The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  I whispered the Master-Word. The shining, timeless fragment in his soul pulsed in glad recognition.

  Human. Perithoös was human.

  The Master-Word stirred something in him. Even though he was frozen, his blood and nerves all solid, there was sufficient action in his brain to allow his thought to reach through the armor of the coffin and touch my brain:

  You came!

  “I came.”

  It was not unexpected that even a frozen man could still send and hear thoughts. If this method of suspending life could have also suspended the spiritual essences of life, and kept them safe, the star-voyages of early man would not have ended in such nightmarish horror, for the space-men would have been deaf to the things that whisper in the dark of the aetheric spaces, and would have returned from the void whole and sane.

  Slay me and then slay yourself. We are surrounded by the powers from the House of Silence.

  “I came to save you, not to kill you.”

  I merit death. I slew Mirdath.

  “Mirdath? She lived and died many generations ago.”

  Hellenore. I mean Hellenore. My only love; the fairest maid our pyramid ever knew. She was to be my bride. And I also slew her child. The child in the womb reached out and touched my mind, and told me things I should not have heard.

  “Your child?”

  No. A creature who carried her off to the Tower-Without-Doors and violated her; things were done to her womb to permit her to conceive a nonhuman.

  I winced at the thought. “What creature? An abhuman?”

  No, though it answered to them. The bridegroom was a thing bred or made by the arts of the House of Silence, in the centuries since the fall of the Lesser Redoubt.

  I knew that when that Redoubt fell, out of all those millions, only Mirdath had been saved. Of the rest, not all of them had been allowed to die without suffering, especially not the women, and most were put to pain of the type death does not ease.

  “You call it a bridegroom? She married it?”

  The abhumans mock our sacraments. You know why.

  I nodded. It is not enough that we die; that will not satisfy them. They must make the things we deem precious seem grotesque and ugly, even to us, so that there is nothing fair left in the world. (I speak of the lesser servants, the ones once human. We are not in the thoughts of the greater ones.)

  The bridegroom bit my weapon out of my hand, and tore off my arm, but the Capsule buried in my forearm broke beneath its iron teeth, and venom filled its mouth.

  “It died instantly?”

  No. Its unnatural life stayed in its frame long enough to slay the rest of my men.

  I killed the child with my thoughts, for its life was weak: but Hellenore, by then, had no soul to slay, and I strangled her one-handed while she clawed out my eyes. Such was my last sight.

  Slay me, that I may cease from seeing it ever and again forever.

  “Many a weary mile, I have walked to save you, Perithoös, for I will not fail of the promise we made as children. Why did you call out to me, across all miles of the Night Lands, if you did not wish me to bring you back into the warmth and human comfort of our mighty home?”

  I cannot open the door.

  “Do you mean the casket lid?”

  The door that opens to escape from a life that grows intolerable. The door that honor commands men to use when all other doors are shut. You must open the door for me. You of all men know that there is something beyond that door, and that it opens back into this life again, but with forgetfulness, blessed forgetfulness, to quench the pain of memory. There is much I must forget.

  A picture came from his brain-elements into the visual centers of my brain. It was an image of Hellenore, her eyes filled with childish faith in the man she loved. She raised a gauntlet too large for the slender hand that bore it, and tilted back a helmet too large for her, and raised her mouth for one last kiss, before she slid down a rope from a small window in the postern gate.

  Away across the black and grainy soil of the Night Lands she walked; and there she was, outlined for a moment against the glow of the Electric Circle; then she was gone.

  She had not been moving as those who are Prepared are trained to move, skulking from rock to rock, or standing motionless to let one’s gray cloak blend with the gray background, avoiding discolored patches of ground. She did not know how to walk.

  And she dragged the great weapon behind her, for the weight was more than she could bear, and she wheeled it like a wheel-barrow on its blade; an image that would be comical, were it not so horrifying.

  His thoughts were clear as crystal, sharps as knives:

  She will not be born anew. The darkness consumed her. I have destroyed her forever. I sent her into the Night without a Capsule, without the words and rites, without the exercises of the soul and mind, carrying a weapon she had never swung before, in armor too big for her.

  More images. Perithoös had sent her out. He lowered her on a rope from a window in the postern gate and watched her walk away. His gift allowed him to choose a time when the portreve was one who admired his fame too much to turn him in, and the gate-warden he could blackmail with knowledge taken from the man’s own guilty mind.

  The enormity of the crime was too great for me to take in. I was overcome with emotion at that moment. The strength left my legs, and I sat. My weapon I put down, the first time it had left my grip in weeks. I put my head in my hands.

  “Madness!” I said. “Madness. There were simpler ways to die, and ways that do not carry hundreds of dead down with you! Was she so jealous of Mirdath, did the law that forbids women to walk the Night Lands offend her so much? Did she so much want to be thought more manly than a man? It was not enough for her that she was more fair than women?”

  That was not the reason.

  Eventually, I said softly: “Why?”

  For love.

  “What?”

  Love. Surely that emotion excuses us from all limits, all law. We thought we could be together, here. We thought the stronghold of Usire would provide us some sanctuary against the Night, but that we would be far from the Pyramid free to live as we wished . . .

  “Madness! Would she step to the bottom of the sea without a suit, or play with lepers without an immunity? Ah, but you don’t know about oceans or lepers, do you? All old things are dead to you, including the wisdom of our laws!”

  Some old things I know. I gave her a harquebus from a museum, and brought it to life with the Earth-Current. I rendered it obedient to her with my thought. The piece was able to discharge a streamer over 900 yards, carrying a charge enough to kill a Dun Giant.

  “You know why the ancients forbade us to use such weapons. The energy can be sensed from miles away, even of a single shot. Or do you? How little do you know of the world you live in, of what has come before? Why trick her into killing herself in such a foolish fashion? Surely it would have been simpler to throw her from an embrasure, or dash out her brains against a post, or bury her alive. Did you want to feed them? Feed the horrors?”

  I was imagining her, surprised by a petty-worm or scorpion, touching off the voltage, and sending a lightning-bolt echoing across the darkened land. I imagined the thing we see shadowed in one of the windows of the House of Silence tilting its dark head toward the source of the energy-noise. I imagined Night Hounds, pack upon pack, swarming down from the Lesser Dome of Far Too Many Doors, baying as they came.

  I spoke in a voice made hollow and weak from despair and disgust. How could he overlook what was so plain to see?

  “No woman, ever, must travel in the Night Lands. Here are monsters to slay us.”

  She thought she would foresee them, or that my spirit would warn me ere they came near. And . . . And . . .

  “And what?”

  I had prepared everything for us, a Capsule she could carry in her poke, an instrument that would lead us to where the Stronghold of Usire was, by the traces of Earth-Current it still gave off. If the instrument sensed
nothing, we would turn and come back home; and so there was no risk – we thought that the monsters would stay clear of any land were the Earth-Current was running. And if we found this place, we could reconnect the White Circle to the Current, sanctify the ground, and erect an Air-Clog of our own, stronger than that we had left. It would have been, not as safe as Home, but safer!

  “You sent her off by herself? By herself?!”

  I meant to meet her before the hour was gone! Less! Forty minutes, no more! Time enough for me to descend and escape out of a wicket, carrying the other gear. I had to stay behind to joggle the power, or else the Air-Clog would not have parted for us.

  From a low window, we had together picked the rock where she was to hide and wait for me; it was less than eighty yards from the gate! Eighty yards! She could not have mistaken the rock; we had studied every feature lovingly. She could not have mistaken the rock! It was cleft like a miter, and one part jutted like my sister Phaegia’s nose.

  He said more, much more, then; many excuses, much sophistry. I could not make myself heed his thoughts. My own thoughts were too loud: I kept picturing what it must have been for her.

  To be trapped in the darkness of the outer lands, being hunted by Night Hounds, to have the eyes of inhuman beings searching the unending night – and then, after hunger and weariness and nightmares and false hopes – to be found by the Cold Ones, and taken to their secret places, and to have one’s nervous system laid open, and all one’s intimate thoughts laid bare. And then to be raped by unclean creatures, and then to marry one’s rapist. And all this time to wonder why one’s own beloved, one’s true love, the beloved you trusted and cherished above all others, to have him merely abandon you to this fate . . .

  I was walking up and down the aisles of the ruined museum, looking for an axe or heavy bar. It was not something I meant to think, but I was looking for something to smash in the casket lid, and expose the freezing innards to the air. (Even in my anger and turmoil, I note that it never occurred to me to use the Diskos on him: it is something we only ever swing against monsters. I do not know if any human person has ever been struck with one.)

  Perithoös broke into my endless circle of thought: I tried! I was prevented! I wanted to come after her immediately. That was our plan, but –

  I pounded my fist against the portal where his frozen, maimed face was held in ice. The noise was loud, but the glass held, despite the hardness of my gauntlets.

  Like water bubbling from a holed jug, my anger left me. Men who have eaten nothing but the tablets for weeks do not have stomach enough to stay angry.

  I sat down again.

  “But you were arrested by the magistrates, weren’t you?”

  Yes.

  I said: “They granted clemency on your promise that you would venture out after her. Has the world gone mad? You mocked the law that says no woman ever may venture into the Land; they mocked that law that forbids a man of unsound mind or unfit character may go. You were but a callow youth, perhaps that can excuse; but they were judges. Men of the law!”

  The judges thought that no punishment the hand of man could mete out would match this.

  “And no one else could trace the screaming, her voice you could hear in your head, back to the source: they needed you to find her.”

  The Silent Ones let her scream so that others would come forth from the Pyramid and be Destroyed. They opened their barrier to let my call reach you for the same reason.

  I nodded sadly. And the Silent Ones would have had me, had not one of those Powers that no one can explain intervened.

  You know I betrayed you.

  “You were afraid the Silent Ones would destroy you unless you called other children of men out from the Last Redoubt. It is an old, old trick. An old fear.”

  A fear you do not share. What is wrong with your thoughts? Why are you not afraid?

  “I was spared.”

  The Silent Ones will not permit us to leave this place! I am wounded and blind. How can you hope we can cross the Night Lands together? Hellenore said she saw many pairs of boot-prints leading out, but only one coming back in. You will live: not me. It is fated.

  I said, “Fated. I don’t understand why Hellenore went forth. Were her visions of the future unclear? Did she have some vision that told her she was to be a wife and mother, but it cruelly deceived her?”

  I deceived her. She saw what was to come. I told her not to believe her visions.

  “Why did she listen to such a stupid idea?”

  Because you deceived her. You convinced her that fate could be changed.

  “I said the opposite; that we must endure what could not be changed.”

  She was convinced of that, too. Even when I talked her into venturing forth, in her mind there was nothing but grim resolve. Women sacrifice much and suffer much to become our wives, to bear our children; nature inclines them to endure great sacrifice.

  “A sacrifice for what? For what gain? She knew that bloodshed and destruction would spring from her going-forth. What – ”

  Something like laughter came from his frozen brain. She saw far, far into the future. Isn’t it obvious? I found the shaft. I reconnected the main leads. I restored the power. As I had planned from the start. But it took me months.

  “What do you mean? What – ?”

  Are you an idiot? The casket is powered. The Earth-Current is alive, here, still strong, but deep, deep beneath the rock. And so the victory of the dark powers here is not complete.

  You must return to the Last Redoubt with this news: if they drive a shaft deep enough, and at an angle to find the sources directly beneath this spot, the Last Redoubt will live out its promised span of life five million years hence; otherwise we fail within a few hundred years.

  The engineering needed to drive a shaft so many miles to find so small a place might be beyond the powers of the present generation of men; but there would be generations to come. The gardens, and fields, and mines beneath the Great Redoubt were so extensive, that, compared to that work, what Perithoös proposed was not an insurmountable matter.

  I cannot explain why I laughed. The laughter was bitter on my tongue. I said, “So all our proud and vain dreams of returning as heroes will come true, won’t they? We will be lauded. I can think of no more just punishment for folly, than to have foolish wish come true.”

  We?

  (I admit the word surprised me as well. It just slipped out; but, once I had said it . . . )

  “We.”

  I am blind and crippled, and wicked besides.

  “You are coming with me.”

  If I return to the pyramid, the magistrates will condemn me to death.

  “And so your wish shall be granted! Or perhaps the law that you may not stand twice for the same offense will forbid a new hearing. If judges still uphold our laws, which seems not the fashion among these modern folk. In any case, it is their affair, not mine.”

  Why do you not bestow the death my acts have merited? Have you no sense of justice?

  “Well, obviously, not so much as I should have. A just man would have not answered your plea.”

  I felt a stirring in the aether, as if he were gathering his brain-elements to send a thought, but the thought was too confused, too full of shame, to send. Had his face not been frozen, I wonder what his expression might have given away.

  “You put me on trial, didn’t you? You pretended to misplace the Master-Word. If I had been a man of justice, obedient to our laws, I would have been safe, and never answered you. I failed your trial and you condemned me to death and annihilation at the hands of the Silent Ones. Your justice condemned me; but something spared me. I wonder why. Why was I spared?”

  You knew you should not come. Why did you come?

  I came because I am a romantic fool, the kind of fool it is easy to fool. But he had asked the wrong question.

  “Don’t ask why I came. Ask why had I been permitted to come. Ask why the cunning of the House of Silence did not prevai
l. A miracle was wrought to permit me to be here. My certain destruction and doom was set aside. Why?”

  I saw now why the star had parted the clouds to touch me, and to restore my life to me.

  It was, at once, a reprieve and a punishment heavier than I could imagine: for my punishment was to stand, in relation to Perithoös, as that star had stood to me, and save him. To be his friend, despite all his crimes, all his foolish pride and boastful madness, to be his friend nonetheless, and save him.

  Perhaps the Good Power that had saved me meant to save the Last Redoubt as well, to let the message go through telling where another vein of the Earth-Current could be found in the shrinking core of the planet. But, somehow, I doubted it. The things that seem great and momentous to men, I am sure are of little matter to the Ulterior Powers who sometimes protect Life.

  I knew the words to start the rebirth-cycle for the coffin, and how to adjust the feeds to bring the Earth-Current back into his body, so that uneven thawing would not mar him.

  I picked up my weapon again, and leaned on it. The Earth-Current within the haft was aware of the current flowing in the casket: a phenomenon spiritualists call affected resonance. It felt good to have the warlike spirit of my Diskos propping me up at that moment; in a former life, I owned a boarhound, and his loyalty had been not unlike this.

  Perithoös touched his mind to mine again, but weakly. His spirit was faint, for his aura was being drawn back close to his flesh in preparation for the decanting, he would sleep many hours before the lid would open and he would wake. But I heard him.

  I don’t understand.

  “How can you not understand me? You see my thoughts.”

  I see your thoughts, but they are senseless.

  Strange. My thoughts seemed perfectly clear to me.

  The same madness that drove Perithoös into the night was the only thing that might save him from it. The love that binds friends or brothers is no less real than that which binds wooer and beloved. The power that saved me surely knew what a boastful and foolish man I was: But mothers do not strangle their babies if they are born lame; the stars do not cease to shine on us if we men cripple ourselves.