by Tanith Lee
“You must picture then,” she said, “guardians. Those who will remain at their posts for all time, as time is known to us. Guardians who, by a vast mathematical and esoteric weaving, constantly repair and strengthen the tissue of cosmic life. No, they are not computers. What upholds a living thing must itself be alive. We are of many galactic races. We guard many gates. This planet is one such gate, and I am one such guardian.”
“You’re a woman, an Earth woman,” he recalled saying.
“Yes. I was born here, in the Terran colony, the daughter of an architect who designed one of the most glamorous hotels in twenty systems. When they came – those who search out the guardians are also sentient creatures, of course – they discovered that my brain, my intellectual processes, were suitable for this task. So they trained me. Here is one more reality: extended to its full range, the mind of a human being is greater, more complex, capable of more astounding feats, than any mechanism mankind has or will ever design. I am the computer you searched for, Jaxon. Not a force of chaos, but a blueprint for renewal and safety. For this reason I remained, for this reason I always must remain. Those who were evacuated were given a memory, a whole table of excellent reasons for leaving. You, also, will be given a reason. I will give it to you. There’ll be no regrets. Despite all the joy you’ve brought me.”
“I didn’t arrive here alone,” he said. “The sky up there is full of suspicious characters who may not believe –”
“Yes. They’ll believe whatever you tell them. I’ve seen to it they will.”
“Good God. So what are you? A human machine, the slave of some -”
“No slave. In the beginning I was offered a choice. I chose – this. But also to forget, as you will forget.”
“You’re still a woman, not –”
“Both. And yes, in her forgetfulness, sometimes the woman despairs and is bitterly sad. ‘Awake,’ she doesn’t know what she is. Only ‘sleeping,’ she knows. Always to know, to know when ‘awake’ carries implications of power I don’t trust myself with. Occasional sadness is better.”
“Perhaps I don’t accept any of this.”
“Yes,” she said. “All of it. As always happens. Dear love, you’re not the first to alleviate my physical loneliness. When the time is right, I call and I’m answered. Who do you think drew you here?”
He swore. She laughed.
She said, “Don’t be appalled. This episode is full of charm and amusement. Thank you again, so very much. Good-bye.”
And she was gone. Into the air. The opening of the door, the whisper of material, they had been reassurances, and a ploy. He told himself he had been tricked. His nerves rioted with an impression of traps and subterfuge, but then these instincts quietened and the sullen protests ceased. It must be as she had said, on some level he did know and had accepted. There had been a joke once, God’s a woman –
He fell asleep, sitting on the bed.
Jaxon drove the shuttle up into the pure air of sunrise, then beyond the sunrise into the inky night of space. He left it all behind him, the planet, the city, the hotel, and the woman. He felt bad about leaving her, but he had foreseen the pit before his feet. Living as she had, she would be a little mad, and certainly more than a little dependent. There was no room in his life for that; he would not be able to deal with it. Her fey quality had delighted him, but it was no grounds for perpetuity. Eventually she would have clung and he would have sloughed her in anger. It might have been expressive anger at that, beyond a cruel word, a cruel blow, and the hospitals were makeshift in the areas he most frequented. She wasn’t for him, and it was better to finish on a note of pathos than in that kind of mess. Ships came by, she had told him. Someone else would rescue her, or not.
“Which woman?” he said to the captain of the mother-ship. “Fine. She didn’t want to leave after all. Come on, you got what you wanted, I did your work for you. Now elaborate on the fee.”
He had left her sleeping. Her hair had spread across the pillows, black breakers and rivulets of hair. Eyes like dark red amber closed by two petals of lids. He thought of the façades of empty buildings, the glitter of meaningless lights, the lizards who did not talk to her. He thought of the hot-house of coloured glass. He had a memory of strange wild dreams she had mentioned to him, which took the place of life. She was a difficult woman, not a woman to be lived with, and if loved, only for a little while. I am half sick of shadows, she said to him now, in his mind’s ear. But that was a line from some antique poem of Earth, wasn’t it? Somehow he didn’t believe the phantom words. Those shadows were very real for Medra.
In the deserted, partly ruined city, on the eighty-ninth floor of the white hotel, Medra wept.
She wept with a terrible hurt, with despair, in her anguish of loss. And with shame. For she had trusted and moved forward openly, without camouflage, and the blow had crashed against her, breaking her, crippling her – as it seemed to her – forever. She had been misled. Everything had contrived to mislead her. His smile, his words, gestures of politeness and lust, meaning nothing. Even her planet had deceived her. The way in which the sunlight fell on particular objects, the way music sounded. The leaves that towered in the hot-house had misled her with their scent. And she, she was guilty too. Hope is a punishable offence. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.
Medra wept.
Later she wandered her rooms. And she considered, with a practical regard, the means to her absolute death. There were medicines which would ensure a civilised exit. Or cruder implements. She could even die in agony, if she wished, as if to curse with her pain’s savageness the one who had betrayed her.
But all violent measures require energy, and she felt herself drained. Her body, a bell, rang with misery. After a prolonged stasis of insomnia, there was no other refuge but sleep.
Medra slept.
She slept, and so . . . she slept. Down, down, deeper and deeper, further and further. The chains of her physical needs, her pulses, sighs, hormones, were left behind as the golden shards of the city had been left behind, and as she herself had been left, by one she had decided to love. Then her brain, fully cognisant, trained, motivated, keyed to vast concepts and extraordinary parallels, then her brain woke up.
Medra moved outwards now, like a sky-flying bird, her wings bearing her strongly. Into the vistas, into the sheens and shades, murmurs and orchestrations. She travelled through a multiplicity of geographies, over mountains, under oceans, galaxies –
Through the periphery of suns she passed, the cold reaches of space. She wove the tapestry and was the tapestry. The pictures filled her with happiness. The universe was her lover. Here, then, in the mystery, the weaver heard some far-off echo, diminishing. She thought, It must stay between the glass. She saw herself, part of a pattern, and elsewhere, random, her life. She said to it, kindly, You are my solace, but you are not enough. The stars flowed by her, and her brain fashioned their fires and was fashioned by them. She thought: But this – this is enough.
Medra
Chosen by Allison Rich
Heartbreak is an unfortunate part of the human experience. Medra, on her planet of glass and steel and luxurious towers has faced her fair share, as well. We only read of Jaxon, who is only one of a long line of dashing men, treasure hunters, even, to visit her domain and be astounded by what he finds… and yet, like all the others, he does not stay.
Tanith’s imagery in this story sweeps you up in a whirlwind of strange beauty. There are the ballrooms which open to serve only two human guests, glorious restaurants in which one can feast on delicacies, the well-appointed room in they can indulge in carnal pleasures. It all describes the frenzied and euphoric pleasures of new love and infatuation … which can only normalize into a more mundane and, perhaps, fraught realism.
We see Medra inconsolable after Jaxon leaves her. We feel her agonizing grief and pain. We can see her shut down in waves of almost unbearable anguish. And yet the other part of Medra, the practical one, inf
orms Jaxon that she was the one who has lured him to the planet, and that he will not be the last. The “joke” has been on him and the sleeping girl in the tower of steel is the only real treasure on that planet, the most central part of the matrix.
Out of all of Tanith’s stories, “Medra” is the one I read in order to feel a catharsis with the heartbreak and to connect with the inner warrior who will keep me strong and resilient. In the end we all stand alone. I am grateful to those inner guardians who protect our very own soul fortresses which not another single person will ever truly breach. We are strong and inviolate.
– Allison Rich
Allison Rich has been the webmistress of Daughter of the Night since 2004, which has become the official bibliography of the works of Tanith Lee.
The Ghost of the Clock
I
I don’t believe in ghosts. Assuming there is a soul, why should it hang around here, if there is somewhere else it has to go? Oh, maybe there are recordings of past events that get left behind. Maybe even extreme emotions leave a kind of colour, like a stain. But that’s it.
So, this isn’t a ghost story. Although it has a ghost.
My name is Laura. And there came a time when clever Laura found herself in bad financial straits – unable to pay the rent on her so-called flat in London, (one room, and use of a bathroom down the hall), or for anything very much. My parents were long gone – my dad to that Somewhere Else I mentioned; my mother to southern France with her “New Bloke”. She’d used him like camouflage and was virtually unfindable.
I ended up accepting the offer of a roof from my aunt.
Jennifer was my father’s only sister. I’d seen her, once or twice, in childhood, but she had disliked my mother devotedly, so it hadn’t been very often. I knew she had a house on the coast – I won’t say where, but it was a good address. I’d been a bit surprised to get her letter.
It was a long journey, and the train stopped outside some picturesque country halt for about fifty minutes extra. My fellow passengers grumbled, but otherwise just carried on as usual, beetling over their ghastly twittering laptops, honking away into their bloody mobile phones. I went to the buffet and got a double gin and tonic. It was eleven thirty a.m., but what the hell.
In the afternoon, when I had arrived and was waiting for a taxi, what struck me was the light.
I’ve heard the light is different – better – in Greece. Having never been there, I don’t know if that is true. But certainly the English light that curtained the seaside town was sheer and crystal clean, as if the sea cast it up fresh-spun. When we drove out of the station and off up the bumping, winding, narrow roads to the hills, I looked at all the May-green woods and fields burning in this light, and the birds darting over like arrows with gold-tipped flights, and then the vast sweep of the sea itself, bluer than the sky.
This was a beautiful spot. The sort of non-resort the sensitive, England-orientated rich go to, for their holidays. Only I wasn’t on holiday. And decidedly I was not rich.
Soon, we saw the house.
“Fair old place, that,” said the driver, who until then had been unchatty.
I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to say my aunt lived here. I toyed with the idea of telling him I’d applied for the job of scullery maid, but that would be about a century out of date. Secretary, then, or personal assistant?
Lamely, I said, “Yes, isn’t it.”
And he and I left it at that.
We went up a winding drive, and the house, which had appeared so dramatically on a hill-top, now vanished behind broad stands of oak, pine and hornbeam, and clouds of rhododendrons, blazing white and crimson.
Really, I suppose, it wasn’t so big – not grounds or an estate, more a huge garden.
We passed under flowery terraces and roses, and then there was the house again, across a blank green oval of lawn.
It was a flat-fronted building, brown-skinned, with a large porch mounted on a little raised terrace, with a statue. I added up twelve windows along the top storey before I stopped counting.
All right, it wasn’t a stately home, but it was much more than just a home.
There was a garden all round, but to one side the land dropped in terraces, and over there, through the boughs of a cedar-tree, the turquoise ocean appeared again, less than half a mile away.
The driver helped me with my bags, then left me. I watched the cab rattle off, as I stood at the door. I’d expected by now a servant in costume to come out to look down his nose at me. But no one had come, and when I finally jangled the old-fashioned bell, nothing happened either. Then I saw the electric bell hiding under the other one, and tried that.
Well, I did anticipate an employed door-opener of some sort at least.
But what eventually came was my Aunt Jennifer.
She looked at me with all the contempt of any imagined butler, before the falsest of false smiles oozed up her wrinkled face.
“Laura! How lovely. Do come in.”
This was my aunt’s big secret. She was mean. Wealthy people sometimes are, surprisingly so. It’s how they stay wealthy, possibly. (I don’t know how she was well-off when we hadn’t been. I think it was from some kind of exclusive legacy.)
Really, if I’d thought, I’d have remembered enough from my childhood. I wasn’t a stupid kid, less stupid probably than I’ve become since growing up. Twenty-five years back, when I was nine or so... That weird thing over the individual ice-cream, for example. “Just eat half, Laura, and save some for later. It will keep in the ice-box...” But my aunt was mean not only in the monetary sense, but in her ways.
She had hated my mother. And I was, after all, half my mother, even if, as far as I was concerned, I’d really only ever had one parent, and he was dead.
I loved my father. He was kind and gentle, a dreamer, who liked music, and silence. Death beglamoured him for me even more – after the agony went off. He had had a heart-attack the night before I was twenty.
Conceivably, I would have liked to get on with Jennifer, who had been his sister and so was, as I was, also partly him.
My bags got left in the wide walnut-brown hallway. We went into a sunny, rather dusty room, with long windows looking out over another lawn, the cedar and the sea. The windows weren’t very clean. All that – the dust, the windows, startled me. I mean, I’d lived regularly in a tip, but I didn’t expect that here – and definitely not amid this antique furniture and these Persian rugs.
The gardens too had been very well kept, trees neatly trimmed to proper shapes, and the lawns mowed to within an inch of their lives. So she did have a gardener.
My aunt told me I must sit down.
“You must sit down, Laura. You must be quite tired. But a cup of tea will put you right.”
Then, another little shock. Jennifer crossed to an ornate eighteenth century sideboard and switched on an electric kettle roosting there. Next to this was set a covered tray. Presently, Jennifer brought everything to a coffee-table between the two white brocade sofas.
Unveiled, the tray held a plate of two dry chicken sandwiches, constructed perhaps in the early morning, two plain biscuits, and a banana past its first flush of youth. This feast was for me.
As she poured the boiled water on to the tea (bags of course) in the tarnished silver pot, I began to see the light. The garden she had kept up – for ‘appearances’? But she had no help in the house, or very little. No one to dust or clean or shine up the silver, let alone open the door. No one came in to cook meals, either, or even make the poor old girl a cuppa.
She was sixty-seven by my reckoning. She looked older, having one of those faces that get easily creased.
“I’ve given you a west-facing room, Laura. It gets the last of the sun.”
Fine, I thought. Chilly first thing and too hot on a summer’s evening.
“Well, you must tell me all about yourself.”
I glanced at her, and she sat there, like a slightly overweight Venus flytrap.
Shouldn’t I think of her like that? Should I be sorry for her, all on her own, and not even able to afford, or too afraid to afford, despite her house, domestic help or even decent tea-bags? Had she fallen on hard times? Was she lonely? Did she truly want to know me? She must have known my whereabouts at least, because her letter had come straight to me. But before that, I hadn’t seen or heard from her since the funeral.
“There’s not much to say, Aunt Jennifer.”
“But you’ve made a bit of a mess of your life, haven’t you?”
Yes, Venus flytrap.
“Not really. Companies are folding all the time in London. Everywhere. It’s the economic climate.”
“I blame these computers,” she said darkly. “This Internet thing.”
“Works of the Devil,” I heard myself mutter.
“Always wanting something for nothing,” she concluded, as if I either hadn’t said anything, or simply endorsed her own suspicions. “And this man – Even, was he called?”
“Eden.”
I sensed she thought I’d had an affair with my boss.
“He let you down,” she said.
“No, actually –”
“American,” she appended scathingly. “Oh, they did plenty of that, letting girls down, I can tell you, in the last war.”
I wondered what she’d got up to during the Blitz – to sound so pissed-off. She would have been a bit young, wouldn’t she?
“Eden was great, and when the sh... when the trouble started, he did everything he could to put things right for all of us. It wasn’t his fault. But if you mean did I sleep with him? No. He was very happily married.”
“Oh yes,” she said. She managed to look disgusted at my directness, and wisely aware I was lying, both at once. “However, you lost your flat and your job. And I gather you have no savings.”