheld. Movement toward the map sends one through the lynk. Movement to either side delivers one to the Overworld.

  Read “The Practical Guide to Travel in the Overworld” affixed to this manual before attempting to enter a lynk.

  *

  [Appended to the Year 2000 Edition, 1492 Doror:]

  It is quite possible to live in Chalco-Doror without concerning ourselves with [lynks], especially if we live in one of the many communities that purposely place themselves in regions remote from lynks and their dangers. Most of us who live far from the Overworld prefer to shun this seemingly supernatural aspect of our new reality. We cherish our memories of Earth. We grieve for those of the first life whom we will never see again. And, when
we can, we seek out others like ourselves, from our own times and races. But that is a mistake.

  During the history of Chalco-Doror, among the many millions who have lived on Earth and lived again here in the worlds, only one such tribal fantasy has been realized and with sad results. The Aesirai, who currently dominate all of Doror and parts of Chalco, are humans selectively bred to imitate the tribe of their founder, Egil Grimson, a man who had lived and died on Earth as a Viking, a sea rover in the third millennium before human extinction.

  Only humans who have Viking genetic characteristics are empowered in Aesirai society. Only Vikings are allowed to dwell in the cities unmolested by the spiders, for the Aesirai have a pact with the zōtl. All other human types have been relegated to the role of laborers or are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness, where the spiders are free to harvest them.

  The Ordo Vala abhor this separatist society for having abandoned the vast majority of humanity to the ravages of the spiders and the dangers of Chalco-Doror. This Utility Manual, banned by the Aesirai, is offered for the benefit of all humans.

  If Zero Could Shut Its Mouth

  The air was so dense, it read as water. Looking down into it, down past the riven cliffs and shining clouds, Chan-ti Beppu felt giddy. She had never before journeyed below the clouds. Just visible among the flying vapors and the thermal jellies of air, her destination sparkled, the sea-mountain city of N’ym. There, if anywhere among the worlds, love waited to join space, memory, and the blue light of northern weather into a man whose story would complete hers.

  “I can see from that silly look in your eyes,” Nappy Groff said, “that you really think he’s going to care.”

  “Of course he’ll care.” Chan-ti did not remove her gaze from the mountainous clouds and the gaunt cliffs. “He’s an exceptional man.”