Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  The unicorn lay down in the blackness of the forest. It drank from its own brain.

  Sometimes the blackness of the wood grew green or gold or rose. Sometimes there were faraway voices, or thunder, or the velvet sound of falling snow. Flowers burst out or withered under the body of the unicorn, which was no longer perceptible as anything like a body.

  The magic of virginity, which had drawn the symbol of the unicorn on the air, both for the virgin and for itself, a virginity ironically almost instantly given up, drifted like a spring leaf on water. Then down and down through the unicorn’s prismatic awareness.

  At last this floating leaf, a green mote, struck the floor of the unicorn’s intellect. It felt a cry within itself, a terrible cry, aching and raging, and full of inhuman human despair.

  What was the meaning of this?

  The unicorn did not know it, but time was also like the wood. As the wood had grown tall and tangled and old, so time had grown, hedging the unicorn round as if with high reeds, or a fence of gilded posts.

  When it ran lightly over the pool, it did not notice it ran across water, as in the beginning.

  The trees on the rock had also grown old. The unicorn passed through them, unimpeded, like fluid. The throbbing centre of the pain which had somehow reached the unicorn was to be found on the track that ran through the middle of the village.

  Under the broken ancient wall of the town, an elderly woman was crying and lamenting, not loudly, but with a desperate intensity. To the human eye, her trouble was immediately quite plain. Two men had between them a covered figure on a bier. One hand, like a parcel of bones, stuck out, and this the woman held and fondled. A man was dead and due for burying, and the old woman, probably his wife, overcome at the final undeniable fact of parting, had halted the proceedings with this eruption of passionate grief. All around, others stood, trying to comfort or dissuade.

  To the unicorn, only the outcry and the anguish were decipherable. They needed no explanation. And then it saw auburn hair and black, and recognised, or so it seemed, the lovers from the earlier night.

  The unicorn moved closer. It stepped across the broken sunlight and the shadows and drew near to the old woman who wept and softly cried out, endeavouring to distinguish the young man and the young woman who were, in their physical forms, its own self from two other ages.

  Then came a separation, of persons, of thought. The young man who resembled Lauro was younger than he had been when last the unicorn looked at him, and his hair was blacker than a coal. It was the girl, older than remembered, older than Sephaina, whose hair hung red as rust all down her back as she held the weeping woman and took her hand from the dead hand on the bier.

  ‘Mother, my mother,’ said the girl, ‘my father is dead and we must let him go to his rest. Has he not earned his rest?’ said the girl, gently, calmly, and it was the young man now who began to weep. ‘Let him be on his way.’

  The old woman allowed her hand to be removed from the stick-like fingers. She stood in the street, sunken and soulless, staring as the men with the bier moved off from her.

  The unicorn sighed.

  It had seemed only yesterday, or seven days before, or maybe at most a month, or a season ago, that it had left them, embracing and new and brimmed with life and trust beyond the spinning wheel. But summers had come and gone, winters, years and decades. Their children had grown. The son had his mother’s hair, the girl her father’s. And the maiden who had slept under the tree was gnarled and bent like a dehydrated stem, and the young man who had wooed her was an empty sack of flesh, its motive force spilled out.

  ‘No,’ said the old woman tiredly. ‘How am I to live, how am I to be, now, alone?’

  The unbeautiful, incoherent words conveyed her desolation exactly. She was rooted to the track. She saw no need to go on, or to return. Meaningless and stark and horrible, the world leaned all about her, a ruin, shelterless. Her poor face, haggard and puckered. The filmy eyes that had been dark as the pool beside the wood, all of her flaccid as the dead man carried away from her. Her mouth continued to make the shape of crying, but now even the tears would not come. She had reached the ultimate lethargy of wretchedness. And tug at her arm as the red-haired daughter might, or try to steel and support her as the black-haired son did, the old woman, who had been young and a virgin, stood on the track and saw her wasted life and the bitter blows of life, and all of its little, little sweetness, now snatched from her for ever.

  And then something changed behind the dull lenses of her vision. Something seemed to open, some inner eye.

  She had seen the unicorn standing not three paces from her.

  ‘Mother — Mother, what is it now?’ the girl asked anxiously.

  ‘Hush,’ said the old woman. She was apparently aware her daughter could not see the silver beast with its greyhound’s head, its amethystine eyes, its body like a moonburst, its single horn like a cone of stars — that no one could see the unicorn but she. ‘Hush. Let me listen.’

  ‘But what are you hearing?’

  ‘Hush.’

  So they fell silent in the street. The men and women looked at each other, fearing for the wits of this one of their number. Yet, politely, they waited.

  The unicorn stood, a few inches from the ground, visible only to one, fixing her first with this lambent eye, then with that. The unicorn, of course, did not speak. It had no speech. But lowering its neck, it set the tip of its horn, like a silver pin, to the old woman’s forehead.

  There is no death. Beyond life, is life. Whatever suffering and whatever disappointment, whatever joy, whatever bewilderment, there is more time than can be measured to learn, and to be comforted. Blindly to demand, meekly to consent, inwardly to know, these are the stages of existence. But beyond all knowledge is another, unknown knowledge. And beyond that unknown knowledge, another. Progression is endless. And to be alone is the only truth and the only falsehood.

  The unicorn vanished on this occasion like a melting of spring snow. The old woman noted it, and she smiled. She walked firmly after the bier, crying still somewhat, from habit. She was to live to a great age. One evening in the future, she would tell her daughter — then rocking her own child in the firelight — ‘On the day of your father’s burying, I saw the Christ. He wore the shape of a white unicorn. He promised life everlasting.’

  But that was far away, and now the unicorn ran, like the wind, and as it ran it left humanity behind itself for ever. It dissolved and was a burning light.

  The light asked nothing of itself, it was content to blaze, which also, surely, was another truth.

  The being of Lasephun was presently transmuted, passing into some further, extraordinary stage, the name of which creature is unknown, here.

  A MADONNA OF THE MACHINE

  A friend played me a strange, intriguing piece of music, partly electronic, and a vision formed of soft colours against a wall of ungiving, ticking steel. Out of that, this.

  Industrial canticles

  Sing the steel.

  A secret language,

  Pain.

  John Kaiine

  Touch touch touch the dial, and the dial turns. Now to the left, and now to the right. Grey light flickers down the coil: half a mile below the platform, where the spiral ends, a lever raises its leviathan head. Ting says a bell. And the process is accomplished.

  peter sits on his bench. He watches the figures moving noiselessly along the panel. After one seventy second unit, a soft flare glows in the panel. peter reaches out again and touch touch touches the dial, and the dial turns, left and right, and the grey light flickers away down the snake-bowel coil, down down into the dusk below, and there the leviathan raises its head, and ting says the bell.

  And the process is accomplished.

  And peter sits on his bench, watching the figures move until another seventy second unit passes and the flare glows, and he reaches out and touch and turn and left and right and flicker and down and raise and ting.

  Sometimes,
as he sits, or periodically stands for a unit or two, when the passing mechanical overseer reminds him, peter thinks. He thinks about whether he is hungry now or not, and if he is, he takes a fibre bar from his overall and eats it. Or if he is thirsty he presses a tube in the grey-silver wall beside the bench, and the tube issues him a vitamin drink. Or he thinks of the talkto in his home, which tells him things or answers questions, if he has any, or murmurs him to sleep. Or he notices the other persons who sit or stand before their own sections on the platform; lines of people six or seven metres apart. He has been among them all his adult life. They are the same people he has always been with, here. And in the start of the diurnal, after the mechanical lark trills him awake, he has heard, for twenty-five years, the other mechanical larks in main building of d district going off one by one, to wake these others. Then they, like him, enter their hygiene cubicles, rid themselves of waste matter, are cleansed and dried, go to their food counters and are fed, expel themselves into the two thousand metre long corridor, for the twice-daily walk necessary for their health. And in the cage-lift they go down into the street, where the pale grey verticals and horizontals stretch away and away, and the airbus comes and sucks them in and bears them off and sets them down here, together, in the heart of the Machine.

  peter knows the names of some of his neighbours. But they have never really spoken. There is no point. What is there to discuss? Each has a talkto in his or her home. The talkto adapts entirely to each individual personality. It knows, by mechanical instinct, what to say, and even when to speak and when to keep silent. It knows the proper sounds and encouragements to aid occasional vague masturbations, or to soothe the aftermath of some unremembered yet disquieting dream.

  There is no need for human conversation, awkward and effortful.

  The flare glows, and peter touches touches touches, and the dial turns. The harmony of the activity and its result are satisfying. It is a dim yet pleasing thought that throughout the Machine, hour by hour, unceasing for its duration, so many millions of men and women carry out, endlessly and faultlessly, similar or complementary actions. The Machine serves and is served. The empathy is perfect.

  The light reaches the lever which raises itself. Ting goes the bell.

  There is a meal-break, and peter leaves his section for the moving ramp which goes down under the platform. On the ramp with him, peter recognises yori and marion, ted and malwe and jane. They reach the lower level and step off, into the canteen. Everything has a mild gloss of cleanness. The clean walls, in reply to the pressure of his fingers, give peter a slice of protein and some vegetable cubes, and a caffeine drink.

  peter sits at a table to eat. The table is shared by jori, jane and ted. They do not speak to each other. Everyone thinks their own thoughts and slowly consumes the food.

  It is as peter is finishing his drink that there comes to him the first Intimation.

  He does not know it for an Intimation.

  It is a feeling he has never felt before; it has no name.

  It startles him, and wondering if he has not chewed his food properly and so has caused some gastric imbalance, he half rises to approach the canteen health dispenser. But then the feeling without a name ebbs away. It goes so softly (not as it came, sheer and hard, like a glass sliver), that peter is reassured. He does not, however, finish his drink, subconsciously blaming it.

  On the ramp back to the platform, ted speaks.

  He says: ‘There was a pinkness over my screen, before meal-break.’

  No one answers. jane glances at him, then politely averts her eyes.

  ted says nothing else.

  They return to their positions.

  peter touches. The dial turns.

  Just before the next meal-break, peter feels the second Intimation. It is unlike the first, coming insidiously, sweetly, like the gentle libido which sometimes wakes him in the twilight of sleep prior to the trilling of the mechanical lark. This is not a bodily feeling, nevertheless, even though it invades his body. What is wrong with him?

  peter is struck by a sort of paralysis. He stares inward at the feeling, trying to determine its shape.

  It is a type of wave, with an upcurling head, pliant, mutable, yet formed. Running in.

  It strikes him, somewhere in the region of the heart.

  He is ill. There is something medically wrong. His heart is beating strongly and very fast. peter looks up from his panel to the emergency button in the wall. And there, above his section, he sees a gleam of light that is pink, the colour of a rose, a special colour that perhaps his genes recall, although he has never seen a flower of any type. peter looks at the rose light and, gradually, it unfolds itself, and it too, like the wave-shape within him beating on his beating heart, takes on a form.

  He thinks it is like a woman. Yes, it is like a woman. She is clothed in a flowing, pleated garment, all the rose-colour, and on her head is a drift of scarf, the palest yellow, also rose-like. Her flesh is pale, luminous and white, not like skin. She has eyes, although the rest of her features seem to him blurred. The eyes of the woman fix on peter. He tries to look away. It is not possible. Something terrible is in her eyes, something he has never, in all his twenty-five years, seen in a human face and expression.

  peter opens his mouth and makes a sound, and something happens to him. His chest is heaving, and the air is coming out of him in gasps and liquid is rushing down his cheeks, as if he bled, but it is only water pouring out of his eyes.

  And then, the rose light fades from the wall above the panel.

  peter comprehends, as he struggles helplessly with the paroxysm of the body once known as weeping, and which he does not understand, that the figures have reached the seventy unit interval and the soft flare has gone off and he has not touched —

  Then he sees that the dial is turning left and right. The flickering energy is running down the coil to the lever below which lifts, and the bell goes ting.

  peter has not touched the dial, the three immaculate touches. Absorbed by the dreadful vision above the panel, peter has failed the Machine. But despite this lapse, the dial had turned, the coil has been activated. The process has been accomplished.

  peter stops crying. His chest and throat are raw, and his eyes sting. He wipes his nose on the sleeve of his overall without thinking, and as the light flares again, he touch touch touches —

  He does not know what else to do.

  He hopes what has happened will fade, as the first Intimation faded.

  In a way, it does.

  The talkto comes on as peter enters his home.

  ‘peter,’ says the talkto. peter smiles. The smile is involuntary, not precisely automatic. When he hears the low mechanical voice, he is always pleased. A kind of happiness envelops him. It is hour seventeen, and now he is here in the room that is his home, to relax and to sleep, for ten hours.

  Home is rather bare, like every home (with variations) in main building, and in d district, and in all districts and buildings above the heart of the Machine. The walls of home are concave and dust-resistant, although every diurnal they are mechanically wiped. The cushioned floor supports a low sleeping-couch. On one wall is the food counter, and through a sliding door the box of the hygiene cubicle, with its water-tap, lavatory bowl, and shower. There are no windows in peter’s home. Air is constantly breathed in and out via hidden orifices. It is the clean, dry, odourless air, common throughout the Machine.

  In one corner, near the convex ceiling, the talkto perches, a small grey bulb that faintly shines when peter is at home. Nearby, the mechanical lark waits above the bed. The light, like the air, is constant, never-changing, muted yet clarified.

  There is, too, a languid, unmodulated hum, which is the eternal music of the Machine.

  The Machine is outside, and all about, and home is merely a tiny microcosm of the Machine. Home needs no textures and no patterns, as peter himself needs no decoration or individual markers. He, all humanity, are the pattern within the Machine, the jewellery
of its vistas that stretch in every pale grey direction upwards, downwards, and in parallels towards an infinity which Is.

  peter knows this and is consoled by this. He speaks to the talkto. He speaks a sort of meaningless, friendly jargon, which the talkto answers in the same vein.

  Going to the counter, peter is given a light supper, and a mineral drink. He and the talkto exchange banter throughout the meal. When peter falls silent, the talkto falls silent, only continuing to shine.

  peter takes off his overall and drops it into the chute. Tomorrow a fresh garment will be ready for him, complete with a fibre bar snack in the pocket. He goes into the hygiene cubicle, where his teeth are cleaned, and his body sluiced with warm water. He urinates at the lavatory bowl, and finally comes back into the room.

  ‘Today,’ he says, ‘today.’

  The talkto waits, ready to take up his phrase.

  ‘Today,’ says peter, ‘I saw a woman above the panel. How can that be?’

  The talkto pauses, then it says, ‘A woman. Yes, peter.’

  ‘How could she be there? She was in the wall of the Machine.’

  ‘Machine, peter,’ says the talkto.

  ‘And I missed touching the dial. But the dial turned. As if I touched the dial. As if — ’ peter fumbles for his own meaning. He says: ‘As if I needn’t touch the dial.’

  The talkto says, ‘Bedtime, peter.’ And it begins a sort of song it murmurs before he sleeps.

  Normally, he finds the song very soothing. Now, an unaccountable tension runs through him, and sensing it, infallibly, the talkto becomes utterly silent, only shining there above him as he lies down.

  Presently, he loses consciousness.

  peter dreams he is walking up the pure, surfaceless wall of the Machine above his section. A woman in a pink garment and silver-yellow veil is walking before him. Her feet are white as roses, and they leave, in the steel endurance of the wall, delicate indentations that vanish in a few moments, as if she walked over the film of a lake — the memory of which his genes recall, although he has never seen water save from a faucet or in a lavatory bowl.