Day by Night

by Tanith Lee

Hejerdi came some further minutes after.

  “Was the princess nice?” he asked. Casrus did not answer. “There was a crone listening down the stair. She told me your lady was shouting about some Fabulism she made.”

  “What do you know of the Fabulisms?” Casrus said.

  “Nothing. I seldom go there. It enfeebles the mind. And you forget. There’s one that some claim to recall. Let’s see. . . . A prince who duels with another for a woman—and a great cat of bronze that kills men when they sleep—”

  “A blazing sun,” Casrus said. Involuntarily, with a gestural drama rare to him, he dropped a fresh coal into the scoop, causing the fire to blaze.

  “A sun—that Fabulism—Yes. Must be one like that, I’ve seen sun symbols painted on walls. That’s one way the memory comes back. Or we tell a story. The ganger Zuse, when he was drunk on alchafax seven Jates ago, said he’d seen an installation on the surface that was like a dream he’d had. He said the sunside of the planet had women on it with golden bodies and gold tresses and uncanny black eyes. And there were gods there, like yellow globes, inside a house of bronze, or brass. He’d been to Kaa center recreation.”

  “So must I,” said Casrus.

  “You? Dreaming’s not your business. I know a girl—”

  “Hejerdi, I have to lock you in again. Or you can take the door tab, if you want.”

  “You mustn’t trust me,” Hejerdi barked at Casrus, but Casrus, leaving the tab by the fire scoop, had gone.

  Fatigue chewed on Casrus’ brain as he walked. Perhaps it was fatigue which drove him to investigate Vitra’s insane outcry. Fatigue which said: She has overreached herself, put into your grasp the key to retribution and recovery. She, who killed Temal by inference, and the worthless brother. Children. But such evil children. If they must be eradicated in order that life and duty can go on, then eradicated they will be. When I am myself again, he thought, I will think more tolerantly. Go quickly, said the other within him. See and judge and act before you think better of it, before you tolerate. A hundred may die this Jate or next, which the machines of Klarn could deliver if you had charge of them. Regain those machines. Why cosset two worthless ones, and let a hundred of the luckless perish?

  The plot Vitra had boasted of as inherent in the Fabulism, he had fathomed too well, having borne the brunt of it. If the Fabulism could prove the scheme and intention of the plot, the machines could not refuse his appeal. She was sufficiently demented to come to him, his overt enemy. Why not sufficiently demented to reveal where the flaw in her security lay? He pitied Vitra, even then. But a ruthless anger, engendered more by Temal’s senseless death than any other thing, goaded him toward Kaa. He was twenty-five, had never allowed himself a boyhood, scarcely a childhood. All at once, the denied ghosts of his younger selves beset him, sobbing and shouting for justice. For revenge. He pushed them down, but he kept walking.

  * * *

  • • •

  Vitra Klovez went swiftly to Rise Iu in the robot car, the larger transport left behind at one of the tubular, gloomy entrances to the Residencia. And as the coal luminous light of the city salved like a medicine across her agitated nerves, she took several new drinks from the flagon.

  At Iu, she dismissed the car, and moved toward the doors of the dome chamber. Her ten robots followed her. She was amused by the picture they must make. Tragically amused. She had become a figure in a drama, Vitra spurned, Vitra in despair. She comprehended that when her sense of theater seeped away, she would begin to cry ignominiously once more.

  But she had no opportunity, either to strike poses or to cry. Or to enter Iu and erase the tapes of her Fabulism.

  On the twisting road she heard a vehicle behind her, strung in a singing of bells. All at once. Vyen was beside her, clad in pointless somber synthetic furs to complement her own, scowling to compliment nobody.

  “What are you doing here?” rasped Vyen.

  “My new Fabulism—” her continued pretense to him that the old was wiped from the records was now most important.

  “It’s Maram, J’ara. No prince conjures up stories for the worker-worms at this time. Where have you been?”

  “I was—strolling.”

  “With ten robots. How extraordinary you must have appeared.”

  “I was depressed. The Fabulism will make me feel better.”

  “It usually makes you worse.”

  “I don’t care. I must do it.”

  He looked at her, cold pale face, cold pale eyes. Colder than the eyes of Casrus, yet not so disconcerting.

  “Why?” he said. And suddenly she was disconcerted after all.

  Vyen had insisted that the tapes be erased. She had not touched them, but pretended that she had. Now that he might learn of her stupidity—it had been stupid—she feared him. She had betrayed him, and read the innate viciousness of his face, so similar to her own, with foreboding.

  “If I say I want to,” said Vitra, “I will do it.”

  “I perceive,” said Vyen slowly, “there is unfinished business in the dome. What haven’t you done, dear sister?”

  “Accusations!” she squealed.

  “Did you,” he asked, “destroy the tapes?”

  Vitra stared at him. “Did I not tell you I had? Of course I did.”

  Vyen was suspicious. Feverishly, cruelly he played with fiddle-toys of steel and crystal, watching her.

  “Then come to Klef. You were invited to dine there. Shedri and three others were clamoring for you.”

  Vitra set her mouth, her very soul.

  “Then I’ll come.”

  She got into the Klovez chariot car and averted her face haughtily from Iu, the Fabulism, Casrus, destiny.

  * * *

  • • •

  The crowd waiting to dream was just then shuffling into the center at Kaa. A few recognized Casrus dimly, muttered and lost interest.

  Chips clattered in a chute, an opening folded wide. The darkened platform, with its shallow cushioning, rose up like a step toward death.

  A stir of noises rippled through and through the room.

  The crowd, arranging itself on the platform, lapsed, sprawled.

  Casrus reclined, staring with the rest at the great curved ominous screen. The others drifted, he must not. His mind, used to supposing itself the servant of his will, though sunken with sleep and gathering hypnotics of the chamber, conditioned itself to remember. Somewhere from the walls, mechanical voices wafted. The maximum request from the crowd, issued and collated before Casrus’ arrival, was for all installments of the drama, from the beginning Jates back, up to and including the latest. The fortuitousness of this struck Casrus as bizarre, yet the hypnotics, his struggle against them, took away doubt and all questioning.

  The screen flashed bright.

  The crowd on the platform sighed.

  Casrus beheld a great white star that had burned the sky to a fiery green—a sun, some spans below its zenith.

  A columned palace shone above a strand, a green water lay like a huge spoonful of jade. On the pale gold sand stood a golden young woman and her three attendant robots.

  She was. . . . Vitra Klovez. But a Vitra he had never seen. A Vitra with large, curiously darkened eyes, warm skin, a depth, like the depth of the strange lake, held close within her face. Even the poise of her, the angle of her head, her burnished slender wrists ringed with apricot metal, conveyed nuances of a thought, a spirit, a training, alien to Vitra as was this sun to a black sky of stars.

  “Vel Thaidis, your brother is coming.”

  The extremely humanized robot had spoken to the golden girl.

  “You are certain that it’s Velday?”

  “I will check the patterns. Yes, they are his. There are also companions.”

  Presently the girl asked, “Is Ceedres Yune Thar among them?”

  About one minute f
ollowing this interchange, Casrus Klarn saw drive across the screen a golden, physically rather different version of Vyen Klovez. Eventually, a golden, physically not so different version of himself.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the twenty-fourth hour, the last of Maram before Jate, Vitra Klovez paced her apartment at Klarn. She had been mildly scintillant throughout the J’ara at Klef, and had drunk much wine. The young men had more or less knelt at her feet; Bermel Klef had made her First Lady of the Feast, an arcane title of absurd glamour. Three quarters of her mind had been willingly captivated. One quarter remained intransigently in panic and at Iu. But she could not escape Vyen. And Vyen must never discover whom she had visited, what she had done or left undone.

  Now, sober again and too late, she came to see that Vyen’s frenzy was less important than the proof of their crime left undestroyed.

  Yet, she could not, somehow, credit that Casrus would work her ill, or even bring her to justice. No, not Casrus. Not Casrus against Vitra. The very fact that she had not deemed it essential to erase the tapes before was sound evidence of her instinct for Casrus’ restraint. Yet, why ever should he be restrained?

  When Jate began, she would ride to Iu and make all right. Providing Klarn, who would not hurt her, had not unremembered it by then, she revealed her complicity to the over-seeing machinery of the Subterior.

  Casrus had come from the recreation area at Kaa in the fourth or fifth hour of Maram. Too exhausted to walk back to Aita, he had sat down leaning on a wall of rock there and slept, along with others homeless or tired beyond mobility.

  The Jate bell of the Subterior woke him.

  Automatically, he took a piece of the concentrated food from a compartment of his coat, broke off a small square and placed it in his mouth. Sucked slowly, it would gradually soften without water, providing both moisture and nourishment. A whisper at his side, and he had broken off another square and another, to feed the destitutes about him. It was automatic, yet, as he performed the action, he was aware he had reached a hiatus. That now he gave his food away not from guilt but from a sense of divorce. All around, his world, palace or Subterior, seemed to have grown phantasmal.

  As Vitra raced her chariot car to Iu, blue hollows beneath her lustrous eyes, Casrus sat by the wall of Kaa center, and noticed Hejerdi pushing a way to him.

  “You kept J’ara in there?” Hejerdi asked, astonished still by the prince’s sudden uncharacteristic penchant for Fabulisms. “And now your head is thick. Don’t forget I’ve an interest in your wage.” Hejerdi grinned sheepishly. “Don’t lose our wage, Klarn.”

  Casrus said nothing. Hejerdi squatted by him.

  “Do you recall any of it? Share.”

  “I recall sufficient to damn my enemies,” said Casrus.

  Hejerdi’s mouth opened behind its shield—the Jate was very cold.

  “Well, damn them, then.”

  “But I see,” said Casrus, “a box within a box.”

  “What box?”

  “A manner of speech,” said Casrus.

  “Oh, princely talk. What will you do?”

  “I must think.”

  Casrus rose and walked away, to Hejerdi’s relief toward the Kaa exit point for surface transports.

  As Vitra stood, her ringed fingers darting on the keys in the chamber of the dome, she felt a sort of concentrated regard upon her, and glanced over her shoulder in fright. No one was there. Possibly she had caught the ray of Casrus’ inner eyes staring at her through tissue, skull, rocks, plastics and room. His impulse to obtain proof of her treachery had faded. This was not the aspect of Vitra which obsessed him, which had obsessed him so violently there had ceased to be a need to fight the hypnotics of the Fabulism platform. Wide awake and fully conscious, he had analyzed and processed the pictures before him. Presently, as was his habit, he had put aside himself, his wrongs, his rescue; even Temal he put aside, for she was dead, he could no longer help her.

  The balance of the Klave, he had always known, and unwillingly accepted, was out of kilter. Now, now he saw, amorphous and untranslatable, a mystic answer, written in pictures on a sun-blazoned screen. Untranslatable? Maybe not forever.

  Vitra, shrugging off her fears, returned to her work on the incriminating tapes. She did not hear Casrus’ inner voice, which asked of her: How could you, Vitra, poor shallow empty child, have dreamed such a world, and such deeds in it? You, who lack the imagination to understand the pangs of the Subterior, to invent a Subterior by another name, burning in white heat under a zenith sun. You, unsubtle, naïve, to create the subtlety of Ceedres, the apathy, nobility and anguish of Vel Thaidis and her inadequate brother? You?

  Can it be you are not the inventor, but merely the transmitter of another’s invention? Or another’s actual existence? Their lives, and ours, troubled, disturbed mirrors of each other—but equally real.

  With a shake of her head, mannered and pretty, Vitra gazed upon the stilled keys. The tapes of her Fabulism were blank. Vel Thaidis, Ceedres, Velday, Tilaia, all were obliterated. Nothing more could happen to them or their fictitious world. They were myth now, like hell and like Kaneka.

  It was over.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Part One

  At the twelfth hour of Jate, when Seta lay stilled and sluggish after the riots of J’ara, Vel Thaidis left the mansion, and walked from under the parasol of olive glass, toward the roil of the Slum below.

  She wore the dark tunic of Seta, the gilded belt and sandals. Over her yellow-dyed hair, to shield her head from the sun, was draped a broad fold rent from the loose black robe Seta had also given her. To destroy or tamper with the property of the mansion was a crime. But it scarcely mattered now. Or at least, it would not matter for long.

  Her Maram had been sleepless, somehow timeless. She seemed to have lain on the pallet for a year. To begin with, a million thoughts beset her, of suffering and recrimination. But eventually she thought only of one thing. Not of the failure of the gods. Of her own failure.

  Like an inky stain spreading in clear aqua, so Ceedres’ guile had spread across her landscape, blotting it out. And now the stain, a huge smoke, smothered against the lips and nostrils of Velday, stifling him. Stifling, blinded, he loved the smoke, trusted the smoke loved him, was not smothering him but nurturing him. But she, knowing everything, had traded Velday’s life and Ceedres’ death for her own survival. Despite the fact that her own life was now worth nothing, and had ended, in soul or purpose, Jates before. Thus, argue as she might that Ceedres would have prevented her attack on him during the J’ara, his hands, muscles, wit, all too quick and too vital for her blow—yet she grasped only that she had failed in not attempting it. The last door of her destiny she had retreated from. For the ills which accumulated now, she alone would be to blame. This, her constant thought through the hours of Maram.

  Then, when the Jate-calmed house grew muffled and sullen, timelessness and self-accusation left Vel Thaidis. The answer came softly, saying to her: It is not too late.

  Tilaia had taunted her with the promise that Ceedres would return to Seta the following Maram. Vel Thaidis believed her. Oh, yes, he would come back. Back and back, until he could erode her control, and watch her crawl to him. Which one Maram, eventually she would do. She understood as well as Ceedres that it remained in her to do it. When Tilaia had knelt, Vel Thaidis saw herself, and was chilled. But, lying in silence under the roof of her enemies, suddenly she beheld that what had oppressed her was to be her salvation. He would return. She would kneel. She would abase herself. This very Maram she would do it. And when she rose up, she would plunge the knife she had concealed deep in his breast.

  The enormity of her insight shook her through. A gulf of frightened astonishment, a gulf of murderous gladness, rushed together and mingled.

  So she rose and went into the city. The final lunacy had made her rational. She already knew t
he knives of Seta were not sharp enough.

  Clad in her sluttish finery, freshly painted to hide her face, she would find someone on the street. She would barter herself and her pride and her fastidiousness for a metal blade of the Slumopolis.

  When it was burnished by Ceedres’ blood, there would be the space, granted her by the surprise of others, to sever her own veins.

  Thereafter, she might rest, in paradise or in nothing. In her weariness, death seemed acceptable, if she could seek it without undue fear or pain.

  * * *

  • • •

  She had come to a wide street. Blue metal buildings craned to her right. A wall of bricks, stained and scorched looking, went up twenty feet on her left, a pillar of dirty vapor lifting beyond it and straight to the sky. People came and went, crowded in porticoes, spat and drank and brawled, mild scufflings that did not attract the Law. She had passed another cat fight, which had turned her faint and sick, so she had leaned against a doorpost and a man had come out and pushed her aside. There had been games of throw and guess, too, childish and often malignant. There had been open yards yawning on to alleys, full of men and women blotched with filth and scabs and burns of acid or steam or plasta. There had been two girls, twelve or less, faces daubed with the white protective cosmetic fudge, patrolling arm in arm, brass rings in their ears, prostitutes not special enough for the mansions, good enough for the streets.

  These persons were like another species. It was going to be difficult for her, after all, even to approach them. They seemed now not to see her except as something to be thrust aside.

  In a seizure of self-doubt, reaching this street, she had paused to nerve herself to her work.

  Her eyes burned, irritated by the high sun after the J’ara parasol and the fuel lamps of Seta. Again, as formerly, her throat was dry, and it troubled her to swallow. She had no strength to bear it any more.

  Go to a man, she thought. Any man. The more atrocious the better. The atrocious one will be sure to have a knife about him. But she could not, had not, and did not.