Bear, Greg - The Way of All Ghosts by Bear Greg

Author:Bear, Greg [Bear, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-30T15:33:59+00:00

"She shows some wisdom," Plass acknowledged grudgingly. "But the allthing still must exist."

"And all this ... elaboration?" Olmy asked.

"Spoiled by deathlessness," Plass said, "by never-ending supplies of resources. Never freshened by the new, at its core. Order without death, art without critic or renewal, the final mind of a universe where only riches exist, only joy is possible, never knowing disappointment."

The lander shuddered again and again as they dropped toward the pyramid. Its inertial control systems could not cope with the sweeping rays of different world-lines.

"Sounds like a spoiled child," Olmy said.

"Far worse," Karn said. "We're like spoiled children, Rasp and I. Willful and maybe a little silly. Humans are silly, childish, always learning, full of failure. Out there -- beyond the lesion, reaching through it ... "

"Perpetual success," Rasp mocked. "Ultimate and mature. It cannot learn. Only rearrange."

"Deirdre Enoch was never content with limitations," Plass said, looking to Olmy for sympathy. "She went searching for what heaven would really be." Her eyes glittered with her emotion -- exaltation brought on by too much fear and dismay.

"Maybe she found it," Karn said.

"I can't welcome you," Deirdre Enoch said, walking heavily toward them. Behind Olmy, within a chamber high in the Redoubt, near the tip of the steel pyramid, the lander sighed and settled into its cradle.

Olmy tried to compare this old woman with the portraits of Enoch in the records. Her voice was much the same, though deeper, and almost without emotion.

Rasp, Karn, and Plass stood beside Olmy as Enoch approached. Behind Enoch, in the lambency of soft amber lights spaced around the base of the chamber, wavered a line of ten other men and women, all of them old, all dressed in black, with silver ribbons hanging from the tops of their white-haired heads. "You've come to a place of waiting where nothing is resolved. Why come at all?"

Before Olmy could answer, Enoch smiled, her deeply wrinkled face seeming to crack with the unfamiliar expression. "We assume you are here because you think the Jarts could become involved."

"I don't know what to think," Olmy said, his voice hoarse. "I recognize you, but none of the others ... "

"We survived the first night after the lesion. We formed an expedition to make an escape attempt. There were sixty of us that first time. We managed to return to the Redoubt before the Night Land could change us too much, play with us too drastically. We aged. Some of us were taken and ... You see them out there. There was no second expedition."

"My husband," Plass said. "Where is he?"

"Yes ... I know you. You are so much the same it hurts. You escaped at the very beginning."

"I was the only one," Plass said.

"You called it the Night Land," Rasp said, holding up her hands, the case with her clavicle.

"How appropriate."

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