Ferrum couldn't help but think along stereotypic lines. “But why? Do you want me to fight with him?"
“Goodness, no.” Rabiah laughed softly for a moment or two.
“Is he a jealous fool? Will he attack me, maybe?"
“My cousin is more civilized than either of us. In fact, he's a mathematician, and a great one at that!” Then, with a wink, she added, “But if you'd like ... if it would make you happy ... maybe you could slice off his penis...."
Then she broke into wild laughter, and for several moments, her new boyfriend wasn't sure if his embarrassment and horror was the source of her pleasure, or maybe, just maybe, this exotic desert creature expected him to commit some horrible revenge...
* * * *
Five Sisters ruled the evening sky: Mistress Flame, Little Wind, Ocean's Angel, and the Sullen Twins. Out of fascination and fear, ancient peoples had studied those bright bodies, measuring their slow, stately motions; and after so much focus and the occasional insight, it was decided that the heavens—the sun and moon and every Sister—rode upon a collection of nested spheres, crystalline and perfect. And the world was a perfect sphere sitting at the center of all that existed. And because it was a good story, the ancients decided that each Sister was given to the world by the gods, each lending its distinct magic to the lives of good people everywhere.
Of course those old explanations were flawed, but they allowed those early astronomers to predict how the sky would look in another half year, and after a full lifetime. With bare eyes and persistent calculations, people realized that the Sisters could never huddle close together. Envy had to be the reason; none wished to dilute her beauty with her siblings’ glow. But there were years when the solitary Sisters pushed close enough to fill one kite flyer's gaze, while the Sullen Twins stood in the opposite direction, carefully balancing the heavens.
Once in a thousand years, on average, their good world would throw its shadow across the moon; and at the same moment, the Twins would dive behind that lifeless gray rock, allowing themselves to be swallowed whole.
One Day would end, and shortly after that, the Next Day would begin.
But for a little while, darkness and chaos were unleashed on the world. Or so it was said. Threads of evidence did support those legends. Lost cities and early societies had collapsed at the same approximate moment. Chance might be to blame, and of course those first civilizations might have been frail and failing as it was. But whatever the cause, survivors blamed the darkness that lay between the Days. Then for the next thousand years, old women would happily tell their horrific stories to frightened, spellbound young children.
“The Night makes a soul insane,” they would claim. “Good families will suddenly fight with their neighbors, and brothers always turn against brothers. Homes are burned; the old laws are forgotten. And then the Twins rise again, and nothing can ever be the same."
“But what do people see?” the children asked. “What did the Night show them?"
“Nobody knows,” the old women would promise. “Whatever was there, it was too awful and far too strange to be remembered."
“Then we won't look,” young voices proclaimed. “If the Night shows itself, we'll hide indoors. We'll live in our cellars, with sacks tied over our heads."
“And what then? Do you think that you're the first clever people? Make no mistake, little darlings. Wherever you hide, the Night will find you."
Nothing can save a person, particularly when he or she insists on believing in a particular fate. If the entire world decided to remake itself every thousand years, then the Night was a fine excuse, chaos sweeping away what was weak and old so that tiny prophets had their chance to stand on the wreckage, proclaiming new faiths and followings.
* * * *
Ferrum's grandmother liked to tell the wicked old stories. She would laugh out loud when she described riots and wars and other flavors of mayhem. This was all in the past, of course. The perceptive soul was free to mock the ignorant hordes from Days gone. But she made a critical error—the same mistake repeated by millions of sturdy, doubting adults across the world. She assumed her little grandson would hear about the Night and its madness, and Ferrum would realize that this was nothing but a fun old story.
Yet young boys have a fondness for worlds that teeter on the brink, ready to collapse into fire and blood.
Ferrum wanted to believe in the Night's power.
“When will the darkness happen?” he asked, his voice soft as a whisper, but fearfully sharp. “Soon, does it?"
“Very soon,” she told him.
He imagined going to sleep after this evening's meal, and then waking in the morning to find the world transformed.
“Twenty-four years from now,” she continued.
“But that isn't soon,” he pointed out.
“I suppose not.” She laughed. “Yet for me, it's as good as forever."
“Why?” Ferrum asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Because I won't live long enough to see this next Night.” The grim words made the old woman cackle. Already his grandmother's eyes were turning soft and dark, and by year's end she would be living inside her own endless Night—a suffocating experience that would make her bitter, small, and hateful. “But my little Ferrum ... you'll still be a young man when the Night happens. Probably with your own wife and family to share the experience with...."
The boy couldn't shake the images of insane people fighting in the darkness, setting fires and spilling guts. When terrified, young boys will find something very compelling about mayhem.
The bigger, the sweeter.
“But what does the Night look like?” he asked again. “Does anybody know?"
“Oh, everyone knows what the sky holds,” she told him.
But Ferrum didn't. The subject never came to mind before this. He was young and ignorant, curious, and very persistent. From that moment, he would bombard adults with questions about this once-in-a-thousand-years event. He interviewed his parents and teachers and neighborhood adults. And what struck him about their confident answers was that each vision was very similar, but no two were perfectly identical.
Which brought an epiphany that twenty-four years and a considerable amount of education hadn't wrung out of him:
Each eye, no matter how ordinary, inevitably sees its own Night.
Ferrum's grandmother proved to be a flawed prophet. Ferrum became a man, and the Sisters indeed were aligning themselves in accordance with elegant scientific principles. But he stubbornly remained unmarried and childless. There was only Rabiah in his life, and nothing about their relationship seemed secure: Long periods of passionate, desperate love would dissolve with a suddenness that always mystified him, and even when their fight was finished, the tension between them remained so deep and dangerous that a single careless word would surely shatter their love forever.
Their worst battle stemmed directly from the Night. Several years earlier, Ferrum paid a considerable fee to reserve time at an observatory being built for the occasion. The large mirror and assorted optical equipment cost a modest fortune, but the resulting telescope would reach deep into the sky, harvesting details that larger instruments couldn't achieve on an ordinary evening. Ferrum liked to boast about his investment: It meant that so many heartbeats could be lived with one eye pressed against a viewfinder. And because he loved the girl so much, he gladly promised that he would share half of his time, or nearly so.
But Rabiah didn't appreciate his charity.
“How much did this cost?” she asked, her tone dismissive, even scornful. “This is a one-in-forever event, and what are you planning to do? Catch a glimpse through a tiny sliver of glass?"
“It's more than a glimpse,” he responded. “And more than a sliver of glass, for that matter."
“Come with me instead."
“Where?"
She named a place that he didn't know, and then promised, “My entire family is gathering, and hundreds more too. This is our traditional way
of meeting the Night. Don't you think a celebration sounds both fun and appropriate?"
He didn't think so, and Ferrum decided on honesty.
The resulting fight went on for a long, painful time.
He finally had enough. Apologizing for his stubbornness, Ferrum said, “Tell me again. Where's this gathering to be?"
The site was far from any city, on a plain shackled by high hills. Nobody was building giant mirrors, but if Ferrum joined Rabiah, he could bring his father's old hunting telescope to watch the sky. He spent a few moments trying to convince himself that this was best, that it would even be worthwhile. But what would he do with his reserved place in line?
“Sell it,” Rabiah advised. “You could make back your investment, and probably more too."
The girl might be right, yes.
“But what happens there? What does your traditional celebration mean?"
Rabiah named favorite foods, old dances and music, and then almost as an afterthought, she mentioned the Night's culminating event.
Ferrum cringed.
“What's wrong?"
“A once-in-forever event, and that's what you do?"
“I know it might sound silly,” she agreed. But she didn't act joyful or much in the mood for teasing. “In our history, for as long as anyone remembers, my people have met the Night in a very similar way."
“How stupid,” he blurted.
No lover would tolerate those words or the tone they were delivered with. But Rabiah's anger was so large and consuming that she couldn't speak, giving Ferrum time to begin making amends.
“I don't mean you're stupid,” he offered. “I would never say that."
Then he confessed, “It seems like such a waste, that's all."
Finally, he snapped, “This doesn't make any sense."
She worked on him with silence and her eyes.
“The event of our lifetime,” he complained, “and you're letting a tribe of ignorant nomads dictate what you are going to do...?"
Rabiah dropped her gaze.
At last, Ferrum realized how deeply he had hurt her. But he didn't offer apologies. With the last of his resolve, he told himself that she deserved the truth, and maybe in the next Day, she would thank him.
But then his lover suddenly looked up, and with a dry, almost dead voice, she mentioned, “My cousin will be there."
“The cousin you slept with?"
Rabiah didn't rise to the bait. Instead, she just smiled at him. Then for the first time, and last, she told Ferrum, “You are a bright young man, darling. Well-read and thoughtful. But my cousin is smarter than you, and, in ways you'll never be, he is wonderfully wise."
* * * *
Ferrum lost that fight, and as a result, sold his time on the giant telescope. Just as Rabiah predicted, he made a fat profit—enough to pay for their coming travels. Despite his car's age and several worrisome cracks in the ceramic shell, that is what they drove. Her vehicle's sordid history would be too much of a distraction. They pretended to be married, spending their first evening at an isolated lodge far from the highway. The nearly full moon was still below the horizon. Even without the benefit of an eclipse, the sky proved dark enough to use his father's little telescope. There was a bonewood field nearby, recently harvested and usefully bare. Ferrum set the telescope on a flat stump, four stubby legs holding the tube and lenses steady. Then he focused on the narrow crescent of the Lost Sister—a nearby world of rock and blazingly hot air that showed itself only at dusk and dawn.
When Rabiah bent to look, Ferrum described what was known and what was guessed.
In the earliest days of Creation, their sun was surrounded by dust and countless half-formed worlds. Collisions and near-collisions shaped the history of those worlds; titanic forces shattered crusts, melting each to its core. Debris was flung this way and that. By chance, one world gathered more than its share of the solar system's metals. Then came the final collision: A rogue body from one of the Sisters struck hard, ripping away fat portions of the stony exterior while leaving the precious iron mixed swirling inside the molten stew that remained.
That miserable world became their home, and its former crust pulled itself into their stony moon.
“We won the iron,” he mentioned. “Without it and the other metals, we wouldn't be here."
She had heard his lecture before. But Rabiah could be a good listener, even if her lover repeated what both of them knew.
“And if we didn't have our moon,” he continued, “then the stone crust under our feet would be too deep and stubborn for volcanoes to crack open. Without volcanoes, minerals wouldn't be recycled. And our carbon cycle would probably collapse. In the end, this would have become a giant version of the Lost Sister. And I wouldn't have you begging for my affections."
“What did you say?” she asked.
Rabiah was only pretending to listen to him, he assumed.
But then she laughed. “You are the beggar, my dear."
“How can you say that?"
“This business about worlds colliding ... it's a symbolic tale about lust and intercourse and the like..."
Maybe she was right. Soon they were making love on the soft ground beside the stump.
Then later, as Rabiah slept and the moon rose, Ferrum focused his telescope on the Twins—ruddy little suns dancing close to one another, illuminating a few dead worlds well beyond the reach of all but the most powerful telescopes.
As he watched the sky, a tiny artificial moon silently spun its way overhead.
Later, he roused his lover and led her to their bed, and they made love again before sleeping longer than they intended. In the morning, they drove fast until their fuel ran low, and then Ferrum picked a random station and parked against an empty nipple. Stepping out of his car, he heard a stranger shouting, “Hello,” to somebody.
Innocently, Ferrum made an agreeable gesture, in case he had met this fellow before.
But the stranger was talking to Rabiah. He smiled and said her name, and she smiled back at him, replying, “Hello, Ocher."
This was the infamous cousin, Ferrum realized: A heavy man worn down by one or several infirmities. And the woman riding with him looked very much like his wife would look. She was short and fat, and when she saw the young woman smiling at her husband, her expression said everything.
The fat wife turned away, snapping off a few hard words.
But the cousin—Rabiah's former lover—seemed untroubled. He invested a few moments staring at his replacement, and then he smiled. And suddenly Ferrum found himself grinning too. So this was the cheating husband? The fellow that he'd been jealous of for months? Goodness, he was just a chubby old fool with a homely, nagging wife.
Really, the situation couldn't have been funnier.
Ferrum suddenly wished they'd brought Rabiah's car. What did it matter? The image of that invalid and his girlfriend doing anything in the front seat ... well, it was sad, even pathetic, and how could he have wasted his worries about the two of them...?
* * * *
An acquaintance from work purchased Ferrum's time on the new telescope. But before he would agree to the asking price, the buyer wanted to see the equipment and its placement. One evening, the two men drove out of the city, to the high hill where teams of engineers fiddled with gears and lenses and the astonishingly large mirror—a highly orchestrated chaos in full swing. Ferrum's companion didn't seem especially worried that with just a month left, nothing was finished. Indeed, he spent remarkably little time examining the facility or the fancy equipment that would split the light, directing it into dozens of eyepieces. He didn't say two words to the experts who liked nothing better than to break from their labors, explaining their narrow discipline to any interested face. No, the fellow seemed most interested in the view behind them. Standing on the highest knoll, on a pile of weathered sandstone, he looked back at their city and the dark swatches of irrigated farmland, bonewood and lickbottom trees dark with the season. And with a matter of fact t
one, he declared, “Soon all this will be swept away."
Ferrum asked, “What do you mean?"
The man's intentions were obvious, at least to him. So obvious that he said nothing, his mouth closed for a long moment, perhaps expecting his companion to suddenly say, “Oh, swept away. I didn't hear you with the wind. Yes, I know exactly what you mean."
But Ferrum didn't understand, and he asked his question again.
They were workmates, not friends. But Ferrum's companion was as smart as him, or smarter, and he was definitely better read in matters of history and politics. With a devotion to the past, the co-worker could discuss the ebb and flow of civilizations, the relative strengths of different governments, and the dangers inherent in ignorance and blind trust. He was particularly fond of the great men: Those godly names that everybody recognized, even when few understood the bloody particulars of their glorious lives.
Ferrum's companion studied him, as if examining his soul for flaws. Then he looked back down the hill, saying to the wind, “The Night will remake the world."
It was an old sentiment, and perhaps not unexpected.
But Ferrum felt surprised nonetheless. “It's just darkness,” he muttered. “And we know what we'll see—"
“Do we?"
“Of course.” History might not be Ferrum's favorite terrain, but he felt at ease with the sciences. “I can tell you exactly what you're going to find when you look through that telescope."
“So it's not worth my money?” the man asked.
Ferrum hesitated. Was this a bargaining ploy?
“If you ‘know’ what you'll see, there's no point in looking. At the sky, or anything else.” The man offered a wicked little laugh, adding, “That girlfriend of yours. You've seen her naked once or twice, so why look at her body again?"
“Enough,” Ferrum warned.
“But do you see my point? When you and I set our eyes on anything, anything at all, we refresh our memories. Make new what is familiar. And if we're very lucky, we might even see a detail or two that we somehow missed with every past glance."
Asimov's SF, October-November 2007 Page 12