Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  There was just enough space between the body and the ice for us to crawl one by one. I was in the middle between Libba and Jimi. The silver-dollar man went last. I caught myself missing the red-haired woman, whose name I'd never heard. I might never know why she'd done what she did. Sometimes there isn't any good reason for sacrifice. It just is.

  I hoped she did find her music, and was singing the beast to sleep.

  We climbed out of the stinking cave into daylight so bright it blinded us. There was grass under us. The green smell of it slowly overrode the stink.

  I looked back. Vast hairy legs and cloven hooves thrust out of the field like a weird tree. The Devil's clawed hands were hillocks half-overgrown with grass.

  I took a few seconds to wonder what would happen if he ever broke free. Then I left it for nightmares and turned away.

  Dante found Purgatory on the other end of the Devil. We found something a little bit different. It wasn't a hell at all, but as afterlives go it was crashingly dull—unless your idea of heaven is Sunday in the park with Socrates. Personally I preferred the Motel Six.

  The road ran down through perfectly mown lawns to the manicured bank of a river. There was a marble pier there, and a boat tied to it.

  All the way to the river, we passed groups of the dead sitting in groves or in little temples or beside limpid pools. Many of them had harps or flutes beside them, but here as everywhere, the music had gone mute.

  The boat was the first inkling that this was not as tame an afterlife as I'd thought. It was a rickety-looking thing with all the paint worn off the sides, and weeds trailing just below the waterline.

  The boatman was even more ramshackle than his boat. He was old and his beard was long. He wore a long coat of no color in particular, and a hat with a wide brim pulled low over his forehead. I could just see the tip of his long hooked nose, and his eyes gleaming out of the shadow like an animal's. His hands on the oars were gaunt but strong, with thick ropy veins and corded wrists.

  We all stood on the pier, knowing there was another toll to pay, but only one of us had what he needed. I looked down into the water and wished I hadn't. It was jet black and oily and much too thick. There were things in it, coiling under the surface.

  There was no swimming that, and no getting around it, either. The trail of the curse went on downstream.

  The silver-dollar man took the coins from his eyes. They opened, blinking, and looked around as if they had minds of their own. They were fairly ordinary brown eyes, but there was a light in them that made me shiver under my skin. His face was different with them in it: much less inoffensive, and just a little bit disturbing. This wasn't a man I'd want behind me in an alley at night.

  He flipped one coin in the air, and then the other. In an instant he was juggling them, round and round, from hand to hand. He juggled faster and faster, until they were a silver blur. Coins spawned coins as they spun through the air, splitting out of the original pair, gleaming and spinning.

  Jimi shot out a hand. The silver wheel fell apart with a sound that almost—almost—made me think of bells and chimes.

  In Jimi's hand were half a dozen silver coins. The originals had been American silver dollars, but the eagles on these had mutated. They looked like owls now, with big staring eyes, and the English words had turned to Greek.

  The boatman took them without a word and let us onto the boat. It never rocked and never sank under us. Only the living had weight.

  The silver-dollar man was the last to get on. Even while he was finding a place to sit, the boatman dug in oars and rowed away from the bank. I could see the pier on the other side, jutting out from a shadowy shore, but he rowed us straight downstream. I could almost see the curse like a rope tied around the prow.

  I knew better than to look down into the water again, but I caught myself doing just that, leaning against the side of the boat and hanging my head over. It was like a drug. I didn't want it, but I couldn't stop myself.

  "This water is forgetfulness."

  Libba's voice was soft and full of sleep. Or maybe it wasn't her voice. No one else was talking.

  "Drink," she said, or whoever was speaking through her, "and abandon memory. Forget fear, forget pain. Forget your very self."

  "I won't," I said, but I couldn't take my eyes off the water. "I can't forget the music. I never knew about it while I was alive. I stumbled on it because I was lost. It gave me back myself again. I don't want to lose it."

  "Forgetfulness is peace," said the voice that no longer sounded like Libba's. It was like water sliding past the boat's sides, and wind whispering in my ears. "Forgetfulness is bliss. Nirvana. Heaven. Sweet oblivion. Music is pain. Music is sorrow. Music rips at the heart and sickens the soul."

  "Music is life," I said thickly. I was hanging out over the water. I knew that if I touched it, I'd be lost. I watched my hand, the fingers fading even while I stared at them, stretching toward that black and gleaming surface.

  The things under it were waiting. I could feel them, their hunger. They ate memories and swallowed souls.

  Hands pulled me back into the boat. The water heaved; the boat rocked. I hung on, and the others hung on to me. The boatman paid no attention to any of it, except to steady the oars.

  We were going mostly downstream, but little by little we edged toward the opposite bank. The green and sunlit country was far behind us. We glided through a landscape of shadows, with the banks rising gradually into barren cliffs.

  The river was narrowing. We were in a gorge as deep as Malebolge. It was so deep that the sky had gone dark, and stars shone in it, flat and hard.

  The things under the boat had not gone away. I could feel them swimming just below it, and occasionally brushing against it with a soft, ominous bump. They weren't going to stop until they'd taken one of us.

  I was dead weight. I wasn't a musician and I wasn't a guide. The others could easily spare me.

  They were all watching, trying to protect me from myself. Except ...

  Sippie was in the stern of the boat. I could barely see her; she'd faded while I was absorbed in my own troubles. She was leaning over the side as I'd done, with her face as blank as mine must have been.

  I couldn't get to her in time. Even if I did, I might not be able to save her. She'd gone translucent, and her edges were fraying. I dived through the barrier of bodies, grabbing wildly.

  She slipped over the side and sank without a sound. The water rose up to meet her. I saw how she spread her arms, how she embraced the things that came to feed on her.

  My howl echoed against the walls of the gorge. "No! No! It should have been me!"

  "Not yet." The echoes ricocheted off one another, filling the gorge with clamor, but I still heard Libba's voice, as soft as it was. "She was nothing without the music. She was almost gone—but she made her passing count for something."

  Libba wasn't very solid, either, but she was still holding on. The light grew slowly on her face. The walls were drawing wider apart and sinking little by little. The stars had faded. The sky was blank and blue again, and the sun was hanging in it. The river opened into a broad slow stream. The right-hand bank was green; the left was bleak and bare, an unrelieved expanse of sand and rock stretching away to a thin line of horizon.

  Ay sighed as if a weight had lifted from his shoulders. The river had changed after it left the gorge: there were still things in it, and they were deadly, but they were cleaner somehow. The dark things were placated; they hadn't followed us. Here were crocodiles and hippopotami and fish that fed on drowned victims, but nothing that would render a soul into nothingness.

  As the boat turned in toward the bank, I had a brief and unbecoming thought that Ay had led us here just to get himself home. But he could have done that on his own, without dragging us along with him.

  I could feel the curse pulling us. It was getting stronger, and I was becoming more sensitive to it. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I could see it.

  We were closer tha
n we'd been to the source, but no nearer to understanding it than when we started. We left the boat with relief, and I for one didn't look back to see what became of it.

  ~~~~~

  This was a peculiar country. A thin line of lush green followed the bank of the river. All around it was desert. Wild things lived in the red land: hawks overhead, lions and jackals below. People lived among the green.

  And they did live—more than in any afterlife I knew of. They ate, slept, even procreated. People tilled the rich black earth of the fields by hand and with oxen, and sailed on the river in brightly painted boats, and paraded down the roads in princely processions. I'd never seen such light as there was here, or such color, or such a hum of earthly activity.

  I would have liked to stay here, to be alive, even if the faces were strange and the way of living was ancient and there was no music. What kept me going, I didn't really know. Maybe I was just stubborn.

  We followed a wide smooth road to a place of blindingly white walls. The way up to it was lined with sphinxes. There were colossal statues on either side of the gate. One was of a man with a jackal's head. The other was a man in mummy's wrappings, wearing a tall crown and holding a crook and a flail.

  The jackal's eyes opened as we came closer. The man's stayed closed, but I could feel him watching us.

  The road went on inside the gate, opening into a square surrounded by columns and crowded with more of the immense statuary. At the far end was a pyramid with a hundred steps, and at the top of it a throne. The throne was big enough to seat one of the guardians from the gate, but it was empty. Something sat at the foot of it, waiting for us.

  It was small on the scale of that place, but when we were close enough to get a good look at it, we could see that it was twice as tall as the tallest of us. Ay went down on his face in front of it.

  I couldn't move. I was too busy staring. It sat upright on hippopotamus haunches, but its head was a crocodile's and its arms were the forepaws of a lion. A lion's mane poured over its shoulders. Its eyes were human, quiet and rather sad. They made its face more alarming rather than less.

  "Ammut," Ay said, his voice echoing up from the ground. "Eater of Souls. Have mercy on us. Help us if you will. We are seeking—we need—"

  "We know what you seek," the creature said in a long reverberating hiss.

  Jimi pushed his way to the front and faced the creature. "You know? You really do? So tell us. What are we chasing after? What happened to the music?"

  "It was eaten," said the Eater of Souls.

  "Why?"

  Ammut did not answer.

  Jimi wasn't afraid of anything. He planted himself at the creature's feet and glared up the whole bizarre length of it. "You know why. You can tell us. Then we'll be gone. What are you afraid of? What are we getting ourselves in for?"

  Ammut was still silent. I thought Jimi would haul off and smash his guitar on it, but Ay stood up and laid his hand on Jimi's arm. His eyes were the same as Ammut's—exactly. "Grief," he said.

  "I know we're in for grief," Jimi said crossly. "Why?"

  "Grief," Ay said again.

  "Whose?" I thought to ask.

  "Hers."

  He sagged like an empty sack. When we picked him up again, the spirit that had been in him was gone. He was Ay again, the guide who could see the trail of a curse.

  That trail led straight down below Ammut's big round hippopotamus feet. The base of the throne was a door, and the door opened on darkness. The curse was down there somewhere.

  I could feel it. I could almost see it. And yet I had no desire to follow it into the dark. It would have been oh so easy to stay here in this afterlife, where everything was so bright and so clear. Nothing was forcing me. I didn't have to go.

  When the rest moved forward, moved with them. I couldn't stop now, even for this afterlife. I was bound as the rest were, even if was the end of me. We all walked under the arch of Ammut's legs, down into the pyramid.

  ~~~~~

  The light went out behind us. We walked in musty darkness, tramping down a long straight passage.

  Slowly the darkness lightened. The light had an orange tinge, which grew stronger as we came closer. After an endless, leg-cramping while, we came to the bottom.

  A lake of fire surged and seethed in front of us. A thin rim of shore ran around it. We walked in single file, feeling the heat crisping our faces and hands. The flames hissed at us. I could hear words and fragments of sentences in those bloodless voices.

  The shore was black glass, and slippery. It was hard going. Ay, in front as always, moved slower and slower. He hadn't been himself since Ammut's spirit possessed him. He was thin and pale, and he looked terribly old.

  I saw how he let go. He just stopped, and his foot slipped. Jimi, right behind him, caught him before he fell.

  He twisted in Jimi's hands. His face had contorted out of all humanity. He struck with long thin fangs. Jimi recoiled against the wall. The scaled and limbless thing that had been Ay dived into the lake of fire and disappeared with a flick of snaky tail.

  The four of us who were left stood on the glassy shore. The lake was a circle; if we followed the rim, we'd end up back where we began. Our guide was gone. The trail of the curse ran right—ran straight—

  I almost laughed. Of course it ran straight to the middle of the lake and then plunged down, just as the Ay-snake had. He had been guiding us after all. He'd led us to this, and that would be the end of us.

  "It's there," Libba said as if she'd read my thoughts. "It's down there, at the bottom of the lake."

  "Just when you think it can't get worse," Jimi said, but he didn't sound particularly depressed. Ever since we'd come through Malebolge, he'd been almost happy. The beast had eaten his fear. Maybe he didn't even care any more that he'd lost his music.

  I couldn't let myself think that way. "I'll go," I said. "I'll swim the lake. I'll bring back the music if I can."

  "We'll all do it," Libba said. She'd stopped fading, and her voice was strong. "I know what this is. It's purification. I wouldn't mind being pure."

  "I would," Jimi said, "but I mind losing the music more."

  He grabbed Libba's hand and my hand. I had just enough time to grab the silver-dollar man before Jimi pulled us all over the edge into the lake.

  ~~~~~

  It hurt. It hurt behind imagination. It seared the fresh clean off my bones and charred the bones to ash. It stripped my soul bare. Every tiny flaw and fault, every sin, every failing, every word I'd said that had done any least bit of harm, flared up and puffed into smoke.

  And all the while my soul was flaming out like a meteor, I was falling down through the lake of fire, stretched tight between Jimi and the silver-dollar man. They were burning as brightly as I was. Libba was a nova, blinding and beautiful.

  We fell out of fire into grey twilight. All around us was a flat and marshy country interlaced with skeins of rivers. We were all still there. The others were clearer somehow, not transparent exactly, but they looked as if they'd been cleaned inside and out.

  I felt and must have looked as brand-new as they did. Jimi was more Jimi than ever, with his wild hair and his big guitar, and Libba was wonderful—beautiful. I'd almost have said they didn't need the music. They were what it struggled so long and hard to be.

  Silver-dollar man was the only one who looked charred around the edges. The fire had had to go deep with him, and burn hot, to get rid of whatever wrongs he'd done. His face had fallen in and his eyes were too wide and too bright. His clothes hung loose on a frame gone gaunt.

  I let go of him and wiped my hand on my jeans. It was a failing, after I'd been cleansed of so many, but I couldn’t help it. This was—had been—a man I'd never have wanted to know.

  He'd come with us through hell and worse, and he'd never abandoned or betrayed us. I had to give him credit for that. He wouldn't still be here if he wasn't supposed to be.

  We'd come through to this place at dawn. Day grew as we picked a directio
n and went in it—following the sense of the curse, which was so strong now that it was a compulsion. Mosquitoes whined. Birds chirped and skreeked and cawed. This was like Ay's afterlife—irresistibly alive.

  This was a very, very old place. Older than Malebolge, older than Ammut's kingdom. It was so old that its souls had completely forgotten they were dead. They lived perpetually the lives they'd known in the morning of the world.

  We came out of the marshes to a city of low mud-brick walls and squat towers, and rising out of them the tapered steps of a ziggurat. There were houses outside the walls, reed huts inhabited by short, round-headed, stocky people with very round and prominent eyes. They were fishermen and farmers, and some were artisans: I saw one building a two-wheeled cart and another molding a short, round-headed, stocky image out of river clay.

  They stared at us as we went by. Visitors must be rare here, considering how difficult it was to get this far. Their stares weren't hostile, and a few even smiled. They weren't afraid, then.

  Even here, the music was silent. They had instruments, but no one played them. No one sang in the fields or on the boats. The rhythms of ordinary speech were all they had, here as everywhere else.

  Somehow I'd ended up in the lead. The thing we'd followed so far was like a rope around my neck, pulling me down the road and into the old, old city.

  It was a city of circles, each one with a gate, and at each gate a guardian. The people who lived there came and went at will, as far as I could tell, but strangers could only go one way, and that was through the guarded gates.

  There were nine of them. Nine was an important number in the afterlives. The first guard was almost human except for his long white fangs. The second had eyes like a cat, round and yellow and sly. The third had a goat's horns curling over its shoulders. By the sixth, there was nothing human about it.

  They wanted payment for passage. I satisfied the first with the buckle from my belt, which was a Green Man in pewter. The second took silver-dollar man's snakeskin boots. The third got Jimi's Peace medallion.