by Tanith Lee
I spent the next few days rushing from place to place, creating uproar. I spoke to officials who had no wish to speak to me, and friends who hadn’t done so for years. I forced my way into the plush offices of galleries, and the condemned-cell back premises of council buildings. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, but this was of no consequence. Eventually, less than a week later, armed with a battle-plan that allowed of no prohibition, I tore back to the house to warn him what I was about to unleash.
My rage of knocking was at last answered. A woman passing along the street called to me, and when I went down to the drive, inquired, ‘Was you after old Mr Sums?’
‘Somes? Yes. Where is he?’
‘Well, I’m afraid it’s bad news,’ she said, with apologetic satisfaction.
She ran the corner shop it seemed, and Mr Sums had sometimes gone in there to buy a bit of bacon or a quarter of tea —
‘What’s happened?’ I demanded.
‘Well he was took poorly. Very bad. That was two nights ago. Lucky it happened in the high street and somebody phoned for the ambulance.’ She saw my face and said, ‘I’m ever so sorry. Was you some relation?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Well, yes. He passed away only this morning I heard. He never looked after himself proper, but you know what they are, on their own. And it’s such a shame, with the rehousing. I told him, he’d get a nice flat somewhere, with one of them lady wardens that looks after you.’
It didn’t really penetrate, this last item of news, though I’d been aware of a vague noisy disturbance at the other end of the street as I drove up.
I didn’t know what to do, and I went away to get assistance. When I had what masqueraded for it, and came back again, there was another precious day gone, and the insane asylum patient in the sky, that guffawing cosmic, was there ahead of me. The house was boarded altogether, windows and door, in a net of barbed wire. The bulldozers were moving down the street.
I’ve tried every way I can to stop it. But the official rubber stamp coming down, crushes all beneath itself. No one has been able to get in legally, even to take a photograph — photographs, particularly under such conditions, would anyway be fairly useless. Red tape, tape of all types, or just indifference. After all, he isn’t very well known, is he? G. now, if this happened with G. — The problem is, they say, the walls couldn’t be salvaged. And what else is there but to cut the paintings off the walls by sorcery, and likewise squeeze them through the door — And besides, wasn’t I over-reacting, some elderly eccentric I’d felt sorry for …
I haven’t given up, but that’s just the twitching of a headless chicken. If somehow some preservation order is achieved it will arrive at the exact instant the black ball of destruction crashes against the house. I’ll stand there calling Stop! Stop! And the bricks will be falling in a multicoloured shower, the beetles will be running. There in the stinging-nettles will lie fragments of green and bronze, peach and rose. Perhaps that’s all the answer the perfect question can ever expect.
In fact, obviously, he did know. Of course he did. Even when he started working, he knew. Or maybe I’m only reading something into it because, by a fluke of chance, I got to see what he’d done, Somes, what he’d found how to do. If we want the works of a G. to worship, that’s what we can have. But this? Somes replies, Not this, for you. In his youth he’d pined for the fruits of success and been cheated of them by a grabber in a grabbers’ world. Now he said, I don’t want the fruits, don’t need the fruits of that. There are other fruits. After all, if he’d found out how to ask the one true question, he didn’t need to go begging through the streets how we were, or how the buses ran, or the time from policemen.
THE TENEBRIS MALGRAPH
The next piece is, as with the earlier The Tree, based very closely on a dream I had. Indeed many sequences in the story are put down directly as I witnessed them on the cinema-screen of my inner eye. Arro and Cimarin (she complete with her name) both appeared there, in the looks, garments and decorations I accordingly described. Tenebris, then, is truly the watery jungle-forest of the Id.
Neither did I learn the writer’s gender until the moment it is revealed.
I have told this story only once before; that was to the Master of my Lodge. I was obliged to. I had used the Lodge Seal to exercise authority. Now, I am due to set down the facts. I owe it to myself, in part, for how often does such a strange event come in one’s way? And owe it also to others, conceivably, who might find in the record a guideline for some future strangeness which may, in turn, befall them.
The substance of my case is, perhaps, that all things are possible in that condition we still sometimes term Nature. But more than this. That nature itself is changing.
It has been thought for some years, in this twenty-first century of ours, that — while the physical aspect of Man has been greatly improved, the human persona has grown, conversely, more fragile. The passage through the Millennium, which tends to afflict all cultures with superstitious horror, conscious or un, was achieved, and well achieved, but not without a degree of anxiety before, and euphoria after, the event. To come through intact had required too, for want of other words, some string-pulling, which is generally known and accepted. Added to all that has been the legacy of stimulants — elixirs, drugs, hypnotics, etheriums of many sorts. Such have always been, in some form, an accessory to human living, since the first cave-dweller found that the smoke from his fire could sometimes induce visions. But the artificial softeners and heighteners of awareness, with which we began by playing, have by now fined and pitched the society which uses them to a curious degree. I do not speak merely of the more exotic drug fashions. The most cerebral and hermetic may have their cellared wines, distilled juices, purified teas and tobaccos. Or, more insidiously, their rare books, their study of psychic matters, their music to be listened to only through small pearls dropped inside the ears. Visualise, if you can, our time without a glass in its hand, or painted china cup. Without its star-telescope, its psychotherapy, its vivid dreams of other lives. Hardly to be done. We are a world of aesthetes. And so we, too, in our way, are now to some extent purified, distilled; and as we have been honed to instinctual precision and artistic and spiritual receptivity, so we have been opened wide as radar bowls, and every trembling nerve laid bare.
No, it was not avoidable, only to some extent delayable. And humankind, with its thirst for growth, has always been impatient. In the long run, our vulnerability of now will breed the superiority of mind and heart that may invest the future. Unfortunately, the Now has become a late adolescence of the psyche, with all that any adolescence entails.
From this phase of interim spring new maladies. Illnesses not of the body, but of the intellect, yet physical enough that they can kill. An excellent example is the so-called Orion-Hysteria. This fixation — actually upon a particular pattern of stars associated with the constellation of Orion — became an obsessive desire for, a leaning towards, an acceptance only of a single aspect. Which led eventually to a stage in which all other realities would abraid unbearably and terribly. (I cross-reference here to my other paper, Green Is God. *) Suicide, in such instances easily predicted, seldom answers. In fact the body, that rarefied crystal body, that open, gazing mind, seems to fly apart spontaneously. One is left with a physical death that has no root physical cause. A death stranger than that which was once induced by witchcraft, a needle in wax, the pointing of a bone. A death by self-coherent fragmentation. Perhaps, the fount of every death.
Having said so much, it remains a backdrop rather than a preface to what I have to tell.
Researching for a book, I had found myself stranded at the Inner Ocean port of Catseye. A freak magnetic storm had thrown scheduled passenger travel into disarray. Though these storms are a regular seasonal feature since the shocks of the thirties, the Islands authorities still term them ‘freaks’ and seem always taken by surprise. This is a kind of game, I believe. One plays it, or wastes time in anger. As I was busy i
n my hotel, trying to organise private transport to cross from Catseye to Tenebris South, a message came up in the screen. There was a huge white villa-yacht in the Basin. I’d been looking at her through the window, an elegant colossus like an iceberg, dwarfing all the little subs and divers of the port. Now I learned whose property this vilyo was.
‘Hail to you, my scholastic friend. How goes it?’
The face in my screen was that of Cimarin Haine. She called me always her ‘scholastic friend’ though she did not know me well. Her climate, of the very rich, was one I seldom entered. Oh but, she said, You are my friend, aren’t you? And who else do I know that’s at all scholastic? Which may have been true. I had last seen her five years before. What struck me now, at once, was that she seemed different, a different person almost. What was it? The opulent plumpness was the same, a little increased, perhaps, but not unpleasantly so. She had always had a good figure, supple and femininely muscular from swimming and dancing. Her hair was a soft natural honey-blonde, cut always casually and with enormous skill. Her large eyes stretched wide in a wish to participate and enjoy. Her mouth had a relaxed and charming smile. All, all as remembered. But I knew at once she was, despite that, deeply unhappy. And unhappiness had changed her.
‘It goes fairly well,’ I said, when she repeated her question.
‘Not so, dear liar. I’ve heard. The storm knocked out all boats wending south. You’re stranded. It goes badly, my scholastic friend, badly. But rescue is at hand. Look out of the window at the lovely white vilyo. ‘’Tis mine, old cleverboots. Or, mine and his, but Arro won’t object. So come aboard. We have clearance to pull out just after noon. Only here for a re-fuelling. We’re going south, glorious south, all the way over Tenebris, fishing for fossilised sharks and photo-recording all the crocs — smile, please!’
‘Well, Cimarin, that’s very kind. Are you sure? There’s a certain amount of gear of mine — ’
‘Oh, we can squeeze it in somehow. We have about twenty miles of storage space left over. I’ll send the pick-upper across. Be ready in half an hour. Yes?’
‘Yes. Thank you very much.’
‘See you for the Orange cocktail.’
As I hastily assembled my baggage and materials together — the robo-carrier would arrive early, Cimarin’s unpunctuality operated always in pre-emptive strikes rather than tardiness — I thought of her reference to her husband: Arro won’t object. Which meant can’t object. She had been married to him now for two years; the social media was full of their union, for a while. He was an actor, talented, handsome, and not without funds. Nowhere in Cimarin’s class, of course, financially or otherwise. She had seen him, liked him, and bought him. It was that simple. I’d forgotten, until she said his name in that defiantly playful way. So, the reason for unhappiness and change lay there, only in something so mundane.
Cimarin was well educated, quick-witted, and could be delicious, but her intelligence was of a straightforward sort, and limited. The marriage — one expected such a gaffe of her, really. But it was a generous, wholehearted sort of gaffe. She had loved him, almost certainly. He would be the villain, or the weak fool, to have given in to irresistible temptation.
He was everything I visualised.
It was what they call, in the Tenebris lagoons, the Orange Hour, the fake sunset that comes just before noon, when the sun rises in to the belt of magnetised static shock-dust around the apex. Sultry dark light, thick as liquid amber, and hardly any shadows. I had got aboard, and conducted by the robo-steward, arrived on the terraced roof-deck, a garden of heat-loving blooms. The potted mutated jungle flowers of the Islands turned their faces up to heaven and yawned in ecstasy. Under a tall canopy like something from a cinematic set, Cimarin’s boat-party was coming out in floral classics or tasteful undress, just like the flowers. Of course, Cimarin’s kind are always flowers. Gentle, predatory, and innocent of what they do. Who was it said the rich never sin? It’s the interlopers who provide the snakes in Paradise.
And there he was, the arch-interloper, wound round the tree of Cimarin’s life. I recognised him from his photo-tapes. Tanned with the Tenebris tan, black-haired, with yellow polarising soft lenses over the coloured portion of the eye. He was drinking, talking idly yet intensely to a couple of women, neither of them Cimarin. When he saw me, he ignored me. It was a conscious and determined thing. I sensed he feared our greeting, the salute of fellow aliens, would betray him. And besides, if I were a guest of his wife, he needed to disassociate himself here, as in all else.
(The clarity of my observation on these feuding marital rites comes from many other instances, not Cimarin’s alone.)
Cimarin came to greet me in a pale gold rope of dress and silvery body powder.
‘Hallo, my dear scholastic,’ she said, and kissed me. She led me by the hand, away towards a tall tiered drinks service. ‘We won’t disturb Arro,’ she said. She smiled at me. ‘He’s busy setting the scene for his latest conquest. Oh, I don’t mind,’ she added brightly. ‘Actors always have to act. It’s one of his best roles — the Lover.’ I smiled in return and asked her something about the boat. She said, ‘You don’t have to change the subject, either. We’re both quite open about what we do.’ ‘Even you,’ I’m afraid I couldn’t stop myself saying. She shrugged uneasily. ‘Well, I’m too lazy. Infidelity takes such a lot of energy.’ The ‘openness’ was entirely one-handed, obviously.
Her friends and relations — she never went anywhere without a group of them, the beautiful rich flowers of the vilyo were only these — had clustered near. They loved her, as they loved each other and themselves. It was a phenomenon I had often watched and grown used to, a sort of emotional inbreeding. The love was perfectly real, valid. But, though they could like outsiders, even to the extent of making friends with them, that was normally as far as it went. Which made it a sort of sell-out, what Cimarin had done. They would forgive her, had done so, because they loved her. But Arro, never. I felt a twinge of compassion for him, a brave stinging-weed alone in the hothouse.
I was introduced. Great courtesy and amiability were shown me. I was only due to be on the yacht three or four days.
We were discussing the massive fossilised crocodiles of the Tenebris Octa, when a beautifully articulated (almost tailored) voice cut through like a knife.
‘These drinks are bloody awful, Cim. The programme needs checking. Can’t you get it seen to?’
‘With all you put away, Arro,’ said one of the male flowers, gently, friendly, ‘I’m surprised you can still taste a difference.’
‘Oh, I can taste a difference. Quite a difference. But then, you have to know what it’s supposed to taste like in the first place.’
‘Arro, are you seriously trying to tell us you have any taste at all?’
That last from one of the women. She hung close to him, but her swimming stare had malice as well as sex in it. She was part of the tribe of love-flowers.
But now he looked at me.
‘And you’re the hitchhiker,’ he said. He raised one eyebrow at me, lensed eyes cold and blank. But it was a facial trick, a defence mannerism. I said, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Then if you bore us, we can use you for live bait.’
‘Arro,’ said Cimarin. ‘Don’t get ratty with my scholastic friend just because you don’t like the cocktails. This guest of mine is an illustrious genius. Makes me feel positively stupid.’
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult.’
Cimarin laughed. Her eyes clouded. She glanced into her amber drink and said, ‘No.’
Round about, they all watched. Everything was on show. Suddenly Arro Haine turned away. He walked off again, and the woman who had remarked on lack of taste moved after him, pulling a face over her shoulder at us, imitation of his.
Cimarin said merrily, ‘She’ll keep him happy. Oh Lord, I hope she will.’ Wildly humorous she said, ‘Anything for a quiet life, God help us.’
One of the women leaned forward and kissed Cimarin. One of the
men came over, and slipped a flower into her hair. Very graceful and — loving.
After that, she insisted on giving me a tour of most of the living decks. We saw swimming pools and dance areas, solariums, libraries, an aquarium, a dining deck — already being dressed for tonight. I could see by then the promenade was tiring her, and pretended that it was tiring me. We must have walked about two miles. Apparently ignoring my lie, she presently showed me the storage bays from a moving gantry — see how carefully we’ve packed your things — then, going up in a lift, I was drawn into the master suite. ‘Look, isn’t this nice? We had this shelf-wall made in the Octa, carved from a single tree. Or I did. And do you like these porcelains? Yes, you’re right about the artist. And do you know, they wouldn’t take a sou? A present… And there, through that door — isn’t it splendid? — the place where I sleep, quite alone every night, with all my pretty cherubs.’ The bedroom had been done something along the lines of Marie Antoinette a Versailles. An extraordinary sight. But Cimarin had begun violently to cry, and asked me, apologising, if I would go, the robo at the door would see me to my cabin.
Dismissed, I went. There was nothing I could do anyway. There is a perennial insistence in the human thing, to learn through agony, the inability to let go of the red-hot knife. Life-drama.
In the air-conditioned cabin it was cool, even when the vilyo juddered magnificently and began to move, and the flame breeze that lies out in wait along the lagoons roared in past the windows. I worked for a while, then did go up on the deck above my cabin. No one was about, though over on one of the lower decks they were letting down ‘fishing’ apparatus into the water; I could hear the laughter and the salient jibes. The comet-salts, which metamorphosed the lakes of Tenebris, and fossilised or mutated the life-forms inhabiting them, tend to render a scandalous catch.