by Tanith Lee
She pondered the tiny five-hour days and nights. The second day she walked a little farther in the garden. Distant buildings dazzled across lakes of moss, grasses, flowers. Should she go to them?
She perceived the tireless movement of ubiquitous machines. She did not ask her attendants any more about the states of being or not being. It was useless. They told her everything, but everything made no sense to her. There was, actually, nothing to be achieved in going forward toward the other buildings. Five hours and the day was gone.
A night, a day, a night, a day, she lay on the divan, sleeping, and on waking, suggesting herself again into sleep. I am weary, she repeated to herself. It was not weariness. Peace murdered her slowly.
But at the end of the fourth day, she could not drug herself any more. Her healthy, resilient flesh shouted for mobility and purpose. She called the silver robot.
“Am I to go back to the Yunea?” Like a petulant child, hearing the unfitness of the words, she stressed them more vigorously.
“No, Vel Thaidis,” the robot said.
“You told me I lived.”
“You live, Vel Thaidis.”
“Then why shouldn’t I return? Would the Law of the Yunea lie in wait for me—is that the prohibition? I should be seized and executed at the Zenith?”
“No, Vel Thaidis.”
“No? Then I’ve passed beyond the Law. If I’ve passed beyond the Law, I’m dead.”
“Legally.”
“Then I can return?”
“There is no transport by which you might return.”
This mundane equivocation startled her.
“The chariot I stole from Chure—”
“The chariot will not take you back.”
“You mean I would be prevented from leaving here?”
“Yes.”
“That’s blatant,” she said. For a moment, she was scandalized. “Can you, a robot, defy me? I see you can. How?”
“Kaneka,” said the robot, “is Kaneka.”
“How,” she said, “if I tried to find the door from—Kaneka? How if I found it?”
“There is no need to leave Kaneka.”
“I have a need,” she said.
“Your needs will be served.”
“Then let me go,” she said, passionate for the wastes, the Slum, even perhaps for boiling death in preference to this temperate death drawing over her now.
The robot did not respond, and, in abrupt despair, her energy went from her. She sank down on the divan. Then in the dusk, she climbed the slope and sought the chame.
The coming and going of the robot insects fascinated her eyes. There was an illumination in the garden, even when full night entered it, more than that of the sprinkled constructed stars. Vel Thaidis turned her mind to Velday, and to Ceedres. She tried to experience anger, anguish, the wrath of the living. When she could not, she came to her feet and called out wordlessly across the quietly murmurous distances contained within the hill of heaven.
And then, seating herself again, she began to strike notes, chords, tearing seamless garments of melody from the instrument before her.
Almost immediately, an awareness of relief swept through her, as if she had unleashed, despite the inanimate calm of Kaneka, some power of living virulence.
So she played on, neither well nor attractively as, when a princess of Hirz, she had been tutored to do. But loudly, tumultuously, thrusting out as if with spears into the shadows, alert for reality to spring forth, from ground or air. Earth tremor, a great wind, a star crashing on the slope—anything to shatter the casement of indifference, the bars of the cage.
She played until her wrists and her arms, the joints of fingers and shoulders, her spine, her brain itself pleaded with her for rest, like sick children. Only when their pain translated into numbness did she let her hands drop from the keys and strings of the chame.
Nothing had altered, and the last solace of her frustration was to shed tears, or perhaps instead a tearless howling, such as the women of the Slum might give vent to in grief.
But before the paroxysm could be summoned, the darkness was split. Not by lightning or catastrophe. By a single motion, a glimpse of something that did not fit the tapestry of the garden—extraneous as herself.
She raised her head a fraction at a time. Her heart, unbeating, a rock, her ears two bowls of listening, her eyes enlarged to swallow the world.
About fifteen feet away, standing between the night-folded fans of trees, stood Ceedres Yune Thar.
For a second, she could not stir, finger or foot or limb. Then she rose, and she took a step.
She had no weapon, it was gone with the chariot, subtracted from her at the gate of paradise when she had barely noticed. She did not consider gun or knife, however, even a blow struck with the fist. The improbability of her enemy’s arrival here had already occurred to her. She felt weightless.
“You are an illusion,” she said. She held out her hand, half expecting a weapon after all to materialize in her grasp. “But your death may still comfort me.”
The man came alive. He walked toward her, and the shadows dropped from his shoulders but strangely coalesced about his head. The night garden painted him with its glow. His skin was pale. Too pale for the skin of Ceedres, like ivory in the shade. She glanced at her arms where the loose drapery of Kaneka left them free. His skin and hers, the same in the world, dissimilar now as day and night.
“I am not,” said the man, two yards from her, “who you think me to be.”
He stopped. She stared at him. His gilt hair had soaked up the night and was black. His eyes were like two jewels, like the cold jewels in the sky.
“Your disguise is inadequate,” she said.
“I am not Ceedres Yune Thar.”
“His ghost then. His reflection.”
He began again to approach, and her fear returned to her. Like many a longed-for gift, it was, in possession, unwelcome.
“No farther,” she cried.
Once more he halted.
“My name is Casrus.”
“Ceedres. Or his twin,” she said mockingly. Her body jerked on its bones, as if with illness. The illness which was a warranty of life.
“The genetic matrixes, white-black,” Ceedres said to her, “have been induced to create near doubles, your side of this planet and mine. Corresponding. Even the names alike. But let me come nearer. There are sufficient differences.”
He had not once copied her expressions. Suddenly she missed that everlasting gambit. Suddenly, she knew him to be another, not Ceedres, and absolutely here with her. She stood shivering, and said. “I see the proof of what you say.”
“Good. I can come closer?”
“Yes.”
He came to within three feet of her. He seemed to shut out the sky, the slope. She was alone with him in a space no larger than the space between them.
“It may interest you to hear,” he said, “you also bear a resemblance to another. Some resemblance. The more I look at you, the less I see it. I believe that if you’ll bring yourself to look at me, you’ll find the same.”
“You could not be Ceedres.”
“No.”
She gazed at his eyes, which seemed the color of the deepening sky. She was not really seeing him, but portions of him, now the black hair, now the outline of the cheekbone, the cleft in the chin, now the chiseled fold of cloak from the shoulder, the sculpture of forearm and hand. So much that was as she knew it, and so much that was not as she knew.
“The machines,” she said abruptly, “never informed me I would have company. Are there others?”
“I think not. Just you and I. And the robots.”
“You understand this place, and what has happened,” she said.
“I have one fixed, perhaps erroneous, idea. But then, I was granted evidence you were not.”
“I,” she said, “I was granted nothing. Not even my enemy to slaughter.”
“Maybe,” he began, but hesitated, watching her. She could no longer bring herself to regard him. He offered her his hand then, with an unspeaking restraint, the ritual greeting of both their worlds, an unsuitable yet essential gesture. For a moment, she avoided contact, then shyly, like a well-trained adolescent girl, she put her palm to his. It cost her something. He was the image of so much that had shaken her, body, heart and mind. But his hand was mortal, as was hers, and the hand of a stranger.
“So,” he said, “I’ll leave you now, if you wish.”
Her hand separated from his.
“If you stay, I will be afraid of you,” she said. “But I’m afraid of your going.”
“Yes. Then I will go, but not very far.”
“Where will you be?”
“Look up, and I’ll show you.”
She raised her eyes. He pointed into the dark below, toward vague trees, sewn by pearlized needles of water.
“Something like two staeds away,” he said. “A building where the robots housed me.”
“Will you explain to me what’s happened?”
“What I understand of it, if I can.”
“Not now,” she said swiftly. “Next Jate—”
“You’re more comfortable in the light,” he said, “as I prefer the darkness. You see, my world is the dark side.”
“Hell,” she said.
“Literally, in part. As is your own. And this is paradise, Kaneka.”
“Please go,” she said. Her voice was low and hoarse. As he turned, he caught the glimmer of her hands involuntarily lifted, as if to clasp him, guessed at her lips opening to call him back. As he went down the slope, he heard her say aloud a name, but it was the name of the other. He walked on into the thickening of the night.
* * *
• • •
Since he had come from the recreation area at Kaa, the Fabulism on his mind, Casrus had dimly sensed the inexorable forward propulsion which had swiftly torn him, like a page, from his world. He had inadequately surmised it would be meaningless death he went to, the hot-side desert, which, though supporting a form of life, would not allow his metabolism to survive. But arriving in the mild warmth of the artificial country, seeing its dawn like that of one of those other worlds memorized by Klave computers, his primitive resignation to futility had cleared. The fact of a twilight zone he comprehended, as any educated member of the Residencia would have done. But the exquisite garden, prototype of the myth of heaven, intimated structures of thought and preparation. Though he had been brought here like a beast led by rope, yet some sort of program, and surely not a random program, had ordered events. The whiff of logic revived his logical intelligence. Soon, it seemed to him that within a framework of coherence his self-reliance and aptitude might be retrieved.
If he accepted that the Yunea was extant off a screen, its complementary values proposed a hideous parallel with the Klave. Both societies were absurd, with their core of godlike parasites and their hosts of condemned. Both, too, were patently doomed to collapse, each feeding on itself as it was, its technology running down or awry from unawareness and ignorance. Between these two habitats was Kaneka, also mechanical and also under the organization of machines. Kaneka, to which he, who had been the double face of his own society, had been brought. The key was apparently in his way, but he did not yet presume to name it.
(Nor, with the return of ego, the straightening of mental shoulders, did the wings of the dreamer carry him; he gained no sense of personal destiny. To Casrus, ego was an inner proposition, rather than a flare to be broadcast over outer regions. If he saw himself as in any way distinct, it was merely as an element of things as they were.)
Thus, unhurriedly, he let the robots of the garden attend him, beginning with them to erect a groundwork of clues. His questions, unlike the questions of the young woman two staeds away, were exact.
The ambient information which was dispensed to him, he assimilated; Kaneka’s functions, external: the establishment of atmosphere and weather, and internal: the manufacture of a benign environment.
“For whom?” Casrus asked the robots.
The silver reed with the humanized face, which consistently replied, said to him: “For any that might come here.”
“And who has come here?”
“Yourself, Casrus Klarn.”
“Only myself?” The robot did not speak. Casrus said to it, “Tell me who else is here.”
“A woman.”
He went on questioning until it had given him her name and her biography, which ended in her flight to the twilight. Naturally, he had realized instantly who she was.
“And why are we here?” he said at length to the machine.
“You will live here.”
Its obtuseness seemed of design. He said, “And why will we live here, she and I?”
“You cannot return to your own prior situations.”
“Cannot?”
“Cannot.”
“What will we do here?” he said.
“As you please,” said the robot. In his physical weariness, Casrus had smiled at this curious joke.
Later, after he had slept, he walked out into a marvelous indigo darkness, and back over its blue lawns and black cliffs and silver floral staircases to the empty point through which he had come. He could not locate that entrance, nor had he thought to; it was merely his thoroughness.
He retraced his steps to his new apartments and began again a relentless interrogation of all the robots that would obey his injunction to come to him. Sometimes one would go away and another replace it. Sometimes several replied at once. They always would reply, but not always unambiguously. The more succinct the query, frequently the more nebulous its vocal reward. But gradually they gave up to him hints of vaults, libraries, banks of intellectual and practical acumen. It seemed he must seek these unaided.
“I’m to be tested, am I?” He thought of princes in Fabulism, and theatricals, infantile dramatized trials of valor and wit, unsuited to this dome.
“You must do as you desire.”
“I desire to be shown the cache of books and records, printed or visual, which I believe you’ve alluded to.”
“They are all about you.”
“In this chamber?”
“In Kaneka.”
Thereafter, for three periods of blue-winged darkness, unlike the iron cowl of space, three periods of fiery light, unlike any light he had ever known, he investigated the potential of the gold and silver buildings under the roof of heaven.
And found the records easy of access.
That he was practiced in such delving from his earlier investigations in the Klave assisted him. But the memorized visuals and the great books of the Klave were a synopsis and a prelude to what lay in the cortex of Kaneka. He recalled an ancient legend of Heaven’s five hundred and five gates. Had it referred, not to numerical title, but facetiously to gates of stored intelligence? The history and science of a million planets and a million times-interrelated to his own, he cloudily saw, yet only by inference. In a few day periods and periods of night, some twenty-five hours, interrupted by one further indiscriminate Maram of two hours sleep, he could amass very little. What he absorbed served mostly to reveal the trek before him, all uphill.
At the fourth hour of the third five-hour day, he walked on to an avenue of brazen pillars and reached a marble hall.
As the doors of rose-stained glass drew aside for him to enter, a gust seemed to blow out over him from the chamber within. Only then did unnerving sensation decipher itself for him, showing as it did so, that it had been faintly with him all along. Pragmatic, Casrus did not deal much in impressions, those vapors of sensitivity that offered themselves as omens, inexplicable insights. Even in the otherworld of Kaneka, he
had seen through the veil of legend. While Vel Thaidis had descried the dome’s mystery, he had only descried its human application. Both had fathomed something the other had not. But now, the hall before him fashioning a slow tender light, no more harsh than the day, but seeming more false, Casrus checked, examining the bizarre idea which all at once riveted him. Which was that not a machine, but a living creature, had been here, on this area of ground, in this hall, not long before him.
He thought at once of the girl, but somehow acknowledged the girl, alien to him though she was, would not have left behind such a marker of strangeness and of presence.
He had had murmurs of this feeling previously, and dismissed them unexplored. The constant coming and going of the robots might have been responsible for them, in any case. But no longer, for the murmur had become a shout.
The hall had been occupied, and though seeming empty now, the occupation had splashed an opaque intellectual tinting over what remained.
Unarmed, and in the casually rich, nondefensive garments of Kaneka, Casrus crossed the room’s threshold.
The tiles were a mirror of somber marble veined with cracks of jewel-work. A mail of bronze and silver and white platinum, brushed aside, displayed two vast screens confronting each other over five yards of shining floor. The screens reflected in the floor, one a dark thick gold, the other a burnished black, equally blind.
Dwarfed by them, disturbingly congruous, two elegant cushioned chairs placed back to back dominated the center of the dual reflection.
Casrus walked forward and set his hand on the central communal spine of the chairs. Each faced toward a screen.
The Fabulasts of the Residencia, Vitra and the rest, were a tradition. The hot-side Yunea, rather more primitive than the cold-side Klave, had somehow loaned itself to be spied upon. Directed, presumably mechanically, through Vitra’s feckless brain, the world of the sun had become a live and recorded diversion. Already he had placed this extraordinary happening inside the new framework Kaneka apparently offered. Guided by the computerized mechanisms of Kaneka, the mechanisms of the Klave had primed Vitra to become a transmitter. Another world of aristocratic pleasure and slavish toil had been caused insidiously to intrude, undermining the foundations of Klave society from its subconscious upward.