The Last Of All Suns

back to part 2
By John C Wright

Part 3

20. THE VIEWING TABLE

Uj fled.

We all jumped up, startled. I don’t know what the others thought, but I brought my rifle to my shoulder and aimed at the retreated back of the shaggy man. But no: I could not shoot. What if Uj were running for some innocent reason? What if he knew who was traitor was and fled from him? (And, yes, the thought did not escape me that I might be the one, and some devil-thing inside me might be urging me to kill my comrade-in-arms.)

I lowered my barrel, grimacing.

And yet I remembered that he was the third mind reader in the group, aside from Mneseus and Ydmos. The siren-song that Mneseus feared was audible to Uj.

Sings-Death, on his long legs, went ahead of us, his long spear held lightly on his shoulder, giving chase to the shaggy man. He was not quick enough, however, to catch up to the Uj, who leaped from seat-back to seat-back down the endless ranks of the amphitheater.

The Blue Man languidly lifted himself to his feet and sauntered at no great pace through the ranks and ranks of seats down the stairs of the amphitheater towards the acre-wide floor of glass where Uj, the Shaggy Man, was bounding. To keep an eye on the Blue Man, I followed; to keep an eye on me, Mneseus followed, and on him (I presume) Enoch followed. Mneseus paused to snatch up his dropped bow before he hurried to catch up to me, taking four and five steps at a stride, and his arrows clattered in his quiver on his back.

Abraxander-the-Threshold and Ydmos stayed behind for a moment or two, talking in low tones. Eventually Ydmos took up his heavy wheel-axe weapon and came down the long stairs behind us. The slippered feet of Abraxander made a slight noise against the soft substance carpeting the stair; somehow, the heavy boots of Ydmos made none.

Uj, He-Sings-Death, and Mneseus were standing on the glass. Enoch would not step onto it, but leaned and peered.

Suddenly, all were still again. Uj was no longer fleeing; He-Sings-Death no longer pursued.

I called, “What do you see?”

He-Sings-Death looked down. There was reddish light from under his feet; it threw shadows across his shoulders, cheeks and forehead. I could see the whites of his eyes as he stared downward.

Enoch spoke first. “It is the hell fire. The pit where the Fallen Elohim burn. There seems to be a long black tunnel leading to it.”

Sings-Death said in a voice stiff with fear and awe, “Sing! May He-Brings-Light reach out his hand and take me up, as I take up the boy-child I love, and the girl-child! Captain Powell of Nantucket: it is no tunnel, but the night sky. The sun is under our feet, and the sun is the color of blood from an old wound. The sun is wounded, for I see dark tears and scabs on his face. How can the sun be below my foot? It should be up in the sky, over our head. How can the sun be wounded? Sacred and bright, bright and sacred things are not to be wounded!” There was a tinge of hysteria in his voice.

I stepped down the last few stairs. The glass floor was less than a yard from me.

Something made me hesitate.

From behind me, Ydmos said, “We are in some Redoubt or Tower of the Silent Ones. This must be a shaft leading to a new source of Earth-Current. I sense that the light is holy: but how can the tower of the enemy stand here? The Earth-Current surely must destroy them: they cannot abide the radiance.”

The Blue Man cocked his head, and looked back toward Ydmos. “Sensed? What sensors, my dainty, what extra-eyes, does the Old Man from the sunless world hide? Sense how?”

Ydmos strode forward, and when he reached the glass floor, he bowed his head and knelt on one knee. Carefully he laid his weapon down, and he removed his left gauntlet.

He spoke: “My Diskos grows heavy in my hand; I feel the joy in the blade: that means her circuits are drinking of the stored ambient power. That means the power is the Earth-Current, which is hale and salubrious for the children of Man, and hurtful to the Watching Things, the abhumans and Night Hounds.”

Reassured by his strange words, despite that I did not understand them, I stepped forward.

What a sight I saw!

21. THE LAST OF ALL SUNS

It was a monstrous sun, and I saw what seemed to be swirls of light wreathing its equator like smoke. As my eyes adjusted to the sight, my mind adjusted to the magnitude, I realized that these wreaths of spiral smoke were hundreds, nay, thousands of spiral and cylindrical galaxies, whole clusters of galaxies, orbiting a sphere of incandescent fire like the rings around Saturn.

Larger than worlds, larger than anything, it was.

Even as I watched, I saw the innermost ring of galactic clusters fall down toward that light. The spiral galaxies spun like pinwheels, unraveling, and the countless millions of tiny specks, the stars, turned red as embers as they rushed into the flames of that immense, unthinkably titanic central sphere of light.

As my eyes adapted, I saw as well that there were streamers of colored vapor wrapping the galaxies, much larger than the galaxies, spread like an aurora borealis throughout the immensity of space, and all the streams and filaments of dust were likewise rushing toward that all-devouring central sun.

Painted across the immensity of the central sun, parallel to the equator of its huge rotation, were bands of brighter and dimmer ruby-red; black splotches like sun-spots, crusts and dapples of darkness floating in the fire.

From the north and south poles of the vast red sphere of flame, two beams, white hot, like the beams of a search light, splashed upward and downward, igniting the surrounding clouds to cool, peacock-tail-colored fire.

The light was as red as the petal of a rose, red as a cherry, and inexpressibly beautiful to my weary eyes. It did not burn me.

It was sunlight.

He-Sings-Death was staring at Ydmos curiously. He pointed at him with a jut of his jaw. “What does this mean? What he does?”

Ydmos had his left forearm held near his mouth. He was staring down into the light. There was a small round discoloration in his flesh of his forearm, as if a something were embedded underneath. He held the spot very near his mouth.

But then Ydmos lowered his hand and donned his gauntlet. “I am Prepared. I thought that if I were the one carrying the enemy inside, stepping into the light of the Earth-Current would make it show itself.”

It took me a moment to grasp what he had said, so calmly had he said it. He thought the light would reveal if he were contaminated. The thing buried in his arm was a lethal pill; a suicide device.

I said, “What is this thing? It looks like a sun, but no sun can be bigger than a galaxy, bigger than a million galaxies.”

The Blue Man stepped onto the glass and stared downward. His eyes evidently had his ghastly fluid in them, for the whites of his eyes turned blue, and so did his pupils, till he looked like a blind man. The blue pigment grew darker and darker, toward black, as the strange microscopic machines in his eye-fluid drew in more and more light from the environment.

The Blue Man said, “A black hole, 'tis. A body in space so massive that nothing, not, even light, will escape from its mass, not ever."

I said, “Why isn’t it black, then?”

The Blue Man said, “Ah, we are seeing surface turbulence only, my sports. The surface area, it be not great enough to absorb the whole of everything, the universe, in one gulp; matter clashes against matter as it drains in, fearful symmetries are recompiled: types of particles, long forgotten since long ere the earliest universe, are being remembered and remade in yonder heat immense. The heat is caused by gravitational stress on the structure of timespace.”

Abraxander said gently, “That one, Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Seven, him, he speaks with less-than-perfect precision. Understand: the tidal stress on even very small particles is too great for the particles to retain, them, their internal cohesion. You know how myth says the Earth’s pull was greater on the to-ward side of the Luna as the fro-ward side? The difference flattened the orb, tide-locked her.”

“The moon always keeps one face toward Earth,” I said. “Kept, I guess.”

A sting of sorrow touched my heart. I remember Lisa looking up at the moon, that time we were on a boat near Spain, and the waves were silver in a shining path leading to the horizon. A blue moon.

She said a girl only would meet the man she was meant to meet once in a blue moon. She smiled at me. Now, there was no more moon. No moon ever again.

22. ENTANGLEMENT

Abraxander was saying in his pedantic voice: “When, during the time of the Fifth Aeon, the moon came too nigh the Earth, she violated Roche’s limit, the satellite, her, she was pulled asunder by tides.”

For the moment I thought he was talking about a girl. By ‘she’ he meant Luna, the moon-goddess.

“At this phenomena, here…” Abraxander gestured toward the rose-red central sun, “The gravity gradient is steep enough, it, to pull small particles open. They suffer mathematical transformation into other particle combinations when that happens, still entangled with each other, though separated, them, by the event horizon.”

The Blue Man looked interested at that. “Science of my day, long-gone-by-day, it would say that nothing reaches inside to outside of black hole. Only mass, spin, angular moment. Entanglements shown to be inter-operable? Our theory held all signal must be null: no information from in-to-out.”

Abraxander said carefully: “The entanglement involves not merely timespace and other metrics, but also symmetries of mind and not-mind, being and not-being. At the fundamental level, it is all one. This one, he who observes: that one, it is observed: both one. At these energy-states, a particle endpoint is indistinguishable from its paired mate elsewhere in time and space. Monopolar, honestly: something that cannot exist alone, them. Entanglement allows for what, in our frame, seems backward-in-time. Eternity is entangled here, too.”

I said, “Entangled? Are you talking about, what? Atoms?”

He-Sings-Death slapped me on my back, and said: “Cannot exist alone! So it is with me and She-Gathers-Reeds, most beautiful of all the band. Maybe He-Stands-In-The-Threshold, he means, they marry. She ties him in her hair. Very soft, not rope, the tie that ties the married pair. Her hair, one hair from her head, is used when we sing the marriage song. Thread of hair is so slender, man could break, if he wants; but good man, never he wants: so thread is strongest of all things. It is tied to his smallest finger here.” He gestured with his pinky, “To show the man how gentle he must be, how little is his strength to pick up love. It is not to be grabbed with the hand. How I miss the hair of She-Gathers-Reeds! Black and shining and long, her hair! Sing! Hear my cry, He-Steals-Fire, steal her out of the black water again for me! This time, I will not forget! This time, I will not look back!”

I said, “Mr. Singer, didn’t cave-men club women on their heads with clubs, and drag them by the hair to their caves? On the contrary, you seem quite the romantic, sir.”

He tilted his head at me. “Who says this of us?"

I shrugged vaguely. "I don't know. Archeologists. Cartoons. Pictures in books."

"Who of your people ever saw my people? Why would they say this unkind thing of us?”

I had no answer for that.

Mneseus muttered: “No, Abraxander is talking not of marriage. He speaks of the principle of contagion. Once touching, always touching. This-" (he pointed to the light below his feet) "This is the alchemic furnace to burn the universe into being: the Central Fire men of earth can never see. This before us is the Athanor of all elements, the oven from which all combinations of quick-silver and sulfur will produce the Great Work.”

Abraxander gently disagreed: “These are image-words that these ones, you two, speak, they are likenesses, and imprecise." And he pointed underfoot, saying: "Observe. This place-event, here-now. Omega point affects an ever larger metric, it. Matter-energy falls towards. Entangled particle pairs are pulled away from each other by tidal forces. Energy is released. Liberated. That is what we see. The core of that body, him, is denser than all number can measure, darker than all mystery. This light is an illusion; a side effect.”

23. DARKER THAN ALL MYSTERY

The Blue Man said persistently, "But you claim information can flow from inside to out? How can that be? Singularity, it swallows all, all but those parameters I said."

Abraxander said, "Quantum uncertainty, in highly compacted frames of reference, becomes macroscopic. Information can go from there to here, if the positions of there and here are sufficiently undefined. All that is required is that the information-density of the N space be greater inside than out. Thermodynamics will require the greater flows to the less, seeking equilibrium.

“How else was the universe created by the Prime Event in the first place? All the mass of the universe concentrated at one spot, it could not have exploded, escaped to another spot, except that, at the same time, it unfolded both into time and space, to create the concept of "another spot". The unfolding was faster than the process of time itself, so that, at no point, was any particle traveling out of the creation gravity-well at faster than the speed of light. You see? It is an illusion.

“We, all the universe, are still within the event-horizon of the original black hole from which the universe came: the creation act was to force information in to the matrices of time and space, within the black hole itself. To observers inside, it must have seemed as if the universe began a sudden, inexplicable expansion. Hence, what we call the Hubble Error. Simpler to assume all matter-energy is shrinking, as it loses information-value due to entropy, than to assume the edges of the universe are flying off from us."

I said, "I thought we were seeing the destruction of the universe? What is this talk of the creation?"

Abraxander said, "It is the same. At the moment when all things become indistinguishable, the direction of the arrow of time becomes indistinguishable. At that moment, creation is destruction as seen from backward-in-time. As a book read back to front might be. However, before and after that moment, creation is the direction of decreasing entropy, and destruction the direction of increasing. Only at the Omega Point itself, does the observer see the symmetry.The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects"

I thought I would try a simpler question. I said, “Is it an old sun? Why else would it be red?”

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. That speck falling in, look there-“ he pointed at one of the millions of stars streaming into the great central mass “He is a sun, him. Planets and cometary halos he pulls with him, the sun, as he falls in. This-“ he pointed at the central sun, “this is not a sun.”

“Why is it red?”

Abraxander said patiently, “It is not. The light seems red because that, the light, it suffers energy-loss while it flies upwards against the pull. Light cannot be seen in any frame as moving more slowly; therefore the energy must seem to be lost in the wavelength: more red. It will seem white enough to these here, us, once we reach it, and join its frame of reference. To our eyes then, all will be white and clear.”

Sings-Death said in a shaking voice, “How can the sun be under my foot? Who buried the sun beneath this cave?”

I said, “We are not in a house, not in a cave. This is a ship: a sailing vessel that flies through the night sky.”

Sings-Death said, “And the sun is below the keel of the canoe? He is swimming from West to East to rise again?”

I said, “Not below. There is no below."

Sings-Death plucked a bead from his hair and let it fall, clattering at his feet. He pointed at the bead with his chin. "Ah! Look! Tricky little bead, fools me, fools my eye. Bead thinks there is a below. That way. The way it fell. Poor bead!"

I said, "Let me explain. The ship is a cylinder. Because it is spinning, it seems to make weight….well, not weight exactly, but acceleration. No, wait, there must be a way to explain this. Hm. OK. Suppose you took a bucket with water in it and swung it around your head very fast on a rope. See? The water would stay in the bucket.”

Sings-Death looked skeptical. “Captain Powell of Nantucket, why should I take a bucket with water in it and swing it around my head very fast on a rope? I am the eldest of ten brothers, and my voice is heard in the wisdom-tent, and even the gray-haired elders listen to my songs. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

“Um…. Okay.” I turned to Abraxander: “You said we were going to enter the frame of something of the sun.”

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. It is the Omega Point. Once this point, that, it achieves condition mathematically indistinguishable from the Alpha Point, all time will re-interpret. Whether the next universe will be as this one, or some other condition, no one can know who is inside the context of time.”

"What do you mean, re-interpret?"

Abraxander said, "Re-evaluate."

"What?"

"Time will re-evaluate itself, will re-impose upon itself the values of meaningful events. You know the difference between meaningful and meaningless?"

"I thought I did," (But, listening to him, now I was not so sure.)

"Time, it is an orderly sequence of non-energy, what is the word? Intervals. Every interval of meaning must have negative non-meaning to define and separate it. Words must have silence; pictures must have white between the black. Ultimately, meaning must mean what it means against a background of non-meaning. Hence, time is a self-evaluating structure. Time gives meaning to time: do you follow me? A thing gives value to a thing by evaluation. This is why life exists only within time-ness, because life must consist of processes bound by birth and death, which are the boundary conditions. Wait. There must be a way to explain. Imagine you are in an infinite but boundaried spacetime of N dimensions. The condition is spherical in N plus Two dimensions. Within your light-cone, of all possible futures, if they have meaning now, they will have meaning then. However, outside your light-cone, in order for the N space itself to have meaning, there must be an imaginary set of points which do not have a past-to-future relationship with any point inside your light-cone. Now suppose (which is impossible in undistorted space) you are rotated to the imaginary points: they would seem like end-points at that time, and could be either past or future, depending on the collapse of the uncertainty wave-function."

I said, "Abraxander-the-Threshold of Tau Ceti, why should I be rotated to these imaginary points outside my lighthouse? I come from a respectable family. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

Abraxander opened his mouth to continue his explanation, but then there was a twinkle in his eye, for he took my meaning, and he nodded.

I asked, “Maybe this would be simpler. How do you know that the ship is moving? There is no sensation of motion.”

Abraxander pointed underfoot. “See where the stars stream like dust-motes, them. There is a spiral galaxy unwinding in a few, to us, seconds, all her scattered stars dropping into the central vortex of the Omega Point like rain-drops. Calculate the mass involved in even a medium-sized star crossing that degree of arc. Surely it is obvious!”

I said, “Not obvious to me.”

The Blue Man turned and drawled: “Math not yet discovered in your time, aye, flesh-born flesh-hunter? Too fast. No galaxy, nothing that size could discombobulate so fast. It took place a million years ago, and took a million years. This ship is crowding light-speed. Imagine a concentric of light expanding, bing! Bing! Many concentrics. Bing! Bing! Bing!”

I said, “Stop binging at me.”

He said, “Imagine them binging off from the sight, one bing per ten thousand years. We puncture a ten bings of concentric in ten our-seconds of flight. To us aboard, datastream is fast-forward. It looks to take a moment or two. Ten seconds. Station time in frame of galaxy, ten thousand times ten years. Get it?”

I said, “No. Forgive me, Mr. Bliss, but I think the spell Nergal cast, or Ydmos, or whatever that hypnotic thing was, might be wearing off. Your words no longer make sense, I fear.”

Of all people, it was Uj who touched my knee and said, “A runner leaves the cave when Krag is born, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Krag is born! He runs east. Second runner leaves the cave when Krag is young man in fullness of his strength, proud as a bull, hateful as a serpent, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Krag is strong, his spear drinks blood, and Krag lifts up his hand in strength! He runs east. Third runner leaves the cave when Krag is dead, and he says, rejoice, all the earth, for Krag sleeps in the ash of the pyre, and his spear sleeps at his side, and slays no more, forever. He runs east.

“A bird who is as swift as the ray of the sun leaves the land of behind-the-dawn, and flies from east to west, for all gods run east to west, sun and moon and star. She hears the first runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the second runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the third runner. She lands on the bulbul tree, and says, Oh! Who was this Krag that all men forever feared would be born! Krag was not so to be feared! He lived and died all within three beats of my wings of fire. Foolish men! So she says. The gods are too swift to know our fears. This hell you say is a canoe is as that bird.”

He meant the ship. The ship was moving so quickly it was overtaking the messages, the light, carrying to our eyes the images of a destruction that, as best I could tell, had already happened, and had taken countless years to happen.

I was staring at Uj in astonishment. This savage was apparently able to grasp with ease something that still seemed locked in a riddle to me.

I said, "Who is Krag?"

Uj waved his hand above him and below, indicating the vast black ship entrapping us. In his language of grunting clicks he spoke: "Krag clings to the canoe of Neomah and Noah, his hands cling to the bark, and he carries the snake in his belly, the scorpion, the toad. Noah was to drown all poison beasts, but Krag saves them, so that Noah’s sons will know pain. Krag does this for the not-people. Krag weeps. But the not-people took Magigi from him. They give her back soon."

"Are you talking about Enoch’s giants? The Nephilim? Or is not-people your word for these devils?"

Uj looked at me with pity, and shook his head, and would not answer.

Ydmos said, "We learned, much to our sorrow, that it is unwise to give names to the things in the Night Land, for then they appear in our thoughts as more human than they are. It is our custom, even among ourselves, to refer to the enemy only by attributes. There is a danger otherwise."

Enoch spoke, "For the good powers of the world, as well as for the ill. It is not right for man to make in brass or iron any image of the Lord of the Eloi, for it is idolatry, and men come to praise the works of their hand, and not Him whose handiwork Man is."

Ydmos bowed toward Enoch, as if toward a sage.

24. THE SUNDERING OF SPEECH

Then, to me, Ydmos said, "If the conjunction made with Nergal the Hunter fails, I cannot re-connect it."

He was responding to an earlier comment of mine, when I joked that I could no longer understand what was being said.

But I was curious. This instantaneous translation of languages was being done without any apparatus, without any people doing the translating. Since no word can be translated from one language to another without some loss of meaning, I did not see how it would be possible at all. "How does it work? Who or what decides which word to pick for us?"

Uj laughed in scorn and shook his shaggy head, but he did not answer when I gave him a curious look.

Ydmos said, “The science of aetheric pnumatics is largely forgotten in my time. The speculations of unwise men breached the walls of time, and opened doors that should have been kept shut. I did perform a conjunction: but I also sensed a unification of energies centered in Nergal the Hunter. His spiritual condition was bifurcated, as if the Night-hearing had once been his, and then had been taken from him. His past self, it enjoyed singularity of language: I brought it forward, for it was connected to the ur-word, which I know.”

I said, “ 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.’ “

Enoch looked at me, a look of fear and wonder on his face. He said, “As if I hear a trumpet: there is one who stands behind Reginald-Powell and speaks words of power through him!”

I said, “It is a quote from the Old Testament. About the confusion of tongues.”

He-Sings-Death whispered to me, "Why does he hear voices? Who speaks to him that does not speak to us?" He pointed at Enoch with his chin.

I said to Enoch, "What are you hearing? Whom did you hear, when I spoke?"

I saw the look of fear and guilt on his face.

He-Sings-Death raised his spear toward Enoch. “He is the one. The darkness is in him like a serpent.”

I said, “What? How do you know?”

Enoch was backing away, and raised his wand.

He-Sings-Death said, “Does he weep? Why did he pull the tongue from the spell Mneseus wove?”

I said, “So that we might live. Mneseus would have had us kill each other.”

He-Sings-Death grinned a savage little grin. “Live? For what? Who else wanted us to live? Who woke us from death?”

Mneseus said, "There is no more time for speech. Now it begins."

I said, "What? What begins?"

25. THE DAWN OF SOULS

Crystals-of-Bliss said to Abraxander: "Are we entering the event horizon, Old Sack?"

Abraxander looked at him with a slight smile, and said, "These ones, us, we will encounter no barrier, no wall. Does this one, you, does he know what an event horizon looks like? It is not like smashing through a pane of ice. It is passing an imaginary point beyond which the calculated escape-velocity exceeds the speed of light."

The reddish sunlight underfoot grew more yellow as he spoke.

I forgot Enoch. I looked down.

He-Sings-Death looked down also, and there was joy in his voice. "Sing! Praise the Dawn, and the coming of the Dawn, and praise as well He-Brings-Dawn, for what should men who walk on Earth, what should we do, if the Bringer should fail to bring? A baby cannot find milk without his mother: no more can men who walk on Earth find light, if the light-bringer does not bring light."

I said, "It is not dawn. We are dropping into the Central Sun. Look! Where have the other galaxies gone?"

For the wide belt of streaming galaxies, pinwheels and spirals and nebulae of all sizes, vanished before we passed through it.

Here and there were scattered stars, stars without Milky Ways around them, and some clouds of thin gas, green and blue and indigo, luminous with the light behind them.

Even those last few suns were dropping toward the Central Sun, like droplets of fire falling into an ocean of fire.

The circle of the central sun grew larger and larger underfoot. Around the rim of that blazing disk, the black sky of the empty universe was beginning to glow cherry-red, as if the whole cosmos were some enormous oven.

Abraxander said, "It is not a sun. It is not the dawn. The hue of light is higher in its frequency, because this ship here, her speed is greater." And then to Crystals-of-Bliss, he said sardonically, "Can you not see the color of the sky beyond and around the Omega Point?"

Crystals-of-bliss said, "So we are already beyond the point of no-return." His nonchalance, for once, had vanished: he looked frightened.

I said to him, "Mr. Bliss, why does the prospect frighten you? If understood Mr. Threshold's explanation, the space and time itself outside the event horizon are also being pulled in."

"That should cheer this Son of Old Earth, you unregistered chance-birth? Not only can we not get out, but there is no place to go. It is impossible to depart this place, impossible to surpass the speed of light."

I said, "Impossible? Sir, forgive me, but, for a man who has been revived from the dead, you seem to have a very certain knowledge of what can and cannot be done."

He-Sings-Death said, "Why is the sky afire?"

Abraxander said, "We are in a pit, us, this ship, all of us. The light is outside the pit and falling inward, onto our heads. The pull of the Omega Point speeds up the light as it falls on us, but light cannot speed up, and so it must grow more energetic, more short-waved, as it falls. Normally, this light is too dark to see, a mere degree or so above absolute zero. As the wavelength is compressed into visibility from infra-red, to us it seems red."

The light underfoot grew brighter, and, all at once, the disk of the Central Sun swelled up and filled the view embraced by the table of glass where we stood. At the same time, the fires parted like mists. Even as mountain climbers make their way up through a low hanging cloud, but do not see the cloud, only a mist that receded from them, so too was it with us and the fires of the Central Sun. I bent down and touched the glass, but felt no heat from the surface.

26. THE SEA OF SLEEP

"Look," I said. "Bubbles. There are streams of fiery bubbles within the fire. Some sort of spray or…"

Ydmos said, "These streams are surely the Earth-Current: there is in them something salubrious to this, our condition of life."

He-Sings-Death threw himself on his face, and pressed his cheek against the glass, squinting. "I saw a face! A drowned man! In the bubbles!" He jumped to his feet, and pointed with his spear left and right. "Many faces! Look!"

Abraxander said, "Formation ghosts. Biological formations, in this case. It is possible, given enough energy, to evoke more complex formations, depending on the initial energy of our imposed rotation. Larger ghosts, these ghosts can wake. Worlds. Stars. Everything."

I said, "What are those bubbles? Windows into heaven?" For I saw faces, too. Faces of men and women, eyes closed in blissful sleep. I have seen children with faces that peaceful in sleep, but not adults.

I was overcome with terror, for I was sure that, at any moment, the face of Lisa would float past the window. I cannot say why it was fear, not joy, that griped my heart at the thought, but I was shaking.

Abraxander said "No. This is an Aleph. It contains the memory of the universe."

Enoch said, "The elect are mixed here with the damned. Do not look into the dark bubbles! The faces are torn with pain, their mouths wide with screams they cannot utter, their eyes staring and blind. Do not look! It is not right that mortal men, who know but finite times of suffering, should look into the eyes of those who suffer without end."

He-Sings-Death looked down. He gave a cry of awe and pointed with his spear down below his feet at something I could not see, "All the faces, white and dark alike, sleeping and suffering, are being pulled there, toward that greater light. There is a face within it greater than all others."

Mneseus took my elbow. "Pwyll! Yours is the mightiest weapon here. Slay us all, and kill yourself."

I shook him from me. "Forgive me, Your Majesty, but why should-"

His eyes were flashing. "There was much in the tale of Abraxander-the-Threshold I did not know, and his words passed my ear, and no seed of understanding was planted in my heart. But this one seed was planted, took root, sprouted: in his tale, how did his people learn his art? The practice by which he conjured your iron thunder-spear, my bow, the bone club of the earth-born?"

I said, "From a radio broadcast from another galaxy…" but I stopped, for I knew Mneseus could not imagine a second Milky Way (which, to him, was a road of stars stretched over the dome of the night sky) any more than he could believe in a second sun.

But Mneseus said, "To which this great ship-this hall you call it a ship-was sent. But it was a trap. Abraxander said this, in his tale. From whence did that art first come? The dark geometry he speaks of, that allows man to open doors between the heaven, earth, and hell, doors the gods abhor that men should open."

"From them. From the enemy."

"Do you think the enemy taught to Abraxander this art, and brought him back from the dead, to be in this place with us now, him and his dark arts, for some purpose that will bring men joy?"

The Blue Man was standing a little ways away from us, and now he raised his hand and spoke loudly, "Radio-signals! I am intercepting a message, my bravos. Or-not intercepting-the mind, the mind inside the black hole. It is talking to me. She. It is Emerald-Laughter-of-Refulgent-Leaf."

"Who?" I asked him.

Absent-mindedly (for he was listening to some voice inaudible to me, and his face was numb with wonder), he whispered. "She…. Was… My daughter-wife. Made of my own tissues. We are genetically interlocked, chemically addicted to each other. Sterile with any other partners … we …"

Ydmos said, "Do not heed the voice, lest your draw her in, and feed your true love to the enemy."

Mneseus said, "It is a siren. We will not be able to resist."

The Blue Man said, "She is coming aboard."

Uj was crouching on the glass floor, staring hungrily at the streams of light flowing past, at the thousands of shining bubbles caught in the light. He threw back his head and uttered a wolflike howl of triumph.

As if by instinct, I raised my rifle and took aim at him.

His face was now dark with wrath and triumph, as if uncounted years of carefully-hidden anger now could no longer be suppressed. His hair and beard were bristling, and his lips were drawn back to show his fangs. His eyes were but slits in his dark face.

"Humans, how you forget! Between lives, we do not forget, the First People. When the Darkness fell down from the stars, it pleased the Silent Ones that you should be hunted from life to life, and wake without knowledge after every death, and let the hunt begin again. But the First People did not please the Silent Ones: we were slain, cub and mother, young and old, and our sacred trees were torn up by the roots, our shades could not climb the branches to the sky. I, and I alone, escaped them, for it amused them to permit me to escape: for the world is a trap, all the world, and I had nowhere to run but here, and nothing to do but this. Now it all begins again."

Because of the hypnosis or the magic Ydmos and Nergal had performed, I knew that by 'First People' he meant the race I knew as Neanderthals.

He-Sings-Death gave out another cry. "I saw a tree! There, in the fiery stream! A bird! Land and sky and rushing waters!"

Enoch said, "Someone is saying the Seven Words of Creation against their order, to slay all men, beasts of the earth, fish and foul, to quench the sun and moon, uproot the green, drown the land, mingle the waters with the firmament, and extinguish all the light. When the Last Word is spoken, all shall be dark again, and it shall not be good."

Abraxander was turning his head slowly left and right, as if listening to an unseen voice, or trying to catch a glimpse of some elusive image.

Then he raised his hand, extending a forefinger, and he said, "That one, he is performing a rotation. That one, he knows the same art as this one, me, but his reach is greater. The fourth-dimensional radius of his major axis embraces this entire area of space-time."

Abraxander was pointing at Uj.

I said to Uj, "Tell me what is going on! Tell me, sir, I warn you, or I shoot!"

He sneered at me. "You knew once, but you forgot."

I blinked. Even though he was but a scant five yards from me, my vision was swimming, and I had trouble keeping him in my sites. The air between us was rippling.

I said, "We … we have met before …"

Uj said, "In other lives, all of you, over and over again. You forget, and I remember."

Mneseus said to me, "Slay him. Surely he is the traitor we fear."

I said to Ydmos, "What should I do?"

Ydmos said, "Do not wrong your fellow soul, or it calls the Thoughts from the House of Silence, whose doors have never closed in all eternity."

Mneseus said, "He is not a man; he is an earth-born."

Uj grimaced and gave a chuckle. "Ask him, the archer, why he does not slay me himself? Why does he urge you to do the act?"

Enoch raised his wand and pointed it at Uj, "Silence! We agreed not to tell him."

27. I AM ALONE

That made me lower my rifle. I blinked and looked around at the others. They were all wavering now, as light from underfoot was surging into the chamber. There was a pressure behind my eyes, like drunkenness, and my vision was blurred. "Tell me what?"

He-Sings-Death said, "Captain Powell is my friend. I will speak: Powell! We are all ghosts. Not you. That is why you were spared."

I said, "What does that mean?"

And I was surprised to hear the words come from my mouth in a voice that was thick and shaking with fear.

Abraxander tucked his hands into his sleeves like a mandarin. "The self versus non-self distinction is breaking down. We are entering a period of the universe where there is no more this one and that one. Look at my lips. I am not speaking. You are recalling my thoughts as if they are yours because we are all becoming one."

Enoch pointed at the ceiling of the chamber overhead, "Look. There is light below our feet, but we do not cast shadows. You cast a shadow. This is not flesh, our substance. You dreamt us into flesh, even as you dreamt the weapon you carry."

I said, "Abraxander did that!"

Abraxander said, "Abraxander is but one of your reincarnations. During his life, Illsa Flosshild von Helse was reincarnated as Nimgwendoline-the-White-Link, and had been, tragically, wed to another, for you had not the patience to await the coming of your true love, promised from previous aeons, to reappear, and did not recognize her, but delivered her to your liege lord, Arthrobel-the-Circle-of-Stars, who was the potentate for the Third City of the Nine."

I said, “Her name was Illsa Powell. Von Helse is her maiden name. Everyone calls her Lisa.”

He-Sings-Death, "When you were He-Sings-Death, she was She-Gathers-Reeds, but on your wedding night, while you disported yourself at the love-play, she was bitten by a viper; and during the moment when she screamed and jumped in your arms, you thought, you thought she screamed because of the pleasure of you. When she fainted, you thought she fainted with pleasure. But then her head lolled back. After the pyre-rite, you went into the sweat lodge, and walked in a vision to the Dry Place, where the shadows of the dead are kept, and He-Is-Rich, who rules the tribes of the dead, granted you leave to bring her up to the world again; but he did this to mock you, for a shadow cannot step into the sunlight."

Ydmos said, "The dead did not mock you. She did come again, and you met her again, and fell in love, and were wed. Her name was Ulliona of Greater East Bastion, daughter of Psymmachus the Librarian. I returned from a venture into the Night Land, but I carried a mind-sickness into the Last Redoubt from the unclean things that dwell in the Place of the Thing That Nods, and my thoughts were tainted with extradimensional infusions. In a fit of madness I slew her and my children: when I was brought to my sound senses again, the Lectors asked me to bite the Capsule, and slay myself, for despite that I had entered the Last Redoubt again, I carried the Night Land within me, and the harsh rules of that Outer World applied to me."

Mneseus said, "She was Parthenope, Sorcerer-Queen of Ys, the seaport of the Land of Atlas. Of her you know, how she perished. When the waves in anger drowned our shining cities, her tomb was sunk also: but she was turned into a sea-mew by the gods, and rose again from the salt waves, and in my ship, I and my few men, we followed her white wings over trackless deeps to Aegyptian Lands, and I told the secrets of my lost peoples to the Pharaohs."

Enoch raised his wand in both hands, and brought it down across his knee, to break it in two halves. He sent the broken fragments of stick clattering across the glass floor, and thin white smolder came from them. “I am the traitor. I am the one who cannot say the Master-Word that Ydmos knows.”

I said, “I thought you were Enoch the prophet, a holy man?”

“I am Enoch, son of Cain. He slew his brother in the five hundredth year of the world, when the shepherds and the farmers were a numerous people, and their quarrels over the land were many. We feared the vengeance of the sons of Abel, and hunted them to extinction, and Adam, the First of Man, called Seth and the sons of Seth, those folk you call human beings, upon us: Cain was exiled. Coveting his place, I stole my mother, Lillith, from my father, and made her my wife: from her, I begat the Rephaim, fell and proud. I gathered my people inside the first wall of the first city, and the other sons of Cain, the tall Anakim, gathered about, but my walls could not be stormed. Cain, even from the far land of his exile, wrought my downfall, for he called up from the blood he had shed the Grigorim, the Watchers sent from heaven to see the work of creation, but who lusted for the world and forgot their home. These fallen beings, these Watchers, encamped without my walls.

"Thus began the first of sieges of the First Redoubt of Man. As with the Final Siege from the time of Ydmos, treason from within betrayed the redoubt. They offered me a human woman, and life eternal, that she and I should meet and know love, true love, not merely once, but in life after life.

"Ulliona and Nimgwendoline, Emerald Laughter and Illsa von Helse, Parthenope and She-Gathers-Reeds: all were called to you by me. I paid the price for that necromancy. The serpent you all feared, the darkness, is carried within me: but my memories are within you. We are entangled. We are one.”

Enoch bowed, but the waving and shimmering of the air was no so great that I could hardly see him. His body had grown misty and wraithlike, semi-transparent.

Uj's teeth were clenched as he crouched on the glass floor, staring up at me, but he grinned like a skull. "Where is Magigi? Your woman has come again to you, not once, but many times. Why not mine?"

I looked up. There were two shadows on the ceiling, cast there by the light from underfoot. Mine, and the shadow of the Neanderthal. Uj was real.

When I brought my eyes down from the ceiling, Ydmos, Abraxander, Crystals-of-Bliss, Mneseus, Enoch and He-Sings-Death were gone. They had faded away.