The Last Aerie (85 page)

And another voice joined him in his defiance of the Great Majority; that first, strong voice which had spoken up for the Necroscope, Harry Keogh, and which now spoke for Nathan in his turn
. Hannant is right! What’s wrong with the lot of you? Have you lain here so long in the earth that nothing can move you anymore? We owed Harry Keogh, and we betrayed him! I was one of his teachers, too, just like Hannant, and even after I died I taught him unarmed combat. Why, it probably saved his life a dozen times over! I did that, yes—I, Graham “Sergeant” Lane—and I was proud of it! Yet at the end even I betrayed him. And I know why. It’s this: that we the dead will only admit to two states of being: life and death. Having experienced both, we understand them. But there’s a third state called un-death, a state which we never accepted. And Harry was undead. He’d become a vampire, and so we turned our backs on him. Well we were wrong to do so! Now we’ve been given the opportunity to square it with his son here. And will you turn him down?

The background babble of deadspeak whispers came flooding in again. There were those who believed that the living and the dead should remain apart, always, and that the mysteries of the grave should remain mysteries to the living, until they in turn died and joined the Great Majority. These were the bitter ones who had never succeeded in life, and so lost nothing in death. But they were shouted down by others whose time had been good, so that death had cheated them of a great deal. And their argument was that there was much to be gained: to be able to talk again—through the Necroscope Nathan—with loved ones left behind; perhaps to explain that death is not the end, but the renewal of old loves and friendships waiting in the last long darkness. Not a physical renewal, no, but nevertheless a joining of sorts.

Nathan was party to all of this, which showed a certain understanding on the part of the dead at least: that they no longer excluded him from their discussions, even when he and his problem were the business under discussion. And finally:

Very well
, the voice of the spokesman for the teeming dead was back again.
We accept you and everything you stand for. And as Hannant said, we hope you’ll understand our reticence. These have been strange times for the dead, Nathan.
A great shouting, a terrible tumult from the south, reached us even here. Periodically we would feel it: an urge to be up and about! Something beyond our control! It’s not right that dead men should want to walk again, or that others should have the power to make it so!

Nathan recognized the other’s subject at once. “I believe I know what you’re talking about: John Scofield and the Nightmare Zone. But that’s over and done with now. Maybe if I’d mentioned it earlier things would have been that much easier. Perhaps you would have accepted me sooner.”

You … had something to do with that?

“I was the one called upon to put John and his family to rest, yes. Though I have to admit I couldn’t have done it without the help of the Great Majority. But … am I to understand that you’re not all of you in contact all of the time?”

And now it was Hannant who answered him.
It takes quite a lot out of us to converse at a distance, Nathan. Indeed, it’s exhausting! Not so hard for Harry, in his time. Once he’d been introduced to someone, he could usually speak to him from anywhere in the world! And it should be the same for you. But you and your father, you’re Necroscopes, with all the drive of the living. And we are only dead people. If it wasn’t for you, no one would know we were here at all—except as memories. And even memories are sometimes soon forgotten …

As Hannant finished, so the spokesman came back:

You have our word that we’ll work with you as far as that is possible. But Nathan, you should know this: there’s a great power in you. And it’s not one you might easily recognize. I’m talking about the power of love. In the past, the teeming dead loved your father. So much so that they would do … anything for him. And now a new light shines in their darkness. All we ask is this: use that power sparingly. We feared John Scofield because in his madness he could have made us walk again in the world of the living. Don’t make us fear you. Please, stay out of danger, in this world at least.

“I’ll try to,” Nathan answered, as humbly as he was able. “But as for your love: I haven’t asked for it. Be my friends, and I’ll be satisfied. And as for calling you up: I would never do that. Any who would come up out of the earth for me must do so of their own free will.”

Easily said
, the other’s deadspeak voice sighed.
But your warmth has touched us now. Harry Keogh is in you—the original Harry, before he succumbed—and he was someone the dead just couldn’t resist. A bringer of joy, but a bringer of pain, too. It’s no easy thing, to get up from the grave. But when he needed us, we couldn’t refuse him. And so I ask it again: stay out of danger …

And before Nathan could prepare an answer:

Now then, how may we help?

Nathan turned eagerly to Hannant, tuned in on that one’s deadspeak mind. “Sir? About Harry’s maths …”

And Hannant interrupting, with:
Wait! Before you ask me to show you anything, perhaps you’d better show me a thing or two. You must have learned something since you’ve been here.

Nathan showed him: orthodox maths of a high standard, with one or two “original” concepts thrown in. It was as simple as that: a pageant of equations marching like an army of numbers and symbols down the screen of his mind.

Standard stuff—mainly
, Hannant commented, his thoughts clipped, precise and perhaps “typical” of a maths master.
But if I may say so, you show exactly the same lateral tendencies as Harry. Which of course you must, if you’re to achieve what he achieved. But is this everything? If so, there’s not much to work with.

“There is other … stuff,” Nathan told him. “Stuff that’s inside me. I’ve been training myself to keep it suppressed. But I’m going to need a lot more of this lesser maths before I’ll be able to understand it. It’s not the same as what I just showed you. It’s in flux, changing—mutating?—all the time. It’s … alive! It lives and works within itself. It’s like a whirlpool, a numbers vortex.”

Show me.

“You’re sure?”

What?
The ex-headmaster and maths teacher seemed momentarily taken aback, surprised. But only for a moment, until he laughed and said:
But of course I’m sure! I mean, do you think it can harm me?

So Nathan showed him. And while the numbers vortex could not in truth harm Hannant, it could and did shock him rigid!

Swift as thought, Nathan’s deadspeak—the issue of his weird metaphysical mind—underwent an almost metamorphic transformation. Like a mental meltdown, it sent near-nucleic energies radiating outwards into the incorporeal ether. And at the heart of the inferno:

The numbers vortex! Hungry, seething, and “sentient” in its own right, it sought to fuel its own fires. Mutating formulae where they surfaced and swarmed on the whirling rim were sucked back into the core and devoured; caught in devastating collision, incredible calculi exploded in the cauldron of pure maths; evolving equations were fired in bursts from the wildly rotating wall like bullets from a machine-gun.

Hannant took a full burst before his astonished dead-speak “gasp” registered, causing Nathan to rein back on the vortex and reduce it first to a spiral of valueless ciphers, and finally to nothing.

And in a little while Hannant said:
My God!

To which Nathan replied, “In Sunside we have no real God. He died along with our civilization, at the time of the White Sun.”

And when Hannant was himself again:
As I recall, he said, the Necroscope Harry Keogh wasn’t too sure about a God either. But if there isn’t one, how may I explain what
I just saw? And how is it that you don’t understand it? I mean, to have something like that in your mind and not know what it is? And yet… this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. Something like it, anyway.

“It isn’t?” Nathan’s fascination was obvious.

No, I don’t think so. But last time, it was … what, controlled?

“By Harry?”

Of course. He was in Leipzig visiting the grave of Mobius. Indeed, I was the one who sent him there. Like you, he had come to me searching for answers. But unlike you, all Harry had was an idea, a symbol.
Hannant showed it to him: the Mobius strip.

And Nathan thought:
Mobius’s blazon. And Maglore’s. And now mine, too
. His hand automatically lifted to his ear, to touch the golden earring there—until he remembered that he’d left it in London with David Chung, like a lifeline to E-Branch HQ.

Maglore?
Hannant broke into his thoughts. Nathan’s telling of his story had been brief, and much of his stay in Turgosheim had been left out.
A friend of yours?

Nathan shuddered and answered, “Friend? No, not him!” And putting Maglore out of his mind, he immediately reverted to their original conversation: “But did you say that my father’s numbers were different from those in the vortex?”

Not different but
controlled
. Where your numbers are wild, untamed, Nathan, the numbers in Harry’s mind were like a vast, ever-changing equation on the screen of a computer, which he could stop at the touch of a mental button. Except the power of his numbers was such that it couldn’t be contained, which is the reason I compared them to God! Only attempt to still their activity, they spilled over into something else; their mutation became physical as opposed to hypothetical.

“And then? Did they do something? What did they do?” Nathan’s eagerness was very nearly painful. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, he was cautious; for several people had already told him that numbers can’t do anything, that they simply are. But:

They warped!
Hannant told him.
Through Harry’s eyes, I saw them warp! And they formed doors. Then … I saw Harry use one of those doors, saw him pass through it and disappear …

Doors!

And once again, as so often before, Nathan’s mind went back to Sunside’s furnace deserts—to the caverns under the earth and the dwelling-places of the Thyre—and to what the dead Thyre Stargazer Thikkoul had forecast for him in the undying, everlasting stars. The doors of his future:

“Like the doors on a hundred Szgany caravans but liquid, drawn on water, formed of ripples …” Thikkoul had whispered. “Doors, constantly opening and closing. And behind each one of them, a piece of your future …”

… Nathan snapped out of it. “Mobius,” he groaned. “It always comes back to him. An unending loop, like the Mobius Strip itself. A dead end. I’ve been told that he’s moved on, perhaps used his own Continuum to travel to worlds beyond. I would go and speak to him, except he’s no longer there.” And remembering what Gormley had said: “Only Mobius’s bones are in Leipzig now.”

I know
, Hannant told him, sensing the depth of his frustration.
But you know, Mobius wasn’t the only mathematician in the world. Towards the end of Harry’s time here, he even asked the help of the giants. And they gave it to him! For of course, they owed him. The Necroscope was the one who showed us how to communicate among ourselves. Since when … well, there’s quite a community of us now: a fraternity, you could say. All the various experts in their various fields, they talk to each other from time to time, and keep up to date as best they can.

“The ‘giants’?”

Hannant offered a deadspeak shrug, which was hardly negligent but merely expressed his acceptance of his place in the order of things.
Giants, yes. Compared with such as Pythagoras, small minds like mine are as nothing. Perhaps when I’ve lain in the earth as long as he has …

“Pythagoras?”

As briefly as possible, Hannant explained. And in so doing he humbled Nathan, too. For it brought a sense of human history to him, and a feeling of awe: that the people of this world had records going back all of two thousand six hundred years!

Oh, longer than that!
Hannant told him.
We also have the record of the Earth itself, which goes back billions of years! But as for feelings of awe: I don’t think you realize your own potential. For while your colleagues among the living have the history, you have the power to actually converse with that history! Your text books are the minds of the ancient dead … or those of them still extant, at least.
For a moment he paused, and then went on more cautiously:
Except…

“Yes?”

(Again Hannant’s shrug, this time of defeat, or partial defeat.)
Except Pythagoras has withdrawn back into his shell. For a while Harry brought him out of
himself. He had even dissolved the brotherhood and made himself available. But when he discovered the advances we had made, and saw how the numbers he had known were only the germ of current knowledge … that was too much for him. It was easier to retreat into the safety of obsolete doctrines, surround himself in secrecy once more and await his grand metempsychosis. No one has spoken to Pythagoras for, oh, a long time.

“But you know where he is?”

Oh, yes.

And buoyed up again, Nathan answered: “Then it’s high time someone did speak to him!” And such was his tone of voice, the weight of his commitment, he might easily have meant now, this very instant.

“Speak to whom?” Trask said, his hand falling on Nathan’s shoulder where he sat on the dais of Hannant’s tomb. It was so unexpected that Nathan jumped six inches. And startled out of his deadspeak mode, he lost contact with Hannant at once.

Gasping, he looked up at Trask and blurted, “Pythagoras!”

“
The
Pythagoras?” This from Zek, whose glance was accusing where she aimed it at Trask.

“Was there more than one?”

“No.” Trask shook his head. “I think not.” Then, feeling Zek’s annoyance, he followed up with an apology. “Nathan, I’m sorry. Like a fool I thought you were talking to yourself! But now, from the look on your face, I know that you weren’t. It’s just that … even knowing your talent, it’s still hard for me to believe, that’s all. I tend to forget what you can do.”