[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

warned they were coming to the demarcation.
As agreed, the traction lines switched to low power, and an opening appeared directly
ahead of them, a clarified darkness in the pale green field. This relieved Olmy somewhat; he
had had some doubts that Enoch would cooperate, or that Plass could compel her. The
vehicle rolled through. They crossed the defenses. Behind them, the fields went up again.
Now the floor of the Way was covered with sandy soil. The autopilot switched off the air
jets and let the vehicle roll for another twenty meters.
The pressure suits were already becoming uncomfortable; they were old, and while they
did their best to fit, their workings were in less than ideal condition. Still, they would last
several weeks, recycling gases and liquids and complex molecules, rehydrating the body
through arterial inserts and in the same fashion providing a minimal diet.
Olmy doubted the suits would be needed for more than a few more hours.
The twins ignored their discomfort and focused their attention on the lesion. Outside the
pyramid, the lesion seemed to fill the sky, and in a few kilometers, it would be almost
directly overhead. From this angle, the hairlike swirls of spinning world-lines already took on
a shimmering reflective quality, like bands sliced from a wind-ruffled lake; their passage
sang in Olmy's skull, more through his teeth than through his ears.
The full character of the Night Land came on gradually, beginning with a black, gritty,
loose scrabble beneath the tires of the vehicle. Olmy's suit readout, shining directly into his
left eye, showed a decrease in air pressure of a few millibars beyond the demarcation. The
temperature remained steady, just above zero degrees Celsius.
They turned west, to their left as they faced north down the Way, and came upon the
path Olmy had seen from the peak of the pyramid. Plass had identified it as the road used
by vehicles carrying material from the first gate Enoch had opened. It had also been the
path to Plass's garden, the one she had shared with her husband. Within a few minutes,
about three kilometers from the Redoubt, passing over the rise that had blocked his view,
they came across the garden's remains.
The relief here was very low, but the rise of some fifty meters had been sufficient to hide
what must have been among the earliest attempts at elaboration. Olmy was not yet sure he
believed in the allthing, but what had happened in the garden, and in the rest of the Night
Land, made any disagreement moot. The trees in the southwest corner of a small rapid-
growth orchard had spread out low to the ground, and glowed now like the body of Number
2. Those few trees left standing flickered like frames in a child's flipbook. The rest of the
orchard had simply turned to sparkling ash. In the center, however, rose a mound of gnarled
brown shot through with vivid reds and greens, and in the middle of this mound, facing
almost due south, not looking at anything in particular, was a face some three meters in
height, its skin the color of green wood, cracks running from crown to chin. The face did not
move or exhibit any sign of life.
Puffs of dust rose from the ash, tiny little explosions from within this mixture of realities.
The ash re-formed to obliterate the newly formed craters. It seemed to have some purpose
of its own, as did everything else in the garden but the face.
Ruin and elaboration; one form of life extinguished, another imbued.
"Early," Karn said, looking to their right at a sprawl of shining dark green leaves,
stretched, expanded, and braided into eye-twisting knots. "Didn't know what it was dealing
with."
"Doesn't look like it ever did," Olmy said, realizing she was speaking as if some central
director actually did exist.
Rasp set her sister straight. "We've seen textbook studies of gates gone wrong. Geometry
is the living tissue of reality. Mix constants and you get a -- "
"We've sworn not to discuss the failures," Karn said, but without any strength.
"We are being driven through the worst failure of all," Rasp said. "Mixed constants and
skewed metrics explain all of this."
Karn shrugged. Olmy thought that perhaps it did not matter; perhaps Rasp and Karn and
Plass did not really disagree, merely described the same thing in different ways. What they
were seeing up close was not random rearrangement; it had a demented, even a vicious
quality, that suggested purpose.
Above the rows of flipbook trees and the living layers of ash stretched a dead and twisted
sky. From the hideous chancre of dead blackness, with its sullen ring of congealed red,
depended curtains of rushing darkness that swept the Night Land like rain beneath a moving
front.
"Mother's hair," Karn said, and clutched her clavicle tightly in white-knuckled hands.
"She's playing with us," Rasp said. "Bending over us, waving her hair over our crib. We
reach up to grab, and she pulls away."
"She laughs," Karn said.
"Then she gives us to the -- "
Rasp did not have time to finish. The vehicle swerved abruptly with a small squeak before
a sudden chasm that had not been there an instant before. Out of the chasm leaped white
shapes, humanlike but fungal, doughy and featureless. They seemed to be expelled and to
climb out equally, and they lay on the sandy black-streaked ground for a moment, as if
recovering from their birth. Then they rose to loose and wobbling feet and ran with speed
and even grace over the irregular landscape to the trees, which they began to uproot.
These were the laborers Olmy had seen from the pyramid. They paid no attention to the
intruders. The chasm closed, and Olmy instructed the car to continue.
"Is that what we'll become?" Karn asked.
"Each of us will become many of them," Rasp said.
"Such a relief to know!" Karn said sardonically.
The rotating shadows ahead gave the ground a blurred and frantic aspect, like unfocused
time-lapse photography. Only the major landmarks stood unchanged in the sweeps of
metaphysical revision: the Watcher, pale beam still glowing from its unblinking eye; the
Castle with its unseen giant occupant; and the obelisk with its scaffold and hordes of white
figures working directly beneath the lesion.
Olmy ordered the vehicle to stop, but Rasp grabbed his hand. "Farther," she said. "We
can't do anything here."
Olmy grinned and threw back his head, then grimaced like a monkey in the oldest forest
of all, baring his teeth at this measureless madness.
"Farther!" Karn insisted. The car rolled on, jolting with the regular ridges some powerful
force had pushed up in the sand.
Above the constant sizzle of rearranged world-lines, like a symphony of scrubbing and
tapping brooms, came more sounds. If a burning forest could sing its pain, Olmy thought, it
would be like the rising wail that came from the tower and the Castle. Thousands of the
white figures made thousands of different sounds, as if trying to talk to each other, but not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]