by Tanith Lee
Vitra drew herself up, her fur sweeping the filthy rock.
“Rattle the mesh,” she instructed the nearest robot.
The mesh was rattled. Nothing happened.
Vitra went forward. She looked through the mesh, curiosity and an agonized excitement overriding her doubts.
In the murky space beyond the mesh, a dull fire burned in a scoop of stone. Beyond that, a shadowy amalgamated huddle of pallet and apparently sleeping human figure bundled in Subterine protective garments.
“Casrus!” Vitra said fiercely, “wake up and let me in.”
The figure stirred vaguely, like one drugged. And Vitra seized the mesh in both her gloved hands, rattling it ferociously.
“Let me in, for love of life. I’m terrified—Casrus!”
There came a sudden awful growling from the pallet, and a vast upheaval of movement, that seemed to come careering straight at her, causing her to start away.
“Get off, you hussy, or—” a guttural voice began, and there ceased.
Vitra Klovez and Hejerdi regarded each other, both with infuriated astonishment. She, galvanized by alarm, recovered first.
“Where is Casrus?”
“In Aita, getting coal. Where are you is more to the point. Out of my head, are you? Fabulism, are you, or dream?”
This odd shot so near the mark, gave Vitra a transitory courage to enhance her arrogance.
“I am a Fabulast, it’s true,” she said. She expected gratitude. Or thought she did. There was no gratitude.
“An aristo,” said Hejerdi. His face said more. “A crowd of robots with you—that’s sensible, girlie.”
“Be silent,” Vitra said. Drink, robots, the mesh separating them sustained her. Hejerdi, inadvertently, sustained her, for, made indifferent by his lifelong aversion to her kind, he obeyed. He was jolted but not intrigued by her arrival. He would not argue with her technological strength, her clean and lustrous appearance. She had come to call on her fallen peer. What else? And Casrus was approaching, for Hejerdi could hear the murmur of voices that seemed always now to come and go in the prince’s company. The Subterior was learning fast that to attempt Casrus from behind meant cracked ribs, a ringing head, that to approach with a request was to be helped, never turned aside. In two successive Jates Casrus had gone out early to buy clothing to replace that which he had given away. All the credit chips had been gone a Jate before the new wage was awarded. Of the new wage, half had again been presented to Hejerdi. Hejerdi took it with an oath. Later, when Casrus slept, Hejerdi had crept up on him and replaced two of the three chips in Casrus’ pocket slit. Then Hejerdi had been appalled at himself. To survive meant to take and not to give. Yet Casrus gave and did not look to be crumbling. But Casrus, Casrus was—
The noise pushed into the Slink and became hollow and vociferous, in the enclosure. The female aristo raised her sequined head in fright and quavered: “What’s that?” Shadows splayed on the rock walls, but the alley bottom was invisible, hidden by the overhang. She was too nervous to peer over.
“A big mob,” said Hejerdi, “coming to eat you.”
The Subterines were animals. To be eaten seemed possible.
“Protect me,” Vitra choked to her robots. “Break in the mesh, and beat this man!”
Hejerdi tensed, but the nearest robot said, “He has offered you no physical threat, Vitra Klovez.”
Vitra broke into a drunken tantrum—this was not to be borne—could a robot refuse her order? Then the great noise outside seemed to wash against the terrace, and suddenly sink attentively, and in its sinking she heard Casrus’ voice, though not the words, in the alley below the stair. Perhaps the aristocratic car had been spotted, looming over the terrace above.
“They have short memories of what he did for them before,” said Hejerdi, “but it’s coming back to them. Even so, I don’t know why I don’t try to kill him. It might be worth death, to get an aristo.” He licked his pale lips. “Maybe you.”
Vitra had one of her visions—Hejerdi pushing open the mesh, emerging to wring his hands on her throat, Casrus racing up the stair, flinging Hejerdi aside, cradling her—
“Do it then,” she said.
“Your robots would protect you.”
She had forgotten the robots. Of course, they would protect her from a physical threat. Her head was whirling. She went to a robot and leaned on it for support.
The noises below, muffled by rock, went on. The calm tone of Casrus’ voice reached her occasionally. He was not afraid of the dreadful rabble, had never been. Their thinness, their sores, their stink and melancholy. She turned maudlin with no warning. Surely she, too, had a social conscience, which had driven her to explore these pits of unloveliness, as presented in parallel through the shapes of the Sun Zenith Slumopolis. Her compassion was more developed than she had known or admitted. It must be so. It had never really occurred to her before.
Troubled, still inebriated and on the brink of tears, she missed the dispersing of the crowds and Casrus’ quiet footfall on the stair.
Casrus had spent the Jate working on the planet’s surface, the labor peculiar and monotonous as ever. The first hour of Maram he had spent chipping coal. He had acquired two sacks to carry it, more than one of which he subsequently distributed. The human guard at Aita had demanded an extra tip to permit Casrus to enter. He was gathering fuel for others than himself, and therefore must reward them fulsomely. Casrus refused. Short of combat, the guard could do nothing. Either fear of the nearby Stare-Eyes or of the nearer Casrus prevented the combat. When he reemerged with the coal, a small throng had gathered at the mine opening. The guards ridiculed Casrus for collecting what he would now give away. Casrus ignored them. The machines of Klarn had scrabbled out coal for the Subterior formerly, from countless mines; now he performed the task. The jeers were the same, but from a different quarter. The earlier throngs who had grabbed at the coal had jeered at the prince and his robots, the Upperling guards had fawned on him. Now the guards jeered. The people took almost gently, bewilderedly. They were the destitute, the sick, men and women in the last corner of deprivation. Or if malingerers swelled the throng, he had judged they too had rights to something of his service, skin and bone and rag and disease being also their ultimate lot.
From this he came and found the princess Vitra, in an iridescence of white and silver fur, supported by ten robots, at the entry to his hovel.
He paused, but Hejerdi, locked behind the iron mesh, said loudly: “A sweet gift for a J’ara, Klarn. Pity you’ll be too tired to enjoy it. I, on the other hand—”
“Oh, Casrus,” whispered Vitra.
Casrus walked by her, took out the tab and opened the mesh.
“Oh Casrus—we must talk—”
Casrus turned, looked at her.
“Vitra, your utter foolishness has no place in this world. It was better suited to the world you came from. Go back there.”
“No. Let me explain.” He waited, courteously. She faltered. “Send that man away. How can I say anything when he stands there, insulting me.”
“I don’t recall that Hejerdi insulted you,” Casrus said. “Women here have few choices. To be able to offer a J’ara night to a man who can pay them is an envied talent. Most who must are too ill to try.”
Vitra frowned. Her giddiness had passed, leaving a sour premonition of failure behind it.
“I didn’t come to this foulness to run from it without speaking to you.”
“You intended that I be sent here,” said Casrus. There was no accusation in his tone or in his expression. He seemed not even astounded at that incredible foolishness of hers which he had named. “I am here. Be content.”
Vitra exploded into vehemence, reaching for the first weapon at hand—defense or offense, it was all one to her.
“Temal,” she announced, “killed herself.” Silence. Stiffly, futilely, Vit
ra added: “Temal is dead.”
It was the face of Hejerdi which fell.
Casrus only glanced aside, and with the same enigmatic courtesy said to him, “Are you fit enough to leave me alone with her, for a while?”
Hejerdi did not reply, but came straight outside and moved toward the stair.
Contra-suggestively, beyond herself again, Vitra spat at him: “Good. You do as our master bids you.”
Neither man acknowledged this. Hejerdi hobbled, grimacing now with discomfort at his healing burns, down into the alley. Casrus stood to one side, for Vitra to enter the new Klarn palace.
She flounced by him, a whirl of synthetics and scent, and glinting gems. She stood in the midst of the hovel, brighter than the fire. Then, she hung her luminous head and pressed her hand to her cheek.
“Vyen means to send you the woman’s ashes. In a silver urn.”
“How kind of him.”
“It isn’t kindness—”
“You amaze me.”
“Don’t play with me, Casrus. You’re too clever for me.”
“And all the time I thought it was you who had been too clever for me.”
She flickered up her gilded lids. His face was only polite. He did not mean to cut her with his abhorrence, merely did.
“Casrus.” She tilted back her head, staring boldly at him. She was about to betray the one basic faith she had always kept till now. “It was Vyen’s plan, and Vyen forced me to do it, to implicate you in a crime of which you were innocent. I—I wanted to save you, but he—is jealous. We were both in distress when Klovez failed—but now I must absolve you. I’ll try to lodge an appeal, to gain you a pardon from the computers.”
“A pardon for what?”
“It’s the only way it can be done. I can’t admit our lie, Vyen’s and mine. You’re strong, but Vyen would die here—”
“Vitra,” he said, “why did Temal kill herself?”
“Vyen auctioned off your Subterines. It was a joke. They were all placed. All but one. And Temal—”
“She could have come to me here.”
“Did you tell her so?” Vitra demanded.
“No. She knew she could come to me. If I had said it at that moment, she would have thought I was asking her to return to this place for my sake. She might have found a way to remain in the Residencia. I had no right to persuade her from it.”
“No right—when you had housed her, fed her, clothed her—”
“You’re attempting to turn me from the solution, Vitra. The solution being, I think, that you assured Temal her presence would be unacceptable to me. It seems I was able to teach her nothing of the Klave, or of herself, after all, for she believed you.”
“I did not—” Vitra cried.
“The fault is mine, not yours,” Casrus said. “I was a poor teacher, and you an excellent one.”
The flames sizzled among the fosscoal in the scoop, meeting some imperfection there, a bit of metal or stone. The splash of light showed the lines of weariness in his face which her awe of him had obscured from her before.
Vitra crossed the room. She came near to him and looked up into his face.
“Forgive me all my sins against you,” she said. “Let me atone. Let me set you free of this. I can enter an appeal on your behalf to the computers.”
“The computers which wrongfully condemned me.”
“I will beg them for your liberty. Share Klarn with us. We won’t trouble you.”
His eyes were bloodshot from the frosts and fumes of the Subterior, the stale atmosphere of the surface air-suit and the mine, and the dust of coal. Reddened, they seemed bluer than ever, heavier, deeper, and far, far colder.
“My thanks, Vitra. I don’t want to share Klarn with you.”
“Oh, but let me help you. Please, please, let me help.”
He took a breath, and waited, as if to quiet some turmoil inside himself, though outwardly he showed no evidence of turmoil. Then he said, “If you sincerely would help me.”
“Yes! Only say. I’ll do anything.”
“Will you? This then. Loan me as many machines as you can from Klarn, to carry on my work here. The work you and your brother put an end to.”
Vitra jumped as if slapped. Her features, her stance, merged from the yielding into the hateful.
“No. Ask me for anything else.”
“Simply that, nothing else.”
“I refuse,” she exclaimed.
“Then you intend not to help me after all.”
“Help you to escape this mud into which Vyen unjustly cast you. Not help you to linger here.” He said nothing. Vitra said, “If you were resident at Klarn once more, you could organize the machines as you wished.”
“Vitra, understand yourself, and the circumstances. If you obtained my pardon without admitting my blamelessness to the computers, I should come to the Residencia, not as a prince, but as an Upperling. I’d be dependent on your charity. I’d have no call on any of Klarn’s technology, save what you would allow me to use of it.”
“You’d be free to use all as you wished.”
“All, I surmise, but the machines which would frequently bring me back here.”
This truism went beyond even Vitra’s powers of self-deception and denial.
“I would be your slave,” she said desperately, “I would be your Temal.”
“That,” he said, “I doubt.”
His voice had never changed, yet at last, something within it, or within his eyes, made her draw away. The armor of the fortified wine was deserting her rapidly. She found herself suddenly, as if waking from a trance, alone with her enemy in the belly of premature death. How had she come here? What had she said? What betrayed—and whom? Things which, a moment before, had seemed both inspired and assured of success, were abruptly displayed as mistakes, oversights. And Casrus, for whom she had tried, twice, to sacrifice herself and even her brother, Casrus had nothing for her but dislike. Sober and in dismay, she altered as if she had gone mad.
“You won’t accept my kindness,” she said brightly. “Rot here, then, with your precious dirty half-dead friends. Watch the skin flop loose on your bones, listen to the poisons gather in your lungs and stomach. Fail here and die here.”
He said, “Go now, Vitra, you’ve said enough.”
“No, not enough. You imagine yourself so wise, so superior to me. And all this while, I held you in my palm. I held you by strings and made you dance.” Her breath came fast, and the words expired outward with it. She could no more stay dumb than stop breathing. A pounding of victory rang in her heart, and yet, at the same instant, there was a clamor in her somewhere, a bell which rang a warning. No, Vitra, no. Tell him no more. But the pounding of victory bore her on, a drum of war from a forgotten era of war. “You,” she said, “I made you dance like dolls. Casrus and Ceedres. Temal and Tilaia.”
He might have missed it. He was weary and sad, the endless guilt become, for an hour or so and maybe forever, a block of granite upon his shoulders. But he did not miss those two alien names mingled with Temal’s and his own.
“Who,” he said, “is Ceedres? And Tilai—”
“Til-ai-a. And who is Vel Thaidis? And where is she? Here.” Vitra put her gloved finger to her forehead. Her solitary remaining pride carried her like wings, better than wine, or love. “I have worlds inside my skull, as does any true Fabulast. A world of endless sun. I created it to mock at you, and her, and all of them. Your other selves. And from the plot of their lives, I made the plot to destroy you. You who trusted you were a man of such intellect. You, my superior.”
“Go home, Vitra,” he said again.
“And you, go to a recreation center. Go and watch my Fabulism, Subterine. Go and see the blazing sun, and how I made you dance under it. How I can make you dance, over and over and over, whether you will or no.”
Already she saw the Rise Iu dome chamber before her, and her busy fingers erasing the tapes she should have erased long since, long since.
Strangely, she seemed to have known she would one day tell him all this, which she should not, and it was as if she had left the tapes purposely so he might then witness them.
But probably he would forget her words.
And even if he did not, by the time he had gone from the recreation area, fought off the hypnotic effect which might in any case make him forget, and reached the machines of the Center to register the proof of the Klovez plot against him, she would have destroyed all evidence. If she were quick.
Of course, she was weeping.
She did not see any further unwholesome pictures of the damned through the windows, her tears at least spared her that.
Her social conscience had died before Casrus’ reddened and unfriendly eyes.
* * *
• • •
Another woman came to Casrus’ open door some minutes later. She was quite old for the Subterior, perhaps thirty-eight or forty years. She looked a hundred. Though those who lived to a hundred and beyond it, in the Residencia, would not look this way at all. She straddled the door, arrogant as Vitra, yet not as Vitra.
“My man’s sick,” said the woman.
Casrus rose from the ledge by the scoop of fire, where he had been sitting. He placed two white credit chips in her hand. The woman stared at them.
“They said you would—” she said. “Suppose,” she said, “I lied. Suppose I have no man?”
“You would still have some need, or you would not have come to me,” he said.
The woman hurried to the doorway; her back to him, she hissed that rare blessing of the abyss, “Live long,” before scuttling down the stairs.