Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  ‘An offer of help,’ I said, ‘peculiarly enough, is not necessarily a threat. I know you don’t trust me.’

  ‘No. I don’t trust you.’

  ‘Again, that won’t disqualify me from being helpful. And the machinery, obviously, is impartial. You can trust that.’

  ‘Which only brings us back to the first question — my apologies, the second question. You’re intent on helping me — and I don’t trust you because I don’t know what the game is.’

  ‘There has to be a game?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, and stabbed me with the black eyes, the killing stare of that personality which is basically afraid.

  I could not, at this stage, say to him, I’m drawn to you for reasons that perhaps make no sense, therefore it is as natural to me to come to your assistance as it is natural to you, this far, to back away.

  ‘Justice,’ I therefore said. ‘Something absurdly horrible has happened. Let’s not compound it.’

  ‘Christ, yes. Let’s not.’

  He walked off into the adjacent room, and at that moment the computer gave up its yellow signal, which offers a first section analysis, in most cases merely structural.

  He came back.

  ‘What’s it doing?’

  I drew the paper from the slot. Not, so swiftly, expecting anything drastic, I let him peruse it as I was doing.

  There was a silence. Then he said, ‘It looks wrong.’

  Though the primary analysis was in symbols, in this day and age anyone who has received an education could make some sense of it. (The Lodges and their mechanisms do not employ hidden language in the realms of math.)

  ‘Yes. It’s wrong,’ I said slowly.

  ‘You mean they’ve handed you a cranky machine?’

  ‘No, the machine is functioning perfectly. Wait, please.

  ‘Wait — ’ But he waited, and I played the keys. He said, irritated, ‘What are you asking it?’

  It was his predicament, his life. And some part of me drew strength, something so primal as adrenalin, from his proximity.

  ‘It’s not a fossil,’ I said. ‘Or not a fossil as we would recognise it. There are often animal additives, however obscure, but as you’ve seen, the animal element here is the entire sum of the whole.’

  ‘And will you try speaking like a woman instead of a text book.’

  ‘Very well. This says it’s human. Totally human. Or, that it was. While the age differential — I’m sorry. The sheer old age one expects of a fossil — is missing. It could have formed a month ago, or less.’

  Then the red signal came up. The red signal is always vital. This time the read-out was more complex. I said, ‘We are going to be given a diagram.’ And I pressed the key for the machine’s reply.

  Why camouflage or deny it? There was something to Arro which liberated some part of me. Or perhaps, simply some part of me which liberated itself because of its reaction to him. So I grew fanciful. I saw the computer’s reply as an artist or a poet might have seen it, or even as an actor might have interpreted it. Not in math and the legitimate phrases of carefully processed words — but in images, biological gestures. Finally, it could be nothing else.

  What the machine gave was a graph. But a distorted graph which brought no positive solution until the body-print of a human creature had been set against it. This second print, built up from the vilyo’s medical banks (against some opposition from the frenzied flowers, all thorns), was nothing but Cimarin’s own personal graph. The clues to this, naturally, were apparent in the first of the graphs — the mal graph, the distortion. In just the same way that, seeing the shadow of a man cast on paving, elongated, out of shape from the surface it must occupy, and therefore oddly monstrous — unhuman — yet is identifiable to those who know their own species, having themselves sprung from it. Each print then, placed side by side, substance and shadow, provided the ultimate reply. Not reassuring, not even acceptable — a grotesquery.

  (He, incidentally, named it. For Malapropism — the mis-naming of things: a joke, a misnomer for something which was itself a misnomer of another kind. Jokes seemed needful. As the falling stars wheeled and the lagoons of Tenebris sang their secret melodies of night and chaos. The comet which fell there — the meteor, shooting star, thunderbolt, ship of straying gods — Ah, no, Arro, I was never made to be a poet — this had changed the world of the waters. Now its vegetations touch the sky. The huge beasts of armour and savage eyes stalk and swim in their depths of foliage and fluid, changing to rocks of gemstone indifference. Why are we born to transformation, born to grow, however we train, however we armour ourselves. The savage eyes break through the dark — Why are we born to learn through suffering and not joy, or why do we imagine this is how we shall learn, and so, faithful to the scenario of despair, cannot escape the hard lesson for the pleasant ones? Growing pains. (Tirerpour ouvrir.) (Our fault, ours.)

  (I will not disown this passage. It would be simple to erase it. This I am not obliged to reveal. Or am I? Well, let it stand. You will see how far I’ve come from the serene observer, the narratrix of the beginning, whose gender you did not even know — or care to know. Let it be seen also, my metamorphosis, with all the rest.)

  ‘Do you think you can pass it off this way? Some chant from your magician’s rites? A conjuring trick. No one here is going to believe, although you are a conniving bitch, that you know it all. Don’t try blinding us with science. It isn’t going to work.’

  I looked at them. They looked at me. The love-flowers. I had been explaining for just over two hours, showing them the results from the computer, adjusting it to make displays of its findings, endless diagrams and equations thrown on to the screen. Now the dawn was starting to come, in a grey-red wave, sensuous and sullen, over the swamps and islands and the occult water. Fires lit; sun in patches of fluid, fiery birds burning in the fan-heads of the towering palms.

  Each and every thing began to seem unreal. One correctly placed touch on one tiny hidden panel of the computer-relay, and I would have the physical back-up which would silence this yapping and snarling. But I was, by nature of my advantage, required to offer a solution as mundane and as acceptable as I could. And it was not possible, they would accept none of it. Why should they? They had their high-sophist tribal instinct to succour them through the ordeal. Even Arro, skulking in the door of his prison, eyed me from a distance, coldly and with contempt. So every prisoner in every dock, the gallows an inch from body and soul, will regard the defence lawyer suddenly gone traitorously mad. He too had denied not the findings, mine or the computer’s predication (he had named the article, with appalling aptness, had he not?) but my chance of making the citizens of the vilyo believe. So, he disowned me in supercilious terror. I was alone, and still embattled.

  ‘There is no reason,’ I said, ‘in a universe, on a planet as multifarious as this, that anything should not and may not exist, or be capable of coming to existence, given the proper series of triggers.’

  They mocked me. They took even this truth as a flirtatious quip.

  ‘The premise here is as reasonable,’ I said, ‘as the theory of matter and anti-matter. Each thing is the other, but in reverse structure, and therefore inimical. Placed together, then, the two elements will destroy each other. This object — this fossil — I’ve said, I don’t at this stage know how it was able to form, or the conditions which acted as initiation. Cimarin claimed to have an ancestral link with the area. Taking that as a fact, which I’m not even convinced of, it might provide a working supposition as to where apposite material could spring from — the material which formed this item that is not a fossil at all but which — ’

  ‘Is the physical print of Cimarin, flesh, bone, blood, genes, brain, nerves, cells — all, all, sans rien — completely round the wrong way. Cimarin — matter. This — anti-matter. The two irresistibly drawn together. Resulting in the bodily destruction of Cimarin. And you think this is tolerable as a post-mortem?’

  ‘Why isn’t the fossil destro
yed?’ one of the women asked.

  ‘It may have been. It could be in the equivalent of a dead state — the “live” reading would be different from that of a physically motivated — ’

  ‘Stop it. We don’t give you credence, Lodge Lady. You’re very exalted. But you’re about to convince no one.’

  My hand went to the panel in the side of the computer-relay. Alerted, help would now arrive in less than twenty minutes. Which actually still left them a margin to kill Arro, even to kill us both. These beings who told me I was crazy were themselves far from being sane. Code d’honneur des aristos … It might be worth punishment to them, to get in first.

  The sky was red to its apex, and the birds shrilled from the trees. I remembered their species abruptly — the carrion hawks of the lagoons. Gathering in large numbers, it seemed they had predicted something I had not.

  And the walls of flowers and thorns, inexorable as in some nightmare fairy-tale, began to move towards me, all those rich, well-dressed and sinless dolls —

  I touched the relay, and then I ran for the analyser unit. Arro had come alive, turning to retreat as I was. Those walls of glass were substantial enough, and might be sealed behind us. Unless some master switch located elsewhere would override our instructions. This seemed quite feasible.

  Running forward to the precarious goal, I could see the fossil, a dark shining mass through the glass. It lay on its slab, where I had left it. As I say, I saw it. Then, I did see, and my pace slackened. I stopped. Only one pair of hands came down on me, clear and hard as something mechanical, but courteous, the good manners of merciless dislike.

  I still could not take my eyes off the thing in the unit. My body had been captured, my mind had no space to assimilate two unrelated, imperative ideas. But I had been taught. I said loudly and flatly, ‘Before you do anything to me, look there.’

  Arro, guided by my reaction, had already looked, and seen. He gazed into the unit, saying nothing. The flowers now, as if by witchcraft — the magician’s chant? — moved their heads obediently. One of the women screamed. That was ritual, too. The thin wavering noise died, and it came to me that the birds had also ended their cacophony. Like heavy drops of blood they hung in the palm-tops, waiting to spill away along the air. It was not the looked-forward to dead body of Arro, or of myself, they had arrived for. It was for that other spreading, enlarging object, stretched out like black sodden pearl melted in vinegar —

  When I could move freely, I walked on, and into the unit. Again, this was my training. I was alone. All the rest kept back, I can only think out of the same fear that somehow did not govern me.

  There was a smell, a winy vegetative odour, strong and almost horrible. But not bad, not rotten. And then I beheld the final paradox. For the carcass, so patently human in all its liquidity, moved, writhed — the black melted substance flowed and shook and — hardened. This was not deliquescence. Having broken down, now, it formed. We were watching a primordial mud-pool, and from it the making of the first mortal creation by some invisible god.

  They crowded behind me. No one spoke. We breathed in unison, a susurration, like waves on some beach far off.

  We were the hothouse which had bred this event, this plant of happening. As she, her turmoil, her desire, had bred it. The triggers, the series, everyday things, very ordinary, rather sordid, dripping down into this mysterious profundity of depths, Tenebris a cauldron, into which the sorcerous formula had been flung. Somewhere below, the fossil, born from slime as the first living entity was born. Rising magnetised. Homing in. Meeting, meeting with, taking. And now this. This —

  The mass which had been the fossil surged and quivered, and broke and became and was.

  She was much changed. She was darker. She was a crocodile, a mermaid, metal and crystal, android, alien. Her hair poured, molasses no longer honey, dense as tendrils, fine as light.

  The brain becomes a camera. Shutter raised, and lowered. Portions left out. Glimpses. Black eyes. Silver teeth. The cleverly manicured facets of her fingernails had become the model for every inch of her. Skin not skin. She was a beautiful human alligator, of swarthy glass made in Andromeda. Cimarin?

  Cimarin?

  She slid from the ledge where I had left her, then a triangular rock, the size of one of the vilyo’s bits of tableware, compressed as any piece of fantastic miniaturised computer equipment. She slid down, and, for want of a better word, she walked. The silver stuff that clothed her described her like heavy water shifting over a body of mercury and brass and serpents. She smiled a little, if the thing she had become could smile, and her eyes gave off a hard bright flash, like carved jewels. I only know we stood away from her, all of us stood away, the close friends, the loving tribe, the acquaintance, and her husband. And she was amused by this. Yes, I would say she laughed. She could have slaughtered us like sheep, I can’t say how, maybe only by a mild blow from her hands, or some ray she could discharge out of her eyes. Machine, beast, demon. She laughed at Arro, too. She saw him, and recognised him, in some manner. And laughed, and went on, leaving him behind.

  Great heat came from her as she moved by me. She stepped or glided away across the long deck. She went to the lagoons, by climbing the rail, pausing above the water, dipping into the filled emptiness below, and finally, by being gone. No one rushed to look after her. We were all outcasts together, now. She, the alien, excluded us all.

  No outcry was made. The aftermath was very orderly. When the jets came over, there was nothing about any of us to seem to warrant their arrival.

  While in the below-decks cryogenic storage, the black, hard, triangular stone which Cimarin’s dead body had become, grew very cold, and presently shattered into little lifeless shards, which afterwards were dissected in a hundred ways, and yielded no clue at all, beyond themselves.

  The hawks stayed in the trees a while, watching, conceivably puzzled. Then they flew in silence and left the sky to the planes of the Lodge.

  The account is so brief, almost in shorthand, at the finish. After the talk, the analysis, the rifling of brain and heart, a few words, mostly inadequate. The unconscionable is often quickly achieved. Civilisation obtains, then gives way suddenly, utterly. So with great cities, so with relationships, so with phenomena of all kinds.

  It would be easy to say, and for the most part so it has been established: this did not happen. A woman died, or vanished. The facts are concealed. She hides, or her body hides under salted stiffened water. But no. She swims there, deep down, sheen on sheen, woman-fish, a statue made from overlapping coins, a beautiful monster of the lagoon’s fathomless id. A monster too, which laughed at every emotional dream ever hungered for while in the chrysalis state of mortality, the masochistic longings, cancelled freedoms of its former life. Can it be, then, that image is there in all of us? Is the jewel in the lotus truly a jewel, hard, faceted, shining, cruel and changed? I may have imagined the laughter. A cipher, for something. For the thing I envisaged in her symbol, which was a powerful one.

  And I alone, naturally, recollect it now. Every other witness has had such data skilfully removed from memory. No mind but this one, then, to be tickled, gnawed on by the last sight of the ultimate Cimarin, sinking weightless yet leaden through ripples of thick air, motionless water, and alchemy of Tenebris we none of us understand, down, down, down to the source, the fountainhead. The way of all flesh, and of everything, perhaps.

  I found Arro, at length, a month afterwards, buried alive in one of the deep sink bars of the Catseye Quartier. He was in a private kiosk, shut off in its grey-black light, blinded and dumb in a hubbub of tinny, jarring music. He looked at me as I entered. He was drunk, nothing new in that, but yet in a new way, a modulation upon all the drunkenness and the pretended drunkenness and the decision in favour of drunkenness, that had gone before.

  I was trespassing. I knew it. But need I any longer declare my limited choices where he was concerned? He had still sufficient recall of events to discuss them, or not, as he wanted. I said, �
�I can look for you again later. This isn’t the right time?’

  ‘It depends what you want,’ he said. There was acid in his voice, the sort you throw. But it cut bluntly, the way only the edge of a shield, never a sharpened weapon, ever would.

  ‘Obviously, it is the wrong time.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he exasperatedly said. I watched him struggle for words through the morass of noise, drink and darkness, the unfamiliar caution not to start a fight. ‘Look, you’re very fascinating. I’m sure you’re most unusual and worthwhile. And powerful, I’ve seen that. Daughter of the Lodges. Marvellous. But frankly, to bring it to the helpful level of the banal, I don’t think we have much in common, do you?’ What could I say to that? I said nothing. And I saw him rigid with the wish to be rid of me, one more alien thing he did not like to treat with. He vocalised this almost at once. ‘There’s too much stuff I have to deal with right now. I can’t cope with anything else. Do you follow me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You see,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to be polite. And you — you’ve been very polite, I have to give you that. All through this, polite. Not obligatory for saviours?’ The sarcasm there, and the key to it all. ‘So I’m trying not to be rude to you. But to be honest, I don’t like my privacy penetrated.’ The phrase was bizarre. Oddly sexual, and at that in an almost comic reverse. He meant more than the fact I had found him here. He meant I had seen inside his life, or his mind, or even more deeply. Worse, he did not know what he meant, he thought he meant only my discovery of him in the bar. ‘Thank you,’ he said nastily, ‘for your matchless aid and your concern, but I prefer to be left alone. Do you get that?’ And the most tragic thing of all had happened by now. The beautiful articulate voice, that never once before had ever faltered, even in the face of a lynching, was giving way in the middle of its sentences — the flawless actor’s accent stumbling off into some other untutored slur, slovenly, all the frantic note of his concealed beginnings. To say it was tragic is perhaps too strong. No, it was in its way, quite tragic. ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘Then I must apologise. My intention was never to make you feel threatened.’ ‘Well, there’s a simple answer to that, isn’t there?’