To assist you. That was a good one.
Rackman managed a faint smile. “Thanks, but the car’s okay,” he said. “And I’m okay too. I just stopped off here to rest a bit, that’s all. I’ve got a long trip ahead of me.” He started the car. Silently, smoothly, the Prius floated forward into the morning light and the night that would quickly follow it and into the random succession of days and nights and springs and winters and autumns and summers beyond, forward into the mysteries, dark and dreadful and splendid, that lay before him.
THE TRUE VINTAGE OF ERZUINE THALE
In 1950 an exciting boom in new science-fiction magazines was getting under way. Such titles as Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction were challenging the long-time dominance of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, and more were on the way. One of the most interesting new magazines was Worlds Beyond, published by Hillman Periodicals, a major magazine company of the time, and edited by the shrewd, demanding Damon Knight.
The first issue of Worlds Beyond came out late that year, dated December, 1950, and it was an elegant production indeed, with stories by Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, C.M. Kornbluth, Harry Harrison, and Richard Matheson. The second issue, a month later, was equally strong, as was the third. But for me—a high-school junior, looking ahead to college life and the hope of a career as a science-fiction writer after that—the most interesting thing about the magazine was the advertisement on the back cover of the first issue, promising that a novel by Jack Vance, The Dying Earth, would be “at your newsstand soon,” as part of a new series of Hillman paperbacks.
Even then, though it was still early days in his great career, Jack Vance had become one of my favorite authors. A handful of novelettes and novellas in such pulp magazines as Thrilling Wonder Stories and its companion Startling Stories had excited me with their vivid, colorful style and sly, cynical manner of narration, and marked Vance for me as a writer to watch. And the theme of The Dying Earth, the last days of our world, had been one of special interest to me since I had discovered H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in my earliest days as a science-fiction reader. “Time had worn out the sun,” that back-cover Hillman advertisement declared, “and earth was spinning quickly toward eternal darkness. In the forests strange animals hid behind twisted trees, plotting death; in the cities men made constant revel and sought sorcery to cheat the dying world….”
There was a preview of the Vance book, just a tantalizing snippet, in the first issue of Worlds Beyond—“The Loom of Darkness,” a delicate tale of wizardry and vengeance, which whetted my appetite for the actual book with its images of decay and decline, tumbled pillars, slumped pediments, crumbled inscriptions, the weary red sun looking down on the ancient cities of humanity. I have rarely looked forward to the publication of a forthcoming novel so keenly. And so for week after week I searched the magazine shops of Brooklyn, where I lived then, for Vance’s Dying Earth. I had to have a copy of it. It seemed to me that it would be everything I wanted in a science-fiction novel.
What I didn’t know, though, is that Damon Knight’s Worlds Beyond had been killed in its first days of existence. Discouraging early sales figures led Hillman Periodicals to cancel the magazine soon after the release of its initial issue, although issues two and three, since they were well along in the production process, would be released anyway in a sort of posthumous production. The Hillman paperback line was to be dropped also, once the titles in the pipeline had been distributed, and no great effort was going to be made to put those out on the newsstands.
All through the chilly weeks of November and December I looked without success, and then, early in the new year, a friend who had been lucky enough to find a copy gave me his: I have it still. And treasure that crude-looking little book inordinately, for its rough, badly printed pages unlocked unforgettable realms of wonder for me. I read it again every few years. The effect on is always as powerful as it had been at first acquaintance in January of 1951.
Here we are on an Earth where “ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live.” Vance shows us “a dark blue sky, an ancient sun….Nothing in sight, nothing of Earth was raw or harsh—the ground, the trees, the rock ledge protruding from the meadow; all these had been worked upon, smoothed, aged, mellowed. The light from the sun, though rich, and invested every object of the land, the rocks, the trees, the quiet grasses and flowers, with a sense of lore and ancient recollection.”
Wonderful. Wonderful.
Imagine my delight and astonishment, then, when in the spring of 2007 Gardner Dozois asked me to write something for a book that he was editing with George R.R. Martin of stories set in the world of…Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth! How splendid, I thought, to be allowed to borrow that lyrical tone of voice and that dry, sly wit and enter Vance’s world for myself. I accepted the offer at the speed of light and, in October, 2007, wrote “The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale” for the book that would be called Songs of the Dying Earth. It was a happy experience. My only regret is that I can’t go back and write another one set in that world, at least not without being asked, because the world of the Dying Earth belongs to Jack Vance. But what a delight it was to share it, if only for a little while.
Puillayne of Ghiusz was a man born to every advantage life offers, for his father was the master of great estates along the favored southern shore of the Claritant Peninsula, his mother was descended from a long line of wizards who held hereditary possession of many great magics, and he himself had been granted a fine strong-thewed body, robust health, and great intellectual power.
Yet despite these gifts Puillayne, unaccountably, was a man of deep and ineradicable melancholic bent. He lived alone in a splendid sprawling manse overlooking the Klorpentine Sea, a place of parapets and barbicans, loggias and pavilions, embrasures and turrets and sweeping pilasters, admitting only a few intimates to his solitary life. His soul was ever clouded over by a dark depressive miasma, which Puillayne was able to mitigate only through the steady intake of strong drink. For the world was old, nearing its end, its very rocks rounded and smoothed by time, every blade of grass invested with the essence of a long antiquity, and he knew from his earliest days that futurity was an empty vessel and only the long past supported the fragile present. This was a source of extreme infestivity to him. By assiduous use of drink, and only by such use of it, he could succeed from time to time in lifting his gloom, not through the drink itself but through the practice of his art, which was that of poetry: his wine was his gateway to his verse, and his verse, pouring from him in unstoppable superiloquent abundance, gave him transient release from despond. The verse forms of every era were at his fingertips, be they the sonnet or the sestina or the villanelle or the free chansonette so greatly beloved by the rhyme-loathing poets of Sheptun-Am, and in each of them he displayed ineffable mastery. It was typical of Puillayne, however, that the gayest of his lyrics was invariably tinged with ebon despair. Even in his cups he could not escape the fundamental truth that the world’s day was done, that the sun was a heat-begrudging red cinder in the darkening sky, that all striving had been in vain for Earth and its denizens, and those ironies contaminated his every thought.
And so, and so, cloistered in his rambling chambers on the heights above the metropole of Ghiusz, the capital city of the happy Claritant that jutted far out into the golden Klorpentine, sitting amidst his collection of rare wines, his treasures of exotic gems and unusual woods, his garden of extraordinary horticultural marvels, he would regale his little circle of friends with verses such as these:
The night is dark. The air is chill.
Silver wine sparkles in my amber goblet.
But it is too soon to drink. First let me sing.
Joy is done! The shadows gather!
Darkness comes, and gladness ends!
Yet though the sun
grows dim,
My soul takes flight in drink.
What care I for the crumbling walls?
What care I for the withering leaves?
Here is wine!
Who knows? This could be the world’s last night.
Morning, perhaps, will bring a day without dawn.
The end is near. Therefore, friends, let us drink!
Darkness….darkness….
The night is dark. The air is chill.
Therefore, friends, let us drink!
Let us drink!
“How beautiful those verses are,” said Gimbiter Soleptan, a lithe, playful man given to the wearing of green damask pantaloons and scarlet sea-silk blouses. He was, perhaps, the closest of Puillayne’s little band of companions, antithetical though he was to him in the valence of his nature. “They make me wish to dance, to sing—and also….” Gimbiter let the thought trail off, but glanced meaningfully to the sideboard at the farther end of the room.
“Yes, I know. And to drink.”
Puillayne rose and went to the great sideboard of black candana overpainted with jagged lines of orpiment and gambodge and flake blue in which he kept the wines he had chosen for the present week. For a moment he hesitated among the tight-packed row of flasks. Then his hand closed on the neck of one fashioned from pale-violet crystal, through which a wine of radiant crimson glowed with cheery insistence.
“One of my best,” he announced. “A claret, it is, of the Scaumside vineyard in Ascolais, waiting forty years for this night. But why let it wait longer? There may be no later chances.”
“As you have said, Puillayne. ‘This could be the world’s last night.’ But why, then, do you still disdain to open Erzuine Thale’s True Vintage? By your own argument you should seize upon it while opportunity yet remains. And yet you refuse.”
“Because,” Puillayne said, smiling gravely, and glancing toward the cabinet of embossed doors where that greatest of all wines slept behind barriers of impenetrable spells, “This may, after all, not be the world’s last night, for none of the fatal signs have made themselves apparent yet. The True Vintage deserves only the grandest of occasions. I shall wait a while longer to broach it. But the wine I have here is itself no trifle. Observe me now.”
He set out a pair of steep transparent goblets rimmed with purple gold, murmured the word to the wine-flask that unsealed its stopper, and held it aloft to pour. As the wine descended into the goblet it passed through a glorious spectrum of transformation, now a wild scarlet, now deep crimson, now carmine, mauve, heliotrope shot through with lines of topaz, and, as it settled to its final hue, a magnificent coppery gold. “Come,” said Puillayne, and led his friend to the viewing-platform overlooking the bay, where they stood side by side, separated by the great vase of black porcelain that was one of Puillane’s most cherished treasures, in which a porcelain fish of the same glossy black swam insolently in the air.
Night had just begun to fall. The feeble red sun hovered precariously over the western sea. Fierce eye-stabbing stars already blazed furiously out of the dusky sky to north and south of it, arranging themselves in the familiar constellations, the Hoary Nimbus, the Panoply of Swords, the Cloak of Cantenax, the Claw. The twilight air was cooling swiftly. Even here in this land of the far south, sheltered by the towering Kelpusar range from the harsh winds that raked Almery and the rest of Grand Motholam, there was no escape from the chill of the night. Everywhere, even here, such modest daily warmth as the sun afforded fled upward through the thinning air the moment that faint light was withdrawn.
Puillayne and Gimbiter were silent a time, savoring the power of the wine, which penetrated subtly, reaching from one region of their souls to the next until it fastened on the heart. For Puillayne it was the fifth wine of the day, and he was well along in the daily defeat of his innate somberness of spirit, having brought himself to the outer borderlands of the realm of sobriety. A delightful gyroscopic instability now befuddled his mind. He had begun with a silver wine of Kauchique flecked with molecules of gold, then had proceeded to a light ruby wine of the moorlands, a sprightly sprezzogranito from Cape Thaumissa, and, finally, a smooth but compelling dry Harpundium as a prelude to this venerable grandissimus that he currently was sharing with his friend. That progression was a typical one for him. Since early manhood he had rarely passed a waking hour without a goblet in his hand.
“How beautiful this wine is,” said Gimbiter finally.
“How dark the night,” said Puillayne. For even now he could not escape the essentially rueful cast of his thoughts.
“Forget the darkness, dear friend, and enjoy the beauty of the wine. But no: they are forever mingled for you, are they not, the darkness and the wine. The one encircles the other in ceaseless chase.”
This far south, the sun plunged swiftly below the horizon. The ferocity of the starlight was remorseless now. The two men sipped thoughtfully.
Gimbiter said, after a further span of silence, “Do you know, Puillayne, that strangers are in town asking after you?”
“Strangers, indeed? And asking for me?”
“Three men from the north. Uncouth-looking ones. I have this from my gardener, who tells me that they have been making inquiries of your gardener.”
“Indeed,” said Puillayne, with no great show of interest.
“They are a nest of rogues, these gardeners. They all spy on us, and sell our secrets to any substantial bidder.”
“You tell me no news here, Gimbiter.”
“Does it not concern you that rough-hewn strangers are asking questions?”
Puillayne shrugged. “Perhaps they are admirers of my verses, come to hear me recite.”
“Perhaps they are thieves, come from afar to despoil you of some of your fabled treasures.”
“Perhaps they are both. In that case, they must hear my verses before I permit any despoiling.”
“You are very casual, Puillayne.”
“Friend, the sun itself is dying as we stand here. Shall I lose sleep over the possibility that strangers may take some of my trinkets from me? With such talk you distract us from this unforgettable wine. I beg you, drink, Gimbiter, and put these strangers out of your mind.”
“I can put them from mine,” said Gimbiter, “but I wish you would devote some part of yours to them.” And then he ceased to belabor the point, for he knew that Puillayne was a man utterly without fear. The profound bleakness that lay at the core of his spirit insulated him from ordinary cares. He lived without hope and therefore without uneasiness. And by this time of day, Gimbiter understood, Puillayne had further reinforced himself within an unbreachable palisade of wine.
The three strangers, though, were troublesome to Gimbiter. He had gone to the effort of inspecting them himself earlier that day. They had taken lodgings, said his head gardener, at the old hostelry called the Blue Wyvern, between the former ironmongers’ bazaar and the bazaar of silk and spices, and it was easy enough for Gimbiter to locate them as they moved along the boulevard that ran down the spine of the bazaar quarter. One was a squat, husky man garbed in heavy brown furs, with purple leather leggings and boots, and a cap of black bearskin trimmed with a fillet of gold. Another, tall and loose-limbed, sported a leopardskin tarboosh, a robe of yellow muslin, and red boots ostentatiously spurred with the spines of the roseate urchin. The third, clad unpretentiously in a simple gray tunic and a quilted green mantle of some coarse heavy fabric, was of unremarkable stature and seemed all but invisible beside his two baroque confederates, until one noticed the look of smouldering menace in his deep-set, resolute, reptilian eyes, set like obsidian ellipsoids against his chalky-hued face.
Gimbiter made such inquiries about them at the hostelry as were feasible, but all he could learn was that they were mercantile travelers from Hither Almery or even farther north, come to the southlands on some enterprise of profit. But even the innkeeper knew that they were aware of the fame of the metropole’s great poet Puillayne, and were eager to achieve an audience with
him. And therefore Gimbiter had duly provided his friend with a warning; but he was sadly aware that he could do no more than that.
Nor was Puillayne’s air of unconcern an affectation. One who has visited the mephitic shores of the Sea of Nothingness and returned is truly beyond all dismay. He knows that the world is an illusion built upon a foundation of mist and wind, and that it is great folly to attach oneself in any serious way to any contrary belief. During his more sober moments, of course, Puillayne of Ghiusz was as vulnerable to despair and anxiety as anyone else; but he took care to reach with great speed for his beloved antidote the instant that he felt tendrils of reality making poisonous incursions through his being. But for wine he would have had no escape from his eternally sepulchral attitudinizing.
So the next day, and the next, days that were solitary by choice for him, Puillayne moved steadfastly through his palace of antiquarian treasures on his usual diurnal rounds, rising at daybreak to bathe in the spring that ran through his gardens, then breakfasting on his customary sparse fare, then devoting an hour to the choice of the day’s wines and sampling the first of them.
In mid-morning, as the glow of the first flask of wine still lingered in him, he sat sipping the second of the day and reading awhile from some volume of his collected verse. There were fifty or sixty of them by now, bound identically in the black vellum made from the skin of fiendish deodands that had been slaughtered for the bounty placed upon such fell creatures; and these were merely the poems that he had had sufficient sobriety to remember to indite and preserve, out of the scores that poured from him so freely. Puillayne constantly read and reread them with keen pleasure. Though he affected modesty with others, within the shelter of his own soul he had an unabashed admiration for his poems, which the second wine of the day invariably amplified.
The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine Page 48