by Tanith Lee
“Well, let us say, I had some part in bringing about this sentimental reunion. And, abruptly, love is flowing like a fountain. Though for three Jates, and more, you’ve scarcely thought of her.”
“I have—thought of her,” Velday said carefully, his hair spilling on her wrists.
“Yes. Of course. When we drank and when we rode. When we played suns with balanced dice in Mansion Nu. All through the hours you lavished on shade-river Ler. Each of those times, Vel Thaidis crowded your thoughts.”
Vel Thaidis saw her brother’s stupid bewildered tears drop like pearls of polished lead, falling straight from the flooded sockets, beyond her wrists, to the tiles of the floor.
“Ceedres,” she said, “why are you doing this thing?”
She was surprised to have asked him this. Yet, as her voice, unable to convey her turmoil, had grown level, so this conversation had moved beyond heat or hysteria. Certainly, though she was not calm at all, she could demand his motive. Ceedres, in this environment much more than master, was quite capable of reply.
“Why? If you mean your hapless brother, he has been drinking much and inhaling pavra dusts. By Jate he’ll remember next to nothing. What he does recall, he’ll think to be a figment of the dream-wash in the Maram-chamber. Or hallucination itself, brought on by guilt.”
“No,” Vel Thaidis said, “I meant to ask you why you’ve become a torturer. Your strategy I know, to obtain Hirz. But this. There can be no need for this.”
Ceedres had seated himself on the table’s edge. His lazy eyes were introspective. She realized that he too was a little drunk. As once before, the realization was terrible, to know he felt himself this secure that he would throw away his shield.
“Well,” he said, “well, Vel Thaidis. Why am I torturing you without profit? Let me see.” His eyes came to her face and for the first, she met them. They were only human eyes, the eyes of a young man just four years her senior. Yet they were the eyes of death. “Recollect a certain room,” Ceedres murmured. “A black room you had never seen before. And I told you I went to the room to know my fear of it, and to conquer my fear and know my conquest. In your obsession with rank, your cringing unappreciation of self, how can you possibly assimilate what I tell you? That I’m intrigued to be alive, enthralled with what I am. That I intend to discover every facet of myself, to open the innermost chambers of brain and spirit. My fear, what pleases me, what amuses or disgusts, these things I explore. I intend to taste what I am to the full. And that includes my capacity for cruelty, if you wish to call it that, the lengths I will go to in order to inflict harm, and how much interest harming another affords me.”
“And Velday,” she said, “is merely part of your experiment.”
“Oh, Velday,” he said, “you and your brother, two spoiled brats, two pets kept by robots in a palace and fed off gold plates. I’m astounded you learned to chew for yourselves.”
“You never cared for Velday.”
“Do you imagine that in reality I ever could?”
Then, in the midst of hell, she felt triumph. That Velday, even drugged and half-senseless as he was, had surely heard this admission from their enemy’s own mouth. Even if it were to be forgotten a minute hence, still it had been heard. And then remorse dwindled her triumph. For Velday withdrew his grasp from her, stopped touching her altogether, and sat bowed over in his silence, unreachable.
“You, on the other hand,” Ceedres said, “have irritated me. You did nothing quite as I anticipated. I reckoned you would be easy, since you were a fool, but not so. You have been grit in my sandal, Vaidi.”
She stood up, and an abrupt impulsive solution suggested itself. She began to walk toward the copper doors.
She did not catch his movement, but Ceedres came up with her by the table where he had eaten, encircling both her arms, and holding her there against him. His hard smooth muscles, that pressed on her shoulders, her spine, reminded her of this hour’s beginning, Jates before, and barbs ran through her nerves where she touched him.
“Why not,” he said, “allow yourself the one pleasure you refused in the temple? Now you’re a J’ara whore, you’ve no reason to deny yourself.”
“Grit,” she said, and the words rose freely in her, a fount that bubbled over. “Grit rubbing the heel of your vanity. You think me nothing, yet you can’t bear that I should resist you, that I should be able to. Even now you’ve shown me my brother as your victim, even now you suppose I’d lick your feet as your mistress does.”
“Love is such a curious condition. And you love me. More than your sickly adoration of Velday. So much more.”
“A short distance from my hand there is a table knife. I was exiled here for a lie. I can redeem the Law and make it truth.”
“Vaidi, Vaidi,” he said, “I’m so afraid of you.” And he laughed and let her go.
“Pride and honor you would not understand,” she said. “You have none. You belong in the Slumopolis. You should have been glad to come here. You will be unhappy in Hirz.”
“Shall I? Is that a curse?”
She thought: I cannot kill him, for then I must die horribly myself. I cannot curse him, since there are, after all, no gods.
She went swiftly to the copper doors. Ceedres said nothing further to her, but as the doors unsealed, she heard him say, “Wake up, Velday. It’s no J’ara if you fall asleep. And you lag behind. Drink this berry juice, my brother, and tell me more about Ler of the Forty-Ninth Mansion. Was your couch the purple or the red?”
Vel Thaidis was through the doors, which closed.
Above her, on the hind stair, Tilaia stood in the green and gold of Hirz, the sunseyes prismatic at her throat, her own like blots of ink.
“Don’t you agree,” Tilaia said, “my prince is all I reported him, even though his name isn’t as I informed you. Did he send you out? Don’t grieve. You’ll see more of him next J’ara.”
No more were the gods at Vel Thaidis’ shoulder. No longer could she convince herself supernatural forces might gather to her aid. She had no personal reserves at all. And so the courage of the damned replaced the courage of the blessed.
She mounted the stair, and as she approached Tilaia, Vel Thaidis thrust her aside.
“I have endured him,” she said. “I will not endure you.”
Tilaia huddled to the wall. Generations of an inferior class had left their brand on her genes. But then she recovered, and at the aristo’s back she slung foul words and fouler wishes, like rotten fruit.
The screeching miasma fading behind her, Vel Thaidis climbed intuitively to her cubicle, the only sanctuary she could think of. In her mind the wretched chant went on and on.
There are no gods. There is no strength. There are no gods.
Part Two
Love, the curious condition. . . .
The Klovez auction at Klarn was over. All Casrus’ house pets, his subterines, had been apportioned to the friends of Vitra and Vyen. The best-looking went first; only one was too ugly to be wanted at all. He had groveled like the rest, and finally given evidence of a talent for buffoon jokes directed at himself. When the party grew bored with him, they recommended he try the theater in Dera; shivering, the man went. Neither he nor any of his fellows had retained Casrus’ teachings of self-pride. Nor had it been reckoned they would. The gold salon, softly aflame with its strange false sun, rang and crackled to princely laughter and wit. Twenty persons hung their “barter” of jewels and curios on the brother and sister hosts. Then, Vyen realized that Temal, the prize of his proxy collection, had not appeared.
Vitra had registered Temal’s absence throughout the hour of the auction. She had been irritably dreading Vyen’s registering of it. Now she would have to seek the girl, or at least send the Klarn robots to find her. (Vitra had come to the salon bathed in the glow of the unsatisfactory revenge she had vented on Temal, making her, as before, assume the char
acter of the crawling vicious Tilaia of the Fabulism. Vaguely, Vitra was aware Tilaia also bore some resemblance to herself.)
In fact, Vyen’s complaint did not result in Vitra’s having to send for the girl. Cries of a general willingness to search broke out, and the glittering crowd of aristocrats was already scattering from the chamber when a single robot appeared.
“Instruct,” said the robot.
“What is it?” demanded Vyen.
“The woman Temal is dead. What shall be done?”
Inspired by genuine horror and disgust, the princes were impelled to go and see.
The machine led them into the apartment which Temal had occupied. It was modest, yet blazoned with dark rich colors. The richest color of all spread on the bolster Temal had used to soak up the blood from her severed neck vein. Sure child of the Subterior, she had obviously known the swiftest way to die. Sure child of the Subterior, she had never relinquished her knife, or the pessimistic vision that she might one Jate need it. She had caused thereby the minimum of inconvenience to those hated ones who must find her. She had arranged herself neatly. Only the bolster had been spoiled. Bloodless and white as a stone, her face, angled a little into the cushion, was yet composed. Her hands were loosely joined upon the knife. Her oblique dignity, if not her life, had remained intact.
* * *
• • •
Vitra had never seen death before, actually in front of her. She had been very sick, and now lay in her new bedchamber at Klarn. Vyen held her hand.
“So much distress,” said Vyen briskly, “for a worm of the Subterior.” Yet he, too, was white. Mocking at Vitra lent him bravado.
“Casrus taught her to be human,” said Vitra weakly. “She died honorably.”
“She died moronically. She could have lived at Klef or Klur. I know Shedri would have taken her, if only to annoy you.”
“She wanted to live at the side of Casrus,” said Vitra, and tears rolled from her eyes. It was not remorse, but simply the old guilty fear, coupled to a gnawing knowledge that she too would have wished to live at Casrus’ side. A sudden irresistible picture spread through her mind: Vitra, Casrus’ wife, and Casrus dead in some racing accident or fire-sword contest. Casrus in a silver urn, and Vitra, her white face dignified and composed, cutting her wrists (but oh, not her neck) and lying peacefully to die on a silken divan, her blood caught tastefully (humorously?) in two matching nacre bowls. The fantasy made her feel quite faint. She thought of the gold faked sunlight of the Klarn salon, like and unlike the sun of her invented Fabulism—why, why had Casrus not loved her as she deserved? None of this need have happened. Or, suppose Casrus had betrayed her, sent her to the Slum of the Subterior, followed her there as Ceedres had followed Vel Thaidis, to be cruel to her in bruised vanity and contempt? Masochistic with culpability, she painfully enjoyed these mental wanderings, as she had bitterly and uneasily enjoyed the latest installment of her Fabulism. But she felt herself compelled to say to Vyen, “Probably Temal believed in the Kaneka heaven. In her soul.”
“Confound her soul. Whatever shall we do with the body?”
“Oh!” moaned Vitra.
“Well, but there it is. In the Subterior, those bodies which are found are cremated, and the ashes shoveled somewhere. Unfound bodies presumably rest until detected by their perfume. Or else they freeze.”
Vitra snatched away her hand.
“You are detestable.”
“Practical. I suggest we order her burnt. Perhaps we could send the ashes to Casrus as a token.”
Vitra widened her eyes, as if astounded by his spitefulness. Naturally, disturbing her, a complementary tug of spite primed her spirits.
“You’re revolting, Vyen.”
“Detestable, revolting. . . . Why not in a silver urn? He might be able to barter the silver. This is the fifth Jate he’ll have been in the Subterior. He’ll be grateful.”
Vitra stared into space, at Ceedres Yune Thar opening an urn of gold, discovering gray cinders with a tiny scented note on metal-paper. Herewith, Tilaia. Fond greetings from Vel Thaidis.
A fresh spasm of sickness contorted Vitra’s stomach and face, subsided, and was replaced by a woodenly malicious smile. Why had she not made Vel Thaidis more resilient, more forceful. Her only wickedness was her ignorance. Her nobility was tiresome. She was spineless. An ideal complement, not for Ceedres, but for Casrus.
“I would like,” said Vitra, “to see the urn, when it’s ready. Now go away, you nasty beast.”
When Vyen had gone, she rose. She pressed a gilded button, and a flower cup of platinum, recently designed by her and installed at Klarn, elevated and opened its petals. Vitra chose from the spectacular bottles, flagons and bulbs of liquor—also recently installed—a fortified wine of three layerings of color. She poured carefully into a goblet, making sure the lowest black layer mixed with the transparent rose-tinged middle layer, before running on through the top layer of honey-bronze. The resultant drink was dry, unsickly and uplifting. After three or four goblets, Vitra was herself again. More herself than she had been for some while. More herself than herself, perhaps.
She summoned a robot.
“At the first hour of Maram, I intend,” said Vitra, “to visit the Subterior. The machines of this house are quite accustomed to such visits, I believe.”
The robot assented.
“I don’t mean to go, however,” said Vitra, “with the purpose of offering assistance. I shall require merely personal protection from the savage sub-humans there.”
The robot assented.
“Oh, and there is no need to inform my brother of my whereabouts. You can tell him I’m riding about the Residencia, may visit the Klurs, or may not.”
The Klarn robot assented. It had, of course, no opinions. All house machines were capable of lies, providing they were programmed.
Vitra sampled another goblet of the three-color drink.
She bathed and called other robots to scent and dress her. She chose a plastavel sheath, the secretive white-blue of ice, and had it fitted with a minuscule heating device. Unnecessarily and deliberately, she chose a mantle of white synthetic fur, each hair tipped with dark silver. Blue luminants were combed into her own hair.
Ceedres had dared intrude on the abyss. Why not Vitra? She did not stop to think what she was doing. The way was accessible, and her confidence (a black, rose and honey-bronze confidence) was at its premium. All things seemed possible. Even rescue. Even love.
Only when the robot came to tell her the transport stood at the doors, hurrying herself so Vyen should not see and guess, did she experience a moment’s doubt. Her reaction to it was to hand goblet and flagon to a robot, instructing it to bring them after her. Portable good luck and bravery.
* * *
• • •
The Portables were useful. Abruptly, seated in the transport as it rose through the veins of the planet, taking her to a region she had never visited, thought of rather in terms of a dream-place, barely real (less real than a Fabulism?), Vitra fluttered in a belated confusion.
All at once it seemed to her, as it had now and then seemed before, that Vel Thaidis was possessing her. Vitra had sent Vel Thaidis into hell, and now Vel Thaidis coerced her into visiting her own equivalent of hell. Vitra realized she was afraid to see anything. Afraid to look at the rocks passing the windows of the transport, afraid of the selected Subterior opening that approached.
When they were through, coming to rest outside one of the gray mechanical centers, the fear intensified. The transport settled, and Vitra’s guard of ten robots (more than needed—she had insisted, on seeing there were only two, that eight others be added) were already arranging for the small closed traveling car to be placed on the rock outside. As the transport door opened, a robot came to her. “You should adjust your heat dial, Vitra Klovez.”
She started, fumbled with the tiny d
ial on the collar of her sheath as freezing air scoured the interior of the vehicle.
Almost, she visualized maddened Subterines rushing at her from all sides, waving stick-like arms, cold-gnawed mouths vomiting curses. She was Vel Thaidis, entering in terror the Slum of her world. Though better protected than Vel Thaidis, but Vitra had forgotten that. She was vulnerable. She seized the ready-filled goblet and drank.
Tipsy, yet still afraid, she stepped outside and into the car. It was small and cramped and capable of lifting fifteen feet into the air, in order to negotiate the narrow confines of the Subterior. But it had windows. As they began to move at a quick yet cautious pace, life came and dashed itself in Vitra’s eyes like acid. She had come at Maram, yet even so, there were many abroad, or so it appeared to her. A great pressure of skeletons in flame-bright rags turning to gape. Nightmares shrank away, frostbitten hands and tortured optics and faces twisted in a permanent malady of grief and hurt, now brushed by dull disbelief. The worms. The worms for whom Vitra generously made pretty dreams. Somehow, they had never looked like this as they lay on the platforms of the recreation areas, revealed in the Fabulast’s screen. Then they had looked docile, blank, witless yet reasonable, asking nothing of her at all.
What am I doing here?
Casrus, she had come to find Casrus.
She must rescue him from this. She must rescue him, and then he would love her.
She blurred the windows and drank. The robots had discovered the whereabouts of Casrus’ lodging and would take her there. That was all that mattered.
After half an hour, the car arrived, registered Aita Slink as impassable from ground level, and slid up in the air above the top of the bulging rock walls. Presently, the car cruised down to rest on the overhanging terrace before the three hovels, two of which were patently uninhabited, having inwardly collapsed. The third hovel had a door of iron mesh, shut fast.
Vitra tottered daintily from the car as it opened. The venue seemed thankfully deserted, no one prowled in the alley below. The ten robots had joined her.