by Tanith Lee
“Well,” he eventually demanded, “what do you say?”
“Oh, Vyen,” repeated Vitra, “something awful.”
And suddenly she seized his hand, and drew him into the chamber of the Fabulism.
“I erased the tapes,” she haltingly said. “I did. I truly did.”
“What tapes? The tapes of your sun-world? Life! I should hope you did.”
“No, but,” said Vitra. She pointed to the empty air. “It goes on. I can’t make it end.”
“What do you mean?” Immemorial procrastination. He knew.
But Vitra continued her explanation with appalled precision.
“I had a new plot. The story of a prince who invents a beautiful robot woman real as flesh—”
“Unoriginal,” drawled Vyen inappropriately, trying to stave off facts.
“But the images refused to come. Instead—”
“Instead? Well?”
“Look.”
Vitra pressed a key in the tray of keys, and into the air uncurled a cloud of shapes, colors and light.
The chariot, drawn but not powered by its leaping brazen beasts, speared along the sun-stitched metal roads of the Slumopolis outland. The golden girl, dyed hair blown straight back like a tongue of fire, black tunic molded over her body, the material also blown back and held out behind her as if secured on wires; she resembled a statue, though she traveled almost too fast for any to see.
The air-shield, which Vel Thaidis did not understand, or know of, or contemplate, had raised itself from the prow of the Chure chariot to guard her against the flying dusts and missiles stirred up by their speed. The chariot cut the atmosphere cleanly, clearing all obstacles—sand drifts, shallow ditches—automatically. Human obstacles, which would have halted it, also automatically, did not present themselves. If humans were on the roads, they had dashed from the path of the volcanic rocket which the vehicle had become. Its velocity was at the maximum, two hundred staeds an hour. A fraction more.
If she passed unseen (beyond a rush, a flame), neither did she see about her. Tumbling washes of light, unraveling lines of green and brown, were all she beheld, the waves of the lake of air the chariot cleaved.
Even at her back, she could have seen nothing, if she had looked. How near or far they were, those things which pursued her, or how many. But she had passed, for the moment, beyond looking, or thinking. Hunted, she ran. It was sufficient.
“You see,” said Vitra.
“I see you’re insane. Stop this.”
“I can’t. As I operate the keys, this fills my mind—and so the screen.”
“Then, if you’ve no control of yourself, leave it. Come away.”
“I’m a Fabulast, I must return sometime. Have I actually lost my mind?” she gasped.
“Oh, very probably.”
But his fingers trembled as he hesitantly struck down the keys in the tray, and dragged her from the room.
* * *
• • •
The three round domes of the building were supported on three cylindrical towers, about fifty feet high, twenty in diameter. The towers were linked together by pillared walks below, pillared walkways above. The creamy white metal of the building throbbed softly under the stars, held in the black fluid of space and space-black rock. No sound emanated from the areas. Only the vast silence of the planet’s surface came to the men within their air-suits.
No other manufactured thing was visible in any direction. Far away, left behind, the busy machines of the nighttime surface, the clumsily bounding figures of workers. Zuse had brought his two companions, a ganger whose name had not been announced, and Casrus, beyond the installations, saying oddly, “This is a place we were sent to Jates ago. Only I remembered. But it’s like an invented building, a god’s house in the hot-side Fabulism.”
So it was, indeed. Save it was a cold metal rather than a warm one, and set in bleak darkness rather than a musky dusty valley, honeyed over with perpetual sun. Save that it made no noise, stood voiceless under the stars. Zuse partly recollected; Casrus, who had set himself not to forget, recollected all. To him the comparison was phenomenal, yet somehow expected. The third ganger, equally uninterested in all the structures of the surface, stimulated only by Zuse’s side-of-the-mouth mutterings, balanced nearby, waiting.
Now Casrus said, “Why should you suppose I’m interested in the resemblance to a Fabulism?”
“Last Maram, I met Hejerdi. He said you’d gone to the screen at Center Kaa.”
“I imagine,” said Casrus in his habitual quiet, measuring fashion, “that you told Dorte of my interest, connecting it with this edifice. A convenience. What had Dorte instructed you to do?”
Zuse stared, not exactly in embarrassment or strain. More in relief.
“I knew you’d guess it. Dorte’s sharpening knives for you.”
“Attack would be subject to failure out here, where there is no atmosphere,” Casrus said, “so presumably we’re meant to go inside.”
Impatient, yet sluggish, the other ganger said, “Let’s do it now, Zuse.”
“No. Klarn’s right. Out here we’d fly. And haven’t you heard how Klarn can fight?”
“This isn’t any fire-sword pretty arena,” said the ganger, but he made no move.
“This way,” said Zuse.
He floundered forward, and as he approached, the door in the nearer tower slid open to receive them, as the door of the temple had done to admit Ceedres Yune Thar, Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz, in the Fabulism. If mere Fabulism it was.
One by one, floating a little in the airlessness, they entered the circular chamber. The door shut, but the ghostly dark was incomplete. A vague illumination had woken to greet them. Even the pillars were there, nacreously gleaming. And above, what? A room of religion and golden globes, a second hidden room of black space and the brilliant mercury drops of the stars?
“Come,” said Zuse, absurdly proud to show off the building, whose significance, whatever it might be, only he had noted till now.
Casrus said, “Inform me of Dorte’s wishes.”
The ganger made his move, untutored, at Casrus’ back. Casrus flowed away, the ganger careered on, his great and purposeless leap bearing him up into the ceiling. His yell of anger and disorientation mewed through the microphone knobs, almost amusing.
“There’s a room below,” said Zuse. “We were to stun you, throw you down, let the floor close. Sometimes men get lost on the surface and never found. I’d say that was Dorte’s hope. Or if you should free yourself, or a machine unearthed you, I’m to be his witness and he mine that neither of us meant anything against you, or knew you’d come here. Not many know of this building. The machines seldom come. Last time they took metal from the walls for use somewhere else.”
The soaring ganger tumbled to earth.
“You dolt, you clot—” he said to Zuse.
“Shut your mouth. Klarn’s a safer bet than Dorte. How if,” said Zuse, “you go down in the underroom, and I come here next Jate and I let you out. Dorte will be satisfied. You can say you discovered a way to get free. Then we’ll have a hold over him, do you see?”
“I’m to trust you,” said Casrus.
“If I don’t do as Dorte said,” Zuse answered, “I’ll lose my post in his gangs. And maybe get a beating in a slink some Maram, besides.”
“And you’re certain that argument will sway me,” Casrus said flatly, and thought of Temal, who, last time he had been betrayed, had used almost these words to warn him—to no avail. “You think my concern for you will outweigh my self-preservation?”
“Look at Hejerdi. You hurt him, and next you tend him. Look at the crowd you give coal to, and food. You put us first.”
“Before my life?”
“Let’s kill him now,” droned the unnamed ganger. “No one would come on him here. No one can see.”
And then he caught himself. Beheld himself. Changed. Vitra and the workings of fate had finally engineered an alteration. Because how positive was this world he had been sacrificing himself for? To this question, his thoughts since the Fabulism had led him.
Zuse was running in rocket-like plummets across the floor. Now Casrus stood alone on it, held by his heavy soles, his heavy painful doubt: What am I engaged in, and with what validity? For if a dream is real, this reality may have lost its roots. Life on the planet’s hot-side was deemed impossible, yet maybe is not. Does this cold world exist? For the first, he felt the agonized onus of self, the exclusion of all others, the cry of the voice within: I too have a right to live, to be, to remain. That terrible cry, inside the very chamber of the brain. While all other cries, however loud, however piteous, must sound in exile beyond the walls.
And then, Zuse shouted.
“Down! Down! Down!”
Casrus realized simultaneously that he had halted at the floor’s center. The floor was now jerkily sinking, and inexorably, unsuspected panels of the room above were closing over. Looking up, Casrus perceived the two men, transfixed as if with the same aimless surprise as he himself, craning over, before the closing panels blocked them out.
Even as he had glimpsed the mirage of self-preservation, the way to it had been barred. No matter. It was as he deserved. With abrupt unanticipated sour-tasting humility, he thought: Here is my punishment, my wages, attempting to be a god, attempting to steady the toppling world. No man could do it. I have made it worse.
But ironically the utter blackness which might have been reckoned to accompany punishment, did not come. Instead, slowly, second by second, the under-chamber flooded with a rich red-golden glare.
It was sunlight, simulated but nevertheless accurate. More accurate than the notion of the Klarn salon. Ripe, very nearly raw, burning the backs of the eyes.
Zuse had not seen this light, which came only with incarceration. It could blind a man who, all his Jates, all his Marams, had dwelt in the cool dusk of the Klave. So. It was to be a punishment of flame, not dark.
After a moment, Casrus slipped to his knees. His body did not swim, and it occurred to him that with the light had bloomed a new young air, but blazing and unbearable.
And then another door furled wide in the curving wall of the light. This door was black, a cave of shade, and toward it, bowed over under the burden of fire, instinctively Casrus crawled.
He reached the dark, seemed to slide forward, and then there came another closing over, hemming in, initially merciful, eventually not merciful at all.
After a while, he got to his feet in the darkness.
The support of the air persisted about the bubble of the suit. The cold lay also the other side of it. The rest was black. Impenetrable black after impenetrable gold. And yet, despite this, he sensed a wide way ahead. And then—
And then the ground shook itself.
* * *
• • •
Vitra, standing on the threshold of the apartment, its doors having just opened before her, felt a distinct misgiving. She stared about her, examining every corner and angle of the chamber. Somber glowing colors stared back at her, objects, furniture, but not, on this occasion, the awful white stare of closed dead eyelids.
Temal, whose apartment this had been, was now merely ash in the silver urn Vyen had intended to gift to Casrus, the urn Vyen had subsequently thought better of sending.
Why was Vitra here, in this gaudy, common Upperling’s room, the quarters of Casrus’ mistress? There could be nothing for Vitra here but acid to smart in her wounds. And yet, obscurely, it had suggested itself to her that Temal was, in some way, a clue, a key to what had happened: Vitra’s failure, both with Casrus and with the bewitched fabulism that refused to stop. But how? Some uncanny Subterine curse, lingering on the air of the Klarn palace? No, it was idiotic to be superstitious. Even now, in the throes of unnatural events, insoluble errors, Vitra must retain awareness of her position. She was a princess, and a genius. Not mad. Not superstitious. Not cursed, not hopelessly at the brink.
Casrus had loved Temal—or at least he had respected her life, her person. And she, for sure, had loved Casrus. Casrus’ face, at the news of her suicide, so blank, so hollow. . . . If someone had come to him, speaking of Vitra’s death, what would have been his reaction? Polite regret?
Everything was his fault, his and Vyen’s. Or Temal’s. They had driven Vitra to this wretched pass. She, so sensitive and rare, should not have had to bear it.
She ran into the room. She seized draperies, ornaments, and flung them about. She dashed open a chest and plunged her hands among long scarves and floating shawls, rainbow dyed. The touch of Temal’s garments seemed to scald Vitra. She hated the feel of them as she tore them into shreds.
Suddenly, in the midst of ripping material, paper ripped also between Vitra’s fingers.
She looked down. She beheld an eccentric parchment, unlike the tablets of the writing machines, and portioned by her violence into two pieces, lying on the heap of massacred shawls.
Quivering with aversion, Vitra kneeled and drew these two parchment pieces together. They had been neatly written on with an electric stylus. Probably Casrus had taught the woman to write. Vitra, shrinking, read.
“My beloved, my lord and my life. Every breath I take, every step, every glance, every gesture and realignment of my body, comes about only through the medium of my love for you. My love, which enthralls me, uplifts me. My love which is my universe. How can I be worthy to feel such love? to suffer such love? I would, at any time, have died for you gladly. I would lie down under the wheels of a vehicle, and let them grind me into the earth, for your sake. For your honor’s sake, I would offer myself to knives, and to fires. You are my world. I love you. I did not ever tell you this, in words. I may not tell you now. But I do not need to tell you. Nor have I needed to write it here. It is to be written in my blood.”
Vitra gasped and let the papers fall again, in bits. Had this ghastly trivial thing been penned in the moments before Temal slew herself? What could be the purpose of leaving it here—almost as if someone had been meant to come on it. Vitra herself? Vitra, who would then writhe at these protestations of selfless and inane adoration, these purely badly written lines. (Vitra, who had put herself before everyone, including the man she asserted she loved.)
Temal had sacrificed herself for Casrus’ good, the stupid slut. And as the bearer of the ill tidings, Vitra had been ensured of her loss of him for ever. Temal’s fault. Temal, Temal.
The princess of Klovez got up slowly, her skin crawling with cold, as if the heating at Klarn had also failed.
The notion of curses no longer seemed idiotic. Temal had surely cursed her. The suicide had been a malevolent masterpiece, the guarantee of Vitra’s final false steps.
While, dead, Temal seemed to have become far more vital, far more pervasive than ever in her miserable, amorphous existence.
* * *
• • •
When the ground shook, Casrus had been pitched backward. Even as he righted himself, he touched a surface which was mobile, which ran forward, irresistibly bearing him with it. A moving ramp, like those of the Klave. But proceeding—where?
The burst of solar light, which had flooded the area on the closing of the upper panels, was perhaps an indication.
The simplicity of his thought stilled him. It was an astonishing thing, yet strangely precedented. The conviction had come to him, and would not be shaken from him, that he was to be borne away, straight through the planet, to the golden death of fire that was the planet’s opposite side.
Although about him now was only death-like blackness. And before him, eternal, pitiless, the night, the night.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Part One
Vel Thaidis had dr
iven the chariot toward the barrier of energies that divided the great estates from the great Slum. The barrier which, to an aristo vehicle, was no barrier at all. The impulses were bound to make a door for her, and so they did, beautifully, graciously, a crystalline shimmer, a curtain of brightness parting, a crackle of electricity politely restrained.
At the ease of this passage, a kind of savagery broke on Vel Thaidis. She had reduced her speed to a little less than eighty staeds, and something of the landscape had returned to her vision. Beneath her feet, the white Chure rugs soaked up her blood; over her head, the fringed white parasol immersed her in shade. It seemed, though only for a moment, that she had outstripped fate, and she turned, to see if she had.
She had not. Fate was still behind her. The distant hard sheen of brown metal, the Lawguards: death.
Unshakable pursuit. And yet, not gaining—this far.
Outward from the electronic barrier, where she now meant to go, across the lands of the princes themselves, the terrain was more varied. The chariot’s progress must grow erratic there, as it strove to avoid pitfalls which the Lawguards could evade merely by lifting a few feet from the ground. It was conceivable, was it not, she might meet death in flight, an unnegotiable chasm, some tract of treacherous sand. Her brain seemed to fragment, showing her, in that instant, a thousand possibilities. That she might die before capture, that the chariot might founder, casting her out, unharmed but into the path of what followed. Other scenes aside from death; that she might find the route to the very door of Thar itself, or Hirz, meet Ceedres, emerging or returning, his J’ara curtailed by her gun, the traitorous mocking gun with its solitary shot—or, she might slay herself, not meeting him at all—
Yet none of these vistas of intent or wish could keep a purchase on her thoughts. Savage, she understood only flight. Flight that was more or less senseless, since it swept her from one hell straight toward another. She had no guarantee that she could reach the outmost region, the un-world of the twilight, nor that, once there, she would be protected from further pursuit. Indeed, Dina Sirrid had promised her such sanctuary, and Dina Sirrid had been proven a liar. Nevertheless, Vel Thaidis’ vengeance, her ideals, had gone from her in the burst of the chariot’s speed. She had surrendered to the animal urge to run, and now, whatever kaleidoscope might flood her imagination, her purpose and her goal had become solely escape. No more than that.