Chapter 9

  Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.

  - Lord Dunsany, The Book of Wonder

  Hyperion, the Color Moon

  On pale windswept plains ringed by far horizons stood a lighthouse. No sea in sight, it towered over an expanse of faded gray grasses blown in rippling waves by the wind. Cliffs and ravines scarred the plains, edged with dry gullies and cracked coolies. Here and there a peculiar rock formation rose twisting to the sky. All of it colorless, all of it washed-out, all of it devoid of hue and tone.

  The sunless sky: a featureless blank slate. The air: hazy with mist and distance. The stones: pale. The dust: ashen. The trees and their leaves, the crumbling ruins, the flowers: gray and white, white and gray.

  Shadows crawled in this grayscale world: on the blank sky like ink spreading on wet paper, in the water like blooming jellyfish, over the lands like a creeping cancer worming blindly through unclaimed soil. Wind howled through dark ruins; gloom crept over rugged landscapes; inky seas swelled with strange tides.

  Clear, colorless crystals scattered the lands, as small as coins or as tall as trees. They refracted the grayscale tones of the fields, the hills, the rocky shores; they made colorless rainbows, scattering the light of unseen stars.

  One feature stood out, an unmoving black scrape against the scenery, a vertical gash of night on the pale shadow-wreathed moon: the lighthouse. It gave no light in the dark of night. The crystal-walled chamber at its height remained silent, still, and empty.

  Atop the great light chamber rested a hexagonal platform. This platform was of stained glass, arranged in a pattern of seven circles, one in the middle and six more about. The central circle was of white glass; the others were green, blue, violet, red, gold, black—the only colors on Hyperion. A symbol glinted on each glass surface, and lines connected them into a star formation.

  A single door stood at one edge of the platform, a door with no wall. The door was a solid dark block of stone.

  The door opened, the shadows of Hyperion shifted uneasily, and the Hero of Light stumbled onto the Color Moon.

  Sisyphus, the Garden Moon

  The snow, like stars, danced down from dark heights over a frozen world. It kissed the earth in still mountains; it gathered into deep drifts on hilly plains; it buried solid lakes and streams under a white blanket; it howled across icy wastelands, carried by a blasting wind. It fell, and it fell.

  Pale clouds churned over bright, cold skies. Fields glittered like shattered glass. Trees and bushes hung heavy, glazed with ice, and all the flowers, resplendent in their colors and limitless variety, slept under a dusting of frost.

  Feathery rime decorated every window; fire crackled in every hearth; every hoe and rake and every pair of pruning shears lay forgotten in the farthest cobwebbed corners of sheds and storehouses, under layers of rust and dust. Only winter here, and of course, never Christmas.

  The Garden Moon turned slow and bright through the aether, cold and silent and still, every grove dormant, every orchard in hibernation, every field and flower and lily-speckled sea slumbering beneath the groaning weight of winter. It waited. It had waited a long time.

  A flower grew on a mountaintop, bright in the day, brighter still in the night. A single flower, its bud set to bloom, frozen there in the high, cold air. It waited.

  Far below the flower, in the depths, stood a device. Mountain-vast, cold and still as the glaciers, forged of strange metals, it required only the impossible: to turn unceasing in defiance of natural laws. It waited.

  A greenhouse sprawled on a rocky mountainside. With glass walls, its emerald effulgence in the rock and ice was like a piece of another world fallen upon the mountain, or a seed of one to come.

  The greenhouse enclosed many climates; they spread at random, meeting unexpectedly at awkward angles, joined by odd passages and surprising stairs. Together, these biomes formed an irregular mass. At its height stood a six-sided platform with a single door.

  The platform was a flower, frozen like everything else out in the cold. This golden flower, encrusted with frost, spread its countless petals in lovely six-fold symmetry. These petals made footing treacherous, for they were smooth, slick, and curved. They cried out for summer.

  The solitary door was snow-white, with a shiny brass doorknob and a diamond pattern of fogged glass. It opened, a distant enmity set itself against a singular flower, and the Hero of Movement fell onto the Garden Moon.

  Pyrrhus, the Hollow Moon

  A city. Broken brick, cracked plaster, towers of rusted iron, tarnished steel. No wind drifted through the cool streets, disturbing the dust. No voices rose from under the flickering streetlights. Radio towers blinked on the horizons, transmitting no signals. Highways, stacked in knotted masses of calculated chaos, snaked throughout the Hollow Moon, undisturbed by any traffic.

  A sea of lights in the dark: regular grid of yellow streetlights, blinking red lights on towers, blue and white lights on skyscrapers for warning the planes that didn’t fly, neon lights of indecipherable signs, random scatterings of lit rectangle windows in tall buildings, bright halogen searchlights crawling aimlessly over under-lit clouds, lights of buoys and far-off empty boats twitching on the waters, lights on unmoving construction cranes and lights in long curved lines denoting runway strips on empty airfields.

  So many lights, but no wind. No noise, no movement, not a creature stirring, not even a mouse. A dead city, a tomb, forgotten, frozen in time. What happened here? That question hung like a fog in the dead streets, on the sandy sidewalks. What happened here?

  Lights sparkled in still waters over a bay. Boats beyond the bay rocked gently in faint swells generated by the tidal forces of an unseen planet. Gouts of steam rose from industrial sectors. Now and then a brick would crumble to some unseen impetus, or an electrical breaker would flip, shutting down one more of the city lights.

  Sometimes thunder grumbled in the distance, but it never rained. Sometimes something else grumbled, something in the empty, echoey spaces beneath the streets, beneath the sewers, beneath the surface. Deep, dark, waiting.

  An old stone church rose above townhouses and tenements. A prodigious clock-tower loomed over the neighboring brick apartments, corner stores, dusty streets. The tower contained clockwork of a specific sort: metronomes of staggering complexity and distinct variety. Six vast metronomes towered in a circle, with one more in the middle, the white one larger than all the rest. The green and gold metronomes were ticking, ticking, chopping the passage of time into an endless series of brief, distinct segments. Their ticking was irregular, out of sync with each other, and very nearly musical.

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  The platform on top was a thick iron grate, through which the metronomes below were visible, audible. A single door stood there on one edge of the hexagon, strange and solitary against the background of lights in the dimness. The door was of dark wood, identical to those far below at the foot of the church.

  The door opened, the crimson metronome heaved itself into action, and the Hero of Time stepped onto the Hollow Moon.

  Icarus, the Void Moon

  No moon here—only the emptiness of the aether, punctuated here and there by asteroids and small rocky debris. Most objects adrift in the space of the Void Moon were small, the size of coins, or apples, or houses. Some few of the irregular rocks were as large as lakes or mountains. They turned in the darkness of the aether, silent and somber in their clustered paths. Sometimes they collided; sometimes they caromed off of each other, ponderously altering their slow trajectories. They were barren, lifeless rock—grey, dusty, porous. They were forgotten, remnants, remainders, shadowed shapes moving blackly against the heavenly hosts of the distant empyrean.

  Nothing to see here. Not anymore.

  Nothing, that is, but the space station. It glittered with lights like a sunlit diamond in the dark, a silver mechanism, a contraption of wheels and orbs and clunky attachments. The station turned and spun, evolving into new shapes as unseen parts rotated into view. The station could have housed dozens, but no living thing stirred in those sleek, bright halls. It waited.

  The observation deck stood out, more prominent than any other appendage of this protean metal beast. Near its smooth bubble turned the platform. The platform was a pale crystex cube, rotating in the void, bound by an invisible containment field. This cube contained millions of miles of circuitry. It served as the physical form of a dormant artificial intelligence, unlimited in potential.

  A single door stood like a peculiar growth in the center of one side of the cube. It was a silver arch: a portal, a gateway, a door without doorknob, a door without physical substance.

  The door flickered with energy, something unknown moved among the drifting rocks, and the Hero of Space fell through into the Void Moon.

  Theia, the Cloud Moon

  Once upon a time, there was a beautiful palace. It was pink and blue and white and purple and green, and its windows were colored crystals in the shapes of butterflies and snowflakes. The floor of the great hall was marbled rainbow, and gold and silver columns twisted up into sunset-painted frescoes above.

  This palace had many towers, and each tower had a tall pointed roof, and at the top of each roof was a windmill. Some windmills had three arms, some had four or five or a dozen, and some had too many to count. Some of the windmills’ arms looked like butterfly wings, or bird wings, or clouds, or seashells. All of them were brightly colored, and would have glittered in the sunlight, had there been any.

  The windmills never stopped turning, because here on the Cloud Moon the wind never stopped either. It rushed through red sandstone canyons; it crumpled the turquoise waters of highland lakes; it scattered the many-colored grasses on the high plains like chaotic swells of a sea at storm. The wind shivered and moved like a living thing through the rivers of air that hurried through the atmosphere, and it never stopped.

  Storm unceasing plagued the skies of the Cloud Moon. Thunderheads rolled across the lovely plains, sometimes tinted in colors of blue, pink, and gold. Colored lightning danced in the distance. Always storms, but never a rainbow.

  Light from above dimly illuminated the cloud cover—the stars at night or the Bright World at day—but that light never pierced the shield they made between earth and sky. The Cloud Moon was lit by a weird glow from the bruise-colored stormclouds, and by the flashing of distant lightning.

  Countless caterpillars crawled the surface of this windy world, and many had made themselves cocoons here and there, sheltered from the wind. But no butterflies hatched, not while the storms raged.

  At the heart of the world waited a chrysalis of immense size, flickers of color throughout. That which slumbered within knew how to ease the storms and the monsters, and it knew how to let the light shine again in the skies of Theia.

  The people of Theia, winged and beautiful, waited for one who would stop the storms. They dared not enter the palace, but they watched from their distant glass domes.

  No windmill decorated the tallest tower of the Cloud Palace. There was instead a broad, flat platform shaped like a snowflake made of delicate feathery crystals that caught and reflected the glinting colors of lightning. And there was a single door, shiny, bright, and colorful like everything else in the Cloud Palace.

  The door opened, malice grew within the storm, and the Hero of Sky danced onto the Cloud Moon.

  Orpheus, the Metal Moon

  Like a cluster of spears, like a tangle of thorns, like a gathering of sea urchins with mangled spines, the Metal Moon revolved chaotic and deadly through the dark aether. Seen from the surface of Ardia, the sight of the Metal Moon inspired a vague dread. Such a thing should not be. Whence had it come? For what purpose?

  The Metal Moon was a puzzle box unsolved, a prison with strange cells, a refuge for the strange, the maligned, the outcast, the freak. The Metal Moon comprised countless spines, agglomerated by gravity. Smooth and hard as steel, lighter and stronger than titanium, deep shades of violet, crimson, blue, black. These razor-sharp lances were as small as pencils or as long as the radius of the moon itself. Called lorn, they drifted against each other, pulled by odd gravities, and they rang with piercing resonance when they collided. They drifted in chaos and made a terrible cacophony. Someday, thought some of those hidden, those prisoners, those wanderers who dwelt there, someday someone would bring order to the chaos, forging music from the discord.

  Strange creatures called rue stalked the shifting shadows of the Metal Moon, terrorizing those who dwelt in the labyrinthine interior. Those who vanished were seldom missed.

  Deep in the Metal Moon lay hidden caverns and bale thorns that held memories, pains, sorrows and regrets. Many were those who ventured in, seeking release from the cares of the world. Fewer were those who returned.

  Deep within the Metal Moon, in among the dense tangles of lorn, a construction spread like an angular grey tumor. This unsightly structure served as headquarters for prison operations on the Metal Moon. Whose prison it was, and who the prisoners were, and why, had all long been forgotten. Such things slipped from significance in such a place as this. There must be a prison. The prison must be operated. They awaited only a commander. They waited with the promise that one was coming.

  Deeper in, a grim object held its own against the shifting gravitational forces of the lorn. This armillary sphere, immense in size, hovered in the center of an vast clearing. Grey and silver and gold, its many arms turned and its wheels shifted in ceaseless motion, powered by some ghastly energy within. A sickly golden light shone from within. Its ever-changing shadows flashed over the lorn around it. They called this the Bleak Machine.

  Six metallic hexagonal plates moved in the space around the Bleak Machine, their symbol-engraved faces turned toward the fearful mechanism. One of them had a single door in the center. The door was metal, as most doors were on the Metal Moon.

  The door opened, an awful voracity awoke in the deep darkness, and the Hero of Gravity strode through onto the Metal Moon.