Tanith By Choice: The Best of Tanith Lee

by Tanith Lee

  “So she said.”

  “And of course,” he said, “it can’t be, for she is 18 or 19, a girl.”

  Behind me, May shook her amber head, as if in warning, and a bird hammered a moment on the trunk of a tree.

  “I came here,” I said, “hoping to find out.”

  “Yes, I know it. And I shall tell you. I am Jedediah Goëste, and for now this house is mine. Will you step inside?”

  I went with him up the path, leading May, who I settled in a sunny place. The trees were all around inside the wall, the trees where the black squirrels played. I had been struck by his name – Scandinavian, perhaps, and its affinity of sound to what Luke and I had come to call her: Miss Ghost. Jedediah, too, the father’s name, and the daughter taking a feminized version, Jedella. Was it so simple? For yes, if he had been in his 20s, he would be near his 90s now, and she would be 65.

  Inside the door was an open room, white-walled, quite pleasant, with ornaments and pictures, and with a large fireplace where some logs and cones were burning. Hot coffee stood on a table. Had he known the hour of my coming? No, that was too fanciful. It seemed to me I had better be as careful as I had been when riding through the denseness of the pines. Something strange there was, but not all of it could or need be.

  A wide staircase ran up from the room and above was a sort of gallery. I noticed another man standing there, and Jedediah Goëste gestured to him quietly, and the man went away.

  “My servant. He won’t disturb us.”

  “Is that Orlen?” I said.

  “Oh, no. Orlen is long gone. But Orlen was a avourite of Jedella’s, I believe, when she was still a child. It was a pity they all had to leave her. She used to cry in the beginning. She cried when I left her. But later, they told me, she was philosophical. She had grown accustomed.”

  I had given him in turn my name, and he had taken the privilege of the old to call me at once John. We sat down in two large velvet armchairs, and I drank some of the coffee, hot and sweet and good.

  “I have come back here,” he said, “to die. It’s comfortable for me here, and I have all I want. A few months, no more.”

  I said, “Then shouldn’t you have kept her here?”

  “She was given, implicitly, the choice. She might have remained, although I didn’t think she would. If she had been here when I returned, I would, I think, have had to pretend to be someone else. And even then, the shock -”

  ‘‘Your age. But it’s your death that was the reason for letting her go.”

  ‘‘Yes. I can’t anymore manage things, you see. The experiment is over.”

  “Experiment,” I said.

  “Come now,” he said, “I believe you grasp it, John. I truly believe you do.”

  “I’ve read rather widely,” I said. ‘‘Years ago, I came across the legend of the Buddha.” Goëste folded his hands. He smiled his old strong teeth. “Buddha was originally a prince,” I said, “and they resolved to keep all ugly things from him – poverty, disease, old age and death. He saw only beauty. Until one day something went wrong, and he found out the truth.”

  Jedediah Goëste said. ‘‘You see, John, I began to think of it even when I was quite young. From the start, everything comes our way. Even when they tell us lies, the facts are still before us. There is a moment when we must work it out. The old lady in the mauve dress with her hands crippled by rheumatics. The dead dog the cart ran over. The bird shot for the table. In Europe in the Middle Ages they fixed a skull over the church door. Under that skull was written, Remember thou shall be as me.” He leaned back. His eyes were black, like hers, but, paler with the watery encroachment of old age. “How does the infant learn?” he said. “He copies. The sounds from the mouths that become language. The gestures that become manners. The opinions that he will either adopt or rebel against. And he learns that the sun rises and sets, and as the days and the years go by, he grows, he changes. All around, the lesson is we grow to our fullness, but after that we decline. From the summit of that hill, the path leads downwards. Down to weakness and sickness, down to the first lines and wrinkles, the stiffening and the lessening. Down to the bowed spine and the loss of teeth and sight and hearing. Down into the grave that awaits us all. Remember thou shall be as me. We are taught from the commencement, and reminded over and over.”

  He pointed at the rug before the fire, where I had laid the glass shoes that were not.

  “I made those, to show it could be done. I’ve done many things like that. I had money, John, and time, and a brain. And, I confess, here and there I have experimented with living things – not to hurt them, never that. But to see. Always, to see.”

  “Jedella,” I said, “was never told about old age, or death. Illness was for some reason mentioned, but as something that no longer existed. Pages were cut from books. The people of the house were always young and fit, and when it became likely they would cease to be, they were sent away. And when a squirrel died under her window, Orlen told her it was stunned, and took it back to its tree, and later he showed her the squirrel running on the wall.”

  “A girl came to me in the city,” said Jedediah Goëste, “it was shocking, I had given her a child. She didn’t want it. So she was paid, and I took the child to myself. That was Jedella. She was a baby – younger than Buddha, who I believe was twelve – too young to have learned anything at all. It was so perfect, John, and I had the means. I brought her here, and for those first years I was her friend. And after, of necessity, I had gone, those who came after me carried on my work. They were well-recompensed, and clever. There were no mistakes. She grew up in a world where no one sickened or aged or died. Where nothing died, and no death was seen, not even the dead animals for her food. Not even the leaves of the trees.”

  It was true. She had seen only the pines, renewal but not obvious slough – and then she had come from the open door and down into the woods of fall, where ruby and yellow and wine, the death descends from every tree.

  “Now she sees it,” I said. “She saw it as sickness to begin with. Or something that made no sense. But she’s turning towards the terrible fact, Mr Goëste, that all things perish.”

  “Recollect,” he said, “that she is 65 years old. She’s like a girl. So many lessons, all the same. Can they be unlearned?”

  I stood up. I was not angry, I have no word for what I was. But I could no longer sit in the chair before the fire nor drink the fragrant coffee, nor look in that old man’s face that was so strong and sure.

  “You’ve acted God, Mr Goëste.”

  “Have I? How can we presume to know how God has acted, or would act?”

  ‘‘You think you’ve made her eternally young. You think you’ve made her immortal.”

  ‘‘I may have done,” he said.

  I answered him, “In a world where all things come to an end – what will become of her?”

  ‘‘You will take care of her now,” he said, so easily, so gently. ‘‘Your quiet little town. Good people. Kind people.”

  “But her pain,” I said, “her pain.”

  Jedediah Goëste looked at me with her look. He was innocent, in her way. There was no chance against such innocence. ‘‘Pain, I think, is after all in the unfathomable jurisdiction of God. I’ve never been able to believe that mankind, for all its faults, could devise so horrible and so complex a thing.”

  “She never questioned?” I asked.

  “Questions spring from doubt. Now she questions, I imagine?”

  A log cracked in the fire. There was a small ache in my back I would not have had a year ago.

  “If you wish, I should be happy for you to be my guest tonight, John.”

  I thanked him and made some excuse. Even then, even there, the etiquette of my father stayed with me. Those first lessons.

  As I reached the door, Jedediah Goëste said one final thing to me: “I’m glad that she found her way to you.”

  But she had not found her way to me, nor to anyone, how could she? She had not fo
und her way.

  The years have passed in the town, and it has been faithful to Jedella. She has been protected as best we might. She has her little house behind the church, and her piano that we sent for from the city, her paints, her books – all kinds of books now. She reads for days on end, with her clear dark eyes. Sometimes she will read something out for me when even my glasses fail to help with the small print.

  More people have come to the town with time, and for them she is a mystery that, largely, they are indifferent to. The new creatures of the world are very self-involved, and this has taken away some of the curiosity, the prying, that came to us so naturally. But then, the avalanches of war, and fear of war, the wonderful inventions that cause so much harm and confusion and noise, all these things change us, the children of this other world, much more so.

  Luke died in a war. I have said elsewhere, and will not here, what I did there. Many were lost, or lost themselves. But others take those places. I was even famous for a year, and travelled in the cities and on other continents, and grew tired and came home. And there the town was in its misty morning silence that the new cacophony cannot quite break.

  That was a morning like this one, a fall morning, with the colours on the trees, and the new restaurant, where Millie’s used to be, was having its windows washed.

  But today the restaurant is old and familiar, and instead I passed Jedella’s house, and she came out and I knew I should go in, just for an hour, maybe, and drink coffee, and eat her chocolate cake which she vaunts, and rightly so.

  I went with caution over that road, for now there are sometimes motor-bikes upon it, and as I did I saw her waiting, pale and slender, a girl, with her hair cut short and permed and a touch of lipstick on her mouth.

  She touched my arm at her door.

  “Look, John,” she said.

  My eyes are not so good as I would like, but there in the pure, sheer sunlight, I did my best to see. She pointed at her cheek, and then, she put one finger to her hair.

  “Is it your powder, Jedella? Yes, your hair looks grand.” And then I did see, as she stood smiling up at me, her eyes full of the morning, of the new beginning of all things, I did see what she had found to show me with such pride. The little crease that had grown in her cheek. The single bright silver hair.

  Jedella Ghost

  Chosen by Sam Stone

  I first read “Jedella Ghost” in a copy of Interzone many years ago. I was a regular subscriber in those days and it gave me an opportunity to sample the work of writers I hadn’t heard of before. I was fascinated by the thought behind the concept of immortality that Tanith Lee depicted in this story. The idea that we age and die precisely because we know that aging and death are inevitable has always stayed with me. I later learned that Tanith had a wonderful ability for detailed imagery and thought-provoking, often reader-concept-changing, ideas that left you always with the outstanding belief that what she had written was entirely possible.

  – Sam Stone

  Sam Stone is an award winning British female genre writer. Her works can be found in paperback, ebook, audio and on screen. www.sam-stone.com

  Medra

  1

  At the heart of a deserted and partly ruined city, an old hotel rose up eighty-nine storeys into the clear m sunset air. The hotel was not necessarily the tallest structure left in the city. It had been a very modern metropolis; many of its buildings were of great height. But it had happened that several of the blocks surrounding the hotel plaza had fallen, for one reason or another. Now the tiered, white architecture, like a colossal wedding cake, was visible from almost any vantage of the city, and from miles away, across the dusty dry plains of the planet beyond, the hotel could be seen.

  This planet’s sunset took a number of hours, and was quite beautiful. The hotel seemed softened in the filmy, rosy light. Its garlands and sprays of ornamentation, long-blunted by the wind, had over the years become the nesting-places of large climbing lizards. During the hours of sunfall they would emerge, crawling up and down the stem of the building, past the empty windows behind which lay empty rooms. Their armour blinked gold, their gargoyle faces stared away over the vistas of the city whose tall abandoned blocks flashed goldenly back at them. The big lizards were not foolish enough to mistake these skyscrapers for anything alive. The only dive thing, aside from themselves and occasional white skeletal birds which flew over, lived on the eighty-ninth floor. Sometimes the lizards saw the live thing moving about inside two layers of glass, and sometimes the throb of machineries, or music, ran down the limb of the hotel, so the stones trembled, and the lizards, clinging, trembled, listening with their fanlike swivelled ears.

  Medra lived on the eighty-ninth floor. Through the glass portals she was frequently visible – a young Earth woman, by appearance, with coal-black hair that fell to her waist. She had a classical look, a look of calmness and restraint. Much of the day, and often for long intervals of the night, she would sit or lie perfectly still. She would not seem to move, not the flicker of a finger or quiver of an eyelid. It was just possible, after intense study, to see her breathing.

  At such times, which actually occupied her on an average for perhaps twenty-seven hours in every thirty-six-hour diurnal-noc- turnal planetary period, Medra – lying motionless – experienced curious mental states. She would, mentally, travel a multiplicity of geographies, physical and nonphysical, over mountains, under oceans, even across and among galaxies. Through the flaming peripheries of stars she had passed, and through the cold reaches of a space where the last worlds hung tiny as specks of moisture on the window-panes of her rooms. Endless varieties of creatures came and went on the paths of Medra’s cerebral journeys. Creatures of landscape, waterscape, airscape, and of the gaplands between the suns. Cities and other tumuli evolved and disappeared as simply as the forests and cultivation which ran towards her and away. She had a sense that all these visions concerned and incorporated her. That she wove something into them, from herself, if she did not actually form them, and so was a part of her own weaving, and of them. She threaded them all with love, lacking any fear, and when they drifted behind her she knew a moment’s pang of gentle loss. But solely for that moment. It was only when she “woke’’ that Medra felt a true bereavement.

  Her eyes would open. She would look around her. She would presently get up and walk about her apartment, which the hotel mechanisms kept for her scrupulously.

  All the rooms were comfortable, and two or three were elegant. A hot-house with stained-glass walls projected from one side of the building. Enormous plants bloomed and fruited. There was a bath- room with a sunken bath of marble, in which it was feasible to swim. The literature and music, the art and theatre of many worlds, were plenteously represented. At the touch of a button, food of exquisite quality – in its day, the hotel had been renowned through twenty solar systems – would be served to Medra from out of the depths below.

  She herself never went downstairs. Years ago, now and then, she had done so. She had walked the dusty riverbeds of the streets, or, getting into one of the small hover-cars, gone gliding between the walls, past the blank windows, over the bridges – and back again. At night, she had sat eighty-nine floors down on the hotel’s decorated porch, sipping coffee or sherbet. The planet’s stars were lustrous and thickly scattered. Slaves to their generators, a few lights still quickened in the city when sunset faded. She did not trouble to pretend that any life went on in those distant lighted buildings. Sometimes one of the lizards would steal up to her. They were very cautious, despite their size. She caressed those that came close enough and would allow it. But the lizards did not need her, and “waking,” she did not understand them.

  In recent years she stayed at the top of her tower. There was no purpose in leaving her apartment. She accepted this.

  But every so often, “waking,” opening her eyes, sensing loss, she wept. She was alone and lonely. She felt the pain of it always, although always differently – sharp as a razor, insistent
as a needle, dull as a healing bruise. “I’m alone,” she said. Looking out from the balconied heights, she saw the lizards moving endlessly up and down. She saw the city and the dust haze far off which marked the plains beyond. The weaving of her dreams was her solace. But not enough.

  “Alone,” said Medra in a soft, tragic voice. She turned her back to the window.

  And so missed a new golden spark that dazzled wildly over the sunset air, and the white feather of vapour which followed it down.

  Jaxon landed his shuttle about half a mile from the city’s outskirts. He emerged into the long sunset fully armed and, from force of habit, set the vessel’s monitors on defensive. There was, almost certainly, nothing to defend against, out here. The planet had been thoroughly scanned by the mother-ship on the way in.

  Jaxon began to stroll down to the city. He was an adventurer who would work for hire if the pay was good. What had tempted him to this outcast place, well-removed from the pioneer worlds and trade routes that generally supplied his living, was the connivance of a freelance captain whose ship now hung overhead. They had met in some dive on the rim of Lyra, Jaxon a figure of gold as he always was, but gold somewhat spoiled by the bloody nose and black eye gained at an adjacent fight.

  “So thanks for saving my skin. What do you want?”

  The captain showed him an old star-map and indicated a planet.

  “Why?” said Jaxon.

  The captain explained. It was, at that juncture, only a story, but stories sometimes led to facts. It would seem that a century before, a machine of colossal energy had been secreted on this small world. The planetary colony was promptly evacuated on the excuse of unstabilised earthquake activity. A whole city was abandoned. No one went there anymore. Out of bounds and off the current maps, the planet had by now been overlooked, forgotten. Only the story of the machine remained, and finally surfaced.