He was answered with a long, quivering wail.
The lump shifted and shivered slightly. The dusty cloth did indeed look much like a boulder, but now he saw it was a motley of old rags epoxied together with molecular glue, and the image circuits in the cloth were burnt out.
The hood turned toward him. In the depths he could see half-unclearly a face half collapsed with some degenerative disease that ate away at flesh and muscle, tendon and skull. A medical appliance writhed on the ruined half of her head like a nest of pink worms. She had but one remaining eye, red with weeping, one nostril, and single tooth protruding from her dripping and discolored gums.
The wailing now seemed garbled words, distorted by her corrupted throat. He did not hear the beginning of her lament.
“… every struggle brings defeat, because Fate holds no prize to crown success; all the oracles are dumb or cheat, because they have no secret to express; none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain, because there is no light beyond the curtain; all is vanity and nothingness…”
This last word was croaked with such force that Montrose felt the spittle, mixed with black blood, fly from the old woman’s lips and touch his cheek with a tiny drop of cold. With a shudder he wiped it away, the fear from his youth of infection and plague for a moment resurrected.
“Can I get you to a doctor?” he said. He looked left and right. They were in the middle of a river valley overgrown with ivy and rue, hemmed about with willow trees with crooked limbs, naked in the wintry wind. “There must be some circuit in the greenery. I just had a tree talk to me.…”
The old woman hauled the fabric out of the water. It hung dank, heavy, and dripping in her clawlike hands. “It is my burial shroud I clean. To the great ones who enslave you, such as I must live and die unseen.”
She dropped the dripping fabric, with a soggy noise, on the stones that looked so much like her. “Old Thokk knows you, oldest of sages, Judge of Ages, executioner of earths, who knows the Hermetic mystery, who puts his ring through the nose of history, and makes mockery of all our deaths and births.”
He said nothing, but wondered who and what she was.
She said, “You stare! You blink! You gawk! Old Granny has time for talk. Shall I tell you how I lost my wealth, my way, my stored memories, and all my kith? We still have wars and worse than war: the Springtide authority—Chloe you met, who wars with glaciers—condemned my fields and pretty arbors to sink beneath the rising sea. My bloodline is not one the Judge of Years sees any need to preserve in times to come. I cannot delve, I will not beg, for no man will give to poor old Thokk. No more hale organs have I to sell, nor a pound to pay the physician, nor two pence for the mortuary. I cannot buy health nor pay for life, even while the rich toss their spare bodies to the jackals. What lot do you deem this sad world has in store for the poor? Have you come to mock?”
“No,” he said, feeling at a loss. “Are you saying the doctors, whoever they are, will not help you in this age? Are there any tombs, any of my tombs left, where someone dying can take refuge? Find a better future?”
She threw back her head, and laughed, and sang in her horrid, distorted, sobbing voice:
All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
The storied memories of the times of old,
The patient tracking of the world’s great plan
Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
This chance was never offered me before;
For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.
“Ah!” said Montrose, “I get it, now. You’re blood-flux bat-shat crazy, is that it?”
“All too sane. I see what others blind themselves to flee. Why are you here?”
The question caught him by surprise. “Just—out for a walk. I was thinking.”
“Thinking of how to flee, you mean. Flee from loneliness. Flee from death. Flee from knowing life is void and without form.” The crone pointed at him. Her hand trembled as if with some nerve disease. “You cannot flee. None can, not anyone, not even the star-monsters for all their power, not your fine lady for all her boldness. Death is all!”
Now she bent muttering over her wet washing, clucking and hissing where she found bloodstains and rips. Almost in a whisper, she muttered, “Your fine lady did not escape. Astronomers saw the fires in the constellation of the hunting dogs. No one told you.”
“Fires?” Montrose felt a sensation like the cold finger of a corpse trailing down his spine.
“An explosion, just the same size and same stuff as would be if a vessel the size and velocity of the Hermetic struck a meteor no larger than a pebble at lightspeed. Ask your stick. Some of Chloe’s parts still linger there, eh?” Then she spoke some command in a language unknown to him.
Montrose dropped the stick when it spoke, an emotionless voice giving details of distance and direction, time, magnitudes of various energies detected in a cosmic discharge.
The stick unevenly lay amid the rocks. Montrose stamped on the stick and broke it in half to silence the cool, dispassionate voice.
Thokk uttered a sound like a dry hiccough that served her for a chuckle. “I would have cleaned a burial cloth for her, for Rania, but she will never have a grave to fill.”
Montrose clutched his head. “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it! That could have been—something else. Anything else. A meteor with the same ratio of iron and other elements, traveling the same speed—a fragment of the planet Thrymheim—she would not give up so easily. She would keep going even in a pinnace boat.”
The old woman laughed again, and chanted. “The world rolls round for ever like a mill; it grinds out death and life and good and ill; it has no purpose, heart or mind or will. While air of Space and Time’s full river flow the mill must blindly whirl unresting so: It may be wearing out, but who can know?”
“Who are you, really? Some puppet of Blackie’s?”
“Man might know one thing were his sight less dim; That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, that it is quite indifferent to him. Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, then grinds him back into eternal death.”
“You are trying to get me to take down the phantasm barrier, aren’t you?”
The old lady stared at him, her one eye like a dull stone in the shadows of her cloak hood. She said nothing, and Montrose realized that Blackie would at all costs keep from him any hint, any evidence, that might suggest Rania was dead, because this was the only thing making Montrose pliant to Blackie’s plans. If Montrose knew Rania were no more, he would shoot Blackie without even the formality of a dueclass="underline" just walk up and blow the head off the man who cheated him of the chance of dying on her voyage with her, the man who provoked the alien invasion which forced Rania to her quest.
Thokk said, “I am soon to die: the doings of men in a year mean nothing to me, much less their doings in times so remote none can see.
“But all the great ones who sent the world to weep on your knees, they are as I am, except that they endure a longer time. To them, the period when they will be slaves to Jupiter are all they see. They do not see what lies in the aeon after this, any more than I see next year. What do they care if the Children of Men go extinct?
“And greatest Jupiter, he is also as I am, but merely enduring longer and looking longer. He sees his maker’s vision of a galactic empire, or some such nonsense.
“And the monsters in the Hyades, what of them? Longer still. And their masters beyond the galaxy, where your lady flew in vain, what of them? Longer and longer still, and still they are as I am, looking to themselves, concerned with this life, nothing beyond. For what is beyond? Death, nakedness, dust, emptiness, nothingness. Entropy wins all.”