by Tanith Lee
The chariot was suddenly racing once more. She could not recall if she had operated the driver-box. It seemed she had not, but that the chariot had been pushed into momentum by her will, her instinct alone.
Too fast, again too fast to guess where she might be. Pink striations of rock upon green rollers of air, the flash of waters, huge cascades of shadow—cliffs or plantations—all stirred in the whirlpool of bleached dust.
Until, at last, an abrupt reaction, fear or bewilderment, made her reach with hasty fingers to slow the car, in order that, even for a moment, she might see what country she raced through, and that she might look behind her again, the persistent need of the hunted thing. So she learned she had, in her savagery, rushed beyond the codes of her universe, put herself outside the pale for sure. For the chariot no longer obeyed her touch upon the driver-box. Do what she would, fumble with dials, with gauge, cry out, tug at the reins, fling about to watch the world pulled away like a bolt of fraying silk; nothing could check her progress now.
The final shreds of her identity and her role seemed to discard her. She was left, a pebble spun through chaos, no firm ground anywhere for sanity to take a stand.
The first screen, shimmering a clear brilliant gold, revealed all this in its vast oblong, some eighteen feet in height, forty in width.
The second screen, directly opposite the first, and its twin in height and width, glowed by contrast somber as a coal.
Casrus Klarn, retained in the whitish drop of oxygen his suit provided for him, kneeled on the swiftly flowing subplanetary ramp. The blackness all around had drawn outward, and lightened infinitesimally. Enormous caverns appeared to pile and slope and steeply fall away. Here and there, a pocket of gas or phosphorescence added a brief green or blue or purple luster. Spears of petrified moisture, arches of glass ice and hollow arcades of stone or mist or illusion arose and were retracted out of and into the dark.
That he had not dispelled the protective bubble, the breath of life from around himself, that he knelt on one knee, the resting stance of the active combatant, demonstrated his caution, and that the sudden and the preposterous had not overtaken logic. Terror, that unnecessary and inconveniencing state, had not been permitted to lay its claws on him. His face revealed nothing, nor did any spontaneous movement of his body, his hands. He was apparently waiting, but whether in unease or puzzlement went unannounced. Physically, that was.
The screen itself, in which the smoky image of Casrus was contained, gave off the same invisible rays as the golden screen which framed Vel Thaidis’ chariot. To any who entered, or had entered, or might enter the circle of these rays which emanated from the two screens, the mental condition of all who evolved therein was completely revealed, along with the sensory nuances, the vibrations and the moods of everything depicted.
Casrus, in a cloak of immaculate resignation, reviewed his uncanny journey without flinching. A little anger, perhaps, and a tinge of self-disgust, the only recognition he would give to that knowledge that some large hand had gripped him. That, as Vitra had believed she controlled invented lives, so now some other controlled the life of Casrus, and no doubt Vitra’s life, and all lives that existed, under the sun or out of it. Although he did not gnaw on it, he had never dismissed the incongruous failure of the Law to judge him fairly, nor the inexplicable collapse of the technology of Klovez, nor the pointless Fabulisms themselves. Now, the oblique segments joined together in a cogent whole.
He must be approaching, with burning death, an ultimate solution.
Here was no pebble spinning in madness. Casrus perceived the chain which bound him, and how it had bound him all his years, leading him like a dogga this way and that.
To a man of such strength of will, to comprehend such a chain about his throat was maybe worse than any perception of chaos.
* * *
• • •
The slackening of the chariot, the falling of a rain, roused Vel Thaidis from the semi-sleep into which she had dropped.
Waking, she saw at once, through the curtains of the rain, the transformation of everything. When fear filled her, she welcomed it, a looked-for guest, one familiar thing remaining.
She was perhaps eight hundred staeds from the boundaries of the estates, outward, lost on the Fading Lands. Unraveled by speed, great precipices had passed, chasmatic valleys; and lost in unconsciousness, aqua-courses like the green eyes of cats, herds of antelines gushing on their banks, a fawn-white abstract of sunlight on skin and horn and dust. Behind her, gradually, the Zenith had metamorphosed, and overhead, the sky. Now she beheld a plain, unending, every side. No trace of colored vegetation, no galloping fauna. Only the long ropes of the rain drifting down, and the coming of an alien coolness, and of an alien dark.
No prince had ever hunted here, farther than the brink of the hunting lands. Even the tracks of machines had left no mark on this place. Surely she approached the end of the world. And fear, the known friend, turned her head gently, showing her how it was. While the chariot, slower but yet unobedient, incapable of retreat or halt, enabled her to absorb all the details of this nightmare she had sloughed in sleep, regained in waking.
The sun was much more than three quarters down the sky. Its searing blaze was gone. Through her polarizing lids, Vel Thaidis could glance at it. Reddened by its fall, and shrunken, it smeared the atmosphere below it and some way above in rougings of scarlet and brassy green. But the sky only a fraction higher was bled of brilliance and of tint. It was a sky of old brown wood, unpolished, whorled and traced with lightnings that sifted, eddied and went out like pallid fires inside a dirty lamp.
Before the chariot, on the unending plain, a supernatural overflow, the vehicle’s own huge malt-dark shadow, pooled and spreading as predicted, copied the taint of the sky onto the earth. While the flakes of the dry rain, rusty scales sometimes the size of her palm, dazzled her nostrils with an electrical odor of burning.
Vel Thaidis shuddered in the tepid cold. Quite without warning, out of doors, the inner lids had lifted from her eyes. In her nakedness, she watched a hill of metal rising in front of her across the plain.
* * *
• • •
The black rocks shelved up, the ramp running with them.
Casrus sensed the door before it was reached, sensed it like a note of music, part of some song he had often rehearsed in his mind, never before listened to, but which he now heard sung aloud.
The doorway melted at the precise instant he had known it would, and a round sequin of luminescence wept through the rock. The ramp carried him into it, and drained away under the floor, leaving him, stranded on firm ground, symbolically inappropriate to a degree.
He had been deposited in a cubicle, bare of anything, even of shading or texture. At the cubicle’s farther end, a stair attracted the eye by moving interminably upward and beyond his view, beckoning. And down the stair, into the cubicle, the charge of alien light and warmth fanned to envelope him. Bearably; not as he had expected.
Backing him, the route in from the rocks had healed itself. Only the stair now would take him from this nowhere, or anywhere. And the unseen implacable hand which gripped him, seemed thrusting him forward to the stair. Go that way. There is no other way to go.
With colossal tiredness, Casrus stepped down the stair. Dark head bowed, broad and durable shoulders bowed, lids bowed over the eyes, no longer in the stance of the fighter, indifferent now it seemed, both to an observer and to himself, he stood and let the stair conduct him into whatever presence had arbitrarily summoned him. And journeying thus, he felt himself a boy, with all a boy’s poverty of true ego, and true ego’s quietude. And he felt himself, too, an old man, three hundred years, bored literally, in the manner of his kind, to death with the senseless world.
* * *
• • •
The endless plain had become a floor of cracked and vitrified gray stone. The outer sky ebbed to
a black horizon. Here the lightnings met each other in enormous silent concussions of green and white. Against this backdrop, the metal dome of the hill reflected and returned the snarl of the red and shrunken solar disc, the hill itself shining the redder of the two, and the more bright.
The chariot glided toward the hill, toward a rounded aperture in the hill. Destination was no longer a mystery.
The hill towered up, loomed, burgeoned, blotting out the brown sky, the horizon of green holocausts. Fear the friend made much of the size of the hill, its yearning door.
Then came a sound out of the eerie soundlessness and the rusty fluttering of the rain, a sound indescribable. The damned screaming in hell?
An idea came to Vel Thaidis, led by the hand of fear the friend. Am I dead already? Have I died, unnoticed; am I a spirit, rightly borne into the realm of spirits?
Involuntarily, she brushed her face with her fingers; her lips, her hair and eyes. She was as before, and yet, perhaps all ghosts had so convinced themselves.
The cry of the damned blurred to nothing as the doorway of the hill swallowed her up.
* * *
• • •
The dome, extending deep underground and rising spaciously above it, bore its own unique set of directions, known to all its machinery and accordingly accessible thereby.
The side which faced toward the sun was Dayward, and that which faced away from the sun, toward the black horizon, Nightward. The side of the dome that faced the direction in which the planet circled had been named appropriately Travel. That which faced the area in space from which the planet constantly revolved away, perhaps less appropriately, had been called Return.
Situated on the twilight zone, between the day and night sides of the planet, the exterior function of the dome (which it performed in common with similar structures ringing the whole world, just as the zone ringed it) was to retain intact the air ceiling of the daytime side. The temples, which also ringed the world along the boundaries of the sun-side estates, shared in this function. Identical “temples,” located on the nightside, could additionally have participated in the activity, had the oxygenated ceiling been extended across into the dark, a scheme once considered, but put by.
Here, however, at the fading and blending of light and gloom, of black and amber, atmosphere and void, the waste products of the fabricated sky scaled constantly in an almost endless rain. Lightnings whipped their tails and occasional groanings were audible, both phenomena illustrating where blocks of air and non-air, failing warmth and frigid cold, perpetually collided. Only the incredible powers integral in the twilight domes held catastrophe at bay. Yet held at bay it was, and effortlessly, and doubtless forever.
The edifice which suggested a hill from the surface, a hole from below the ground, was the great master dome of the twilight ring, and had been designated Kae-nentem-Kae, or five hundred and five, but reduced thereafter to Kaneka.
Within, Kaneka was luxurious and beautiful; in the land of hell, a paradise, and invoking much of its two opposed neighbors.
Day and night came and went in Kaneka, both artificial, and yet both of a loveliness surpassing reality. Day began with an ambivalent sunrise. For no disc arose (as later, no disc fell), rather untrammeled light itself welled up from every direction, burning through the darkness, through carmine and apricot and illimitable saffrons, into a clear day, water-green, powdered with small clouds and the luminous flying forms of birds and reptiles. The height of this day sky was five hundred feet, and looked a mile at the least. The shapes which ornamented it were fakes of the most elaborate and perfect kind. The coming of day required an hour, and its going another hour, during which the glory of colors sponged downward in reverse, and first a dusk and then an evening filled the apex of false, undeniably believable ether, rather as a drop of wine might soak through a fine green canopy, a central blush and a sultry and diffusing stain. In an hour jade had become jet, a vault of jet ghosted by the fragrant blue nimbus of clouds, and radiant patterned stars and sweet night winds. Day and night, needing an hour each to replace the other, lasted each a period of five hours only.
The floor of Kaneka was a garden. By day and by night, equally lush, secretive and sublime. Pinnacles and cliffs went up, and fountains of green aqua and white jets of pure air fringed their ledges. Forests proliferated, cacti with pods like rose velvet and trees with stems like fluted luminex, and funguses the shades of antique untreated bronze. Buildings grew out of the soil, out of the forests, and balconied from the recesses of cliffs. Silver buildings and gold, seeming less actual than the unactualities of the region. As if honesty alone were to be doubted.
Between the gold and silver buildings, the gold and silver mechanisms liquidly moved. Robots something like men and women, something like plants or insects, or simply like mechanical facets: wheels and pillars and spheres. They serviced Kaneka and the generating force of Kaneka, its energies and perfumes, its megatonal valves, its delicate arteries.
In a plastum marble hall, fenced by an avenue of brazen pillars, two screens stared at each other, quite blank, two sockets of emptiness, waiting to be filled by eyes.
They did not show, one: the young woman, the caressive day-breeze stroking her hair, the broad leaves of the trees framing her speechlessness her torn feet on smooth moss. Or one: the man, the platinum reed of a robot already before him, the last filament of a sunless sunrise like a pink wrapper left blowing on the lawn.
“We are here to serve you,” said the robots. “Tell us how we may do so.”
From habit, the prince and the princess, the aristocrats, gave their instructions, even in lassitude and disorientation. Neither beheld the other. The entire fabulousness of Kaneka was between them.
The day winds blew daintily. Waterfalls of flowers opened, trees showered their pastel parasols. Tricked too often, the man and the woman accepted, but did not honor, the dream, and reality lay down, quiescent, in reserve.
Part Two
The sloping lawn hung like an island in the huge violet dusk, which, translucent and lambent, would fill the sky, the garden, for one-third of an hour. Stars solidified in flower-like clusters, high and far away across the illusory mile that separated the upper dome from its floor. Robot insects, each a flitting pair of pale luminous wings, scattered like leaves through the air, the bushes, and across the strings of the golden chame.
The girl sat before the chame, not attempting to play it. Its gold, and her own, the natural metal of her skin and undyed silken hair, were darkened and curiously simultaneously drained by this mystic after-glow. Vel Thaidis was learning the lessons of dawn, twilight, night. Repetition alone could convince her of their validity. But she was not afraid, having traveled, it seemed to her, through fear and beyond.
The first period of sun had been easy. In a bewilderment of familiarity, she had ordered the robots which so familiarly came to her, to tend her. She bathed, her hair was washed, her ruined feet repaired. Food appeared, recognizable, on recognizably fine plates, and drink in cut-glass goblets. An ambience of Hirz surrounded her, and she did not protest. She lay down to sleep on a divan, in a room where blue shutters of stained crystal brought the shade of a Maram-chamber. When she woke, total night had come, reminder of death and of Thar. Double-edged, her insecure amazement, suddenly washed of apathy and exhaustion, demanded of her to discover where she had come, and why.
The robots stood ready, peerless attendants, as at Hirz, and every one of them equipped with Voice, moreover a voice which pretended to breath and expression. She questioned them, employing Courteous Address though defiant and withdrawn: Explain to me this spot, its motive, what it will do. But the explanations which were rendered her, redolent of vast data, limitless and somehow therefore unsatisfying, drove her at length to the basis of her apprehension. “Am I dead?” she asked them.
“No, Vel Thaidis.”
She relaxed weakly and they brought her wine and
fruit. The machine which used Voice most often, a slender silver pin mounted on a noiseless runner, yet with a humanoid face and humanoid eyes and lips, murmured to her of night and of day, and of the zone between, and of Kae-nentem-Kae. She used the Distant Address thereafter, turning her head from the robots.
Later, she walked in the night. As the building of rooms she had been taken to was equipped with civilized appurtenances—chambers of sleep, bathing chambers, cabinets of books, stores of food and drink, of machinery and entertainments, so the nearer garden was formal. It had fountains and terraces. And on the sloping lawn which leaned against the hollow sky, a golden chame daubed with the glints of stars.
She sat by the chame, and did not play it. Presently, she went away. A profound and weakening sadness overwhelmed her.
Reality which had been abrasive and destructive had become suddenly too beautiful. She did not know what she must do. She needed, though she did not recognize her need, fresh agony, fresh conflict to reassure herself she lived. Her sounding heart, the rise and fall of her lungs, her body’s hunger, thirst, slumber, these were not enough. Where was the world? Not in this country of dreams. Where were the characters of her story? Where tragedy, terror and vengeance?
The Law no longer hunted her. Nothing did. She was alone in Paradise, and moment by moment, she softly, kindly died.