The Last Of All Suns

back to part 1
By John C Wright

Part 2

12. THE BLUE MAN

I had been very casual, and pointed my barrel at him when I had said my piece about the Blue Man making tools from his fluid. But, when I turned my head and directed the conversation towards Uj, I had not turned my barrel away from the Blue Man.

Only after a moment of silence did the Blue Man look up to notice that I was pointing my barrel at him. He raised an eyebrow.

The man from AD 11,000 was as blue as a peacock’s neck, and highlights of purple, cyan, and jade shimmered through his skin substance when he moved. The Blue Man was reclining, leaning with one hand (chalk-blue on the palm, Prussian blue on the back, his hand) against his smooth plum-colored cheek.

His eyes were half-closed. In his other hand, he held a long-stemmed pipe of clay, like something a leprechaun would smoke, but in the bowl of the pipe was some luminous liquid that fluttered like a butterfly with wings of flame, and a weft of acrid smolder crept upward from the bowl.

He came from a dark ages between the first and second eras of space flight, when mankind engaged in a thousand years of war with giant-things living on the Moon, creatures once men, descended from exiled space-farers, who had grown strange and terrible during their generations-long voyaging to haunted worlds; beings who, in the weightless void, had grown enormous.

"Ah, merry me!" He drawled in a voice of casual disdain. "And what might this poor son of Old Earth done to lure the pointing finger of our brave and noisy shooter here? He is so proud of his chemical explosives, his surface-dimensional thinking, his pre-conflux cortex. I am merely an Adept of the Mind Core, a Ninth-Rank adept of the Excellent rating: whereas he extinguishes meaty beasts for sport, not to eat. What do I do to earn the honor of his suspicion?"

I said, "You will forgive me, sir, but you have complimented the enemy once too often to make your loyalty to mankind a matter safe to take for granted."

Mneseus, who could not maintain the tension on his bow for so long, relaxed his grip, and lowered his bow: but he kept his eye on me, and kept the arrow ready on the string. Some of the tension went out of Sings-Death, but he kept his flint-tipped spear pointed toward Mneseus. Mneseus kept his eyes on me, and He-Sings-Death on Mneseus, but both men listened to what Crystals-of-Bliss was saying.

The Blue Man made an affable gesture. "They are a more efficient form of organization, and even those that are not alive: they replicate, they spread, they consume. They thrive in this present environment, a dark cosmos where the stars have died, and all particles of matter start to fray. How long have they reigned? How many billions of years? A higher form than us, as we are higher than mere germs that make us sick. But, aha, but-" he held up his powder-blue palm, "This bath-born son of Old Earth will cheer for the sickness called humanity, this time. Why not?"

"Sir," I said, "The turtle will outlive a man, as will a Redwood tree; the elephant is stronger, the tiger is more swift, and the lion more majestic. Nature arms us with but feeble tooth and claw; clothes us with hides but fragile and naked to the cold and wet; equips us with a nose duller than a dog's, and an eye more night-blind than a cat's. The enemy is stronger than man, and wiser, and older: but so is the devil himself."

"Devils, are they, then, you think? Is that the science of your awkward old-time age now speaking up, my poppet?"

I said, "With all due respect, I was more skeptical of claims about the afterlife before I was resurrected from the dead. If these are not black fiends from Hell, they'll do until the real ones come."

The Blue Man said, “Oo, that would be comforting, my pets, to know the universe cared about me and mine enough to hate us all! The cosmos is not alive: it is merely processes in motion. Stars do not twinkle to make us smile; runaway disease-mold does not eat worlds to make us cry. Smiles are a tug of muscles in the cheek: tears are salty water in the eye.”

The Blue Man was a smooth-shaven youth with the improbable name of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Version-Seven. He had also been normal-looking before Abraxander had equipped us. Now his skin was died blue and hair on his head was a freakish chalk-white. The stubble on his cheeks had vanished, though I had not seen him shave.

(Neither, by the way, did Ydmos shave. Despite his silver hair, Ydmos was a strong young man, but no hair grew on his cheek. Enoch had black ringlets surrounding his full, red-lipped mouth, and he trimmed his beard into a rough square with his meat-cleaver, and he joked that the blade had no other good use.)

The Blue Man, back when he had been dusky and dark like a Spaniard, had asked Abraxander for flasks of bluish liquid that flowed sluggishly like molten glass. Only if you looked quite close, could you see the liquid was actually a mass of swarming midges, or mites; and even these mites you would see with your eye were fabrications, made out of the substances suspended in the gel by even smaller mites.

Unlike my rifle, which had taken three sleep-periods to solidify, his flasks had turned solid within an hour or two. The Blue Man drank the damn stuff, rubbed some of it in his hair, rolled it between his fingers like a child playing with fast-drying library paste.

He took it like snuff, wiped it into his eyes and ears, and, for all I know, rubbed it up his bung-hole.

After that, his skin turned blue, and he grew himself a garment (if it can be called that), out of his skin cells. He shed his skin like a snake and then wrapped it back over himself as a skin-tight sheath.

Why shed you skin in the first place if you are just going to put it back on again? The garment was an oily material where he could make hues appear. Crystals-of-Bliss was smart enough to copy the camouflage idea from the armor of Ydmos, and kept his chameleon cloth turned to an unobtrusive dull pewter.

Many rows of tiny little pockets, looking almost like fishes scales, ran up and down the arms and legs and chest, giving a texture to the strange material, and here and there I saw a glint of wire or a bead of jet, and I wondered what they were. Ornamentation? I doubted it. I suspect his projection-tube was merely a toy: these electric circuits were his real weapons.

He said, "Is this, all this, merely Human versus Hated-Other? I suspect not. But say that this bath-born Ninth-rank Excellent is just as rah-rah, just as filled with patriot's delight, as our fine Captain Powell of Nantucket, unmodified baseline human, no-rank, born from a woman's womb like the beasts his age exterminated. But say it is so. Are you sure we should hate these creatures? Don't you know who they are?"

He looked around at us. He smiled a half-cocked smile and leaned back, taking and slow draw on his pipe, and letting the smolder waft from his grin. "This high-born knows. Am I the only one here whose brain matter matters?" He watched the plume of purple smoke trickle upwards toward the ceiling.

I said, "Forgive me, sir, but again you speak with admiration of the horrors who have annihilated all but eight of us. These things, whatever they are, these horrors are the enemy of all mankind…"

He laughed a bitter laugh. "What is man? Matter in motion. Meaningless atoms." Then he pointed his pipe-stem at Abraxander. "Go ahead, gray-hair. Go ahead, you womb-born biomass. Tell them what you told me. You know where we are. Who built this place?"

13. THE MATTER-WIZARD

Abraxander-the-Threshold dated from about AD 30,000, and came from the Earth-sized moon of a superjovian-sized world circling a double star in the constellation Cetus.

His people, at one time, had ruled the planet, but their atmosphere-equipment, over the generations, had failed, and the poisonous air native to the planet, the poisonous grasses and sea-microbes, had returned. Of the hundreds of cities and domed villages of his world, only nine cities, in his time, remained.

Back when we had first emerged, wet and shaking from the rebirth coffins in the Archive, Abraxander seemed no stranger than any other man there. He had been naked, like us.

Of the million who fled the burning Archive chamber, I knew that only we survived, unless the other groups had had one like Abraxander among them.

Our band had fled to what I took to be the Engineering Deck. While we waited, Abraxander said that the giant sarcophagi shapes looming along the back wall were “non-continuity” engines. He “sensed” that the oblongs still had a memory (he called it a “formation-ghost”) of the engine’s original ability to break through the walls of time and space. With that power, he made materials for us: arms, clothing, food.

He reminds me of my old headmaster at Bramingham: the same condescending, dry, infinitely-patient tones. Not long ago, he tried very gamely to explain his art to me, which he insists is not magic (“The materialization is accomplished by polydimensional geometry: an axis rotates eidetic forms out of mind and into matter: the formality collects substance along the time-axis, so that to these ones, us, the process appears to take time…”) until I begged him to stop.

His own clothing reminded me of something between a Turk and a storybook wizard: his hat was a fez or a dunce-cap, he wore a puff-shouldered black jacket set with silver clasps, and a pair of pantaloons so balloon-legged that it looked like a lady’s riding habit, or a skirts of a Japanese fencers. His sleeves were so blousy and long that he had to tuck them into his sash. On his nose he wore a silver clasp set with pearls, as if a pair of pince-nez glasses had been shorn of their glass, leaving only the nosepiece.

His civilization had been the last period of three aeons of star-faring. His original home-era was so far in the future as to be unimaginable to me. And yet, even at that, it was less than one eight-hundredth of the time dividing my time from the home-era of Ydmos of the Last Redoubt.

He spoke in slow and sad tone, as if his words came out against his will: “This one, me, I know where we are. This ship is man-made."

He was silent for a moment, and doubt sat on his brow.

The Blue Man said, "Speak, under-human, born unplanned. Tell them. When they hear from where this so-called enemy has come, what they are, they will see this lofty Son of Earth does not kiss boots to call them superior: I but state fact."

Abraxander-the-Threshold said: "My people, us, we knew all life in the island-of-stars, the Milky Way, had been wiped out.

"Our paleoxenologists sifted through the rubble, first of one world were evidence of life was found, then, centuries later (for the star-voyaging is slow) a second. My people, us, we found strange buildings, beautiful as sea-shells, on a light-weight world, but the skulls, fifty millions of them, a billion years old, had been placed in orbit around it. On the next world, a layer of radioactive crust, mixed with bone and blood, lay crushed beneath half a million years of sedimentation.

“Radioactivity, we found, a burned world. We thought, us, evidence of internal self-destructive wars. Not so. Weapons that split the atom and use the primordial energy of the universe itself did not prevail against the Slayers, but were able to deny them. You grasp?”

I did not, but Ydmos did. He said gravely: “They were Prepared, and they bit down on the Capsule. They burned themselves with Earth-Current, but they were not Destroyed. It has often been debated among us to do the same.”

I said, “I thought Earth-Current was magnetic force? Is it radio-activity?”

Ydmos shrugged. “It is the Earth-Current.”

Abraxander said. “It is a geopsychomagnetic fluid. The current does not occur on all worlds, and human life cannot endure on worlds that do not have it: their children are less of human each generation, and delight in cruelty. It is a strong force on the long-lost Mother World: perhaps this is why the Slayers did not tarry during their first pass.

"They once passed by the Earth. Long ago, when they burned the galaxy clean of life. And, looking backward into the past, deeper into the sky, we saw, us, that other galaxies we also dead.

“Do you know what a Seyfert galaxy is? The galactic core implodes in such a way as to produce a stream of deadly radiation, hundreds of light years long: a vent, or a jet. As the core collapses, the jet rotates. Any world in the main galactic plane of a spiral galaxy would be sterilized; in dense areas, novas would trigger novas, to burn any planets missed in the first sweep.

“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.

“None of these are natural. The sky is filled with the shipwrecks of galaxies: the nebulae are burnt fumes from slain stars. As if a May-fly, born in hours when the ruin of an arson-torched mansion still smoked, thought the ash and pillars of soot and ember were part of the architect's design. Because our race could have no notion of what a hale and pure universe should look like, we thought this void, filled with radiation and dust and dark matter, was what our home was meant to be.

"It was their deeds we saw, their handiwork: The Great Watching Things.

"In the sweep, they overlooked us. No one knows why. Mars, and the world that once was between Mar 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 person has even returned sane from an astral journey beyond the region of the moon, except, perhaps, the dreamer Snireth-Ko.”

Uj 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, was it not? 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 Greater 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 neutrino waves-little parts of matter. Neutrinos are little parts of matter of exceeding fineness, that fly, and can be blocked by nothing. Neutrino 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… our descendents, born after this one's time, but this one's people, us, the men of the Nine Cities, we eventually committed the Deed.

"It was an anachronistic event, simultaneous throughout the time-vector. Before it happened, our instruments sensed the energy-echoes showing us that one day it would happen. Our mathematics showed us that attempts to warn our decedents, to preserve the memory so that our warning would be clear, would do no more than hasten the day of the Deed, collapsing the uncertainty and making the Deed more likely."

I said, "What is the Deed?"

Abraxander said: "The opening of a door. 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.”

14. THEY ARE NOTHING OF OURS

The Blue Man said, "And so, and still, my swaggering blood-born 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. These so-called devils? 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 get-go?”

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. "Vicious things, humans. 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 human 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. "Its 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 Uj.

I said, "Key?" Odd. How would the Shaggy Man, a creature less than half a step above an ape, 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. The Old Man was the name Crystals-of-Bliss used for Ydmos. 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 accusative 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 permitted to act against 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."

Crystals-of-Bliss looked askance at Abraxander. "You are planning to do what to me? Rotate me? And this will make me dizzy? My counter-measures detect no pulse from you, offworlder. Your signals are at zero. You have nothing to decrypt me with."

Abraxander said patiently, "No need has this one of mere electronic signal weapons. All such toys and rubbish were surpassed in the Third Aeon. 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?"

Mneseus said, "Surely your people will slay the young man and the old man, who are caught unawares by the creatures of chaos and Old Night, since you fear so much that they will attaint your spirits: this is no different."

Ydmos frowned at him. "Euthanasia, it is called, or Aschoff-killing. Men of old have done this thing, and added many years to the lives they must live again to erase the stain. Men of my time are less than the ancient heroes, and the Earth-Current is weak in us, and so our sanctity is more precious. There are no more Aschoffs among us, no more Aschoff-killers. What little light is left to us, we horde." He turned to the rest of us. "And now! All mankind is reduced to eight! There is less, far less, than a single spark left. A single sin will smother it. Let us not remove our humanity. Fathers and ancestors, put down your arms!"

15. SPELL-CAUGHT

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.

Enoch called: "Our hearts have been hardened, brother against brother. Who has done this thing? It is not an earthly power: who has send 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 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 defeats 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 Uj 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, not him. He stole his father’s woman to be his wife, but she was not his wife.” He pointed at Enoch. He-Sings-Death points by jutting out his jaw with a jerk of the head.

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?"

16. THIRD FROM ADAM

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, Crafty One. 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.

Five sleeps ago, when we had camped in the Museum (our last peaceful night before the Black Mist swallowed two of the men on watch, Mr. Clockwork from AD 6000 and the ever-cheerful Huc-Huc Pounce from AD 4500, who I missed dearly) Enoch had spent an hour carving flowing letters into the wood with his blunted knife, and crooning to it in a harsh, glottal language. He said it was the language of the Angels, and he would not take any of the better weapons we looted from the turncoats and half-humans during the Pantry-raid.

When I think of “angels”, I think of long-haired men in togas with wings and harps. He called them Kherubim, and terror shook his voice when he spoke of seeing them. Once, in his youth, he had seen one shining with fire in among the trees, rolling slowly on the business only God knew, and lighting played from its concentric rings of eyes. Somehow, I did not think he meant what I meant when I said the word ‘angel’.

According to his tale, merely seeing the angelic living creature had somehow granted him knowledge of their speech. Now he raised the staff and showed us the lettered written there. It was a cursive script of unearthly beauty.

Mneseus threw his bow and arrow onto the deck with a curse. "May all memory of glory won in war be forgotten! Break, string, and shatter, staff! For you are proven too weak to do your master's will!"

As he spoke, it occurred to me that it might not be the wisest thing in the world to shoot the Blue Man, much as I disliked him, considering that I, not he, might be the traitor, or alien influences might be tampering with my judgment, making me want to shoot.

I lowered my rifle and worked the bolt, so that there was no cartridge in the chamber.

He-Sings-Death saw me, and he slowly lowered his javelin.

The Blue Man, seeing this, made a little twitch of some expression I could not read, and reached and touched one of the many electronic circuits webbing his filmy coat. I presume that was something to tell the little machines he had smuggled into Ydmos to stand down.

Mneseus saw our weapons being set aside, and he grimaced with frustration, and he said to Enoch, "You have condemned us. Dead, we could serve no longer the purposes of those that woke us from the grave. Alive, how can we not? Alas! How did you overcome my spell?"

"Everything that is named of Adam’s naming,” Enoch said, “Dominion is given to me, eldest son of his eldest son; for I had the words from my father, and he from his father before him, who is king of all men, eldest, and first: but the words of those things Adam did not name, the older things, sun, moon, stars, trees, waters, light, and the darkness that was before the Lord of the Elu on Oreb spoke His Word: over these things, the sons of Adam have no dominion. In life, I wrote the letters of this speech upon a column of brass and bronze, foreboding what was to come, and I built a city with a tower and a wall near the garden of my grandfather’s exile, by the shore of the river Pison. In times to come, and earthquake will bury these pillars, and an age will pass, and then other children of Adam will unearth and read them."

He-Sings-Death was looking at Enoch in wonder. "I name you He-Speaks-Words! Use your words, you, to drive back the Dry Things and Cold Ones who follow us. Find for us the way out of this cave of iron to the warm places beneath the sun again!"

Enoch shook his head. “Even these Words of the Elu will grant me no power over the Grigorim, the Watchers: for the Watchers came down from heaven, to watch the work of creation, but, (woe to mankind!) came to love the gardens of creation, and will not depart back to heaven when called. I foresee that these sons of Elu will take the daughters of women to them, yes, as many as they wish, and giants are born from them, mighty men of renown.

“The giants, the Nephilim, in time to come, one day rule the world, for their strength sweeps all before them. The One of Oreb shall be displeased. He shall open the windows of heaven. The world shall end in a great flood and the elder race of man shall perish. All this shall happen five generations from me, in the time of my grandson’s great-grandson, who is called Jubalcain the Harper. The Grigorim shall perish then but not before.

“It is as it is. No one, not the Elu and the Lord of all the Elu, no one can destroy the Grigorim without destroying the world.”

Uj barked at him: "Teach me your words!"

Enoch said disdainfully: "Those who were kings of the earth before Adam have no claim on the Words. You are no child of Adam: they are not for you."

17. THE WILL TO KILL ONESELF

The Blue Man puffed on his pipe, and said thoughtfully, "So, Mneseus, were you monkeying with our nervous systems? Adjusting glandular levels, trigger parasympathetic responses, and work some such as that, and all to get baseline Powell to blow his tubes of chemical explosives at me? Was there some point to that?"

I said, "With respect, Mr. Bliss, were you not paying attention. His Majesty was attempting to have us all join his suicide pact. If any of us live, it aids the enemy, or so he thinks. Knowing that some of us would be too weak, or too Christian, to slay ourselves, he used some sort of hypnosis or mentalism to urge us to kill each other. I suppose he was hoping the survivors would be those who held their lives lightly."

Ydmos said to me, "Child of a happy age, it is not that lives are held too lightly, that we are willing to shed them, but that we dare not allow our lives to be Destroyed. What of man remains after his thoughts are eaten, and twisted, and taken into the dark of the silence-thought, that wounded remnant of him will make his voice cry out, or what sounds like his voice, and his dreams wing across the Night Lands, making such promises as few ignore, tempting his loved ones to their deaths."

"Sir," I said, "I mean not to disparage your people, and I know not the dangers, spiritual and physical, they face: but surely self-destruction is the very definition of despair. That door opens to Hell, if you will forgive my saying-so."

Ydmos said, "Our science shows that souls are born again, for the aetheric currents outlast the fleshy vessels, and maintain themselves in standing waves in the magnetosphere of the planet: if they are Destroyed, there is no returning, not in all the thousands and tens of thousands of generations our records reach."

Abraxander said, "The people of the Nine Pressurized Cities, us, we were taught that children must not be born aboard the space-traveling vessels of which eldest legends spoke, and for such as reason as the men from the time of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss, them, those ones knew well, back in pre-history on the Manhome planet.”

Crystals-of-Bliss looked at him. “You recall our times, duckling? Good. That means we lived.”

Abraxander said, “Legends only. The Moon became the haunt of giants, for the children were born without humanity, and none of their coding was right." Then, to me, he said, "As for mental essences, our measurements show a partial formation ever-present in the timelessness, which is why anticipation and memory, two non-time-specific functions, are addressed by the phenomena of the mental axis, and not by the physical. To restore whole person backwards from the essence, our savants held it to be possible, but no necromancer ever reduced the theory into practice."

The Blue Man said, “’Tis but a gravity effect, my ducks. The moon-men were like us once, but meddled with their gene plasm so they could dwell in microgravity without bone decay. Of course they got big. So they lost marriage, and human emotion, and humor, and love, and so they do not blink their big eyes? Brain-chemicals gone wrong, that is all. Deep down, still from human stock, so the old records say. Nothing supernatural about it.”

To me, the Blue Man said, “Self-shut-down, what you call suicide, puts you beyond all worry: there is no more you to worry. There is no punishment, no you to punish. And nothing gets saved from some sort of worse-than-death Destruct. There is nothing to save and no one to notice anything might have been. He says 'tis courage to shut-down, you say not: but it neither can be or cannot be. A once-had-been cannot be a coward, not matter what he once was: he cannot be brave. If he be not at all, he cannot be this or that.”

He spread his blue hands and looked so very smug. He no doubt thought his skeptical belief in no one and nothing was the very pinnacle of wisdom, instead of the void created by its absence.

I said to the Blue Man, “When your loved ones die, do you tell yourself that they are merely meat? Do you say a dead daughter is made up of just as many atoms as a living one, and so therefore any distinction between them is an arbitrary preference?”

He was taken aback. His cynical mask for a moment was disfigured, I saw human grief, plain and clear, on his face. He said softly to himself, "Emerald Laughter.”

I blinked at him. “Beg pardon?”

He did not answer me, for Ydmos then spoke up, saying, "Even among your people, Captain Powell of Nantucket, would you not condemn yourself to Hell, if it meant saving your loved one from being taken in your place to Hell?"

I had no answer for that question. My mother knew the Good Book backward and forward, and knew how riddles like that were answered: I had little use for Bible-learning, back when my world was alive. At that time, I was sure it was some trick made up by priests and hysterical women, to prevent strong men from running things to suit themselves. Now, I was not so sure. I had been a great admirer of pagan virtues, then, who honored strength and boldness, and who were not about to let the meek inherit the earth. Now I was a rat in the hold of a ship crewed by monstrous beings from beyond the cosmos, something out of all human reckoning. You see the virtues of strength and greatness differently, when you are the weak and the hunted, I guess.

"Forgive me, gentlemen," I said, "But I am no theologian to puzzle out the implications of your lore and doctrines. The world is full of mysteries.”

I stopped, for I head a woman’s voice. I could not make out the words, but it sounded familiar.

18. VOICES FROM THE ALEPH

Mneseus grit his teeth, and said in a voice of passion, "Children of my children, posterity, we cannot! We cannot live!" He looked back and forth among us. "Do no other of you hear the voices, tempting, pleading, saying they know all the secrets of the past and things-to-come? I know these voices, know their cry: did I not once call them up to wreck the ships of enemies who dared the coasts of fair Atlantis? The sirens sing, and tempt, and call out in voices of the ones we lost."

Ydmos said, "I hear them. Can you not pay them no heed?" But his face was troubled. I suppose, based on what he had said before, that those among his people who could hear the telepathic lures of the enemy, but could not resist them, had long ago been culled from the gene pool. He was surprised that anyone could be tempted. Ydmos said, "The Watching Things can make shapes in thought that sound like our thoughts, but the Master-Word will silence them."

Enoch looked at him. “What word is this? Is it Adam’s word?”

Ydmos said, “It is the ur-word upon which all human speech is based: it is the fundamental root of human essence. It is prior to language, and no human can misunderstand its import. The things of the Night Land can neither speak nor think it. This is one of many reasons why we know they are not of us.”

Mneseus held up his hand, "Listen to me, my children! Think! What other cause could these beings have, lamp-eyed children of Echidna, titans and earth-born and all fashion of monstrous prodigies and ugly wonders, to hale us up from our graves? What can we do that they cannot? What purpose serve? For, in the state, each craft has its craftsman; and in the parts of animals, so each part has its work. What is our part? What can we do, we humans, that these dark gods of the infernal realm cannot?"

19. WHAT DO THEY WANT?

The Blue Man said, "Right he is. It hides not for naught. It hears us, aye: its watches us with a pale cool eye. For what, my poppets? For what? What do its codes tell it to do? Wants it us dead? Nothing to fear, in that. Dead, it cannot want us, for, if so, then why then this restart, this re-incarnal knowledge, life to-be-continued in Part Two? Why this…” (he tapped his blue chest lightly with his pipe stem) “This sark, these bio-housing coats, fine and fair, firm flesh and pretty hair? Why bring us up from tape-backup if it wants no more than but to put us down again? Nor, deem I, this hidden one, would it crave aught it could by fear, or pain, or deconstitution of our brain, cell by cell, get for itself.

"What else? What else is it to be? Something we can do, which it cannot, and which we cannot be made to do by force or fright; and since it could befrighten us to any act (or me, at least) it must be something we not know how to do, not consciously, not while awake. It must want something from our instinct, our core self, the deep architecture codes of the human mind." He tapped his temple with his pipe stem.

He-Sings-Death slapped himself on the thigh, and laughed and said, “Song! When the He-Calls-Day blows through the mouth of man, it is as a man who blows through a reed. (Make my song worthy, O He-Makes-Grass!) The good reed sings well, a cracked reed, badly. I have seen it, a cracked reed can be wrapped in wet doeskin leather, and the crack swell shut, and the flute made whole again. (Make me whole, oh He-Brings-Sun!) This, it could be, is that the Smotherer seeks, eh? The reed knows nothing of what he sings, till the song is breathed in him.”

Ydmos said, “We were not brought to sing. The enemy knows nothing of song.”

I said, “Then why?”

Ydmos said, “Bait. The strength of the House of Silence knows no limit. The Silent Ones would not need human men for something human men can do. Our living souls are but morsels of food to them, orts for their glut. But: something another can do, another who will come for us. But whom? No one will depart from the Last Redoubt to seek one who has fallen in the Night Lands. The Law forbids it.”

I said. “Bait for whom? For what? No one is coming. Everyone is dead. Even the sun and moon are gone so long ago, that the age of the dinosaurs was yesterday, compared to that. No one is coming.”

Ydmos said, “You are quick to doubt. Before the Lesser Redoubt fell, Naani thought no one was coming. She did not even know her lover had survived the death of the world of sunlight until she heard him calling her in a dream. Till then, the folk of the Lesser Redoubt thought they were the last of man: how could they have known a Greater Redoubt, destined to stand another ten million years longer, was in the Night Land south away?”

I said: “But our whole world, all the worlds, the galaxy, all the galaxies, all the stars, everything. I thought you said-“ I nodded toward Abraxander “-that the structure of space and time was breaking down. Reality and unreality are getting mixed. Time is ending.”

Abraxander said mildly: “Distinction. This one, me, I said the plenum elements were Disassembling. The process is an orderly backward infolding of the cosmogenesis, and return at low energy states of the original unbroken symmetries of fundamental concept-points. Does that one, he, grasp?”

Uj spoke. “Love.”

His voice seemed louder than before, almost a bark. We turned to look at him, but he was still staring at the round patch of light against the ceiling.

The Blue Man said, “Oho. The ape-man apes a man, oh, aye, he speaks his speech. I hear with my ear, yet I do not hear. Say your say, Uj the Only Ugly Outwardly!”

Uj the shaggy man cocked his head at a strange angle, looking almost like an owl twisting his head backward, and because his head was turned so far, it pulled his mouth askew, and made him squint, so he seemed to be sneering at the Blue Man. “Men do. Men do not know how to do. It comes. It is its own. It is done. Love.”

I said, "Why would they, the enemy, want us to love?"

Ydmos said, "What else will bring a man out from the Last Redoubt? For what else will he risk his soul to utter Destruction by the Forces that move in the Night?"

Uj said, "If it does not breathe, it cannot blow on the coal. If it does not love, it cannot mate; not mate, not bear. They need us to remake the all-of-all that is. We are their plant stalks. We are their seed corn. They hate love, but must have it now. They promise much; with both hands, they will give." And he drew back his lips, and showed us the fangs of his grin.

And he scampered across the floor away from us, running on all fours.