Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  It was after I saw her as a child that the wound sank in too deep to heal, and then, at once, the time-travelling ended. And so it became a treat withheld, and one day I asked them to let me see her again. This only happened once. The request was not granted.

  She was a blonde child, very fair. I suppose she had had some reason for re-molecularising the colour of her hair, and leaving it so, and never mentioning it. I’d never learned, till now. The blonde child danced on the edge of a beach of yellow sand, practising her dancer’s exercises, with only the wide sea behind her. I forgot, and called aloud to her. She seemed almost to turn at my voice, as if she caught some echo of it. I recalled she had said to me, the first night we were together, that she seemed to know me, and asked if we had met before, but that was the common theme of a girl in love, and she was in love with me. At the end of our first and only full year as a couple, on the eve of the Lion Square March, when they brought in the soldiers and three thousand people were shot down around the memorial, along the boulevard and in the parks, Merah had believed she might be pregnant. She was very concerned. We had no legal tie and it would, given our unhelpful political stance, be unlikely a marriage licence might be granted us. This would mean a compulsory termination. She wept that night. Next day, early, we heard the sound of machine guns and ice-cannon. We had meant to be part of that march. But it had been pre-emptive, all of it, and by eight o’clock it was over. We forgot about the phantom child. A week later, when the last of the casualties were still dying, she told me she had made a mistake. With the memory of those corpses thick as snow on the streets, it hadn’t seemed to be so important any more, one problematical butchered foetus. Perhaps it had been real but died in her, hearing the noises of murder from the city through her ears. No, romance has no place in this statement.

  But the child who was Merah was also like this unborn and perhaps never physically conceived child. It was fair, as I am, but it was Merah’s image, as her daughter must have been.

  I didn’t ask them to let me look at her again in order to see the child she was, or any specific portion of her life, before or during the time she was with me. It wasn’t even love, though I did love her, perhaps, and now I do love her because she is the cypher for the sweet agony of exile, and the theft of the Earth. Oh God, I suppose she was my numbered page. A record. The anchor. A sign I had once lived.

  My request was not granted, who could ever have thought it would be? (I note, too, that I am almost sure I’ve never relived any of those times during which I was placed in the frame, never relived any of those seeings of Merah. Which confirms my idea that the machines have some control of our wanderings, though we ourselves have none.) They knew, from my asking, that they had succeeded, I had been broken open. One little piece of my mind had joined my mindless racing heart, and was lost to me, out of my jurisdiction. Therefore theirs, to be used against me as they wished.

  There is no surprise to you, that I saw Merah, or anything, in the past. Many millions of you have seen the transmitted stills and moving videos, the Historicals that have absorbed your TV screens for years. Time, as a manifesto, has been open to the authorities most of my life. As for the masses — opium? The great extravaganzas of past events, replayed, for educational purposes, but basically for entertainment. And the initial disappointment was long forgotten, that time might be viewed, even experienced with certain senses additional to that of sight — but not sentiently journeyed through, not lived in. For the past has happened and is over. It leaves only its multi-dimensional print upon the molecular structure of everything that persists. We can receive and develop the print, and gaze on every aspect and facet of the human condition since first we crawled out from the primeval seas. But we can never mingle with the crowd, touch it, talk to it — we can never change a thing.

  That was why I had thought they would put me back into the time-frame — for that too is tenable, given the complex equipment only available to government — bitterly to enter, though not to co-exist, or in any way to influence my former self. I visualised rambling along beside this me, through my — his — last fatal months on earth before my (his) arrest. Watching him at the meetings, in the marches, seeing as a third person the contact made with the other, the package of documents, the reading of them, the final going to ground to complete my writing … with perhaps the knowledge of Merah asleep in the next room, with her black hair spread over the pillows. See myself making all my mistakes again, unable to step inside, to say — They’re after you. Throw down the pen and run.

  But they chose the better way. There are no fools in their ranks. Clever men and clever women, all.

  But, to return to this overview of time. We accept, then, that the past has been, and has left its evidence. What of the future? A contradiction. There can be no excursion into the future. While the past has come and gone, the future has yet to be. And so, for the meddlers, no future has evolved for them to meddle with, it is not yet there — a blank page to be written on. All the time paradoxes are dismissed.

  But, although there is no future as such, there is a place — a state, a dimension — a somewhere — that fills the void in front of us, just as the past fills up the gap at our backs.

  And here, in that condition which is not, but will be the future of the Earth, here — are we. The prisoners. The dissidents. The revolutionaries. Trapped within the black crystal under that one dull Star.

  The existence of this place was concealed, for sound political reasons, and naturally for the good of the people.

  I found out.

  As I’ve said, some documents were leaked — we learned that they had discovered such a place, explored its potential — a place ahead of time, in which, therefore, time did not exist. Where, therefore, time could be invented, and by means of the invention, become so tangled, so ravelled, that they saw at once a use for it. And they were already using it. What better? Out of everybody’s way, these trouble-makers, safe on that futureless future plain … and something more.

  For three-quarters of a century, the world conventions of human rights have held back the strong correcting arm of government. All known forms of coercion have been outlawed, and no one wishes, any more, to stand beyond the human pale for ever. But here, in the new situation, a new solution. The future state which was not future but limbo, giving rise as it does to extraordinary anomalies of time and the fact of existence inside time, or un-time — take it as it is and harness it. Not as a torture — for who wishes to torture anyone, or to unhinge minds, or to wipe bare the surface of intellects? — but as a simple corrective. And the tables of rights, drawn up before this thing was happened on, have no proviso for it. While those in on the secret debate amendments and vote this in and that out, we stand in the dark, and they — they play with us. No, not in any savage animal way, but kindly and clinically, the clever men and the clever women.

  We have every comfort, don’t we? The most lenient prison system of Earth is no match for our charming quarters with their pleasant colours, clean bathrooms and hygienic air, the firm beds and good food and wine, the foolproof medicine, the books and games, the gentle caring of the machines.

  But time, which is straightforward elsewhere, is never so, here. Here, one may travel in the future — as much, or more, than twenty Earth years — Dorf told me once this had happened to him. He found himself there, up ahead, inside a self old and young at the same minute. Accordingly, he knows now he will be here that long, at least. Generally, the time movement seems to come after slumber, unconsciousness casting us free to drift — you fall asleep at point one, and wake at point twenty-one. Or vice versa. But Choski also told me once he moved backward, to the day he beat me three times in a row at chess, living it again, though the result slightly altering, and this took place after the lightest doze.

  So we meander up and down the scale. Our future, and our past in this region, both equally accessible to us. Yesterday may come tomorrow, and tomorrow may be now, today. Today itself will come again, ve
ry very likely. And for each of us in this near-black zone of random hell, flitting like winged insects to and fro, each has his own path, intercepting others, missing them, refinding them again. Only the machines keep track of us, by a complicated math no man will ever fathom, I am sure.

  They keep it hidden, this place. Did you ever hear of it? Now you do, because I tell you. Here, locked in the thrust and weave of five hundred time-streams, waves breaking upon blank shores, bursting up and sinking down into the midnight ocean.

  I can’t prove it to you, I am only here. With Edvey, who keeps his books of numbered pages where tomorrow he may write one again, and be incoherently aware of it. Or he may write seven thousand and go again, or for the first, to find the wires or the hanging line he spoke of. And with Wyld, who is already ceasing to be conscious of it, collapsing, reminding me of the senility of a very old man, this boy of twenty-three who led the Lion Square March with flames in his eyes. And with myself, holding like a sponge my thoughts of Merah. Two pasts, hers, and my own. And my future, into which, so far I haven’t delved very deeply — just a year or so. I saw an Edvey there who had tried, unsuccessfully, to electrocute himself; he lay in the sick-bay, tenderly cared for. And I saw my own footprints on the black land outside, where I had walked for miles, six, six thousand, a million and six, trying always, like some dying dog, to get round full circle and come home. I, who have no home any longer.

  I often walk out there, or will walk, or am walking. I pass my own shadows, unseen, in those almost hills and nearly valleys. Round and round. Unable to be lost. Every direction leads you back. The land not quite begun, waiting. Waiting to rise up in the geography of an Earth that has yet to mould it, the future. Beneath one star, which is — what else — the sun, the only light great enough to cast forward some visible show, yet dull and feeble and small. Until just before the Shift, when suddenly Earth’s present starts to catch up. The avalanche of light erupts in the sky and the sun swells and begins to bloom like a fearsome flower. They are coming, coming to trample us down, all the ones we have betrayed by our capture and captivity. The present our actions have formed, those miles away in our past.

  So we run away in turn. To escape. These efficient machines facilitate the flight to keep us always neatly in limbo, the chastisement of anomalous sliding time. But we’re happy to fly. We don’t want to know what has become of you.

  And Shift no longer means the frame, the sight of Merah.

  Tomorrow, never having written any of this, I may write it again, differently. Or I may decide sensibly not to write it. Or, come on it written, and destroy it peevishly. Or write instead a letter to Merah she will never read. By starlight through the window.

  It was Robespierre, that arch-revolutionary, who jotted in his note-book, ‘A writer is the most dangerous enemy his country can have.’

  And, I confess, in that age of dreaming, drowning ostriches I left (was dragged from), I found fiction the sharpest weapon. It makes a thin cut they can’t feel. And knowledge pours in like poison. By the time you know, it’s too late. Awareness is in your veins. You’re done for.

  I had just written those words, when one of the hoveror machines came in at my door, and at the same second, light flowed over my window.

  ‘A request has come to our attention, your desire for further coded-viewing of the female subject with whom you cohabited.’

  I had made that request, you remember. It was denied. Or I would make it and it would be denied. But here, by some fluke of their always suspect mercy, it is made, and it is acceptable.

  I don’t want to see her any more. What’s their game?

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said.

  ‘Your relationship with the woman was a close one. It is thought best you see.’

  I got up. The Star, something, confused my vision. It could only be one thing, this.

  One should armour oneself at such times. Why help them, why comply with their schemes by growing afraid? Why, in any case, fear? It must be over, or they couldn’t show me. Beyond this place, only past time was available. To enter the frame with it, it must be finished. Concluded, then. Whatever they had done to her, it was no longer happening. They would show me her death. It had to be.

  Guided by the hoveror, I went up all the ramps, onto the shadowy platform, and stood under the top part of the egg-shell, waiting for the Shift. The machines threw their switches, and I fell down, weightless, warm, into a room somewhere on Earth.

  It had the smell of Earth. (In the frame, scent, sometimes vagaries of touch — such as the effect of temperature — may be present, with the senses of sight and hearing.) A city. Traffic, and revitalised air, the dusts of streets unslaked, and neon breath. But stars stood in the night-time window. The room was high up in a tall building, and looked mostly into the sky. It was very white, the room, and pristine. Antiseptic mingled with the smells of the city. It was a hospital room, and in the bed an old woman was quietly dying all alone. She looked eighty years old. She might be much younger, or a great deal older, depending on how her life had mapped itself, what money she had had, and what drugs and vitrogens she had been given access to. The room was serviceable, but had no hints of opulence. Probably she was poor. Had she kept her convictions? Jettisoned them? Were they even hers? No one was in the room with her. No friends, no husband — no one, after me? Or just some accident of timing, they were outside or on their way —

  They would not be quick enough.

  Merah. Black hair, gold, and now grey and brittle. The white bed seems to suck your life away. Your eyes are closing. Merah, I’m here, but useless to you. I can’t be such a fool any more as to call your name, or try to hold your hand. You can’t see me. Merah, I was miles away, hurrying back to you but never getting home. Merah, I brought you to this, but you let me. What happened to you, between that time of then, and this, all those years between?

  She looks so old it makes her seem very young again, like the child on the beach. Her dancer’s hands twitch on the sheet. Thin hands, that show the marks of incipient arthritis the proper drugs have retarded. How clean she is, how sterilised. Her cool eyes are colourless. Is she afraid?

  We were the dreamers, weren’t we, you and I? And here, our dreams have brought us. You to this white beached death alone. And I to the realisation that if today I see your death, some fifty years after I left you — then somewhere today exists, the proof I will be their prisoner fifty years. Or more. For though I can travel forward, I can’t see Earth’s future, can I? I can only be shown what has already happened there …

  Merah? Oh. She’s dead. She died, when my mind wandered. Only a moment of appalled self-pity, and in that moment —

  Already the room’s fading. They’re taking me back from the frame.

  Did I ever write to you? Did you see the letters? Letters heavily censored. Parts of them? How long did you remember me? The unborn child, or the bold marches, the sound of ice-cannon, Lion Square, the private press under the police ray, metal running like chocolate — any of it? No? Thank God, I think you had forgotten. Your face was so empty.

  I have been their prisoner fifty years or more, yet it seems I have been here a year — less. She died in the past, for that is all they can show, with Earth. Where have I been, how many chess matches, how many thousands of walks, six-thousands of black miles? What have I forgotten? Christ, oh Christ.

  ‘Why do you think about it?’ Edvey says to me. ‘You’ll never go back. Take me. A wife, two wives, five children. Three sisters. The horses, the coffee crop, the mansion, my films. My God, Calle, you can’t think about it.’ He picks up the yellow bishop and I think of taking it away from him, but what does it matter if he messes up the game?

  I always believed insanity was a sudden thing, but it blossoms slowly. It’s in me now, I feel the bud, its pressure, ready to fold open.

  Wyld is sitting smiling under the window. He looks at the Star, and he starts to cry, with no tears. At that minute, the Star begins to pulse, whiter and whit
er, brighter and more bright.

  ‘Shift.’

  ‘You bet,’ says Edvey. ‘Shift.’

  So now I have written it, my poisoned fiction which is the truth, my story, my Realm of Darkness: A Final Siberia. For the historical time-videos will remind you that to that wide land, which had become a virtual acronym of such things, that long land of pines and birch trees, under its lemon-tinted and colossal sky, the rebels were sent long ago. They took their places in the cold country, and underwent the programmes that have since been banned, till their minds were wiped clean as porcelain tiles. Or so they say.

  Siberia — was nothing to this.

  In the next room, Merah is sleeping, with her black hair spread on the pillows. She said to me once that, as a child, she believed a dancer should have black hair. I could steal in and lie down on that hair, and sleep, too. But instead I’m going out, to creep through the restricted streets at two in the morning, to the printers in the alley.

  I know, of course, that this is my warrant for arrest I have written out here. These papers. I speak of what I have only read about. But I shall know it, soon.

  Tomorrow, or the day after, they’ll come for me. The trial will be minimal, but legal. And then I shall enter the realm of darkness, the umber formlessness under the sharp blades of light, the Star which will be the sun.

  I am afraid of it. I’m afraid of what I have done. But I had to do it. Though we shall never win, we must fight. Only by fighting can we keep hold of our humanity. The fight is the victory.

  It seems to me, though it isn’t quite yet, already I hear them on the stairs. And I hear the slammed door of the prison mobile, its siren. And I hear the echo as I fall downward into the crystal.

  You, all of you out there on the smarting back of the Earth, remember sometimes we’re here, in that place, as you walk straight forward from day to day, from night to night, under your skies of many stars.