Paragaea (43 page)

“You are welcome to Atla,” the man called Eduro said, gliding across the floor to stop just before the trio, moving effortlessly and with an impossible grace, “as we have not had any visitors in long centuries, if not longer.”

“You might entertain more often,” Hieronymus said warily, moving nearer to Leena, “if the Barrier wall did not still prevent all approach to the mountain.”

“Oh,” Eduro asked distractedly, “is that old thing still on?” He tilted his head momentarily to one side, stared into empty space, and blinked. “There. We'd simply forgotten it had been left on, all those years ago.”

He held his arms wide, and regarded the trio with a thin smile.

“Now,” he asked, “why have you come to Atla?”

Hieronymus and Balam both looked to Leena, who stepped forward, shuffling her feet sheepishly like a recalcitrant student summoned to the front of a classroom, uneasy in the spotlight's glare.

“I am from Earth, an inadvertent traveler to this land,” Leena said after a moment's pause, her tone firm and determined. “Tell me. Do the Atlans know of the gates which lead to Earth?”

“But of course,” Eduro said with a dismissive wave. “The fissures are simply a side effect of the unfortunate incident which created Paragaea itself.”

“Created Paragaea?!” Hieronymus regarded the strange man through narrowed eyes. “What ‘incident' do you mean?”

“An experiment involving a singularity, of course, much like the one which now powers Atla itself.”

“Singularity?” Leena repeated. “You talk in riddles!” She paused, taking a deep breath, collecting her reserves of patience. “Explain yourself, if you please.”

Eduro shook his thin head fractionally from side to side, and his eyelids slid closed and open sleepily. “I'm afraid all of this excitement has quite exhausted me.” He turned and started to walk back under the archway. “The servitors will lead you to your rooms”—he waved his hand, and a trio of the metal-and-crystal machines scuttled out of hiding, one stopping before each of them—“where you can make yourselves comfortable. When we have all regained our strength, I'll summon you and we can talk further, yes?”

Eduro passed beneath the archway, and from a hidden recess above, a door slid down into place in an eyeblink, sealing off the passage.

“It would appear,” Leena said, her mouth drawn into a line, “that we have no choice.”

The scuttling creatures led them to a suite of sumptuous, palatial rooms, the finest Leena had ever seen. Each room had a separate bathing chamber, with a crystal tub the size of a small boat that filled
with steaming hot water at the touch of a fingertip, smelling slightly of roses. Trying to quell her mounting impatience, Leena took a long, luxurious soak in the tub, collecting her thoughts.

“This is a remarkable place,” came the voice of Hieronymus from the doorway. He had stripped off the bulky layer of clothes he'd worn through the frozen wastes, now barefoot and wearing only a new pair of trousers and a loose-fitting shirt open to the waist. “If anyone has the answers we seek, it must be these people.”

“New clothes?” Leena said, leaning her soap-slicked elbows on the edge of the tub and giving him an appraising look.

Hieronymus looked down at his shirt and trousers admiringly. “Yes, it appears our host has thought of everything. When I climbed out of the bath, I found the strange little servitor machines had lain out clean clothes for all of us in the vestibule.”

“Oh,” Leena said with a disappointed pout, “so you've already bathed, then?” She rolled over and kicked to the far side of the enormous tub, floating lengthwise on the surface, her breasts and belly just cresting the water's edge.

“Well,” Hieronymus said with a sly smile, “I suppose I
could
still use a bit of cleaning, at that. Balam will be busy grooming himself in his room for ages, and until this Eduro summons us, we've got nothing to do but wait.”

He slipped out of the shirt, which fell to his feet, his tattoos and scars revealed, like a history of his lifetime written in ink and blood.

Leena stood, the water coming just to her navel, her wet hair plastered against her neck. Hieronymus shucked off his trousers and, as he slipped into the tub, she watched him admiringly, and smiled as she took him in her arms.

After a time, the voice of Eduro echoed from the walls, inviting them to dine with him. Hieronymus and Leena smiled sheepishly, entangled in rugs on the floor of the bathing chamber, and dressed quickly in the clothes provided. Leena's options included a floor-length gown, a kilt and blouse, or a pair of trousers and a loose-fitting shirt much like Hieronymus now wore. She opted for the trousers and shirt, though was grateful to find a pair of comfortable slippers in her size laid out on the bed, thankful not to have to put her boots on again for a short while.

When they had dressed, the trio gathered in the vestibule. Having traveled rough for so long a time, they each found it strange to see one another clean-scrubbed and dressed in finery. Each of them, though, had strapped on their holsters and scabbards, just as a precaution.

The servitors, scuttling before them, led the three through the corridors of the citadel city to a small room, modestly appointed with strange paintings and tapestries covering its walls, dominated by a long dining table upon which was piled a confusion of fruits, vegetables, and meats. At the head of the table sat Eduro, a beatific smile on his face, his teeth showing bright white against his red skin.

“Eat, my friends,” he said, gesturing broadly to the table. “The city's senses indicate you have not eaten well in many days.”

Leena, Hieronymus, and Balam exchanged guarded looks, but then sat around the table, eagerly diving into the proffered food.

“Why have we seen none of your countrymen,” Balam asked, fruit juice dribbling down his chin, “none but the living dead in the sunlit room?”

“I am the only Atlan to remain mobile,” Eduro explained, taking a sip from a crystal goblet that held some sort of light green liquid, “the rest having opted to impair the functioning of their right temporal lobes, severing their sensory connection to the outside world, preferring instead to live on in silent contemplation in their ageless, near-immortal bodies. Most of the more adventurous Atlans departed millennia ago, off to explore space or time.”

“Exploring in ships, you mean?” Hieronymus asked. “Sailing the heavens?”

“Some left in vessels, to the moon, the planets, and the stars beyond,” Eduro said. “But others used the fissures to travel back to Earth, in an attempt to save Atla that was, the original island nation that had been their home before the creation of Paragaea; but the fact that Paragaea persists suggests that they failed. Or, if nature prefers diversity to paradox, perhaps their efforts merely created an Earth where the island nation of Atla did not destroy itself in an accidental discharge of energy with the unleashing of a black hole, incredibly small but dissipating so quickly that their whole culture was destroyed.”

Leena looked to Balam and Hieronymus, and it was clear they were as confused as she.

“I'm not sure I understand,” Leena said. “You said
back
to Earth?”

“Yes,” Eduro said, with a heavy sigh. “My people originated on Earth, like you. But at our civilization's peak, we destroyed ourselves, and were very nearly pushed over the brink of extinction. Our civilization had harnessed the power of singularities, such as that found when a star is so massive it collapses under its own gravitational pull. We used the power of controlled singularities to conquer the fundamental forces of the universe, and were the undisputed masters of Earth. In our arrogance, though, we grew lax in our precautions, and as a result, there was…an accident.” Eduro blinked slowly, deep in thought. “Atla was a highly developed nation, our cities covering the length and breadth of our island continent. We had outposts on the other six continents, and our sphere of influence covered the globe.”

Eduro pointed to a painting on a nearby wall, which seemed to depict a stylized map, with an island at its center, roughly circular, with a large inlet on the east, a hump to the west, and a tail of a peninsula to the south, surrounded by oceans ringed by oddly familiar landforms. Leena looked at it for a long moment before realizing that it appeared to be a map of Earth, with the Antarctic continent at the center of the projection.

“We had harnessed the means of creating singularities,” Eduro went on, “and then drawing power from the energies that evaporated from them. But the temperature radiated from a singularity is inversely proportionate to its mass, and the smaller the singularity, the faster it evaporates away. Our scientists…miscalculated, and created a singularity that produced such a high energetic output over such a short span of time that our machinery was unable to compensate.”

Eduro lowered his head for a moment, his eyes shut, but after a pause, resumed.

“We can only speculate what happened to Earth in the days and weeks following the destruction of Atla. It is theorized that one effect of the catastrophic release of energy might have been to shift the Earth's crust around its molten core, creating ecological havoc worldwide. Others object that the crust could not move in such a fashion, and in the absence of empirical evidence, the debate has raged for millennia. But, as I am the only Atlan still communicative, and I hold to the crust migration theory, I suppose that is the history to which we will adhere.”

Leena and Hieronymus exchanged a glance, while Balam munched happily on some kind of iced fruit concoction.

“Whatever the extent of the devastation, though, Atla as it was had been destroyed. Only the pocket realm of Paragaea, created by chance in the wake of the explosion, proved our salvation. Two ships full of Atlans, aware of the coming catastrophe, attempted to flee, and found themselves thrown into the maelstrom of gravitational effects, where the very stuff of space-time itself was distorted. One of the ships passed through a fissure into an infant universe, which had been spawned just moments before in the final instant before the singularity released its energy in the final cataclysm. The other ship did not appear, and it was originally believed that it had been destroyed along with the Atlans' island home. In any event, this infant universe in which the Atlans found themselves was like a degraded copy of their
home universe, though operating at a different time scale, and by the time the hapless Atlans were through the fissure, a billion years had already passed. Here, they found a twin to Earth, the continents familiar but lifeless.”

“Lifeless?” Hieronymus asked.

“Yes, here on Paragaea, life had not taken root. The world which first greeted my forebears' eyes was barren and lifeless. Our history does not record their thoughts of those early days, but they must have been dark days, to say the least. They had only the contents of their ship to sustain them, and meager supplies at best.”

Eduro motioned to a tapestry on a far wall, which depicted a few dozen red-skinned men and women standing before a large, crystalline ship, overlooking a wide, barren desert.