The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  At that time, neither one of us knew Hellenore of High Aerie.

  I had been found in the library by proctors of the Watch, whose instruments had detected the aetheric disturbance sent by the voice in the Night.

  The Monstruwacans kept me for a time as a guest in their tower, and I drank their potions, and held the sensitive grips of their machines, while they muttered in their white beards and looked doubtful. More than once I slept beneath their oneirometers, or was examined inch by inch by a physician’s glass.

  I told them many times of my mind-speech with Perithoös, and they did not look pleased; but the physician’s glass said my soul was without taint, and my nervous system seemed sound, and besides, both the Archivist (the head of my guild) and the Master of Architects (the head of my father’s) sent letters urging my release, or else demanding that an inquest be convened at once.

  I spent the remainder of my convalescence in Darklairstead, my father’s mansions on level Fourscore-and-Five. Ever since, a generation ago, the power failed along this stretch of corridor (half the country receiving from the sub-station at Bountigrace is dark) it has been a quiet and restful place.

  Among my very earliest memories was one dream, repeated so many times in my childhood that I filled a whole diary with scrawled words and clumsy sketches trying to capture what I saw.

  When I was seven years, my mother died, and her shining coffin was lowered into the silvery rays of the Great Chasm. My father became strange and cold. He sent my brother Arion to prentice with the Structural Stress Masters. Tmelos (who is younger than I) was sent to the quarters of my Aunt Elegia, in Forecourtshire, for her to raise; Patricia took holy orders, and Phthia stayed with Father to run the house and rule the servants. Me, I was sent to board at a school in Longnorthhall of Floor 601, where the landing of the Boreal Stair reaches for many shining marble acres under lamps of the elder days, and potted Redwoods grow. When I left home for school, the dream left me.

  As I recovered at my father’s manse, the dream came once again, and it no longer frightened me, for nothing that reminds one of childhood, even ill things, can be utterly without a certain charm.

  It was a dream of doors.

  I saw tall doors made of a substance that gleamed like bronze and red gold (which I later found to be a metal called Orichalcum, an alloy made by a secret only the ancients knew). The doors were carven with many strange scenes of things that had been and things that would be.

  In the dream I would be terrified that they would open.

  Father and I would dine alone, without servants. The dining chamber is a pillared hall, wide and gloomy. Out of the hatch window, I would often see, across the air shaft from me, little candles dancing in the hatches of some of my neighbors. Once, candles had been used only for the most solemn ceremonies, back when the ancient rules against open flames in the pyramid had been enforced: the sight of candles used as candles always saddened me.

  Some nights there was a hint of music from some city far overhead, echoing down the shaft, and, once, the hiss of a bat-winged machine carrying a Currier-boy (only boys are small enough) down the air-shaft on some business of the Life Support House, or perhaps the Castellan, too urgent to wait for the lifts.

  Our table was made from a tree felled down in the underground country, by a craftsman whose art is the cutting and jointing of living material, an art called Carpentry. Such is Father’s prestige he can have such things brought up the lifts for him, but he has never moved the family to better quarters.

  My father is a big, tall man, with fierce, penetrating eyes in an otherwise very mild face. He shaves his chin, but has a moustache that bristles, and this gives his penetrating eyes a strange and savage look.

  I have dreamed of other lives, and once, in a prehistoric world, a dusky savage who was me, strong and lean of limb, and braver than I ever hoped to be, died beneath the claws of a tiger. The great cat was more bright of hue than anything in our world is, shining orange and black as it slunk through dripping jungles beneath a sun as hot as the muzzle of a culverin. I wonder what became of that species, that lived on some continent long since swallowed by the seas, before the seas dried up, before the sun died. I have always thought that extinct beast looked something like my father.

  His bald head was growing back in new hair, as sometimes happens to men of his order, for men who work near the Earth-Current, their vitality was greater than normal.

  After dinner, we brought out carafes of water and wine, which glistened in the candlelight, and mixed them in our bowls. I am sparing of the wine and he is sparing of the water; but he is sober even when he drinks deep, and shows no levity nor thickwittedness. Perhaps exposure to the Earth-Current helps here too.

  He sat with his bowl in his hand, staring out the air-shaft. He spoke without turning his head. “You know the tale of Andros and Naäni. You were raised on it. I am sure I hate it as much as you adore it.”

  I said, “Andrew Eddins of Kent, and Christina Lynn Mirdath the Beautiful. The tale shows that, even in a world as dark as ours, there is light.”

  Father shook his head. “False light. Will-o’-Wisp light! I do not blame the hero for his deeds. They were great, and he was a mighty man, high-hearted and without vice. But the hope he brought served us ill. Perithoös was no Andros, to go into the Night. And that highborn girl who toyed with your affections; Hellenore. She was no Mirdath the Beautiful. Hellenore the Vain, I should call her.”

  “Please speak no ill of the dead, Father. They cannot answer you.”

  He raised his bowl with a graceful gesture and took a silent sip, and paused to admire the taste. “Hm. Neither can they hear me, and so they will not flinch. She is not the first of the dead who have served the living poorly. He did us ill, whichever forefather first thought it would be wise to leave us tales and songs that tell young boys to go be brave and die, or to perish for a gesture.”

  I said, “Keeping a promise counts for more than mere gesture, Father.”

  “Does keeping a promise count more than preserving flesh or soul?”

  I said, “Those who study such matters say that souls are born again in later ages, even if the conscious memories are lost; poets claim that oath-breakers are reborn into lives accursed with turmoil and bitter anguish. If so, then each man in his present life must take care to die spotlessly, his soul still pure.”

  Father smiled bitterly. He did not read poets. “What point is the punishment, if, in his next life, each criminal has forgotten what crime he did?”

  I said, “So that even men who are stoical and hard in this life will fear to break their word; for, in their next, they will be young and green again; and suffering that comes unannounced, for reasons that seem reasonless, are surely the hardest pains of all to bear.”

  “A pretty tale. Must you die for an idle fiction?”

  “Sir, it is not a fiction.”

  He said: “Must you die, fiction or not?”

  “I had no other friend in my school days.”

  “Perithoös was no true friend!”

  “And yet I gave my word to him, friend or not. Now I am called to fulfill it.”

  “Who calls? There are Powers in the dark who can mock our voices and our thoughts, and deceive even the wisest of us. Only the Master-Word is one the Horrors cannot utter, for it represents a concept that they cannot understand, an essence that does not dwell in them. If what called to you did not call out the Master-Word, you know our law commands you not to heed it.”

  I answered: “Despite the law, despite all wisdom, still, a hope possesses me that he is alive, and undestroyed, somehow.”

  He said grimly: “A true man would not call out to you.”

  I did not know if he meant that a man of honor would die before he let himself be used to lure a friend out into the darkness; or if he meant that what called out to me had not been human at all. Perhaps both.

  I said: “What sort of man would I be, if it truly were Perithoös calling, and I did not answer?
”

  He said: “It is your death calling.”

  And I had no answer back for that. I knew it was so.

  After a space of silence, eventually he spoke again: “Do you see any cause for hope you say has taken possession of you?”

  “I see no cause.”

  “But – ?”

  “But hope fills me up, Father, nonetheless, and it burns in my heart like a lamp, and makes my limbs light. There are many ugly things we do not see in this dark land that surrounds us, Father, horrors unseen. And there are said to be good powers as well, whose strange benevolence works wonders, though never in a way humans can know. And they also are not seen, or only rarely. There are many things, which, although unseen, are real. More real than the imperishable metal of our pyramid, more potent than the living power of the Earth-Current. More real than fire. So, I admit, I see no cause for hope. And yet it fills me.”

  He was silent for a while, and sipped his wine. He is a rational man, who solved problems by means of square and chisel, stone and steel, measured currents of energy, knowing the strengths of structures and what load each support can bear. I knew my words meant little to him.

  He reached his hand and doused the lantern, so that I could not see the pain in his face. He voice hovered in the dark, and he tried to make his words cold: “I will not forbid you to venture into the Night Lands . . .”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “. . . Since I have other sons to carry on my name.”

  Visions, pulmenoscopy, and extra-temporal manifestations are not unknown to the people of the Last Redoubt. The greatest among us are known to have the Gift; and at least one of the Lesser Redoubt also was endowed with the Night-Hearing, and memory-dreams.

  Mirdath the Beautiful is the only woman known to have crossed the Night Lands, and her nine scrolls of the histories and customs of the Lesser Redoubt are the only record of any kind we have for the history, literature, folkways and sciences of that long-lost race of mankind. All the mathematical theories of Galois we know only from her memory; the plays of Euryphaean, and the music of an instrument called a pianoforte, infinite resistance coil and the sanity glass, and all the inventions that sprang from them, are due to her recollection. Her people were a frugal folk, and the energy-saving circuits they used, the methods of storing battery power, were known to them a million years ago, and greatly conserved our wealth. Much of what she knew of farming and crops we could not use, for the livestock and seed of our buried fields were strange to her.

  She knew more of the lost aeons than even Andros, and was able to tell tales from the time of the Cities Ever Moving West, of the Painted Bird, and of the Gardens of the Moon; she knew something of the Failures of the Star-Farers, and of the Sundering of the Earth.

  More, she also had the gift of the Foretelling, for some of the dreams she had were not of the past, but of the future, and she wrote of the things to come, the Darkening, the False Reprieve, the disaster of the Diaspora into the Land of Water and Fire, the collapse of the Gate beneath the paw of the South Watching Thing, the years of misery and the death of man, beyond which is a time from which no dreams return, although there is said to be a screaming in the aether, dimly heard through the doors of time, the time-echo of some event after the destruction of all human life. All these things are set out in the Great Book, and for this reason Mirdath is also called The Predictress.

  Mirdath and Andros had fifty sons and daughters, and all the folk of High Aerie claim descent from them, some truly, and some not.

  Hellenore of High Aerie was one of those who made that claim truly.

  When I was a young man, a time came when my future had disturbed those whose business it is to seek foreknowledge from dreams, and I was summoned to an audience.

  For many generations the Foretelling art had fallen in disrepute, and charlatans rose to deceive the common people; but then a girl of the blood of Mirdath was born whose gift was proven by many sad events, the Library of Ages-Yet-To-Be was reopened. The Sibylline Book had more treatises of prophecy added to it, and eschatologists compared dream-journals and revised their estimates. Even I had heard of her: the hour-slips said she was sure to be the next Sibyl.

  I don’t recall the date. It must have been soon after my Initiation, for I wore my virile robe, and my hair was cropped short as befits a man. The blade that was ever after to be partnered with my life, I had hung over the narrow door to my cell in the journeyman’s room of the Librarian’s Guildhouse, as only those beyond their fourteenth year are permitted. I remember that the squire to come fetch me called me ‘Sir’ instead of ‘Lad’, even though he (to my young eyes) seemed incredibly old.

  I remember the Earth-Current was running strong that year. It was my first time at the Great Lift Station for my floor. Invisible forces lifted the platform in a great surge of wind off the deck. Maidens clutched their bonnets and squealed, and many a young gallant (for a strong flow of the Earth-Current makes lads more bold and amorous) took the opportunity to put an arm around fair shoulders to steady a maiden making her first voyage away from her level. Some of the more daring boys leaned over the rail, and waved their caps at the rapidly dwindling squares and rooftops of the city, before, like an iron sky, the underside of the next deck upwards swallowed the lift platform. I rode the axial express all the way to the utmost level. I remember I had to drink a potion made by the apothecary, because of the thinness of the air.

  Fate House that sits atop the highest stories of the highest city; the hanging gardens of High Aerie sit between the shining skylights of West Cupola and the pleasances and airy walks of Minor Penthouse. There are floral gardens here, under glass, as well as pools and lakes amid the rooftop-fields of the long-empty aerodromes built by ancient peoples.

  The domes of Fate House are dusky blue, inscribed with gold, and, above the roof-tiles, many a monument of ancient hero or winged genius of the household stood on slender pillars among the minarets. All within was as somber and august as a fane.

  Here was Hellenore daughter of Eris. I see again the sheen of her satiny dress, as she sat beneath the rose lamp on a Lector’s chair too large for her delicate frame. How like a swan’s, her neck, all her mass of ink-black hair was gathered up and held in place with amethyst pins, jewel-drops like the stars the ancients knew, within the clear darkness of their temporary nights. I recall the delicate small hairs, wanton and wild, that had strayed from the strictness of her coiffure, and kissed the nape of her neck.

  None of our pyramid has eyes like that, hair like that, save those descended from the strange blood of Mirdath the Beautiful. And none but me remembered the grace of the swan, and so none but me could see it in her.

  Her voice was soft music, each word careful and light, like a brushstroke of calligraphy laid in the air. With what delicate tones she spoke of the grim horrors in the night, the grim future she foresaw nightly in her dreams!

  We spoke for a time, of the horrors of the Deception two million years hence (slightly less than halfway between now and the Extinction), when colonies of man leaving the Great Pyramid would go to dwell in what seemed a fair country to the West, even as certain legends said, not knowing that the House of Silence had already cursed and undermined the whole of that land, and merely held their influence at bay for millennia, waiting for the memory of these prophecies of Hellenore to be forgotten. Whole cities, pyramids and domes as great as ours, would be swallowed and cracked open, and multitudes would die, one entire branch of the human family wiped out; the survivors to be changed into something not human.

  Then we spoke of my fate.

  “My visions revealed hundreds shall die because of some ill-considered act you set in motion; first one, then many more, will go pelting out into the darkened world to perish amid the ice, or be ripped to bloody rags by Night-Hounds, to be sucked clean of their souls and left as husks, grinning mouths and eyes as dry as stones. Heed me! I see many prints of boots across the icy dust of the Night Lands, leading outward from our gat
es; I see but one set coming in.”

  I asked: “Must these things come to pass?”

  “No human power can alter what must be.”

  “And powers more than human?”

  She said softly: “We foreseers behold the structure of time; there are creatures not quite wholly inside of time, powers of the Night Lands, whose malice we cannot foretell, since they are above and alien to the rules of time and space that bind all mortal life; there are said to be good powers, too.”

  “A riddle! Man’s fate can be changed, but men cannot change fate,” I asked.

  Her full lips toyed with a smile, but she did not allow the smile to appear. “We are but drops in a river, young man,” she said. “No matter what one drop might wish or do, the river course is set, and all waters glide to the ocean.”

  These words electrified me. “Ah!” I said, forgetting my manners, jumping up and taking her hand. “Then you have seen them too! Rivers and oceans! In visions, I have seen and heard the waters flowing, ebbing, pulled by tides, crashing by the shore. There is no sound alike it in the world, now.”

  She was startled and displeased, and favored me with a look of ice as she drew her fair and slender hand from mine. “Strange boy – what is your name again? – I spoke a line from old poetry. My people in the high-most towers are learned in such lore, and know old words like river and sea; but no one has seen them, except in the decorations of volumes none can read.”

  I did not say that there was one who could read what others had forgotten. I spoke stiffly, “My apologies, highborn one. Your comment thrilled my heart, for I had thought you meant to say that we would do great deeds in times to come, to defy that ocean that must swallow of human lore and history, so that the watercourse down which the current takes us might be ripped free of its bed, and set to a new path.”