Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  “Yes.”

  “But not finding. I can tell. But you’ve no drinkie. Can’t have that on All Hallows’ Eve.” She raised an arm. “Waiter, drinkie.” A dead waiter came to me and I reluctantly took a glass from his tray.

  “If you’ll excuse me …” I unfastened her hand which had somehow attached itself to my sleeve and pressed on into the party. She was a swap. A transex. I could tell from her hunger. The dead do so enjoy playing their little games. Dressing in the body of another for All Hallows’ Night is a favorite.

  Fireworks began to burst high over the old fortifications and people oohed and aahed as they do at fireworks. The living, of course. Such things are beneath the supposed dignity of the dead. I stopped by a ruined wall to take a sip from my drink and watch the skyfires. A middle-aged man stood beside me. He raised his glass.

  “Merry All Hallows’ to you.”

  Rockets burst in red and blue. To be sociable, I asked, “Who brings you here?”

  “Father, actually,” the middle-aged man replied. “Came here, oh, must be eight years back when he found he had … you know. Rather have the Scanner Slug take him than that, and who could blame him? He was one of the very first, you know. Come here to see him every Hallows’ Eve since without fail. Funny thing, the old man looks far better dead than he ever did alive. Must agree with him.”

  I smiled politely. “Wife,” I said. “Liver took her. Weird thing, the liver. The only thing they can’t do anything about. Hearts, lungs, kidneys, even brains, they can cope with, but the liver, nothing. She only came this year.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Still …”

  I was in confessional mood. “Family fortune got her here. Well, it was either here or Nagarashima; you know the way the lists have filled up since this thing became fashionable, but it was really here she wanted, she always loved the Mediterranean. Even after the small fortune that went into the Thamos Foundation’s numbered Swiss account, there’s still enough left for me to live on in the decadence to which I’m accustomed.”

  And then I saw her. In a green dress; she flitted across the busy street and up a stairway that twisted between two ruined houses.

  “Excuse me, but I’ve just—”

  “Seen her? I say, good luck to you! Bon chance!”

  I climbed the rotting staircase as quickly as I dared and came out into a courtyard where cypress trees grew. There were tables beneath the trees at which people sat talking and drinking together. I looked about me but there was no sign of her. I stopped an old woman with a touch on the arm and asked if she had seen a young woman in a green dress but the old woman shook her head slowly, sadly, and passed on down the stairway.

  As the night passed I worked my way through the rings of fortifications to the top of the island. I did so unconsciously, some mystic magnetism drawing me inward, upward. I passed through tavernas and bierkellars and barbeques, through foxtrot and gavotte and jive, through alcohol and tobacco and opium, through people dressed in garish fashions and in classic evening wear and in casual nakedness. But I did not find her. I would stop these people and ask them the same question: “Have you seen a young woman in a green dress?” Some shook their heads and returned to the party, others nodded and pointed me to an alley or a stairway or a cloister. But I did not find her.

  Toward midnight, the traditional witching hour of this All Hallows’ Eve when the festivities rose to their most frenzied, I thought I saw her running down the steps to the Charnel House. I called her name but she did not stop, and when I followed I found the Charnel House empty. As empty as any Charnel House can ever be. Another morbid little joke, but the skulls which line the floodlit pit are not those of the Dead. Their bodies lie in anabiotic suspension in necropolises cut deep into the underpinnings of Thanos. These bones were those of the humble lepers who owned this island long before the expense-account dead took it for themselves.

  “Sometimes the gleam of polished ivory can be so beautiful,” said a voice behind me. I turned. A dead woman stood at my shoulder. She paid me little regard but stared, fascinated, into the pit. Then at last she looked at me. Her eyes were very green. They should have been dust many years ago. “Our hold on immortality is very weak,” she whispered, “and our world, our reality, so tightly bounded. And we may only truly live as you live on this one All Hallows’ Eve.”

  The air under the brick dome of the Charnel House was dry and clean and the floodlights caught the little cracks and irregularities in the stonework. Skulls within a skull.

  “But, rather this, rather my one night of fleshly life than that …” She nodded at the skulls. “Isn’t it beautifully Classical? One night in the year our souls may be released from Purgatory, one night in the year when the bodies of the dead are relit and we move among the living. And, with the first light of dawn, we are gone, our earthly flesh back to the crypts, our souls back to the Simulator. Homer would have loved this place. We are the stuff of legends, we dead.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Catharsis maybe. And maybe I am Cassandra, and I call across the barriers between life and death to warn you of the boredom of being dead.” She laughed at that, a dry, dusty laugh. “Though I wonder how much more boring to be as they are.” She nodded at the gleaming leper-skulls.

  “Tell me,” I asked, “tell me, I’m looking for my wife, maybe you can help me?” I described her and I told the dead Cassandra of how the liver had eaten away at her until the morning when she called the Death House and two careful men had arrived with metal cases. They were both living but there was something very dead about their eyes, very very dead. They had opened their metal cases and taken out the tools of their trade and injected their slug into her brain and that was all until one day I had come home and she was gone. Gone away to Thanos with the men with dead eyes. We had written at first but then the letters had grown more and more irregular and had finally stopped altogether. It was then I had decided to come to the Island of the Dead to find her.

  The woman nodded bitterly.

  “This is the way it is,” she said. “Our lives are tinsel-bright in the island, but we are bored bored bored and bored people develop strange pastimes.” She turned to leave but I restrained her arm as she stooped to climb through the low arch.

  “Have you seen her? Can you help me at all?”

  The woman shook her head. “Leave. Don’t look for life in the place of the dead. Go.”

  Out on the terrace, masked dancers stepped in a stately minuet beneath light-strewn trees. I passed through them smiling and apologizing; then I caught a glimpse of her passing up a staircase onto the battlements. Dancers tripped and cursed and stumbled as I pushed and elbowed my way through but I reached the stone stairway just in time to see a flash of green dress vanish around a corner of the rock wall. Panting, I climbed the staircase and ran along the rampart. Puzzled revelers cleared out of my path, politely not staring. Then I saw her round a corner of rock. I ran. And there she was before me, leaning on the parapet, staring over the water to the hills of the mainland beyond. I stopped. I called her name once, twice, three times. She turned. I looked into her eyes. And they were not dead.

  “I’m sorry,” I remember saying, “I mistook you for someone else. I apologize.” I remember being amazed at my presence of mind in such a situation. The woman looked perplexed and in that instant the sideways tilt of her head reminded me achingly of her. Then the expression was gone and I looked again and she was not like her at all.

  “I mistook you for my dead wife,” I said. “I must have been following you around by mistake all night. I do hope you haven’t been getting any wrong impressions about me.”

  “I had noticed,” she said, “but the dead, and the living too, for that matter, do odd things on All Hallows’ Eve.” She seated herself on the parapet and patted the stone next to her. I sat and leaned back, stretching tired limbs.

  “Careful!” she said. “There’s a nasty drop back there. It would never do if there was a real death he
re.”

  I laughed at that, and relaxed, and there was a long comfortable silence.

  “The Venetians built this place,” she said after a while, looking up at the sheer stone walls of the bastion that bulked from the rock above us. “Put it here to keep an eye on the Turkish privateers who played hell with their trading routes. Didn’t do them any good, because the Turks took it off them sometime after the fall of Byzantium and kept it so they could keep an eye on the Venetian privateers who were playing hell with their trading routes. Held it up till the end of the First World War when the Greek nation was re-formed, and by that time piracy on anyone’s trade routes was out of fashion and even stout Venetian masonry was no match for ten-inch naval guns.”

  She cupped her hands around her knees and leaned back, looking up beyond the crumbled fortress to the autumn constellations.

  “Then the new Greek government designated it to be a leper colony. Strange to think there were such things as lepers in a civilized country like Greece until half a century or so ago. They used to bring them here from all over the Aegean. Sort of sad, I think. The last sight of the wider world was the little harbor of Aghios Georgios as the boat took them across to the island. I wonder sometimes how they were received by the others when the boat sailed away. Perhaps with sad resignation, perhaps with joy at the coming of a new brother to their little fellowship. Somehow, though, I can’t see this as having been a sad place.” She looked at me. “The last leper died in 1950 and the colony was closed and the island became a macabre tourist attraction. Hordes of check-shorted trippers in sun-glasses and sun-hats swarmed over it by the boatload snapping little Instamatics of the ruined village and the skulls and the tombs. That I think is sad; let the dead rest in peace.”

  “Little peace for the dead,” I said, “not after the Thanos Foundation bought the island from the Greek government. I heard that the price they paid was enough to refloat the foundering economy.”

  “I heard that too. Do you know what they called this island before the dead took it? Spiranaikos. That was its name, Spiranaikos, but then the dead came and dug their necropolises deep underground and filled it with their computers and renamed it Thanos. And on one day every year, on the Greek All Hallows’ Eve, they hold the Festival of the Dead and their bodies are relit and their souls come out of the Simulator and they walk amongst the living.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “I do? Perhaps I should be. I’ve been searching too.”

  “Your husband?”

  “No, my brother. We were very close; together we ran the business. Close, but separate, really, if you understand. Anyway, he contracted … you know, and he had only a matter of a few months left to him. But he wasn’t going to lie back in his bed in some comfortable, terrible hospice for the terminally ill and trickle away to nothing, not he. He spent his last months living in his grandly extravagant style. “Lived in style and I’ll damn well die in style too,” he said, and he did, he had style, you know. When his time came he called me to his lodge in the Andes and I saw him there on the sofa and he looked so dreadful. But he smiled and said, ‘It may try to get you in the end, but not me, not me,’ and he tapped the side of his head and winked. ‘It wasn’t cheap, this slug in my brain, but it won’t get me. After all the things I’ve done in this life, I’ll not have everything come apart just because I’m dead.’ I was the organizer, you see, but he was the one with the genius, the creative talent for business. Then he sat up and said, ‘In three days they’ll be back to take me to the Death House and then I’ll live forever.’

  “And in three days they returned and put him into a suspension pod and flew him to Thanos and he was gone. At first I received letters and phone calls and reports from him and the business boomed. The Simulator has lines to the outside world and the dead can conduct the business they did in life. Being dead hadn’t impaired his business acumen in the least.”

  “I’m reminded of Sylvia Jenke, her In This Still Life series of tone poems.”

  “But have you noticed,” she said intently, “how abstracted the works of the dead are becoming? I wonder, is it because their reality is just a computer simulation? In one of his letters my brother told me of how he had once taken a boat out of the harbor and sailed away toward the mainland but the nearer he drew to shore the hazier and more indistinct it became until he must have crossed some invisible boundary and there was nothing. No boat, no sea, no town of Aghios Georgios, no body, no self, just … void. Then he looked back, wherever ‘back’ might be, and there it was: Thanos, floating in a little bubble of air and sea and sunlight in the midst of void.”

  From the battlements above drifted the vigorous sound of Greek folk music: Iyra and bouzouki and flute and clapping hands. It sounded wonderfully real and vital.

  “Then there was a shift in the void, and he was back in the boat on the sea and the sun was shining and there were the blue hills of the mainland before him.

  “He said in his letter that he must have gone beyond the limits of the simulation, over the edge of the world into the nothing beyond.” She looked up to the source of the lively music. Up there people were whirling and stamping their feet and whooping in glee. “I sometimes wonder what it’s really like.”

  “They say you can do anything, be anything, you wish.”

  “As long as you stay within the limits of the simulation.”

  “True. One freedom bought at the expense of another. My wife told me in her letters how she spent each day, swimming and playing tennis and playing bridge and talking. She said you could drink all day and never get drunk, eat as much as you liked as often as you liked and never be full or fat. And of course, there were the wonderful imaginary companions she could conjure up when she tired of conversing with the pick of the world’s finest and richest minds. After that she stopped writing.”

  “Yes, my brother stopped writing too. I can’t help wondering if this dream-life is jading after a while? Perhaps the dead find their blunted appetites turning to more introverted, bizarre pursuits?”

  I remembered the dead man dressed in the woman’s body who had talked with me in the ruined town. I remembered the dead woman in the Charnel House who told me that bored people develop strange pastimes. I remembered the figures waltzing under the olive trees and realized that the dead danced with the dead and the living with the living.

  “We mean nothing to them,” I said. “They live in their own world where they make their own rules and their own relationships and the love we feel for them is forgotten.”

  “I began to realize that years ago,” the woman said, “but I kept coming back each year until this All Hallows’ Night I met my brother and greeted him and he did not even recognize me. He looked straight through me and all the love I felt for him just poured out of me onto the ground and was gone.” She looked around her. Her eyes were dark. “I hate this place. It refuses to die. The lepers; they died and their past died with them and their bones and skulls became a part of this island—but the dead that don’t die, they haunt this place, they hang over it like a shroud!

  “If you came here on any other day of the year, if you could slip past those smart sailor-boys who carry German machine pistols on any other day of the year, you would find the streets empty and the courtyards deserted and the houses crumbled and still and the dust thick under the olive trees, but you would feel the presence of the dead all around you; you would hear whispers of their casual conversations and their idle small talk as they swim and sail and play their phantom games of tennis in computer simulation while their restored bodies lie in underground tombs, awaiting this one day when they can walk amongst us and remember what a real world is like! We aren’t important to them any more, but our reality is! We remind them of the ghosts they truly are.”

  She was quiet for a while after her outburst. Then she said quietly, “Shall we go from this place?”

  I took her gently by the arm and together we left the quiet place on the ramparts. We came to a small ta
verna under the branches of a cedar tree and here we sat by a private table and talked and drank raw, resinous wine while the Dance of the Dead whirled past us. We talked of many things and after a while danced to a swing band. We laughed a lot. We found a tiny restaurant in a disused boathouse and ate grilled red snapper straight from the spit, burning our fingers on the hot flesh. We watched jugglers and acrobats and joined hands and danced in a ring to the tune of a Greek folk dance half as old as civilization. We stood on the beach by the embers of a dead bonfire and watched the breeze from the sea whipping the soft gray ashes away from the glowing coals beneath. We drank ouzo and watched the dark hills of the mainland grow in definition in the gray predawn glow.

  “Look,” she said, pointing. Columns of figures were climbing the alleyways and staircases that wound up the island. Bright costumes, bare skin, they moved up the winding stairways and along the limestone cloisters and ramparts of the Venetian fortress: the dead returning to the Underworld.

  We reached the stone jetty just as the first rays of morning touched the island. The last of the dead entered the necropolis and the brass gates closed behind. I knew that last figure.

  And she had once known me. But now she had returned to the land of the dead, that bone-dry landscape where she lived other lives and loved other loves. The island seemed to throb beneath my feet as the pulse of power built that would strip soul from body and send it whirling back into the Simulator while quiet, patient machines carried the discarded flesh back to its underground chamber and gently restored it.

  I blinked, shuddered, banishing the vision. The boats were arriving to ferry us back to the mainland. It was for us as for the ancient Greeks; only the living may return across Styx and only on the condition that they bring nothing back from the domain of the dead. I looked at the woman beside me, then at the bulk of the island. The sun was strong now and the fairy-lights in the olive trees glowed wanly.

  “Let them go,” I said at length.