Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  “And the era which did that deed is still reviled for its nearly nightlandish inhumanity. I will not make the memory of our age even darker, by putting the fairer skin of a female beside the hide of a criminal, and mine own daughter. Historians have enough to condemn when comparing our aeon to others.”

  Creon said heavily, “Sir, history will recall that few other ages, aside from this, suffered the gene-darkening due to influences from the Quiet City, and few had their mathematicians confirm that the degeneration of the race into abhumanism was already much advanced. Without the eugenics laws, in a mere twenty thousand years, we would have de-evolved into beast-things, and more cities would be deserted than they are: without the hierarchy, we could not enforce the eugenics laws.”

  Father turned his ear: “What would you do, brother?”

  “You are always too lax, brother.”

  Father said, “We dare not use the law to kill. For human to kill human is unheard of in civilized times: an abomination. It will pollute the thought-streams for ninety generations, both consciously and subconsciously, and mar the cycle of incarnation and reincarnation.”

  “Then let her be locked in an empty city, without water or victual.”

  “Death is not a penalty our laws inflict.”

  “But it would not be inflicted! Oh no. It would merely be…” and now Creon smiled his toothy smile, “…allowed. To cut off feed and water is not to execute: it imposes only gentle slumber. She has betrayed the safety of the pyramid. Why should we take extraordinary measures to keep her alive?”

  “Impossible,” said father curtly.

  Creon did not like being crossed. If father had been able to see the look on Creon’s face at that moment, he would have locked Creon into a dark and empty city on some deserted level, and left him to starve.

  45.

  I spoke up. “Gentlemen, this little drama no doubt would be convincing to a girl of lesser wit, but I can count. I know my birth-hour. I have been presented, and I have danced, but in the eyes of the law, not for a week do I reach the age of my majority: until then, I am a child. Our laws forbid corruption of the blood, attainder, reduction, or abnegation for those of tender years, and certainly our law holds children free from threat to life and limb.”

  Creon said, “As a child, the law permits your father to beat you with a rod, provided only he breaks no bones.”

  I tossed back my head, and glared up at his eye. “The hour-slips will be eager for the details of his cruelty!”

  (It was still distracting to toss my head defiantly and not feel hair slap against my neck. I was not used to it. It made me realize how often I made that head gesture. Maybe it is not one a grown woman should make.)

  Creon’s lips drew back from his teeth. He said in a tone of sinister patience, “Countless millions of men live in this huge hive: we cannot control them unless they bow. They will not bow if we seem weak. If you break with us, we seem divided, hence weak. So, right or wrong, you cannot be seen to defy our family in public. It will convulse the Pyrtaneum, and undo all the life’s work of your family.”

  I said archly: “Is that so, uncle? Then do not cross me.”

  Father whispered something to Optimina. Her voice was louder than his, and I heard her reply, “Her expression is much like your own, lord. She means to have her will.”

  I said sharply, “By Creon’s logic, you all must support my brother, and close ranks around him. It is Creon who says any breach within our ranks will shake the public order.”

  Father raised his hand, saying, “Enough sophistry. You know the many pains and punishments, either in my public office as your liege, or in my private office as your father, that are in my hand to deal to you: yet your seal upon this encyclical will obviate such need. Surely the reputation and honor of our family, the highest of all high families, weighs heavily on you.”

  “My brother is of blood as ancient as my own,” I said. “He is a hero who survived a dark land no one in this chamber, no one in this city, no one in this Great Redoubt, was bold enough to tread. He brought back the cruelest beasts of the Night Land fawning and crawling at his foot. You should erect a monument in the Agora taller than the figure of Andros!”

  “Daughter, give way in this, or I must punish you. Come! Your seal upon the document, that all high-born may with one voice condemn those who venture Out, and censure dreams of ancient heroism left better dead beneath dead years.”

  I was appalled. For a moment I could not speak. Then: “Will you take back your word? You assented to the expedition. You lauded the young men who donned the heavy armor and charged their great weapons, and you blessed them as they crept softly from our gates into the icy gloom. Did you not also yearn to discover if the ancient lore was sound, that there might be a Place of Refuge, an escape from the Night Lands, some place away to the west, beyond the Land of Abhumans, beyond the lidless eyes of the Watching Things? Have you never wondered where rests the terminus of the great highway that crosses so near the base of our Redoubt? Polynices says that humans built it, in times past. The Last Redoubt must praise those who discover this mystery, and add to the sum of the wisdom of Mankind. You know this, Father: you said it. Your word condoned the expedition!”

  He shook his head sadly. “You know Polynices has gone far beyond anything I allowed or dreamt. For the remaining four million years of history, the only thing children will remember of our age, when all else is smothered beneath the pile of time, is that this era allowed two Night-Hounds inside the armor.”

  “But you sent him Out, he and his men, calling them heroes!”

  “That word I spoke then was fit for then.” He said heavily, “Then is the past, and now is the present. Now another word we all must speak.”

  I said, “Am I the daughter of a Castellan, or only of a politician?”

  Creon growled, “Liege, time flees us. Let her be half-rationed: the hour-slips will only report with glee that a rich daughter of the aerie lofts must eat a poor man’s meal.”

  Father nodded a slow, heavy nod, his face not pointed toward any of us in particular, his pale and filmy eyes seeming more blank than usual.

  Bia stepped to the door of the chamber, and whispered to a clerk, who ran off.

  Father’s shoulder slumped, and his frame seemed to shrink in on himself. “It will not matter. This is all farce; this is all vanity. Even if my daughter and all the ghosts of the sunlight days were to dance from deck to deck, singing the chorus of condemnation with voices like thunder, and waving white banners of silk and red, faces painted like demogorgons, it would not sway the Populists. The world can never forgive what has been done. The Optimate party is finished, our phylum is finished, our family is done. Authority and rule slip from my fingers like a lump of the drinking powder exposed to air: it fizzes instantly to liquid, and no fist can grasp it. It will mean the end of the Bloodline Laws. The degenerations of the race resume.”

  Kratos said softly, “Despair not, my Liege! Even the common-born know the need to excise the diseases Outer Forces have introduced into our gene plasm. No mother yearns for an unworthy child, large-toothed, small-skulled, and dark with hair!”

  A look of regret crossed the face of Kratos as this last word escaped him, and I saw the glance of apprehension he darted, first at me, and at my lustrous dark hair, so unlike the fair hair of those not of my house, and then at my father.

  This was the first time I realized what must have been obvious to my brothers and my sister, all this life.

  They thought we were atavisms. Throw-backs. Lesser beings. The envy of those who had no blood of Mirdath in their veins convinced them that we were archaic; that we were not just of the second race of man, but of a lesser race. No doubt this comforted them when they resented our rule.

  Another thing my father did not see was Uncle Creon nod toward Kratos, a mere tilt of the eyes, a small motion of the fingers, which told Kratos not to worry. It was a look of camaraderie, a look of agreement.

  Creon’s words
had double meaning when he said, “The rule of the family of Andros will not fail. The Bloodline Laws will be upheld: the people see the need for them. The human race will not commit suicide. It is human instinct to follow self interest.”

  Father spoke in the most sad and hollow voice I have ever heard come from a human throat. All his years of bearing the burden of the Castellanship, his hidden fears, seemed to speak in that moment, and his words came slowly forth, strangely monotonous: “No, brother! How little you know of the instincts of man. We will embrace suicide so willingly, when we die for love. The young maid thinks nothing of her grandchildren’s genes when her unworthy suitor calls. Mobs go mad when some demagogue arises, promising them revenge against their betters, adoring him; and this is love as well. Men will love anything to which they put their hands: even my son loves the monsters that slay us, and he becomes a monster himself, his thoughts and dreams drifting ever further from the human norm; even my daughter loves him loyally, despite what Polynices has become. The rulers and the people actually salutary to us, wholesome, wise and good, those we do not love, but scorn. Such is human instinct, brother: we are unnatural creatures.”

  Creon said only: “Not so, sir. Brother-love is the firmest of sentiments.”

  I had a woebegone look on my face at that moment, hearing Father’s toneless voice. If Optimina had only told him what I looked like then, things would have gone differently. I was opening my mouth to speak, when the Registrar (who had entered the chamber with the log book in his hand, and the master seal) asked Father what name to put on the order for my reduction in rations.

  “Name?”

  “Your daughter’s name, sir? Her adult name.”

  This stirred him from his woe: his expression grew hard and cold. “Let her be called Antigone, for she opposes her family and her bloodline, and acts always against her birth.”

  I suppose if Optimina had looked at my face then, she would have seen a look of brittle pride mirroring that which shone from my Father’s face.

  Païs would have asked forgiveness and tried to make amends.

  Antigone never would.

  Horrid name. I must carry it henceforth until I die.

  46.

  It was Creon, not long after, who finally convinced father to visit the prison of his son, and to see close at hand the two monsters he had brought in with him. The watchmen were dismissed, or so I later heard, and only Creon’s partisans, men whose faces Father never saw, whose hearts he never knew, were in the steel-floored quarantine area with Polynices and his two Night-Hounds.

  The story of how it was that father and his maid were destroyed, and yet Creon and his heavily armed men escaped unhurt, was never convincing to me.

  47.

  The popular opinion swung to support Creon once he announced the abolition of the indenture debt. The public treasury was drained, and the lowest of the low born, armed with staves and cudgels, now cheered for Creon whenever he appeared, and set upon any noble or his entourage who opposed Creon in the Pyrtaneum.

  There were tumults, and the Architects shut down power and lights to cities up in arms. Doors were locked and air turned stale while angry parties negotiated surrenders, and Adepts with the few working Mind Glasses we still had confirmed their oaths and scanned for mental reservations.

  Even the Master Monstruwacan was harassed when he emerged from his high tower, though as the bravoes closed in on him with ugly words and gestures, he drew himself up and spoke the Master Word. The young men remembered their humanity, and fell back, ashamed and astonished, and the Master Monstruwacan gathered his robes of office around him, and walked from between them, not hurrying.

  Perhaps such things had happened when my father seized the command, during the food emergencies of so many years ago. I had not been born, and the only accounts I knew of such things came from the witness of flatterers, from accounts courtiers loyal to him told.

  How little I knew of him! Now, when it was too late, far too late, did I wonder. He could have answered with a word, had I ever spoken to him as a daughter should do; answers now forever lost to me.

  What had he been in youth? Did Father unleash rioters, and use the hunger of the needy to wrestle high command away from Laius his father, and seize supreme eminence for himself? If so, it was a ghastly deed. A mob is a monster, as hungry as a Night-Hound, destructive and wanton and without a soul.

  How like Polynices he was after all.

  48.

  During the time of the tumults, I stole from my chambers, and crept down the long, cold deserted stairs of the Main Flight to the Archivists Quarters. The Pyrtaneum was dissolved, and the Tribunes were arrested, and so no one knew who or what was in charge. The Master of the Library, Aristophanes, was willing to help me, or, I should say, fearful not to help me, not knowing how high my position might be, once the fighting ended.

  In the archive, in an insulated cabinet an apprentice opened for me, I inspected the Time Glass which had been focused on the chamber where my father died, its penetrating rays reaching back to the hour in question. There were two Chronometricians present to work the glass, which even I was not permitted to touch.

  49.

  The image in the surface of the glass is blurred and smoky, as is often the case when weapons powered by the Earth-Current are discharged in a confined space. Only a few clear images are preserved in the smoky glass. One is the image of my brother Polynices, a stern look on his face, putting out his hand and calling the two monsters to his heel. The vast and ungainly Night-Hounds fell back, their jaws awash with human blood, their eyes like coals from a grate, but they crouched behind Polynices.

  The image shows Creon and his men at the chamber door, each man with a glittering Diskos in his gauntlet, the spinning blades held out left and right, the butts of the weapons grounded against the deck, the shafts fully extended, the whole squad ready to receive a charge. What words they exchanged, the glass could not record.

  The blur on the floor is surely the corpse of my father. Mercifully, all the details are indistinct. One shadow could be a spray of blood, or it could be his torn cloak, or perhaps his hand, held at an odd angle, fingers spread.

  The last clear image, from a minute later, and blurred somewhat with the others, shows Polynices stepping forward, his face set and grim, and his monsters looming up flanking him, rising to their feet and opening their great mouths; and before them is the silhouette of Creon cringing, and his men falling away to the left and right. There was a flash of weapons as the men spun their Diskos blades up to speed, and the image reconstructed in the glass again turns into a mass of blurs.

  That last image, though, one half-second before the shadows swallow all, is a haunting one, and I asked the prentices to trifle the glass by increments slowly back and forth to study it.

  Polynices, arms spread and slightly raised, rests one hand lightly on the manes of each of his monsters as the three step forward. His beasts flank him. Their vast force is under his control. He looks so proud of them, so pleased, so in love.

  He does not look down as he steps over the body of our father.

  50.

  Later, I heard that he had walked his monsters to the gate, and thrust them forth. The Monstruwacans objected, demanding that the monsters be slain and studied, but Polynices was the son of the Castellan, and even the Watchmen feared his high rank; and so, against the ancient practices, on his authority alone, the gate was opened.

  I never heard the complete tale. The Watchmen came to blows among themselves, those who respect the old laws were fewer than the young men who feared that Polynices would soon be Castellan, and hold untrammeled power over their lives.

  Perhaps they were right to fear, though they feared the wrong man. Upon his ascension, Creon exiled all those who did Polynices any good turn to the worse levels of the plantations and mines beneath us; and he exiled those who stood for the law as well, not liking men man enough to defy the blood of Andros. All the witnesses of the gate-breaking were s
cattered and frightened beyond my efforts to find them.

  To open the gate without the procedures is the stuff of nightmares. It is how the Lesser Redoubt was destroyed. No one will speak of what happened.

  I do know that Polynices walked unarmored across the Night Land soil, protected by nothing but his savage monsters. A million people watched him from the embrasures. He went not far: to the White Circle; and he came back without the Hounds.

  But he had not been Prepared, and the Watch should have not permitted him to depart.

  Had he been a man of common birth, they would have recalled their oaths, and stopped him. It was only a matter of a few minutes, a quarter hour at most, but when I heard the news, I knew that our age was as corrupt and degenerate as the Foretellers warn; and I secretly wondered, even I, when the Messenger of Time would be born to correct us.

  Once inside again, Polynices surrendered to the Officer of the Watch, who bound him to the magistrate. The penalty was attainder: he was rendered sterile, unable even to adopt. The magistrate’s written opinion was circulated. His reasoning was that any child of Polynices would be honor-bound to esteem his ancestor’s name, and hence would defy, in his heart at first, but surely later openly, our strictest law and prohibition, the rule of quarantine. The idea that any son of Polynices, any child of the House of Andros, would be so callous as to disregard his father’s name and fame, of course, was not contemplated.

  Creon issued penalties more severe, including degradation of the family shield, and namelessness, and every humiliation our laws allow, but he suspended them upon Polynices’ sworn parole to live simply, without bringing further shame to family or phylum.

  Polynices swore to have no further traffic with the Night-Hounds, and no further dreams of a day when men domesticated hounds or rode the backs of monsters with the bodies of Centaurs and the heads of Gandharvas.