by Tanith Lee
‘Now if only the bush had flowered in time, as your bush flowers, all would have been well,’ the villagers cry.
The traveller smiles. He in turn does not tell them of the heap of peculiar bones, like parts of eagles mingled with those of a woman and a man. Out of the bones, from the heart of them, the bush was rising, but the traveller untangled the roots of it with care; it looks sound enough now in its sturdy pot, all of it twining together. It seems as if two separate plants are growing from a single stem, one with blooms almost black, and one pink-flowered, like a young sunset.
‘Flur de fur,’ says the traveller, beaming at the marvel, and his luck.
Fleur de feu. Oh flower of fire. That fire is not hate or fear, which makes flowers come, not terror or anger or lust, it is love that is the fire of the Bite-Me-Not, love which cannot abandon, love which cannot harm. Love which never dies.
BY CRYSTAL LIGHT BENEATH ONE STAR
Regret for what might have been, and fear of what might be, are the dual anvils for this peculiar reforgement of time. Meanwhile, the plight of a dissenter touches anyone who has ever felt even the most fleeting disagreement with any regime. There but for the grace…
The fragment of poem is from a travel novella by the actor Michael Pennington, Rossya, which served indirectly, and in ways I can’t pin down, as an inspiration.
Six thousand miles is not too far
To hurry home to you
By crystal light beneath one star
It seems
I haul across the world
These dreams
Michael Pennington
It’s true. There is a strange kind of beauty in this place. For one thing, the terrible beauty of exile. There’s a sweetness to pain.
Today, if it can be called Day (no, it can’t, but we do, I shall), I must have walked for miles, through the realm of darkness. I don’t, and I never will, understand about the dark, and the way the dark is light. I only see the ebony landscape, not quite black, under the sky — black neither — and that the light is there like panes of most fragile crystal, sharp enough to cut, razors and diamonds, and everything so piercingly clear. And yet so completely, softly, voluminously dark. It hangs, this world of daylit night, from a single nail — the Star. Dull and pale, the Star gives scarcely any illumination. Only in the hours before Shift does the Star brighten. Then it’s more like a noise than a light — a sort of roaring whistle. And I get the old panic, which is nothing to do with an impending Shift, its moments of slight discomfort for us, its bland routine for the machines that order it. It’s a psychological horror I feel, probably, since the brightening of the Star indicates the true dawn is approaching this vast nocturnal dock; the Earth is catching us up. ‘Why do you think about it?’ Edvey said to me this morning (which was no morning, but I shall call it so). ‘You’ll never go back.’
‘You think not.’
‘Not you. You won’t fit. Take me,’ said Edvey, which means I’ll have to, no choice, I’m to be awarded his autobiography, again. ‘A wife, a second-law wife, five children between them. My parents were gone, of course, but I had three sisters.’
‘Just like Andrew Prozorov,’ I murmured, but he wasn’t to be stopped. He never was.
‘Cousins, nephews — all of that. And a couple of good apartments in the cities, and a house, a real show-place, up east of the Centerline. Wonderful land, you could do anything with it, grow coffee, raise horses, dig minerals out of it. And then I had my work. My God, Calle, I had two careers, didn’t I? I had everything.’ He sat down across from me at the small window table, where I had been playing three-handed chess against myself and myself. ‘Christ, if I start to think about all that — I’d go crazy, Calle. I’d start petitioning and arguing, like some of them, causing trouble. I’d probably get something on with the wires, or just plain rig up a line and hang myself.’
‘The machines that run this place would never let it happen.’
‘Oh, there are ways,’ he said. ‘There have to be ways. But I’m not a potential suicide. I never was. I was always positive.’
‘And you’re still positive.’
‘You bet I am, Calle.’
He picked up one of the red bishops, and started to play with it. I thought of taking it away from him, he was messing up the game, but what did it matter anyway?
‘What I say is this. I serve my term. And then I get back.’
‘Which term?’
‘You know what I mean. I do my graft.’
‘Your what?’
‘Calle, don’t try to be clever. I do it, then I get sent home.’
‘Home,’ I said. ‘The wives and horses and coffee and sisters.’
‘That’s it.’
‘How long do you think you still have to serve?’
He glared at me. He was sweating, and his eyes looked wet and full of tearful menace. We all harbour our own versions of the truth. Nobody likes to hear the other version.
‘You don’t know,’ he said to me, ‘any more than I do, how long you’ve been here.’
‘I didn’t say I did.’
‘But I,’ he said, ‘keep count. Yes, sir. From the first day I arrived. Oh, it’s a crude method. No watch or chronometer is going to record it, right? So I just keep a journal, and every night, before I turn in, I damn well make sure I write something on a fresh new page. And every one of those goddamn pages has a number to it. And every goddamn damned number is a day here.’
‘How many pages?’ I asked.
I knew he would know exactly. He did.
‘Seven hundred and thirty-nine,’ he said. He was smug, for a second.
‘That must be a very large book.’
‘It’s more than one book. Come on. And the machines issue me a new one whenever I ask. Allowed stationery. No problem. I have a regular stack of them.’
‘Just over two years,’ I said, ‘if you go by the Standard Calendar.’
‘Thirteen-month calendar, right,’ he said. ‘Just over two years. I mean, that’s quite a while. They don’t want heart’s blood after all. It won’t be long now.’
I took the bishop back for something to do mostly, so I wouldn’t tell him the thing he knew already, that maybe tomorrow he and I would meet and he’d have two thousand pages in his books, or only two pages. He didn’t want to see it. He wasn’t about to see it. Whenever or whatever, he had filled seven hundred and thirty-nine numbers, so seven hundred and thirty-nine times, at least, he had refused to see it. So there he was.
It seemed I could remember meeting him the first time I ever did, the first time I was ever told about the sisters and wives and horses — though specific memory is always hazy here — and he had only been in the place a seven day Standard week. He had said, ‘What did I do? I was making a film. There was nothing controversial in it. It was about families, and how society can work well under an ordered, structured government system.’
‘They may have suspected heavy irony,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But then they had that wrong. I believe in the system. I always did. It was good to me.’
‘Until now.’
‘Oh, they have some reason. I trust them. I’ll sit it out.’
Edvey was not the only one to think — or to say he thought — in this fashion. Sometimes, when they said these things, their eyes flashed this way and that, unconsciously checking for the scanners that would record their pliancy, their willingness to conform. But I —
‘What did you do, eh, Calle? Something silly, I guess.’
‘Very silly.’
‘You’re a writer, eh, Calle? I should know, writers do damn stupid things. What was it?’
‘I’d rather not bore you with it.’
‘I’ll find out.’
‘Yes, if you like.’
When he did find out (not from me, someone else must have mentioned what they half-knew), he showily eschewed my company a long time — until time itself put us out of synch and he forgot. And when he remembered again, it was hazy, and
he began to tell me once more, and more and more, about the sisters and horses.
In fact, I am here for writing a short, slammed-together story, which I published myself on a private press long since melted into slag. The small book was entitled Realm of Darkness: A Final Siberia. It was an imaginary account of this place where I now am, and which I no longer need to imagine. I had heard the tales, I had managed to get access to some classified data leaked by a man who presently blasted out his brains. I wonder how many people on Earth read smuggled copies of that slender volume, or are reading it now — except Now is a concept I sometimes try to forget.
Today, I thought about Merah.
Lest it be supposed I emulate Edvey, or Stenressy, Dorf or Marlin or Wyld, or any of the countless others among us who keep journals, numbered or un, this is no journal. But sometimes the sweet pain of exile … cries out for words, even, audaciously, for print.
I believe, in the normal course of events, Merah would have faded by now simply into a prototype, or a dream. But Merah has not been allowed to do that, for me. Did I love the person called Merah? We were lovers, there was the closeness that can come from that, and a kind of telemetry of ideas, pleasing to us both, abrasive when it failed us — fallings-off, re-unitings, all the ordinary material of a relationship.
But now (in the non-existing now of here), now I think I do love Merah, for Merah has become the immediate symbol of what has been lost to me. They took care that should happen. Should I be flattered they reckon me threat enough still to use this added emotional lever against me? Oh, yes, I flush with embarrassed pride. I must have bothered them. Does that connectively mean, then, that I achieved anything worthwhile, before they sent me here to the night-land under the dull Star?
I had been here what might have been six months Standard, if it were possible to assess. It seemed about that period, though there were already jumps forward, and then sequentially back. I had lived through my first day of arrival three times, I was fairly certain of that, for the dim hazy memory, like the dim unhazy Star, shines on and does not quite let go of all pertinent matters. Six months, then, and on waking in the comfortable private room we are each of us allotted, I heard the machine speaking at me from the wall.
‘There is a procedure you will experience during this time-stage.’
‘What? You’re going to break my legs. Or something less subtle, with a drug?’
‘Tortures of this nature are unrecognised under all united world conventions.’
‘But this isn’t the world,’ I said. I added, ‘Nor are we out of it.’
‘Look from the window,’ said the machine. It had no voice, merely a sound that formed coherent phrases.
I looked. The ebony land stretched softly around and through the razor wafers of crystal light. There are no particular features to the land. It rolls and sweeps, as if about to become a mountain, a valley, a sea — or perhaps invention supplies that fancy. Above, the Star gave off the glow of a tarnished coin, a museum coin from before the days of credit transfer Standardisation. A sixpence, or a centime, or a yen, or a unidisc. But then a sudden blare of light exploded in thunderous silence all through the Star, and it pulsed and swelled, and abruptly a ball of screaming white filled a quarter of the sky, sending its knives of fire slicing across the room, and dissecting all the dark country outside, so its very skeleton seemed to appear through the skin.
‘We’re coming to a Shift,’ I said. I had already witnessed the phenomenon some ten or eleven times before that I recalled, and experienced the Shift itself in the same ratio. Nevertheless, whenever I see what happens to the Star, I become afraid. Of course, it is unconscionable.
‘Shift will occur,’ supplied the machine, ‘in thirty time-stage-units.’ (That would seem to us to be thirty minutes, if minutes were feasible.) ‘Please be ready to accompany the hoveror when it comes for you in fifteen time-stage-units. You are to move concurrent with the Shift, but in a different continuum. When you emerge you will find you have gone back in time, and into a coded era.’
‘What?’ I said. New fear for old. Their jargon, at its most convoluted, generally meant something significant. The same, often, with men. I even felt, foolishness, an instant of blind hope. But I crushed it. I altered my question to ‘Why?’
‘It is a part of the programme,’ the machine answered in its unmusical sound.
‘The object of the programme is to unhinge the mind of each of us here. To disorientate us to the point of insecurity, to increase the sensation of insecurity to the point of insanity. You want to drive me, along with everyone else, mad. Very well, I can’t avoid it, probably. But I like to know the script.’
But the machine said, ‘Remember, please, that in past time you can in no manner participate, only observe. You are discorporate, and invisible. You are reminded of this for your own convenience.’
‘Since when is my convenience important to this government? And what do you mean? I can go back to any of my past here, and relive it, or live it differently. I know I’m doing so, whether that suits you or not.’
‘This is a fallacy. There is no time, as such, in this place; only in the moments before sun-phase and Shift does time begin to evolve. You do not, here, return into the past. Past, present, and what is termed “future”, are continuous and inextricable, which you understand, having written of it.’
My heart was beating too loudly and too fast.
‘Then you do mean past time in the sense of a return to Earth?’
‘This is so.’
I sat very quietly, and let my heart crash and race all it would. I couldn’t control my heart. But my mind was another venture. They were letting me go back, then, that was to be the latest torture. Go back and see how it had been, but unable, naturally, to undo, to alter, to make worse my crimes against the state.
When the hoveror machine arrived, I went with it, up ramps and into a large room with a platform, and I stood where they told me under a canopy like half an egg-shell. The Shift happened. The momentary vertigo washed through me, the light went out, and for a split second I hung in nothingness, no dark, no light, no Star, no world at all. And then I was through, but no longer in the realm of darkness, this place. I was back in the real world. I had thought they would show me myself, frustrating me that way. But it was more sensitive. It might have hurt less, and sometimes I blame myself for (could it be?) falling into their assessment of me, and tacitly agreeing to it, by allowing myself to be more disturbed because it was Merah they showed me.
That commencing occasion, it was the Merah I had known for one and a half years before my exile. Everything about it startled me, not only the image of Earth, of Merah, but the tranquillity. I saw her standing on a hillside. She had companions, and it was summer, and they were debating whether to pick the flowers or leave them in peace, and eventually the vote went in the flowers’ favour. I could smell the flowers, too, and the sun on the grass; even a faint perfume that I recollected she had sometimes used.
So then. I followed her all through one golden summer day, one azure summer evening. It must have been a month or so before we met — she was not quite my Merah that day. Young and straight, the look always of the dancer she had trained to be, and nearly been, fair skin that never tanned, black hair, cool eyes. There was something independent and uninvolved, that I had robbed her of, not meaning to. I, now the helpless voyeur, trailed her over the sun-amber of those hills and down the narrow chalky path to the restaurant. She laughed with her friends. She fed a little white dog with one bluish ear, she drank wine and ate a salad, she lay in the grass under the willows while someone played a guitar. In the dusk, roses and moths and the whiteness of girls’ cheap, pretty dresses, things like these, lovely clichés under a dawning moon, and jasmine on the air — and then she and they were gone from me. The Earth with them.
Returned here. The transition was not bad, not so uncomfortable even as Shift. I went back to my room and sat a long while. I did not recognise where I had come back t
o. I was still there, with her. The machines were silent. The white howl had vanished from the almost-black of the sky, only the smoky gem of the Star hanging there now.
Had she ever told me of that day, that particular, unimportant day? What did it matter? She was in my mind again. Sometimes, as I travelled weightlessly beside them, she had seemed to catch a glimpse of me. She had cast a flirting look over her shoulder at me. She had yearned towards me in the tent of willow — why are you standing apart? Come closer. One imagines these things. It is a form of unavoidable idiocy.
She had let go her uninvolvement to aid my commitment, and to comfort me. She had told me I was right, and come to believe so. It was Merah who said that victory, though impossible, must be striven for.
I thought of many things in our relationship, both good and bad. I continued to sit still through what is considered a night here, and to think of Merah.
Since it had had the desired effect on me — since it had damaged me in some intense yet elusive way — they then let me go back again, and again, to see her often. Sometimes it was the pre-me Merah — at her university, doing her nation-service in some little red factory. A Merah painting a landscape, lightheartedly amateur, a Merah dancing, no trace of the amateur there. Her twenty-first birthday party. Her years at the academy. Then, later, I saw scenes that had come during our time together, though I never saw her with me — never saw myself. Though, in these vignettes, she was often speaking of me, or of the political lessons she learned as I was learning them — all on record. I could not say to her — Hush! They hear you — too late.
What I did not know was if all this was a punishment of me, or one more means to snap the threads of reason, or just an experiment, random. Who knows?
The transfer into the time-frame always took place during a Shift, though the return out of the frame was managed when the Shift had passed. I assumed the power expelled in performing the Shift was also harnessed to facilitate entry into the frame. But this meant little to me, I’m no mechanic. It simply became a habit, the rush of adrenalin, whenever the Star engorged. I would hurry to my room and wait for the conducting hoveror. Which did not, of course, always arrive. Then there would be disappointment, and relief.