“Take their scents,” he said, “that you may follow them anywhere.”
Mizar lowered his head.
“I have them,” he said.
“I will open a series of ports. Do not pass through them. Sniff, rather, at each, and see whether any bear traces of these scents. Tell me if one does.”
The monkey-shape scuttled, approaching the trench’s side, and crouched there, watching.
Death raised his right arm, and his cloak hung down to the ground, curtain of absolute blackness, before the hound. Without preliminary lightening, it became a gateway to a bright cityscape built as within a sphere or tube, buildings dependent from all visible surfaces. It was gone in an instant to be replaced by a flashing city of slim towers and improbable minarets, connected by countless bridges and walkways, clouds drifting among them, no sign of ground anywhere.
Then meadows flashed by, and long corridors of innumerable doorways, both lighted and dark, opened and closed, the interior of an Escher-angled grotto, tube cities beneath a sea, slow-wheeling satellites, a Dyson-sphered realm whose inhabitants sailed from world to world in open vessels. Yet Mizar remained still, watching, sniffing. The pace increased, scenes flashing beneath Death’s arm with a rapidity that no normal eye might follow. Alioth skipped before prospects of live flowers, both mechanical and organic.
Death halted the process, freezing on the scene of a classical ruin— broken pillars, fallen walls, crashed pediments—upon a grassy and flower-dotted hilltop, flooded with golden light beneath a painfully blue sky. Gulls passed, calling. The shadows were all hard-edged, and a touch of sea-smell drifted through the gate.
“Anything at all?” Death asked.
“No,” Mizar replied, as Alioth darted through the gate to settle upon a flower which immediately began to droop.
“I have tried the likeliest choices for the glimpse I had. We will look somewhere more distant, someplace almost impossibly hard to reach. Bide.”
The scene vanished, to be replaced by that blackness which had prevailed earlier. A little later, a light appeared. It brightened steadily, casting illumination far down the trench and beyond it. The black, spiderish monkey-form crouched on the trench’s edge drew back as the brightening continued, as coils of colored light and random-seeming geometric forms drifted within to the accompaniment of an electrical sizzling sound. Trails like lightning came and went. Then darkness ensued of an instant, inverting the values of the various brightnesses. A negative quality came over the crackling prospect.
Mizar stirred.
“Yes,” he said then, the spikes of his teeth gleaming metallically in the glow. “There is something similar here.”
“Find them if you can,” Death said. “Call to me if you do.”
The hound threw back his head and howled. Then he sprang forward through Death’s port into the dark-bright abstract world beyond, sustained by wings of moire. Death lowered his cloak and the gate was folded and put away.
“You may never see him again,” said the monkey. “It is a very high realm to which you have sent him—perhaps beyond your reach.”
Death turned his head, showing his teeth.
“It is true that it could take a long while, Dubhe,” he said. “Yet all patience is but an imitation of my ways, and even in the highest realms I am not unknown.”
Dubhe sprang to his shoulder and settled there as Death rose up out of the trench.
“I believe that someone has just begun a game,” Death said as he headed across Deep Fields through a meadow of blackest grass, black poppies swaying at the passage of his cloak, “and, next to music, they have invoked a pastime for which I have the highest regard. It is long, Dubhe, since I have been given a good game. I shall respond to their opening as none might expect, and we will try each others’ patience. Then, one day, they will learn that I am always in the right place at the proper time.”
“I once felt that way,” the monkey replied, “till a branch I was reaching for wasn’t there.”
The cacophony that followed might have been their laughter, or only the random bleats of entropy. Same thing.
John D’Arcy Donnerjack loved but once, and when he saw the moire he knew that it was over. He knew other things as well, things he had not even suspected till that moment; and so his heart was torn in more than one direction, and his mind spun down avenues it had never traveled before.
He looked at Ayradyss, his dark-haired, dark-eyed lady, there beneath the hilltop tree where they always met, and the moire swam over her, granting her features an even more delicate appointment. He had always felt that, had they chosen, they might rendezvous in his world, but that the dream-dust, fairy-tale quality of their romance required the setting of this magic land. Neither of them had ever suggested otherwise. Now he understood, and the pain was like ice in his breast and fire in his head.
He knew this place far better than most of his kind, and he doubted that Ayradyss was even aware of the first moire flicker which meant her end. He knew her now for a child of Virtu rather than a visitor masked by an exotic name and pleasing form. She was exactly what she appeared to be, beautiful and lost; and he caught her about the shoulders and held her to him.
“John, what is the matter?” she asked.
“Too late,” he said. “Too late, my love. If only I had known sooner…”
“Known what?” she said. “Why are you holding me so tightly?”
“We never spoke of origins. I did not know that Virtu is really your home.”
“What of it, John? What differ—”
And the moire flickered over her again, longer than before; and he could tell by her sudden tensing that this time she had noted it.
“Yes, hold me,” she said. “What did you mean when you spoke of wishing to have known sooner?”
“Too late,” he replied. “There might have been something I could have tried. No guarantee it would have worked, though. Probably wouldn’t have.” He kissed her as she began to shake. “Too small a piece of an idea too late. I have loved you. I would that it could be longer.”
“And I you,” she replied. “There were so many more things to do together.”
He had hoped that the moire would not return for a long while, as might sometimes be the case, but abruptly it was back again, causing her form and features to flow as if seen through a heat haze. And this time he thought that he heard for a moment a strain of discordant sound. This time the moire remained, and Ayradyss continued to waver through more and more distortions. It became difficult to hold her as her shape was altered, diminishing the while.
“It is not fair,” he said.
“It is as it always has been,” she replied, and he thought that he felt a final kiss as she fell and the air was touched again by that sound. A faint track of bright dust lay across the air.
He stood with empty arms and clouded eyes. After a time, he seated himself on the ground and covered his face with his hands. At some point, his grief gave way to a journey through everything he had learned of Virtu, the race’s greatest artifact, and he brought to bear theories he had developed over the years and all of the speculations with which he had played during his enormously fruitful career.
When he rose again it was to seek a single mote of her dust and to begin another journey, down hypothetical ways to the end of everything.
Tranto felt it come upon him as he labored with a fractilizing crew, manipulating small proges into a forest, under a new eyedee, there, outside the thatched hamlet he had also helped to raise. An old pain he’d never quite understood was acting up again at the fore-end of his great bulk—a thing that had been with him ever since his encounter with the phant poacher, whom he had left totally disconnected and flat, never to notch his trophy gun again or return to the Verite. Tranto bellowed briefly at the sensation, and the other phants moved away, rolling their eyes and shifting uneasily.