A Ranma/Tenchi fusion - multi-crossover
by Shampoo

Disclaimer:
Ranma 1/2 Belongs to Rumiko Takahashi, Viz Communications, and Kitty 
Films.  Tenchi Muyo and others are copyrighted to their repective 
creators.

Ranma the Wild Stallion
Teaser 3
 
 We came at the Timekeeper from the south in the very first part of the 
morning.  He had built his hut fifty feet away from a newly opened 
crevasse.  Fifty miles away, Kweitkel stook revealed by the dawn; the 
holy mountain was like a great blue and white pillar holding up the 
western edge of the sky.  When the Timekeeper saw us sledding toward his 
hut from the south, he must have thought we were Musk hunters returning 
home.  We wanted him to think this. We had circled south just so he 
would think this.  In truth, even if he had guessed who we were, we gave 
him no time to ice his sled, to load his furs and food(what little food 
remained), to harness his dogs and flee. We slid into his camp just 
after first light, and he was outside his hut politely waiting for us in 
Musk fashion with steaming mugs of blood tea.
 
 "Ni luria la!" he called out, "Ni luria la!" In his white furs, which 
covered almost all of his face except his black eyes, he seemed as 
wachful as a wolf.
 
 "Ni luria la!" I answered.
 
 All at once three starved dogs bounded from the tunnel of his hut and 
ran among our dogs, barking, sniffing and licking each other's black 
noses.  The Timekeeper must have recognized my voice immediately; he 
must have seen that our sled was a city sled, that our dogs were city 
dogs who greeted his dogs with wagging tails and red tongues lolling.  
He set the mugs of blood tea down into the fluffy snow, ignoring the 
largest of his dogs when he began lapping down our welcoming drink.  He 
threw back the hood of his furs.  His smooth face was shiny with grease, 
set with the stamp of grim humor and fate.
 
 "So, the bastard Masaki has tracked me.  Or should I call you, 'Lord 
Tenchi?' Ha!"
 
 Before we could come to a stop, Yoshou was off the sled with his spear 
cocked behind his ear, aiming the point at the Timekeeper's belly.
 
 "Yoshou," the Timekeeper said. "Have you made your peace with your son?  
Tell me, does the City still stand?  How did you escape my old bomb?"
 
 Yoshou ground his teeth so hard that blood ran from his nose.  I could 
see that he trembled to spear the Timekeeper, so I said, "Wait!"
 
 "Yes, wait," the Timekeeper repeated.
 
 Quickly I told him that part of the City had been destroyed, that my 
mother and six thousand others lay frozen in a mass grave.  I told him 
how my mother had died trying to save me from his slel-clone's killing 
knife.
 
 "I knew the bomb was old," he said.  "So old."
 
 "You're a murderer," Yoshou said.  He kicked up a shower of snow as he 
planted his rear foot.
 
 "So, here I stand, a murderer tracked and trapped by murderers."
 
 Yoshou's fist tightened around the spear.  I felt certain he was about 
to kill the Timekeeper.  I watched the murder programs begin to run.  
But he surprised me.  He stared the Timekeeper up and down and asked 
simply, "Why the City? The City you founded three thousand years ago? Is 
that true?"
 
 The Timekeeper let out a puff of steam and turned to me. He said, "So 
you've been inside the goddess, and she's talked to you.  What did she 
tell you about me, eh, Tenchi?"
 
 "She said you were the oldest human being, that you've been alive for 
thousands of years."
 
 "How old am I? What did she say?"
 
 "She said you've been alive at least since the Holocaust Century."
 
 "I'm old, it's true."
 
 I climbed out of the sled and stood by Yoshou.  He stepped closer to 
the Timekeeper; the Timekeeper stepped backward in the direction of the 
crevasse.  "How old?" I asked.
 
 "So old," he said.  "Very old.  Older than the snow.  Older than the 
ice of the sea."
 
 "You'll have to pay for your murders," Yoshou said.
 
 For no good reason, the Timekeeper quickly looked up into th sky.  I 
saw the old hell bubbling in his black eyes, and I knew that he had 
already paid for the murders with pieces of his soul.  He was paying 
still; he would never stop paying.
 
 "It's so quick", the Timekeeper said. "All human lives happen so 
quickly, a few hard seconds, no more.  Is it murder to mercifully end 
their lives a few moments before the ticking stops of its own and they 
die a natural death? Tell me!"
 
 "It's so quick," the Timekeeper said.  "All human lives happen so 
quickly, a few hard seconds, no more.  Is it murder to mercifully end 
their lives a few moments before the ticking stops of its own and they 
die a natural death? Tell me!"
 
 But neither Yoshou nor I had anything to add about the nature of murder 
so we said nothing.
 
 "The City's had its time," the timekeeper said.  "The Order, too.  You 
know why I did what I did."
 
 "Did you have to kill my mother, then?"
 
 "It was my double that killed her, not I."
 
 "No, you killed her."
 
 He made a fist and growled out, "Your mother and you, the bastard 
Masaki with your carked brains, your wild new ideas, all of you, the 
doom of the human race."
 
 I wiped ice from my eyelashes and said, "You would have killed me."
 
 "Once I tried to save you--do you remember?--saved you because I loved 
you like a son." He glanced at Yoshou then quickly turned back to me. 
"Do you still have the book of poems? I wanted to save you from the 
goddess.  I saved you too well, goddamn me for trying!"
 
 I stepped closer to him.  He was scratching Tusa's ear, pointedly not 
looking at Yoshou's raised spear.  Jets of steam billowed from his 
nostrils in slow, even spurts.  In the morning air I smelled his sour 
skin, his sweat, his carnivorous breath.  He was afraid of something.  
His face was as hard as any human face I had ever seen, but there was 
fear cut into it.  I moved closer, stepping between him and Yoshou.  
Yoshou cursed and began circling in order to have a clear line of sight 
should he decide to spear him after all.
 
 I rubbed my cheeks, trying to warm them so my words wouldn't be slurry. 
I said, "When the Lord Imprimatur unraveled your slel-clone's DNA, he 
found nothing."
 
 "So? There's nothing to find."
 
 "The Jurai Power," I said.  "The secret was embroidered in your 
chromosomes."
 
 "Gobbledygook!:
 
 "What do you know about the Jurains?"
 
 "Piss on the Jurains!"
 
 "Why would the Jurains warn me--warn all of us--of the goddess?"
 
 He smacked his fist into his mitten and yelled out, "Why this?  Why 
that? Why, why, why?"
 
 "How old are you?" I asked.
 
 "Old as stone."
 
 "What did the Jurains do to you? I need to know."
 
 "Piss on you!"
 
 I stepped closer; he stepped back.  "Tell me, Kagato," I said. "I've 
come so far to know."
 
 He closed his eyes and grimaced.  With his mouth open he threw his head 
back as if he were about to scream.  It was the first time I had ever 
seen his eyes closed.  "So, you know my name; then you know everything.  
What's left to tell you, eh?"
 
 "The secret."
 
 "How old?" Yoshou asked.
 
 He pointed his chin at me and opened his eyes.  He held his palm 
pushing out toward Yoshou.  "I was born thirty thousand years ago," he 
said.  "Old Earth years.  Do you need to know exactly how many years?  
One hundred forty-two years more than thirty thousand years ago.  One 
hundred fourty-two years, eighteen days and five hours more." As he said 
this he pulled a flat, gold clock from his furs, opened it, and said, 
"And fifteen minutes more, twelve seconds, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen 
seconds...how many more seconds do I have? If the Jurains would have had 
their way, I'd live forever.  The made me to live forever, damn them! 
It's my purpose, they would say.  Their purpose."
 
 "That's impossible," Yoshou said. He circled back the other way so the 
Timekeeper stood between him and the crevasse. "No one could live that 
long."
 
 "Ha, Yoshou, you're wrong! Shall I tell you?  One day, long ago, when 
the forests of Old Earth were green and seamless as a mechanic's robe, 
they came down from the sky and told me they had chosen me to carry 
their message.  The damn gods! I never saw their bodies; I don't think 
they had bodies, maybe they had never had bloody bodies.  Do gods have 
bodies like men? They appeared as balls of light, bright lbue balls like 
the hottest flames of a wood fire.  They told me this: They said that 
the Earth--even my Earth of thirty thousand years ago--they said it was 
too full of men.  The lights in the sky were stars, they said.  Soon men 
would leave earth and wander among the stars.  I thought I was going 
mad.  No, they said, I was not going mad; I was one of one hundred and 
twenty-five immortals chosen to carry the Jurains's message through 
time.  To carry their damn message so human beings, when we learned to 
burn the fueld of the stars, would listen to the voice of wisdom and not 
go mad, and we would not burn ourselves with starlight or other heavenly 
fires.  The Jurains--damn their faceless faces!--they said their spirits 
were read to live within a sky so black and vast that not even the 
starlight could escape the blackness.  A black hole, they said.  I 
didn't understand a word of their gobbledygook, of course.  They told me 
they were sad to leave the human race alone, naked in our ignorance.  
"Naked!" I said to them.  'Ignorant!' Why, I wore the skin of the wolf 
that I killed with my own hands, and I knew the name of every plant and 
animal in the forest! The Jurains didn't laugh at me because they had no 
mouths, but I heard them whispering and laughing inside me, all the 
same.  Then they opened me, the bloody gods.  They filled me with their 
crewelwork, every bit of me, embroidering every cell of my body, down to 
the last strand of DNA.  They carked my seed, my goddamned soul! I 
didn't understand what they were doing.  I was so pissing afraid that I 
knocked my own teeth out with my fist.  I was burning from inside out.  
It felt like I'd swallowed hot tallow, like I'd eaten the magic mushroom 
and lay dying of fever, all at the same time.  After that they left me 
to my fate.  They carked their consciousness into the core singularity 
and left me to wander Old Earth for most of thirty-thousand years.  My 
teeth soon grew back, of course, once, twice, many times, my damn teeth, 
every time I wore them out.  They left me with these fine white teeth, 
to chew the bitter root of immortality, to taste the fruit of the world 
over and over until I was so sick of the world I could have died.  But I 
couldn't die, and that's the hell of it.  So now you know."
 
 I looked down for a moment, thinking about gods and immortality.  The 
snow was up to my knees; it was so powdery and dry I could see each ice 
crystal tumbling down the holes I made as I stepped closer to the 
timekeeper, close to Yoshou.
 
 To the Timekeeper I said, "The message inside you--don't you want to 
know?"
 
 "No."
 
 "Embroidered in you DNA."
 
 He grimaced again, revealing his long, white teeth. "No, there's 
nothing there but disinformation and noise."
 
 "They're gods! Why would you doubt the message of the gods?"
 
 "Because they lie," he said. "The gods, they lie."
 
 Yoshou pushed through the snow, circling right, then left.  His hand 
was hard over the leather grip of the spear while he wiped his bleeding 
nose with the other.  He was backing the Timekeeper toward the crevasse.
 
 I held a naked hand to my chapped lips, then asked, "The other 
immortals, what happened to them? Where are they?"
 
 "They're dead," the Timekeeper told me. "The Jurains made us immortal, 
but we could be killed.  A stone through the forehead, a knife..." and 
here he looked straight at Yoshou, "a spear through the heart--there are 
ways."
 
 "All of them? Dead by accident?"
 
 "Old Earth was a very violent place."
 
 I saw that he was lying, or at least, he was keeping part of the truth 
from me.  He watched Yoshou circle, watched the tip of his spear glowing 
golden as it caught the light of the rising sun.  "You killed them, 
didn't you?" I asked suddenly.
 
 He jerked his chin up and caught me wit his eyes. "So quick, Tenchi.  
Always too damn quick.  So, I hunted them down like sheep, now you know, 
all of them, one by one, even the five of them--shall I tell you their 
names?--even the five immortals who escaped the Holocaust and fled into 
the manifold."
 
 "Too bad," I said.
 
 "They'd lived too long and the secret had to be kept, eh?"
 
 "And you're the keeper of secret?"
 
 "So, I'm the Timekeeper and I've kept it all this time."
 
 "You've decoded the Jurai Power--am I right? Tell me what they say."
 
 "Tell yourself."
 
 "You've no right to keep this secret," I said.
 
 His eyes grew hot as coals and he shouted, "Rights? You talk of rights? 
The damn Jurains took apart my soul! Not even gods have such a right."
 
 I held up my fist to show him my Martial Artist's ring. I said, "The 
day I received this, you called the quest for the Jurai Power.  The 
quest is over, then."
 
 "No, Tenchi, it's not over."
 
 "The imprimaturs could decode the Jurai Power from your insides if--"
 
 "There's nothing to decode."
 
 "--if we brought you back to the City."
 
 "So, you'll bring me back dead.  Can the noble Tenchi and his nobler 
father slaughter me like a sheep? Ha!"
 
 Yoshou could kill him, I thought; he and I had raced across the sea 
just to kill him. I knew he blamed the Timekeeper for Katharine's death, 
so when he moved his spear, I thought he was about to kill him. He was 
aching to kill him, but struggling to restrain himself.  He licked blood 
from his mustache and said to me, "If you want this old killer to live, 
we don't need his whole body.  Yes, cut a few fingers off and freeze 
them.  The imprimaturs can decode the Jurai Power from the DNA of his 
fingers."
 
 He stared at the Timekeeper, and the Book of Silence opened. I read a 
whole chapter of the Book. He, the proud Yoshou, was well pleased with 
himself for rising to his humanity and not spearing the Timekeeper.  He 
loved the idea of being merciful and gracious at the last instant.
 
 The Timekeeper's lips pulled back in what could have been either a 
snarl or a smile. "Ha, is this all you want?" So saying he snapped his 
arm like a whip, and a long stell knife fell from his sleeve into his 
hand.  He shook off the mitten from his other hand.  As easily as I 
might trim the wick of an oilstone, he stretched out his little finger 
and lopped it off. The finger dropped into the fluffy snow and 
disappeared down a hole rimmed with blood, which quickly froze into 
little ruby crystals. He held his splayed, four-fingered hand in front 
of Yoshou's face. White bone gleamed in the dark, red suck of the wound, 
but strangely there was little blood.
 
 "Take my finger," he said.  And then he bent down, retrieved the finger 
from the punched-in hole.  He flung it at Yoshou's face.  Yoshou moved 
his head aside, and it went sailing past him, sailing past me, and it 
fell again into the snow.
 
 Such a little gesture of scorn, but the Timekeeper had read the Book of 
Silence, too. He must have known about Yoshou and scorn.  Yoshou went 
mad, then.  He fell into rage; every bit of humanity and graciousness 
fell away from his mad eyes. He ground his teeth and snorted, and blood 
sprayed out of his nose. His spear arm drew back behind his ear, far 
back with his forefinger straight along the spear shaft, pointing behind 
him at me.
 
 "Read the book, Tenchi," the Timekeeper suddenly called out. I no idea 
which he he was referring to. I tried to step closer, to stop the tide 
of violence beginning its surge, but I was already beginning to 
remember, and I could hardly move.  "That book is for you."
 
 I think he wanted very badly to die.  But life was too much of a habit, 
and he could not die so easily, not the Timekeeper, so he charged Yoshou 
and tried to put his knife into him.  Yoshou threw his spear.  With his 
spear he had once killed a great white bear, and now he would kill an 
old, old wolf of a man.  Even though the Timekeeper tried to twist out 
of the way, Yoshou's spear caught him in the chest.
 
 "So!" the Timekeeper howled out in pain.  He stumbled and fell into the 
snow, ten feet from the edge of the crevasse.
 
 Then Yoshou was all over him, kicking him in the face and throat, 
grabbing the spear shaft and jerking it back and forth, the better to 
ruin as much felsh as possible and to work the tip deep into Kagato's 
heart.
 
 When I began to move forward, Yoshou shouted, "Stay away!"
 
 I took a step closer to them, the last step, the fateful step, the step 
I had seen myself take a thousand different times as I lay scrying in 
our silent snow-hut. I did not know why I took the step.  I only knew 
that I must, that if I stepped closer to Yoshou, somehow the secret I 
had sought for so long would be revealed to me.  My foot seemed to hand 
in the snow as it settled downward.  My muscles were nearly frozen. The 
cold air hurt my eyes.  My vision of the future--the future that was 
now, had always been and would always be--had taken me this far but no 
farther.  Beyond this time, nothing.  I was as blind to future moments 
as a child floating in his mother's womb is to light.
 
 "Bastard!" Yoshou shouted. "Stay away!"
 
 He ripped his spear from the Timekeeper's chest.  There was a hole in 
the Timekeeper's furs as big as my fist, an ocean of blood.  With the 
strength of an Alaloi--or the frenzy of a madman--Yoshou bent low and 
lifter him straight up over his head.  He staggered over to the edge of 
the crevasse.
 
 "No, Yoshou!" I cried out.  I moved across the snow as fast as I could, 
but I was remembering too much to fall into slowtime, and therefore I 
moed too slowly.
 
 "Yoshou, no!"
 
 I grabbed at Yoshou as he heaved and pitched the Timekeeper's body into 
the crevasse. I feel against him; both of us nearly followed the 
Timekeepr over, too.  There was a crack and a spash as the body broke 
through the thin, new sea ice twelve feet below us.  The timekeepr 
plunged into black water; he sank like a stone and disappeared.  The 
secret of life.
 
 "Damn you, Yoshou!"
 
 The seals and fishes would scavenge the Timekeeper's body, and the 
secret of life would pass into them and be lost forever somewhere in the 
icy deeps of the sea.  I clung to Yoshou's furs waiting for Kagato's 
body to rise, but i did not rise; it would never rise again.
 
 "Bastard!" Yoshou shouted this ugliest of words as he caught his good 
hand up in my hair and tried to snap my head back.
 
 Then I went mad, too.  How thin the line between love and hat, reason 
and rage! Yoshou and I went down into the snow, tearing at each other as 
if we were mad dogs. I blindly grabbed for his throat. I punched his 
nose. With his left hand he must have found his spear because the 
bloody, frozen point dipped toward my face. I am sure he would have 
shoved it into my throat, but he did not have a very good grip on it. I 
dropped my chin to cover my throat and jerked suddenly.  Somehow the 
flint tip glanced across my forehead over my eyes.  There was a hot 
pressure and a ripping sound and blood. The flint was in my blood, and 
his blood, Kagato's blood frozen to the sharp spear point, melted into 
my blood as Yoshou sawed the spear across my skull.  I had the eerie 
sensation that my blood recognized the kinship of Kagato's bloodk, that 
inside me his blood was whispering to me, calling forth my deepest 
memories.  Or perhaps it was the shock of the spear or the brilliant 
glare of the sun off the eastern ice that set me to remembrancing--I do 
not know. I grappled with Yoshou hand to hand, and the cold tide of 
memory (and rage) swept me under.
 
 I remembered a simple fact of genetics; I remembered that all human 
beings shared a common ancestry.  The kinship of blood: Yoshou rolled 
against me, and his chest came up against mine, pressing me down through 
the layers of snow.  I opened my mouth to scream, but the blood dripping 
out of his nose got in and gagged me. I swallowed his blood, my blood, 
the blood of his father and grandfather, who was Kagato, the grandfather 
of Genma and Li Tosh, too, perhaps even Shanidar's grandfather, the 
grandfather of the entire human race.  For thirty thousand years Kagato 
had wandered the continents of Old Earth, all the while filling women he 
took with the flood of his loins.  Filling them with godseed.  How many 
children he had fathered across the centuries I could not guess.  
Perhaps tens of thousands of children.  And in each one of them girl and 
boy, the secret of the Jurains coiled and was passed on to their 
children and their children's children, on and on, father to son, mother 
to daughter year after year so that on all the continents and oceans of 
all the planets of man (and on the made-worlds, too) no woman or man 
lived in whom the great secret did not live, lying dormant, waiting 
inside. Inside me.
 
 We rolled over and over in the snow as Yoshou tried to stab his spear 
into my neck.  But I locked his arm--it was a lock Kagato had taught me 
as a child--and I felt the joint stiffen up as he grunted in anger and 
pain.  Yoshou, too, had once taken wrestling lessons, and he broke my 
hold.  He got a knee up and spun about.  There was snow in my mouth and 
down the collar of my furs. I was swimming snow. The ice points stung my 
naked shoulders and froze my neck.  Rivulets of snowmelt and sodden 
clumps of icepaste chilled my chest.  We punched and gouged and wrestled 
through the clean snow, trying to kill each other.
 
 "Should I kill him?" Yoshou suddenly screamed. But, no, the scream was 
inside of him, not in his mouth. I was reading his face; perhaps I was 
reading his mind. The scream was inside me.
 
 The brain is only a tool...
 
 Something else called to me, and I shut my eyes to Yoshou's clawing 
fingers, turned my head and listened to the voice of memory.  In a way, 
it was like a song.  There were harmonies, microscopic motions, and 
rhythms.  I looked into my blood, looked down the dark squiggle of my 
chromosomes where the Jurai Power was hidden. I looked into a place 
where the imprimaturs had often looked, into that useless collection of 
"junk genes" making up much of every cell's genetic material.  I 
listened to my blood telling me that the junk genes did have a purpose.  
They coded for and produced the proteins of chemical memory.  They were 
nothing but memory.  The Jurains had not meant for their message to be 
decoded into something so crude as human language.  Their secret, the 
secret of life, was to be remembered.
 
 'The brain is that instrument for running and reading the programs of 
the universe.'
 
 Each of us carries inside the key to memory.  I felt a rhythem in my 
blood, and it was the precise dance of adenine and guanine, thymine and 
cytosine, and the threads of memory encoded with in my chromosomes began 
to unravel.  Somewhere deep inside of me, strangs of DNA were coding for 
alanine and tryptophan and other amino acids, building up the proteins 
of chemical memory for my brain to read.  Or perhaps the memory of my 
DNA had already been encoded within the neurologics of my new brain; 
perhaps I was remembrancing to the fervid touch of electrons instead of 
forming images called up by protein sequences.  Protein/electrons--in 
the end, did it matter how information was stored?  No, what mattered 
was the voice of the Ieldra whispering those few parts of the Jurai 
Power that I could understand.  The memories of the gods.  The secret of 
life, they said, is simple; the secrect of life is...
 
 "Should I kill him? Decide, then!"
 
 'Mas is a bridge,' they said.
 
 The simplest things are the most difficult to understand.  I grabbed 
Yoshou's beard and jerked his head back and forth. I felt my awareness 
preading outward from our thrashing bodies, outward in circles through 
the cold powder, spreading outward like a blanket of snow over the 
frozen seascape of the world.  I was aware of many things at once: of 
the morning wind as it hissed and hugged the ice; of Kweitkel's white 
summit poking into the blue belly of the sky; of Soli's hot breath 
exploding in my ear.  I remembered many, many things. I remembered 
myself as I really was. Usually our awareness flickers from the inner to 
the outer and back again like a thallow cocking its head from side to 
side.  We spend our lives being aware of objects and events, and 
occasionally we are even aware of ourselves, but to hold both points of 
view at the same time is a very rare thing. I remembered that I was a 
man who hate Yoshou; I remembered this hatred as if I were watching 
myself hate him.  It was stupid of me to hate. My rage and hate programs 
were ruining me, imprisoning me, robbing me of my freedom to think and 
feel and be. I hated that my hatred was ruining me, and yet I could not 
stop hating.
 
 'Human beings must free themselves,' whispered the Jurai Power in my 
inner ear, 'they must be free.'
 
 "Decide, then!"
 
 Soli gouged my cheek with his fingernail; it parted the layers of my 
skin one by one. I gasped in pain, and I remembered there was a way out, 
the way I had once seen on the ice of the Winter Ring, the was of 
creation. Many had crossed the bridge of creation before me. I 
remembered the first female warrior-poet, Tokimi, she who had loved 
flowers and life so greatly that she had fled the death-worshippers for 
the healing oceans of Agathange.  There the god-min had remade her brain 
as they had mine. She had fled the worlds of man, fled far into the 
manifold.  She had laid her brain naked from its surrounding coffin of 
skin and bone.  With the elements of asteroids and planets that she 
consumed, she had added to the neurologics of her brain.  She had 
created her brain and watched herself grow, cnetury after century, 
growing and creating until her brain had become as large as a moon, and 
then many, many moons.  The misnamed Solid State Entity, I remembered as 
I heaved against the churning snow, had once been as human as I; she had 
been a little girl who liked to put flowers in her hair.
 
 The voice of memory, of an old, dying man: 'The gods are tricksters, 
and when they remake a man, they always leave something undone.'
 
 Yoshou began to reach back to grab his spear lying half-buried in the 
snow. It was the wrong thing for him to do. I felt his body's programs 
pulsing beneath his powdered furs, running along the length of his hard 
muscles into his arm. I coughed at the bitter air as I whiled and wove 
my arm beneath his arm up over the back of his neck. 'The half-nelson is 
the first hold I'll teach you,' the Timekeeper whispered in my ear, and 
I was a novice once again grunting on the white furs of the Timekeeper's 
Tower. And younger: I was the boy Kagato wresting with his father on a 
mountain glade on Old Earth. 'It's a good hold, but the full-nelson is a 
deadly hold.' I forced my other arm up into Yoshou's armpit halfway to 
his neck. "Bastard!" he screamed, and I remembered then the thing that 
the Agathanians had left undone: the determination of my fate. I could 
chose. I could edit and rewrite my programs; I could create myself, 
here, in this very moment of rage and cold, rolling over and over in the 
snow.
 
 'But the price of birth is death,' the Jurains whispered.
 
 Yes, I could create myslef, but to crea, I must un-create first. To die 
is to live; to live, I die. Could I be a murderer? My life, myself--and 
there could be no returning that way ever again; there could only be the 
great journey, on and on toward the infinite things, the quest without 
boundary or end. I remembered my promise to Lady Tokimi.  How I 
wondered, would I find the strength to sacrifice my fear?
 
 'There are infinite possibilities. And infinite dangers, too.'
 
 "Should I kill him? Decide now!"
 
 I joined both my hands in the dense, wet hair at the back of Yoshou's 
neck. His sweat was freezing as I locked my fingers and began to pull 
downward, forcing his head toward his chest. And in my fingers, a great 
strength, the strength that Yoshou and my mother, and even Azusa, had 
put there. I must break his neck, I whispered to myself, I must snap it 
as I would me, because the universe was cold and unfair, because, after 
all, more than anything else I loved being human. I must choose a death. 
Never mind that a few wild chances had led me to this moment wrestling 
in the snow. In the end, weren't chance and fate two sides of a single 
face? I stared into the face of fate and found that it was my own.  Does 
a man have free will? 'Can you read the programs of the universe, the 
infinite possibilities?' There, on a cold, windy morning in deep winter, 
I remembered myself and saw a sand, windburnt, finally compassionate 
face smiling back.  Yes, I can, I whispered. I *will*--a choice freely 
made beneath the freedom of the deep sky.
 
 And so, a moment of letting go, of disengagement and freedom. I heard 
the snap I had been waiting for all my life.  Yoshou crouched a few feet 
away from me holding the pieces of his spear on either side of his bent 
knee.  He thre them spinning far out into the snow. He rubbed the back 
of his neck and said, "We could have killed each other, couldn't we? 
What wrong with us, Tenchi?"
 
 I pressed my hand to the cut on my forehead to stop the bleeding.  I 
was panting and I said, "Listen, Yoshou, this...trite tautology, not so 
trite: The secret of life...is life."
 
 Yoshou got up and went over to the crevasse.  He looked down.  "Kagato 
is dead," he mumbled half to himself.  He seemed not to have heard what 
I told him.  "Your secret, dead too.  Why couldn't you have stayed away 
from me? Yes, why this cycle of...why does it go on? But no, it won't go 
on, I swear it, never, never again."
 
 I stared west at Kweitkel as the memories thundered within me.  I 
listened and I watched the light refract in colors off the sparkling 
snow.  Everything--the pink granite of the mountain's northern pinnacle, 
the fresh white powder, the blue air itself--seemed newly created. I 
stood like a man stupefied with skotch, drunk with the beauty of the 
world.  There was not more rage or fear. I turned east where the endless 
sheet of ice was burning with the light of the morning sun.  Somewhere 
out there, beneath the red ball of fire boiling low on the horizon, was 
Nerima.  'Infinite possibilities,' she whispered to me.
 
 Yoshou knelt suddenly, going down on his hands and kness systematically 
beating the snow near him. I remembered that the Timkeeper had hurled 
his finger into the snow.
 
 "No, Yoshou, don't bother trying to find it. There's not point, now."
 
 "Why not, Tenchi?"
 
 Quickly, as my body heat melted the snow that had gotten down my furs, 
I told him about my memories.
 
 "But it makes no sense, does it?" Yoshou said. "Why were the Jurai 
Power encoded as memory? If the Jurains wanted to tell us their message, 
why didn't they choose a simpler means?"
 
 One of the Timekeeper's skinny dogs trotted over to me and I patter his 
side. He sniffed the air in the direction of the crevasse and began to 
whine. "What could be simpler, Yoshou? The Jurains shared their wisdom 
with everyone.  In truth, it's ironic: They relied on our intelligence 
to remember their intelligence.  They must have thought it would be the 
simplest thing for man to learn the tru art of remembrancing.  And we 
should have, thousands of years ago.  They never dreamed we'd be so 
stupid."
 
 'Infinite dangers.'  I glanced north at the blue-black curtain of the 
sky hanging over the frozen icebergs. I listened to the Jurai Power's 
whisper.
 
 Soli stood up and whistled to the rrest of the Timekeepr's dogs. When 
he was done going over them with his hands and eyes, he asked, "Is this 
how it ends? The quest?" Then he, too, was staring off, blinking against 
the fresh wind.
 
 I turned my head.  To the south, the ice was as smooth and white as an 
baby's skin.  There was no end to the southern ice of the Starnbergersee 
"It goes on and on," I said.
 
 We went into the Timekeepr's hut, and Soli boiled water for coffee.  He 
bathed the wound on my forehead with hot, soaking cottons; he thawed it, 
cleaned it, and, with a strand of seal sinew, sewed it closed. After we 
had drunk our coffee, he fed and tended the sick dogs whild I explored 
the inside of the hut. I searched through the Timekeeper's things until 
I found the book. Along with a few steel pens and a glass sphere full of 
ink, it was wrapped in an oilskin, shoved between the pillowed furs at 
the head of his bed.  It was a fat, leather-bound book which closely 
resembled the book of poems he had once given me. I opened it and 
smelled the thckness of old leather. An icy gust blew through the chinks 
in the wall, rattling its white pages. It was not a book of poems.  The 
Timekeeper had painstakingly--agonizingly--covered the pages of the 
book, line after line, with letters he had inked and drawn (and 
composed) himself. It was an exquisite work of calligraphy, the work of 
a man who cared not at all if he spent an hour penning a single word.  
The work of a lifetime. I turned to the title page of the book.  There, 
in black letters as thick as a dog's claws, I read:
 
 A REQUIEM FOR HOMO SAPIENS
 BY
 KAGATO
 TIMEKEEPER AND LORD OF HOROLOGE
 OF THE ORDER OF MYSTIC MATHEMATICIANS
 AND OTHER SEEKERS OF THE INEFFABLE FLAME
 
 Soli, who had never learned the art of reading, came over to me and 
asked, "Why would the Timekeeper want you to have this book?"
 
 I closed the book and rapped the cover with my Martial Artist's ring, I 
said, "This book, these words--it's his Jurai Power."
 
 "Tell me about the Jurai Power," Soli said.  "Not the Timekeeper's 
Jurai Power.  That would make me too sad.  Tell me about *your* Jurai 
Power, the message of the gods."
 
 I told him all that I knew.  This is what I said:  The Jurai Power were 
the Jurain's instructions to human beings on how to become gods.  Man is 
a bridge between ape and god, and the Jurai Power was a design for a 
bridge which would not crumble into snow dust.  Men must be gods because 
that was how we were built.  The god program runs deep in our race, as 
deep as the primitive DNA from which we sprang billions of years ago.  
We must learn how this program runs because that is our fate.  I told 
him this simple thing as he pressed a mug of hot coffee into my hands.  
But there are infinite dangers, I said.  When man looked godward with 
insane eyes, the very stars would explode and drop from the sky. Insane 
god-men, insane gods--the universe is full of insanity; insanity lurks 
everywhere, like a mad, cannibalistic thallow wiating to gobble up any 
godling who attains great intelligence and power.  The more complex the 
programs of an organism, the greater is the danger of insanity.  It is 
very, very hard to be a god.  I breathed in the righ fumes of the 
coffee, and I said that it was the gift of the Jurains to help man cross 
the bridge.  Because they were compassionate beings, yes, but also 
because it was part of their purpose to save the univers from insanity.
 
 "Of course, man is already part god," I said. "And we're part insane, 
which is why we're arrogant enough to tamper with the natural life-cycle 
of the stars.  And therefore: the Vild. Because we're ignorant, Yoshou, 
because we don't know.  We don't see. There are rules; the Jurai Power 
are rules, rules on becoming, of determining our place in the ecology.
 
 'The deep structure of the universe is pure consciousness.'
 
 Yoshou nodded his head and sipped his coffee as he listened to me talk 
on through the day on the night.  The beginning of everything, I said, 
is the reprogramming of our brains.  Even our antiquated human brains 
can be reprogrammed. We can write our master programs; there are 
techniques for doing so; the Jurai Power lays down the rules for these 
techniques.  In the end, we can remake our brains, and if we aspire to 
greater consciousness, then we must, for what is the brain but a small 
lump of matter that concntrates consciousness?  Matter/energy; 
space/time; information/consciousness--consciousness; there are 
fundamentals describable by the Jurain's beautiful, simple mathematics.  
In a way, matter is merely frozen energy floating in an icefield of 
spacetime. And consciousness is matter's way of organizing itself; 
consciousness is immanent in every snowflake, atom, blooddrop, photon 
and grain of sand, every neighborhood of spacetime from the Virgo Cloud 
to Perdid Luz. Consciousness inheres, I whispered; consciousness orders 
everything.  The mathematics of order: There are rulse of quantifying 
the involvement/duty/identification among all the living organisms and 
inorganic matter in the universe. 'Tat Tvam Asi,' That Thou Art, and 
what do I owe a stranger or an alien?  My father? A bloodworm? A distant 
star?  What is man's place in the universal scheme? The great danger, I 
said, is in falsely perceiving the otherness of all things.  Then we 
will pull the wings off flies, or murder seals, or other human beings; 
then we may destroy the stars.
 
 "There's help for the Vild, Yoshou.  A solution, a way out.  There's 
unity of...consciousness.  In a way, matter is just a standing wavefront 
of consciousness, and energy, every bit of gamma radiating from the Vild 
stars, every photon, this moving wavefront--it was all created by human 
action, and therefore it can be uncreated. Or, I should say, re-created.  
Made over in a different form, do you see? It's part of the ecology, 
now."
 
 "You keep saying the ecology," he said, sipping more coffee. "What 
ecology?"
 
 'There is an ecology of information.  Stars will die; people and gods 
will die, but information is conserved.  Macroscopic information decays 
to microscopic information.  But microscopic information is eventually 
concentrated.  Nothing is lost.  Gods exist to devour information.  The 
lower intelligences sort, filter, concentrate and organize information.  
And the gods feed.'
 
 "Pilot?"
 
 "I'm sorry, I was...remembering." I licked coffee from my teeth and 
said, "There are natrual rules for determining our place in the ecology.  
If we could decode the universal program, read the intention of the 
universe, then--"
 
 "You're not answering my question."
 
 "I'm trying.  The Vild--it's not the intention of the universe.  What 
do human beings know of ananke? There are always imperfections and 
insanities.  The orcas--"
 
 "The what?"
 
 "On Agathange, the orcas may or may not be insane, but the yplay a 
crucial role in that planet's ecology.  And so, consider the Vild: an 
ocean of energy being used."
 
 As Lady Tokimi had made thousands of black bodies to store the energy 
of Gehenna Luz, so could we use the energy of the Vild.  Information 
could be coded into signals and sent anywhere, given enough energy.  
Sent everywhere, this iterflow of information.  We could speak with the 
nebular brains in our galaxy.  We could extend our galaxy's information 
ecology.  We--every human being, Fravashi, oyster, santient bacterium, 
virus, or seal--we could drive our collective consciousness across the 
two million light-years of the intergalactic void to the information 
ecologies of the nearer galaxies, Andromeda and Maffei and the First 
Leo--all the galaxies of the localg roup were alive with intelligence 
and vicbrated with the thoughts of organisms such as ourselves.  Someday 
the time would come to interface with the ecologies of other groups of 
galaxies.  Within ten million light-years off the supergalactic plane of 
the local supercluster were many groups of galaxies.  Canes Venatici, 
the Pavo-Indus and the Ursa galaxies--these burning, brilliant clouds of 
intelligence and others enveloped our own small galaxy in a sphere of 
light four hundred million light-years in diameter.  To speak with such 
distant galaxies would require the energy of a supernova, perhaps many 
tens of thousands of supernovas.
 
 "La ilaha il Allah," I said, "and we're all a part."
 
 "Listen, Tenchi, I don't understand you."
 
 I listened to the night wind whispering outside the hut, and to the 
quieter whispering inside.  In truth, most of the Jurai Power I did not 
understand, either.  Most of it was--there is no other 
world--gobbledygook.  I did not yet have the brain to understand it.  
For a moment, the whole, vast architecture of the coming information 
ecology unfolded before me, layer upon layer of ideas, biological 
systems and information structures spreading out, opening like the pages 
of a book.  It was overwhelming and wonderful, but I was like a worm 
crawling across the first page of the book, trying to read it letter by 
letter by the feel of the ink across my belly.  I understood perhaps a 
single page in all the millions of pages of the Jurai Power.  And the 
Power themselves, the collected wisdom of the gods, were only a tiny 
part of the secrets that the universe held, as insignificant as a single 
snowflake in a blizzard.
 
 I tried to tell Yoshou all this, but I do not think he really wanted to 
understand.  "You say that these memories are in each of us? The whole 
of the Jurai Power?" He was staring straight ahead as he knelt on the 
floor, roasting a baldo nut over the oilstone.
 
 "Yes," I said, "passed down from father to son.  That's why the 
Timekeeper killed the other immortals.  He didn't want anyone telling 
people what was inside them.  Because he knew."
 
 "Knew what?"
 
 "That the bridge can only be crossed one way.  And he knew that if we 
listened to the memories, we'd want to make the crossing."
 
 "It's not so easy to remember," he said.
 
 "You could remember the Jurai Power, if you wanted to."
 
 "Is that true?"
 
 I watched the flame's reflection in his eyes.  It must hurt him, I 
thought, to stare so long without blinking. "I could show you how to 
remember," I said.
 
 He chewed his baldo nut a long time before he swallowed. "No," he said, 
"there are enough memories already.  It's too late, isn't it?"
 
 "Never too late," I said.
 
 "Yes, too late."
 
 I drank the last of my coffee and wiped my lips. "What will you do now, 
then?"
 
 He sucked on his fingers a moment to warm them.  He said, "All my 
life--and it's been a long life, hasn't it?--I've spent every moment 
trying to figure out why I was alive.  My own private quest, Tenchi.  
Now you say the Jurai Power is inside me; you tell me I have only to 
remember and...and what?  You say I'll learn the secret of life on a 
higher level of existence.  But life's life, isn't it?  There's always 
misery, yes; and the higher the level of existence, the greater the 
misery.  I've had enough--do you understand? I, Katsuhito Yoshou 
Masaki...I. I, like the Timekeeper--enough.  How can there ever be an 
answer?" He rubbed his nose and looked at me. "All my life I thought I 
was learning how to live.  But I knew nothing, did I? Justine knew 
everything.  Yes, I'll sled on to Kweitkel and live with the Musk, if 
they'll let me.  We were happy there once, Justine and I. Do you 
remember?"
 
 Later we heard the bawl of a bear far out on the ice.  Yoshou thought 
it might be the same one who had led his dogs to their deaths in the 
crevasse.  He went out to look for the pieces of his bear spear that he 
had cast into the snow.  When he returned, he held the broken end of the 
spear by its point.  "It was reckless of me to break the spear," he 
said. "But at least the flint can be saved.  It's a good piece of 
flint."
 
 I ran my finger lightly along the cut on my forehead. "A good piece of 
flint," I agreed. "It nearly killed me."
 
 "Yes," he said, and he punched out and knocked away part of a snow 
block from the roof.  For a while he watched the spindrift curling 
through the opening before he began to shiver.  He stood up to patch the 
hole and said, "Ever since we first met, I've wondered: Why?"
 
 He cut a new block of snow, trimmed it and tapped it into place.  He 
sat across from me on the Timekeeper's bed.  He tried to meet my eyes, 
but he could not.  His face was hard with emotion, the muscles locking 
as two contradictory programs began to run.  He wanted to tell me how 
much he hated me, now he resented my very existence. The words were 
almost on his lips. His eyes were bright blue, as shiny as the sea.  He 
opened his mouth.  He wanted to say, "Yes, I wanted to kill you; I was 
ready to kill you; I would loved to have killed you." And then a long 
moment slowly passed as his face softened, and he rubbed his eyes, and 
he said the other thing, the thing that he thought he did not want to 
say: "No, I couldn't kill you.  How can a man kill his own son?"
 
 I stared at the fire as the hut filled with silence.  He threw his hand 
over his eyes, rubbing his temples.
 
 "Why you, Tenchi?" he asked at last. "What will happen to you?"
 
 I sat there with him eating baldo nuts, and I told him one last secret. 
Then everything seemed to be beating: my heart, his heart, the air 
molecules outside beating against the frozen snow. I listened to the 
beating of the Vild stars calling me, then I told, him, as 
compassionately as I could, that it was his son's fate to be a god.
 
 - to be continued.

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