Creatures of Light and Darkness

by Roger Zelazny

  Then Anubis speaks again:

  “You know every shadow in the House of the Dead. You have looked through all the hidden eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now see what lies beyond.”

  There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels’ eyes, and they pass near, pass far, in the eternity through which he seems to move. There is no sense of real time or real movement, only a changing of the field. A great blue Tophet Box of a sun seems to soar beside him for a moment, and then again comes black, all about him, and more small lights that pass, distantly.

  And he comes at last to a world that is not a world, citrine and azure and green, green, green. A green corona hangs about it, at thrice its own diameter, and it seems to pulsate with a pleasant rhythm.

  “Behold the House of Life,” says Anubis, from somewhere.

  And he does. It is warm and glowing and alive. He has a feeling of aliveness.

  “Osiris rules the House of Life,” says Anubis.

  And he beholds a great bird-head atop human shoulders, bright yellow eyes within it, alive, alive-oh; and the creature stands before him on an endless plain of living green which is superimposed upon his view of the world, and he holds the Staff of Life in his one hand and the Book of Life in his other. He seerns to be the source of the radiant warmth.

  Wakim then hears the voice of Anubis again:

  “The House of Life and the House of the Dead contain the Middle Worlds.”

  And there is a falling, swirling sensation, and Wakim looks upon stars once more, but stars separated and held from other stars by bonds of force that are visible, then invisible, then visible again, fading, coming, going, white, glowing lines, fluctuating.

  “You now perceive the Middle Worlds of Life,” says Anubis.

  And dozens of worlds roll before him like balls of exotic marble, stippled, gauged, polished, incandescent.

  “…Contained,” says Anubis. “They are contained within the field which arcs between the only two poles that matter.”

  “Poles?” says the metal head that is Wakim.

  “The House of Life and the House of the Dead. The Middle Worlds about their suns do move, and all together go on the paths of Life and Death.”

  “I do not understand,” says Wakim.

  “Of course you do not understand. What is at the same time the greatest blessing and the greatest curse in the universe?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Life,” says Anubis, “or death.”

  “I do not understand,” says Wakim. “You used the superlative. You called for one answer. You named two things, however.”

  “Did I?” asks Anubis. “Really? Just because I used two words, does it mean that I have named two separate and distinct things? May a thing not have more than one name? Thke yourself for an example. What are you?”

  “I do not know.”

  “That may be the beginning of wisdom, then. You could as easily be a machine which I chose to incarnate as a man for a time and have now returned to a metal casing, as you could be a man whom I have chosen to incarnate as a machine.”

  “Then what difference does it make?”

  “None. None whatsoever. But you cannot make the distinction. You cannot remember. Tell me, are you alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I think. I hear your voice. I have memories. I can speak.”

  “Which of these qualities is life? Remember that you do not breathe, your nervous systern is a mass of metallic strands and I have burnt your heart. Remember, too, that I have machines that can outreason you, outremember you, outtalk you. What does that leave you with as an excuse for saying you are alive? You say that you hear my voice, and ‘hearing’ is a subjective phenomenon? Very well. I shall disconnect your hearing also. Watch closely to see whether you cease to exist.”

  …One snowflake drifting down a well, a well without waters, without walls, without bottom, without top. Now take away the snowflake and consider the drifting…

  After a timeless time, Anubis’ voice comes once again:

  “Do you know the difference between life and death?”

  “‘I’ am life,” says Wakim. “Whatever you give or take away, if ‘I’ remain it is life.”

  “Sleep,” says Anubis, and there is nothing to hear him, there in the House of the Dead.

  When Wakim awakens, he finds that he has been set upon a table near to the throne, and he can see once more, and he regards the dance of the dead and he hears the music to which they move.

  “Were you dead?” asks Anubis.

  “No,” says Wakim. “I was sleeping.”

  “What is the difference?”

  “‘I’ was still there, although I did not know it.”

  Anubis laughs.

  “Suppose I had never awakened you?”

  “That, I suppose, would be death.”

  “Death? If I did not choose to exercise my power to awaken you? Even though the power was ever present, and ‘you’ potential and available for that same ever?”

  “If this thing were not done, if I remained forever only potential, then this would be death.”

  ‘A moment ago you said that sleep and death were two different things. Is it that the period of time involved makes a difference?”

  “No,” says Wakin, “it is a matter of existence. After sleep there comes wakefulness, and the life is still present. when I exist, I know it. When I do not, I know nothing.”

  “Life, then, is nothing?”

  “No.”

  “Life, then, is existing? Like these dead?”

  “No,” says Wakim. “It is knowing you exist, at least some of the time.”

  “Of what is this a process?”

  “‘I,’” says Wakim,

  ‘And what is ‘I’? Who are you?”

  “I am Wakim.”

  “I only named you a short whire ago! What were you before that?”

  “Not Wakim.”

  “Dead?”

  “No! Alive!” cries Wakim.

  “Do not raise your voice within my halls,” says Anubis. “You do not know what you are or who you are, you do not know the difference between existing and not existing, yet you presume to argue with me.concerning life and death! Now I shall not ask you, I shall tell you. I shall tell you of life and of death.

  “There is too much life and there is not enough life,” he begins, “and the same goes for death. Now I shall throw away paradoxes.

  “The House of Life lies so far from here that a ray of light which left it on the day you entered this domain wourd not yet have traveled a significant fraction of the distance which separates us. Between us lie the Middle Worlds. They move within the Life-Death tides that flow between my House and the House of Osiris. When I say ‘flow’ I do not mean that they move like that pitiful ray of light, crawling. Rather, they move like waves on the ocean which has but two shores. We may raise waves anywhere we wish without disrupting the entire sea. What are these waves, and what do they do?”

  “Some worlds have too much life,” he says. “Life—crawling, pullulating, fecundating smothering itself—worlds too clement, too full of the sciences which keep men alive—worlds which would drown themselves in their own semen, worlds which would pack all of their lands with crowds of big-bellied women—and so go down to death beneath the weight of their own fruitfulness. Then there are worlds which are bleak and barren and bitter, worlds which grind life like grain. Even with body modifications and with world-change machines, there are only a few hundred worlds which may be inhabited by the six intelligent races. Life is needed badly in the worst of these. It can be a deadly blessing on the best. When I say that life is needed or not needed in certain places, I am of course also saying that death is needed or not needed. I am not speaking of two different things, but of the same thing. Osiris and I are bookkeepers. W
e credit and we debit. we raise waves, or we cause waves to sink back again into the ocean. Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the mindless striving of two to become infinity. Can death be counted upon to limit itself? Never. It is the equally mindless effort of zero to encompass infinity.

  “But there must be life control and death control,” he says, “else the fruitful worlds would rise and fall, rise and fall, cycling between empire and anarchy, then down to final disruption. The bleak worlds would be encompassed by zero. Life cannot contain itself within the bounds statistics have laid down for its guidance. Therefore, it must be contained, and it is. Osiris and I hold the Middle worlds. They lie within our field of control, and we turn them on and we turn them off as we would. Do you see now, Wakim? Do you begin to understand?”

  “You limit life? You cause death?”

  “We can lay sterility on any or all of the six races on any world we choose, for as long a period of time as is necessary. This can be done on an absolute or a fractional basis. We may also manipulate life spans, decimate populations.”

  “How?”

  “Fire. Famine. Plague. War.”

  “What of the sterile worlds, the dry worlds? What of those?”

  “Multiple births can be insured, and we do not tamper with life spans. The newly dead are sent to the House of Life, not here. There they are repaired, or their parts used in the construction of new individuals, who may or may not host a human mentality.”

  ‘And of the other dead?”

  “The House of the Dead is the graveyard of the six races. There are no lawful cemeteries in the Middle Worlds. There have been times when the House of Life has called upon us for hosts and for parts. There have been other occasions when they have shipped us their excess.”

  “It is difficult to understand. It seems brutal, it seems harsh…”

  “It is life and it is death. It is the greatest blessing and the greatest curse in the universe. You do not have to understand it, Wakim. Your comprehension or your lack of it, your approval or your disapproval, will in no way alter its operation.”

  ‘And whence come you, Anubis—and Osiris—that you control it?”

  “There are some things that are not for you to know.”

  ‘And how do the Middle Worlds accept your control?”

  “They live with it, and they die with it. It is above their objections, for it is necessary for their continued existence. It is become a natural law, and it is utterly impartial, applying with equal force to all who come beneath it.”

  “There are some who do not?”

  “You shall learn more of this when I am ready to tell you, which is not now. I have made you a machine, Wakim. Now I shall make you a man. Who is to say how you started, where you started? Were I to wipe out your memories up to this moment and then re-embody you, yoll would recollect that you had begun as metal.”

  “Will you do this thing?”

  “No. I want you equipped with the memories which you now possess, when and if I assign you to your new duties.”

  Then Anubis rasises his hands and strikes them together. A machine removes Wakim from the shelf and switches off his senses as it lowers him. The music pulses and falls about the dancers, the two hundred torches blaze upon the pillars like immortal thoughts, Anubis stares at a blackened place upon the floor of the great Hall, and overhead the canopy of smoke moves to its own rhythms.

  Wakim opens his eyes and looks upon grayness. He lies on his back, staring upward. The tiles are cold beneath him, and there is a flickering of light off to his right. Suddenly, he clenches his left hand, feels for his thumb, finds it, sighs.

  “Yes,” says Anubis.

  He sits up before the throne, looks down upon himself, looks up at Anubis.

  “You have been baptized, you have been born again into the flesh.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No trouble. Plenty of raw materials around here. Stand up! Do you remember your lessons?”

  Wakim stands.

  “Which ones?”

  “Temporal fugue. To make time follow the mind, not the body.”

  “Yes.”

  “And killing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And combining the two?”

  “Yes.”

  Anubis stands, a full head taller than Wakim, whose new body is well over two yards in length.

  “Then show me!”

  “Let the music cease!” he cries. “Let the one who in life was called Dargoth come before me!”

  The dead stop dancing. They stand without moving and their eyes never blink. There is silence for several seconds, unbroken by word, footfall, breathing.

  Then Dargoth moves among the standing dead, advancing through shadow, through torchlight. Wakim stands straighter when he sees him, for the muscles of his back, his shoulders, his stomach tighten.

  A metal band the color of copper crosses Dargoth’s head, covers his cheekbones, vanishes beneath his gray-grizzled chin. A latitudinal band passes above his brows, over his temples, meets at the back of his skull. His eyes are wide, the sclera yellow and the irises red. His lower jaw makes a constant chewing motion as he rolls forward, and his teeth are long shadows. His head sways from side to side upon its twenty inches of neck. His shoulders are three feet in width, giving him the appearance of an inverted triangle, for his sides taper sharply to meet with his segmented chassis, which begins where the flesh stops. His wheels turn slowly, the left rear one squeaking with each revolution. His arms hang a full four and a half feet, so that his fingertips barely brush the floor. Four short, sharp metal legs are folded upward along his flat sides. The razors come erect on his back, fall again, as he moves. The eight-foot whip that is his tail uncoils behind him as he comes to a halt before the throne.

  “For this night, this Thousandyear Night,” says Anubis, “I give you back your name—Dargoth. Once were you numbered among the mightiest warriors in the Middle Worlds, Dargoth, until you pitted your strength against that of an immortal and went down to your death before him. Your broken body has been repaired, and this night you must use it to do battle once more. Destroy this man Wakim in single combat and you may take his place as my first servant here in the House of the Dead.”

  Dargoth crosses his great hands upon his brow and bows until they touch the floor.

  “You may have ten seconds,” says Anubis to Wakim, “to prepare your mind for battle. —Stand ready, Dargoth!”

  “Lord,” says Wakim, “how may I kill one who is already dead?”

  “That is your problem,” says Anubis. “You have now wasted all ten of your seconds with foolish questions. Begin!”

  There comes a snapping sound and a series of metallic clicks.

  Dargoth’s metal legs snap downward, straighten, raise him three feet higher above the floor. He prances. He raises his arms and flexes them.

  Wakim watches, waiting.

  Dargoth rises onto his hind legs, so that now his head is ten feet above the floor.

  Then he leaps forward, his arms outstretched, his tail curled, his head extended, fangs bared. The blades rise upon his back like gleaming fins, his hooves fall like hammers.

  At the last possible moment, Wakirn sidesteps and throws a punch which is blocked by the other’s forearm. Wakim leaps high into the air then, and the whip cracks harmlessly beneath him.

  For all his bulk, Dargoth halts and turns rapidly. He rears once more and strikes forward with his front hooves. Wakim avoids them, but Dargoth’s hands fall upon Wakim’s shoulders as Dargoth descends.

  Wakim seizes both wrists and kicks Dargoth in the chest. The tail-lash falls across his right cheek as he does so. Then he breaks the grip of those massive hands upon his shoulder, ducks his head and lays the edge of his left hand hard upon the other’s side. The whip falls again, this time across his back. He aims a blow at the other’s head, but the long neck twists it out of the way, and he hears the whip crack once more, missing him by inches.

  Dargoth�
�s fist lands upon his cheekbone, and he stumbles, off balance, sliding upon the floor. He rolls out of the path of the hooves, but a fist knocks him sprawling as he attempts to rise again.

  As the next blow descends, however, he catches the wrist with both hands and throws his full weight upon the arm, twisting his head to the side. Dargoth’s fist strikes the floor and Wakim regains his feet, landing a left cross as he does so.

  Dargoth’s head rolls with the punch and the lash cracks beside Wakim’s ear. He lays another blow upon the twisting head, and then he is borne over backwards as Dargoth’s rear legs straighten like springs and his shoulder strikes Wakim in the chest.

  Dargoth rears once more.

  Then, for the first time, he speaks:

  “Now, Wakim, now!” he says, “Dargoth becomes first servant of Anubis!”

  As the hooves flash downward, Wakim catches those metal legs, one in each hand, halfway up their length. He has braced himself in a crouched position, and now his lips curl back, showing his clenched teeth, as Dargoth is frozen in mid-strike above him.

  He laughs as he springs back into a standing position and heaves with both arms, casting his opponent high up upon his hind legs, struggling to keep from falling over backwards.

  “Fool!” he says, and his voice is strangely altered. His word, like the stroke of a great iron bell, rings through the Hall. There comes up a soft moaning from among the dead, as when they had been routed from out their graves.

  “‘Now,’ you say? ‘Wakim,’ you say?” and he laughs as he steps forward beneath the falling hooves. “You know not what you say!” and he locks his arms about the great metal torso and the hooves fail helplessly above his back and the tail-whip swishes and cracks and lays stripes upon his shoulders. His hands rest between the sharpened spines, and he crushes the unyielding segmented body of metal close up against his own.

  Dargoth’s great hands find his neck, but the thumbs cannot reach his throat, and the muscles of Wakim’s neck tighten and stand out as he bends his knees and strains.

  They stand so, frozen for a timeless instant, and the firelight wrestles with shadows upon their bodies.