Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  “I shall treat you much better in the future,” said his father. “I swear it.” He walked to the casement, pulled off the cloth. There was no light to be seen through it, nothing inside the wooden casing but a deep and formless blackness.

  “Perhaps the world has entirely ended,” said Farfal, “and now there is nothing but nothing.”

  “Only a handful of seconds have passed there since we came through it,” his father told him. “That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it is younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, like oil spilled on a still pond.”

  Then he removed the sluggish spell-creature he had placed on the casement as a lock, and he pushed against the inner casing, which opened slowly. A chill wind came through it which made Farfal shiver. “You send us to our deaths, father,” he said.

  “We all go to our deaths,” said his father. “And yet, here you are, a million years before your birth, still alive. Truly we are all composed of miracles. Now, son, here is a bag, which, as you will soon discover, has been imbued with Swann’s Imbuement of Remarkable Capacity, and will hold all that you place inside it, regardless of weight or mass or volume. When we get there, you must take as many stones as you can and place them in the bag. I myself will run up the hill to the nets and check them for treasures—or for things that would be regarded as treasures if I were to bring them back to the now and the here.”

  “Do I go first?” asked Farfal, clutching the bag.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s so cold.”

  In reply his father prodded him in the back with a hard finger. Farfal clambered, grumbling, through the casement, and his father followed.

  “This is too bad,” said Farfal. They walked out of the cottage at the end of time and Farfal bent to pick up pebbles. He placed the first in the bag, where it glinted greenly. He picked up another. The sky was dark but it seemed as if something filled the sky, something without shape.

  There was a flash of something not unlike lightning, and in it he could see his father hauling in nets from the trees at the top of the hill.

  A crackling. The nets flamed and were gone. Balthasar ran down the hill gracelessly and breathlessly. He pointed at the sky. “It is Nothing!” he said. “Nothing has swallowed the hilltop. Nothing has taken over.”

  There was a powerful wind then, and Farfal watched his father crackle, and then raise into the air, and then vanish. He backed away from the Nothing, a darkness within the darkness with tiny lightnings playing at its edges, and then he turned and ran, into the house, and through the door into the second room. But he did not go through into the second room. He stood there in the doorway, and then turned back to the Dying Earth. Farfal the Unfortunate watched as the Nothing took the outer walls and the distant hills and the skies, and then he watched, unblinking as Nothing swallowed the cold sun, watched until there was nothing left but a dark formlessness that pulled at him, as if restless to be done with it all.

  Only then did Farfal walk into the inner room in the cottage, into his father’s inner sanctum a million years before.

  A bang on the outer door.

  “Balthasar?” It was the voice from the courtyard. “I gave you the day you begged for, wretch. Now give me my thirty stones. Give me my stones or I shall be as good as my word—your sons will be taken off-world, to labour in the Bdellium Mines of Telb, and the women shall be set to work as musicians in the pleasure palace of Luthius Limn, where they will have the honour of making sweet music while I, Luthius Limn, dance and sing and make passionate and athletic love to my catamites. I shall not waste breath in describing the fate I would have in store for your servants. Your spell of hiding is futile, for see, I have found this room with relative ease. Now, give me my thirty stones before I open the door and render down your obese frame for fat and throw your bones to the dogs and the deodands.”

  Farfal trembled with fear. Time, he thought. I need Time. He made his voice as deep as he could, and he called out, “One moment, Luthius Limn. I am engaged in a complex magical operation to purge your stones of their negative energies. If I am disturbed in this, the consequences will be catastrophic.”

  Farfal glanced around the room. The only window was too small to permit him to climb out, while the room’s only door had Luthius Limn on the other side of it. “Unfortunate indeed,” he sighed. Then he took the bag his father had given to him and swept into it all the trinkets, oddments and gewgaws he could reach, still taking care not to touch the green flute with his bare flesh. They vanished into the bag, which weighed no more and seemed no more full than it had ever done.

  He stared at the casement in the centre of the room. The only way out, and it led to Nothing, to the end of everything.

  “Enough!” came the voice from beyond the door. “My patience is at an end, Balthasar. My cooks shall fry your internal organs tonight.” There came a loud crunching against the door, as if of something hard and heavy being slammed against it.

  Then there was a scream, and then silence.

  Luthius Limn’s voice: “Is he dead?”

  Another voice—Farfal thought it sounded like one of his half-brothers—said, “I suspect that the door is magically protected and warded.”

  “Then,” boomed Luthius Limn, decisively, “we shall go through the wall.”

  Farfal was unfortunate, but not stupid. He lifted down the black lacquer box from the nail upon which his father had hung it. He heard something scuttle and move inside it.

  “My father told me not to move the casement,” he said to himself. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved violently, pushing the heavy thing almost half an inch. The darkness that filled the casement began to change, and it filled with a pearl-grey light.

  He hung the box about his neck. “It is good enough,” said Farfal the Unfortunate, and, as something slammed against the wall of the room he took a strip of cloth and tied the bag that contained all the remaining treasures of Balthasar the Canny about his left wrist, and he pushed himself through.

  And there was light, so bright that he closed his eyes, and walked through the casement.

  Farfal began to fall.

  He flailed in the air, eyes tightly closed against the blinding light, felt the wind whip past him.

  Something smacked and engulfed him: water, brackish, warm, and Farfal floundered, too surprised to breathe. Then he surfaced, his head breaking water, and he gulped air. And then he pushed himself through the water, until his hands grasped some kind of plant, and he pulled himself, on hands and feet, out of the green water, and up onto a spongy dry land, trailing and trickling water as he went.

  “The light,” said the man at Denny’s. “The light was blinding. And the sun was not yet up. But I obtained these,” he tapped the frame of his sunglasses, “and I stay out of the sunlight, so my skin does not burn too badly.”

  “And now?” I asked.

  “I sell the carvings,” he said. “And I seek another casement.”

  “You want to go back to your own time?”

  He shook his head. “It’s dead,” he said. “And all I knew, and everything like me. It’s dead. I will not return to the darkness at the end of time.”

  “What then?”

  He scratched at his neck. Through the opening is his shirt I could see a small, black box, hanging about his neck, no bigger than a locket, and inside the box something moved: a beetle, I thought. But there are big beetles in Florida. They are not uncommon.

  “I want to go back to the beginning,” he said. “When it started. I want to stand there in the light of the universe waking to itself, the dawn of everything. If I am going to blinded, let it be by that. I want to be there when the suns are a-borning. This ancient light is not bright enough for me.”

  He took the napkin in his hand then, and reached into the leather bag with it. Taking care to touch it only through the cloth, he pulled out a flute-like instrument, about a foot long, made of green jade or something
similar, and placed it on the table in front of me. “For the food,” he said. “A thank you.”

  He got up, then, and walked away, and I sat and stared at the green flute for so long a time; eventually I reached out and felt the coldness of it with my fingertips, and then gently, without daring to blow, or to try to make music from the end of time, I touched the mouthpiece to my lips.

  Afterword:

  I would have been thirteen. The anthology was called Flashing Swords, the story was called “Morreion,” and it started me dreaming. I found a British paperback copy of The Dying Earth, filled with strange misprints, but the stories were there and they were as magical as “Morreion” had been. In a dark second-hand bookshop where men in overcoats bought used pornography, I found a copy of The Eyes of the Overworld and then tiny dusty books of short stories—“The Moon Moth” is, I felt then and feel now, the most perfectly built SF short story that anyone has ever written—and around that point Jack Vance books began to be published in the UK and suddenly all I had to do to read Jack Vance books was buy them. And I did: The Demon Princes, the Alastor trilogy and the rest. I loved the way he would digress, I loved the way he would imagine, and most of all I loved the way he wrote it all down: wryly, gently, amused, like a god would be amused, but never in a way that made less of what he wrote, like James Branch Cabell but with a heart as well as a brain.

  Every now and again I’ve noticed myself crafting a Vance sentence, and it always makes me happy when I do—but he’s not a writer I’d ever dare to imitate. I don’t think he’s imitable.

  There are few enough of the writers I loved when I was 13 I can see myself going back to in twenty years from now. Jack Vance I will reread for ever.

  —Neil Gaiman

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH

  First published in the United States by Subterranean Press

  Copyright © 2009 by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Songs of the Dying Earth / [edited by] George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  A tribute anthology to Jack Vance’s seminal Dying Earth series.

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-2807-6

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Martin, George R. R. II. Dozois, Gardner R.

  PS648.S3S49 2010

  813'.0876208—dc22

  2010035742

  1 A variety of mollusc valued for their succulent flesh. It was once proposed that glace possessed a form of intelligence, this based on the fact that many who consumed them raw reported experiencing poignant emotional states and hearing what seemed to be pleas in an unknown tongue. For this reason, they are now served either fried or broiled. As to the question of their sentience, their severely depleted population prevents a comprehensive study.

  2 The gid is a hybrid of man, gargoyle, whorl, and leaping insect. In their “newt” stage they are relatively harmless, yet they inspire an atavistic fear. Once they have tasted human blood a metamorphosis occurs within minutes and they acquire mental powers that permit them to dominate lesser minds with ease. The physical changes are, reputedly, also extreme, but this is unproven, since a mere handful of men and women have survived the sight of an adult gid and none have been capable of reporting coherently on the particulars. The “newt” gid is copper in color, with black facial markings. As to the adult’s coloration, we have only the word of Cotuim Justo, blind since birth, who claimed that the beast’s colors “burned my eyes.”

  3 It is something of a euphemism to describe the behavior of the copiropith whelp or imp (the term more commonly used) as “gentle.” After devouring their mother and a majority of their siblings, the litter typically invade the nasal cavities of humans and attach themselves to certain nodes of the nervous system, provoking the victim to grin broadly and to hop and caper about in dervish fashion, all while experiencing terrible pain that results, after some weeks, in death. As adults, however, the whelps acquire an affectionate personality, soft, bluish gray fur, and a pleasing, cuddlesome look. In this form they are greatly prized as pets and believed by some (particularly residents of the Cloudy Isles) to house the souls of the men and women they have killed, and thus are treated as family members.

  4 This truncated doggeral works to better effect in the untranslated original.