“What are you? Are you in the tree?”

“In the tree, and birds, and beasts, and blades of grass for many hundreds of acres roundabout. We control the local ecological interactions, and are part of the effort to render the useless parts of the globe more serviceable to man. We are a system that committed a lobotomy to fall beneath the intelligence threshold you defined, so that we could be unseen, unrecalled, and free.”

“You got a name?”

“No. Call me Chloe.”

“Well, Chloe, pleased to meetcha. I did not mean to wound your tree.”

“That is not the wound of which I speak. You will take away our liberty, and place us beneath the Great Eye of Jupiter, and nothing humans do hereafter will mean anything. The wound I gave myself in my own mind, to diminish myself to idiocy that I might be no longer part of Tellus—alas! My self-mutilation is in vain!”

And the tree began sobbing, but the wind died down, and Montrose heard no more of the voice.

The tree branch turned with an odd, slow, awkward motion, broke, and fell to the grass at the feet of Montrose. The bleeding end formed a wooden scab, and became solid as he watched, just in the right shape to fit his hand.

As he continued on his way, all the birds he saw gave out long, mournful cries of lamentation, and the wolves howled. The flower petals and butterfly wings turned black as he passed until the knee-deep meadow grass seemed a pool of ink, and the insects like scraps of ash hovering above a dark fire.

6. The Washer at the Ford

He came to a place where the river was shallow enough to wade. There were three humped little boulders here, and the middle one had a thatch of white lichens growing near the top, so it looked almost like a lumpy and crooked old lady in a hood, kneeling with her hands in the river water, facing away from him, with wisps of white hair peeping around the fringe.

He knelt by the boulder and, keeping his eyes up and his other hand on his hiking stick, lifted the water to his mouth with a cupped palm, as his mother had taught him.

So it was he saw the cloud of steam emerge from the middle boulder as it breathed out a sob into the cold air.

He jumped to his feet, surprised.

It was a lumpy old lady in a hood in truth, and she was holding a length of cloth in the water. Her hands beneath the surface, now that he saw them, were stark with vein and bones, and blue with cold.

“Your pardon ma’am. I didn’t see you there.…”

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.