by Tanith Lee
An example of one of the ubiquitous aimless crowds ever present in the Slum was shambling up and down the street. Presently Vel Thaidis wandered with it. The street gave on to a square on three sides of which the blue buildings lined up their archways, while on the fourth the high wall angled away. Near the square’s center a fire was blazing in a large iron pot. A woman tended it, the sweat raining from her heat-bitten face. Buckets swung over the pot on a hook and bar device, boiled, and were removed, and fresh buckets hung up. A queue filed to the pot and away, handing the woman, along with each full receptacle, a credit chip or article of barter. The barter the woman picked over, shaking off all the time her furious sweat. She was an aqua-boiler, to whom unfortunates, who had lost a personal brazier in which to purify the Jate’s supply of liquid, had recourse.
Vel Thaidis, pushed to the wall, saw a knot of women coming from the pot-queue with their now-drinkable rations. The fourth woman in the knot was barefoot.
Vel Thaidis edged through the crowd and ran to the woman. Halting in her path, Vel Thaidis pulled off her sandals.
“These,” she said, “for a drink of that.”
The woman looked at Vel Thaidis with scorn as she reached and grabbed the sandals.
“You must be an imbecile, girl. To offer me both shoes. One would have bought you drink. Still, you witnessed her, didn’t you, friends?”
The women, envious of their comrade’s luck, and contemptuous of the imbecile, grumbled mocking assent.
“Drink then,” said the woman, and set her bucket before Vel Thaidis on the ground.
Vel Thaidis knelt in the brown dust and scooped the aqua into her mouth with her palms. It remained hot from the fire and scalded her fingers, lips and throat. After she had achieved five or six mouthfuls, the woman drew the bucket away. She was already wearing the sandals, which were a little too small for her. She had tongued off the smears from them, and now paraded their sparkle coyly.
“I trust you came by them legally,” the woman said. “If the Law asks me, I can describe you very well.”
Vel Thaidis stared at her, and felt heavy remorse. She had learned want and fear, she had learned villainy. She understood, at last.
In that instant, a commotion began in the crowd behind her, in the square. To begin, there was only shouting, a confused bustle of movement and an illustration of speed which had not been there previously. Then a part of the queue seemed to explode. A woman fell, and a man came jumping over her back, his arms and legs pummeling.
Vel Thaidis received the impression of one driven mad, the straggly flying hair and limbs, wide-open mouth and eyes that flashed, for in his extreme agitation the polarizing inner lids were fluttering up and down. This had almost blinded the man, yet he kept running and now his arm struck against the suspending device over the fire pot. Aqua tipped and sloshed upon the flames and gouts of steam arose. Shrieks of outrage at fluid wasted were coupled to the wholesale yelling, as the press sprung aside, to avoid more than the onrush of the demented sprinter.
The crowd had peeled back now to the very walls and arches that framed the square and led from it. Vel Thaidis saw several men burst up the deformed trees in the street beyond.
The running man ran on. No one questioned him, attempted to detain or chase him.
As he raced from sight, so the outcry in the street and square also vanished. No one uttered or moved. Plastered to the walls, tensed, noiseless, they waited.
Half a minute elapsed.
Then the atmosphere sizzled. What the people anticipated was coming.
The air tore.
Two red-brown metal missiles, horizontal, parallel to the earth and five feet above it, pierced into the square. Their jets sent a colorless emission after them, their rounded heads pointed inexorably. The velocity in this populated area was not great, sixty or seventy staeds an hour. Probably, too, power had been reduced in order that the hunt be prolonged, for plainly it was reckoned a public show.
With a hiss and tide of heat, the Lawguards came level, flared by, and were gone. Swerve and battle as he might, they could not lose their target.
Uproar broke out again. Jammed in the maelstrom, Vel Thaidis beheld face after face, identical. Excited, electrified, transformed by terror and greed, the lust to see another less fortunate in this most misfortuned place. New shouts: “The outer ramp! On to the roof!”
The crowd, like a single organism, hurled itself forward, and Vel Thaidis, swathed in its mass, was hurled forward with it.
Her feet almost left the ground. She was borne upward, along a slanting walk that led from the street to the apex of one of the blue metal buildings. Glazed matte though the metal was, it gave off a furnace breath of sun. The plastum ramp sang under the thud of footfalls.
They were on the roof, sixty feet up. The crowd gushed against the railing, climbed on each other’s backs, pointed, swore. Through smolders, between chimneys and blocks, they could see him running still, small as an insect now, and behind, a few staeds off, the copper pointers, ever in his wake.
“That’s Nesh. It must be,” a woman said to Vel Thaidis. She leaned on Vel Thaidis’ arm, for they were all brothers and sisters at this minute, bound by their hunger and their sublimated fear. “Nesh—he stole minerals from the manufact where he had worked, and made a gas-gun, and shot his woman’s customer with it.”
“No,” said a man close to them, “not her customer—her employer. But it’s Nesh.”
“Her employer and her customer. Also the woman’s neighbor,”—another.
“They’ll drag him howling to the Zenith,”—another.
“He’ll roast.”
“His guts will bake.”
The small figure was flagging now, as if weighed down by the burden of so much amplified hate. On other roofs all about people had scrambled for a vantage.
The Lawguards gained suddenly, for the spectacle could be prolonged no further, the man was on his knees. Tentacles shot from the pursuers, scores of them, thin as threads in the distance, wrapping and wrapping him, raising him, bearing him. And now the two rockets upended and came vertical and were two copper needles with a knitting between them, and a struggling insect tangled in it. The crowds on all the roofs cheered, and when the cheering died, Vel Thaidis heard his cries, erupting to their freedom as he could not, hitting the walls and blending to a ghastly music.
They would carry him to the nearest precinct of Law. They would not hurt him, only question him, to be sure. After which, the Zenith desert.
If I delay with the knife on my wrist, Vel Thaidis thought, there is my end. Then, almost a cry within her: No knife. Here is the means!
The crowd, deflated, began to disperse. Soon she was alone on the roof, the sun beating on her skull. The revelation was extraordinary. Nesh had killed with a gas-gun. Driven by his madness (who but a mad or desperate man would commit murder when the process of the Law was virtually inescapable?), yet it had been difficult for Nesh to obtain a weapon—he had to steal and construct it himself. But such an implement was easier of access to Vel Thaidis. Easier than a knife. More certain than a knife.
* * *
• • •
“You assured me you’d permit me my death,” Vel Thaidis said. “I have come for it.”
Dina Sirrid had lifted her head, bound this time in a scarf of luminous white that made her whitened face sallow, her teeth ocher bones, her eyes lusterless and black as two holes. If enjoyment or interest touched her, she did not reveal for the moment.
To reenter the Instation had been uncomplex. As Vel Thaidis stood before the steel door, a voice had asked of her, in the manner of mechanical Slum entrances, “Give name and reason for approach.”
“Vel Thaidis,” she said, “formerly titled Yune Hirz. I seek Dina Sirrid, who pledged she would receive me.”
The door, instructed presumably by the Instation’s mistress,
opened and let Vel Thaidis in, next showing her, by pointing hands which lit on the walls, the way she must take to reach her objective.
The journey to the door, however, had not been so simple. It had taken more than three hours. An initial hour of asking direction through the maze of streets, of following it, in some cases observing she had been willfully misled, turning aside and asking again. The city clocks were raucously speaking the fourteenth hour when she emerged onto the border road which led up to the Instation of hest-Uma. Two hours had elapsed as she walked from the fringe of the Slum, up the steep incline. She had walked perforce barefoot, and before she left the city, already she stepped in her own blood, leaving footprints any might note.
Some way up the slope, she sat by the road and knew she could go no farther. An apple bush grew there, withered and black, yet affording spots of shade. The shade erratically revived her. She told herself that she could, after all, proceed, and must do so. If she would only suffer this, Velday would live and Hirz would live through Velday. She recalled legends of ancient contests before the Yunea had been settled, when ancestors had been glad to die, providing they could pass shoulder to shoulder with a dead foe and providing their house persisted after them.
Half mocking herself, she thought: Demonstrably, I was weaned on ideas of honor. But nevertheless, her impetus was renewed.
Somehow she got herself the rest of the way up the hill to the brown barren ridge, the steel building with its thin, thin towers, and so into it and to Dina Sirrid who had formerly said to her: “The gun is always here, ready for you.”
Yet now, Dina Sirrid had remarked, “Whatever can you want of me?”
Vel Thaidis had answered, “You assured me you’d permit me my death. I have come for it.”
“You disappoint me. Thaidis, I thought, after your display of determination, you’d last rather longer.”
“The odds against me were too great.”
“True. But I believed you hadn’t yet realized as much.” Dina Sirrid unfolded to her feet. “The gun is locked away. I’ll take you.”
“Tell me first—am I to have privacy? No machine to watch my death?”
“If you want, why not? Privacy leading to the ultimate privacy. Are you concerned as to what crematory arrangements will be made?”
“No. But the gun—will you explain the principle of it?”
“Why do you need to know that?” Dina Sirrid inquired. “To know it will kill you is surely enough.”
“You told me,” Vel Thaidis said, “when I sought you, you would be courteous and kind because you had derived pleasure from my wretchedness. Look at my feet. Be kind, be courteous.”
“Have I grown large in your sky, at last?” Dina Sirrid asked. “Yes, I see I have. Hang on my words, then. Touch the activator and direct the nozzle of a gas-gun at any subject, in this instance, yourself. Immediately, the gun will read you. Your chromosomes, atoms, blood, brain-wave, pulse, the very ladder of nerves buried in your spine. Next, compress the gun’s flexite bulb. The minerals in the bulb will already have formed a puff of gas inimical to you alone. Use such a device in a crowded chamber, and you alone die. The closer to your flesh, the more lethal and therefore the swifter the dose. But I’ve seen men fired on by such a gun at a distance of several yards, and the gas marked them down and slew them quite efficiently, though more leisurely, hurtfully. The principle: human uniqueness. As no human, even a twin, is ever entirely identical to another, so our bodily content, the grand-plan of our individual survival, is in each unique and can be chemically reversed—the gas—to choke on a breath of unique poison. We rejoice, even in our murder, Thaidis, that we’re not part of the huge battery of machines. Better than our robots, which are as like as one Jate to another.”
“How often can the gun be fired?”
“Curious question, Thaidis. Should I suspect duplicity?”
“If I should miss—”
“Haven’t I explained there’s no possibility of your missing? Generally these guns will fire seven or eight times, rendering seven or eight individual poisons. The gun I offer you has only one charge.”
Vel Thaidis had lowered her head. She had absorbed the talk in the street—the murdered persons numbering three—she had assumed this gun also would have several charges.
“Yes,” Dina Sirrid said musingly. “I’d almost begun to distrust you. Except that, for the murder of another than your-self, unavoidable death is your payment—so what gain? Come, then.”
* * *
• • •
The round pale room was as Vel Thaidis remembered, the panels, voices of hidden mechanisms, bathed in the turgid, harshly shining light of the Instation. The great plastum chair was also present, in the arm of which reposed the gun.
“Vel Thaidis, erstwhile Yune Hirz,” Dina Sirrid informed the room, “has come here to avail herself of death.”
The panels responded, flashing gold then black.
In the confusion of her plan, which seemed coming unwoven as she took it up, Vel Thaidis nevertheless cowered inwardly. To be twenty-one years and hear of the world’s end—for the world was alive only while she experienced, felt, knew of it—she could hardly bear this vocalized sentence. For if she did not die this hour, yet she would die soon. Death deferred remained death.
Dina Sirrid depressed buttons along one wall and all the panels were suddenly colorless and the murmurings silent.
“I’ve shut off the machinery in this chamber,” she said. “Now, neither overlooked nor overheard. The partition will also open in the arm of the chair. Go and take the gun, little girl.”
On slow, slow feet—she welcomed their blazing living agony—Vel Thaidis went to the chair. She recalled the partition as if she had seen it operated only moments before. The gun, a black serpent, lay curled within, awaiting her. She put in her hand, and at the contact of flesh, metal and flexite, she felt the breath of oblivion on her neck.
What had been her unwoven plan? To kill the woman with the first charge of the gun. (In contemplation, Dina Sirrid’s death had seemed naturally less real than her own.) But the gun, she had learned, held only one charge, that charge her gift to Ceedres—not enough poison left to account even for herself, then. (The blunt knives of Seta would have to serve her if not the man. But she was not so well-armored as he, more brittle, softer, requiring less to be broken. And if it was terror, she must not think of it.) Yet now, in this place where no machine kept track or record to raise an alarm, Vel Thaidis must somehow destroy or disable the Instation’s mistress, unaided by the gun.
She held the gun cupped in her hands, like a small animal she nursed. The raised nub, its activator, was tempting, unusable.
Fool, she thought. As Ceedres called you: fool. What now, fool? What will you do?
Everything was a question. She had no answer, could no longer reason, could not decide.
It would be simple to stand forever, the gun in her hands, her eyes closed, her soul leaking out of her.
“Strange,” Dina Sirrid’s voice entered Vel Thaidis’ head like an iron pin. “You seem less fervent than you said. Perhaps, when I’ve left you, your suicidal inspiration will return.”
“Wait,” Vel Thaidis cried. She darted around on the woman, the gun still clasped unweaponlike to her, her face full of misgiving.
“Ah!” Dina Sirrid let out that yap of hers. “Now I see it. You want to take the gun away with you, and I must be incapable of warning the Law of the theft. Well, girl, either you use up the gun on me, or you fail. Do you reckon a Slum dweller in my exalted position knows nothing of defending herself. I’d cripple you, little aristo. Little tender lady. Your snapped bones would rattle under your satin skin.” But the Instation’s mistress seemed only amused, not threatening. “Despite everything,” she said, “you go on performing for me. I’ve heard some gossip from the J’ara quarter. Let me put it together for you. You had a lov
er, one of your own princely class, a man you hate since your exile. Would the gun be for him?”
Dina Sirrid toyed with a fold of her white scarf, and with Vel Thaidis’ life.
“You see,” said the woman, “my predicament, here in this room with its machinery shut off, where nothing records what we do or what we say. I abide by the Law at all times. But the notion of two dead aristos—one slain by Vel Thaidis, Vel Thaidis herself carried to the Zenith to bubble and crisp and fry—how I relish it. How it tickles me. Worth a brief discomfort to allow it, maybe. A handful of lies. For I can lie some-what to the Lawguards, a talent few possess. Did you see the chase in the streets, the zenen Nesh hunted down by the Law? The screen here shows such things. They freshen all our lives. Shall I let you refresh my life?”
Vel Thaidis did not mean to speak, yet the sentences came.
“I ask only the opportunity. I’ll kill him, and must therefore die myself.”
“But can I rely on you not to disappoint me? Delicate hands flinching aside at the last instant.”
“I won’t disappoint you.”
“You hate him so much?”
“I hate him.”
“An extra thing,” said the woman. “Shall I?” she queried of herself. “Shall I? Yes. You aristos,” she said, “so well educated. I wonder if you know this? But then, you know your world is round, but, in common with all your kind, never needing to, you’d find it hard to visualize as such. And the world’s turning; you grasp the Stations of the hours through hest and hespa, but not their significance. No. And the Fading Lands. You know the name. But what are they?”
Vel Thaidis simply stared.
“Very well,” said Dina Sirrid. “The Fading Lands lie beyond the hunting lands, seven hundred staeds outward of the great estates. Far from the temples and far from the beasts, and far from men, farther than you ever went, riding or in your mind. These are the lands where the sun has fallen low, a burning coal on the horizon, and where the sky’s dark as the shade of a Maram-chamber. Where your shadow runs before you, but like no shadow you ever saw, long and black, a phantom on the ground, leading you to the door of hell. These are the Fading Lands, my lady. And were you aware the Law and its guards will pursue a criminal to the edge of them—and no farther? What a hideaway, among those long shadows, those cheerless Jates and Marams.