by Tanith Lee
That the organizing machinery of either side, linked through Kaneka, should gear such a scheme into motion implied both enterprise and virtue. This was the logic Casrus had put together. But now the logic faltered.
The Klave observed the Yunea.
Some other thing had observed both Yunea and Klave (gold and black, the sigils of the two screens were obvious.)
A computer, surely, did not require such screens to detect those it sought to influence. Certainly, it did not require two chairs.
Casrus turned. He went back through the mail curtain, and through the reopening roseate doors.
As ever, the scape of the garden, near and far, was glinting and fluid with the progress of robots. Along the avenue an opaline wheel approached, but such mechanisms paid the human voice no heed. Casrus raised his arm, hailing instead one of the slender silver kind. It seemed to blow to him on its runner, the mask of its face parting to take a needless, humanly reassuring breath before it uttered.
“How can I serve you, Casrus Klarn?”
Casrus beckoned it into the hall, and indicated the blind screens, the blinder empty chairs.
“Who sits in these?”
The robot breathed once more.
“How can I serve you?” it said.
“You can serve me by answering my question.”
“Please repeat your question.”
“My question was, who occupied this room formerly, and used the two screens?”
The sweetly armored face parted for its breath.
“How can I serve you?”
Casrus mused, watching it. This was the first time a forthright and complete refusal had met his request for enlightenment.
“You have been programmed not to discuss the matter.”
“How can I serve you?”
“Instruct me on how to operate the two screens.”
There was then the briefest pause.
The robot said, “The method is by thought, and will. There is no other method.”
It must be so. Casrus had noted the absence of paneled keys, the absence of everything save the apparatuses themselves.
He let the robot go and stood some while before moving to the golden screen. He had faith in the quality of his concentration and the capability of his mind, but the prospect of so using them was unwelcome to him. That he preferred to attempt an evocation of Yunea rather than Klave was both challenge and evasion.
But the screen did not react. Unlike the key-motivated disc of the Fabulast, it demanded more than a wish to wake it.
An hour he kept himself there.
The hour gone, he seated himself reluctantly in the chair which faced the screen. Leaning back, the tension poured from him, his eyes blurred, and a picture came, great and glowing, filling the gold. Only for a second. He saw the girl, Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz, treading a road of metal and dust. Her hair, seared with the dye of Seta, as he had last seen it in Vitra’s Fabulism, was folded within a dark veil. Her feet were folded in blood. This was a replaying of a portion of the biography the robots had told him of.
Only a second, yet the rays of the screen ran over him, informing him of her agony, her determination, the deeds she intended to accomplish—the acquisition of the gas-gun, the murder of Ceedres, her suicide.
He was jolted, jarred, both by what he received and by the way in which it came to him. As the screen wavered into returning blankness, he found himself stupidly obsessed by her two feet, slippered in blood. Vel Thaidis took on the character of the actress in Eres sector, she who by her bloody foot, her pain, and her desperation to prevail in the good will of the princes, had planted the towering tree of his guilt and his endeavor.
The screen had recalcitrantly shown him the past, in more ways than one.
When the sunless sunset began and he went from the hall, all across the park, its uplands and rifts and blossoming labyrinths, he heard the clamoring of the desolate crying chame.
He was drawn to her suddenly, she, his female counterpart in the wake of the appalling discovery. Drawn to her resolution, the pathos of her hurt and fear, her loveliness, like Vitra’s, and not like at all.
He surprised himself, more than a little. After the hall and its aura, the search for human companionship, never indulged before, seemed ridiculous. Why, at such an hour, did a woman, whatever her worth or her symbol, compel him? Yet she was vulnerable, more vulnerable than he, understanding nothing of what had come about. There was some reason to go to her.
As he went, Temal was not quite forgotten.
Meeting Vel Thaidis, he did forget. Troubled by her trouble, he did not tell her much, or even warn her.
* * *
• • •
The second meeting, for her sake, was by day. Casrus had begun to reason that apartments and articles of clothing adjusted to increase or subdue for both of them the warmth or coolness of the garden, just as they were soothed by its robots and aesthetics. Whatever motivated the provision, he could do no less than a machine in considering her.
She waited for him on the sloping lawn, under a fountaining tree with delicate pale green ribbons. Three golden robots attended her. He was struck by a recollection of her stance beside the lake of Hirz. She would hardly have asked these robots: “You are sure it is Casrus who approaches?” Though if she had found the two chairs in the marble hall, she might have had some cause to ask.
She greeted him. Her etiquette was touching and admirable together, her means of holding fear aside.
He had been careful to give her advantages; the light, the chosen spot, the outdoors itself, native to her and foreign to him. She resembled Vitra only slightly, but by her eyes he knew he had stayed for her as Ceedres. He supposed the locked gates of Kaneka would supply them with the time to fade such comparisons. Already, the dynastic implications of a male and female brought here together and shut in had suggested itself to him, and probably also by now to her.
They strolled to a decline where green aqua flowed through a channel of stone. Robot fish darted in the currents and plumes of moss brimmed over from the bank.
Vel Thaidis and Casrus had adopted a veneer of propriety and leisure, as if they conversed in some salon. Yet when she spoke, she asked at once: “We are prisoners?”
“It seems so.”
“The two of us, served by these hundreds of robots.” She smiled at the water, her slim golden hands folded tight upon each other. “It represents a worse extravagance than those of the Yunea.”
“Or of the Klave. I’m afraid you have yet to learn of the dark-side counterpart to your world. I think there’s a way here to show it to you. A screen that reveals my world, another that reveals yours. The past. Or, I imagine, the present.”
“Casrus,” she said firmly, confronting his name, but her eyes lowered on the aquatic fish. “I never knew of your world, except as a myth. Yet I can absorb the expression of it—almost too readily. It occurs to me there’s some spell in this garden.”
“Magic,” he said gently. He remembered, her civilization was more primitive than that of the Klave.
“Not magic. Hypnotism, possibly. Or some chemical in the air, the scent of these flowers. How can I believe so much which, to me, should be unbelievable?”
Her oblique keenness intrigued him. She postulated a factor he had overlooked. If it was so, his earlier philosophies emerged in a different garb. Though there was no remedy, it was as well to know.
“This dome holds a hoard of instructions, applicable to both our worlds, and many others. It may contain explanations of itself.”
“You said, when we met before, that you would tell me of the impulses of Kaneka. As you saw them to be.”
“Perhaps I spoke rashly. I may be mistaken.”
“I’d like to hear.”
He glanced at her frightened hands and averted eyes. His inclination was to pro
tect her and smooth her way with lies. Then he noted his error, for she would have to be told—the screens, the Fabulism, all of it. He reflected on the decision half a moment, debating as to whether he himself, or the force of the garden, prompted his judgment to speak.
Then he told her everything, sparsely, almost conventionally.
“And the machines of Kaneka order these things,” she said when he had finished.
“The machines, at the direction of what governs them.” He had told her everything but the ultimate conclusion. She seemed on the verge of saying it herself, her face transparent with loathing.
“Vel Thaidis,” he said, “we have to accept the notion that two persons have been watching every moment of our lives and the lives of those about us.”
“But it’s more than that,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“They seem to have brought us here,” he said. “Whoever they were, or they are, they could do that. Why not more?”
“Why not. Thar, which fell over some hundreds of years. That would be straightforward to negotiate, given such control of surroundings and machines.”
Or Klovez, he thought, a quicker fall, engineered for maximum effect.
She spoke suddenly and rapidly, not to him. It was a prayer.
“But I suppose I shouldn’t pray,” she said. “I might be praying to them. Whoever they are. Gods. Cruel gods. Playing with us.”
“Probably. I think not only machines were included in their scope. Our emotion, thought even, may have been capable of distortion via the screens. Without doubt, thought and feeling are relayed to whoever watches.”
Even now their emotion and thought were perhaps transmuted, shaped, as the girl had deduced. He had uncovered the secret of the screens with small hesitation, and told it to her. And all the while they made no outcry. Horror, yes, but no rush to escape or to resist. . . . Kaneka was molding them. Not alone to the moods of night and day, but to an enormous insupportable complacence. And there was no help for it.
“Whatever it was, or whoever,” he said, “has gone, but left its will behind it. I have the theory that we’re to take its place.”
The screens were ready, they had only to be mastered, and once they had been. Thought and will. Power beyond power. Until through the screens, as a Fabulast would form and disintegrate the lives of his or her inventions, so the denizens of Kaneka could make and break two worlds. As two other denizens had been making and breaking them for centuries.
A balance out of true.
Why not, when it was a story created purely to entertain? Where was the entertainment when no one rose, or stumbled, when none suffered or bled or died? If all were equal, all princes, all happy, where was the narrative, and where the splendor?
He and she had been characters in a book of Jates and Marams. And now they could become, had indeed been chosen to become, its authors, the heirs to this wickedness. A wickedness beside which the foibles of Ceedres, of Vyen, of Vitra, were innocent and naïve. Blameless even, if their inclination, mind and soul, had been manipulated.
And Kaneka silently sang to its captives, mesmeric, caressive, when they slept or when they woke, convincing them that all was as it should be. That to rule as gods was fair and just.
The two who had gone away had left them that as their legacy, before they sealed them in Heaven.
“We could die,” Vel Thaidis said quietly. “Would it be better to take our lives?”
“Perhaps.”
For a long while they said nothing, and then he beheld how her hands had loosened and her eyes lifted to his face. They were beautiful, her eyes, within the charcoaled lines of their inner lids.
“I recall my brother, Velday,” she said, “and Ceedres. And the vengeance I never came to.”
And what do I recall? he thought.
The wretched warren of the Subterior, and the aristocrats who lived on it, beasts tearing at a screaming bone.
With the power of Kaneka, if such a power were truly within reach, maybe a game could be devised that set the imbalance to rights. You played god before, his heart said to him. And his brain: why not once more? And better.
“It’s too grave an office to refuse,” he said. The sentence echoed in his skull, the phrase of some other man who had spoken with his mouth.
They had been matrixed to be compatible with this, and with each other. The likenesses which had salted the performance were also a lure. It came to him to wonder if they bore a resemblance to those who had been here before them, those who had invented them.
“Why,” she said, “did they leave their kingdom to us?”
“As well ask why they brought our ancestors to this star. Oh, yes, I think our races were taken from some other planet entirely, to be their toy. If we guess them to be gods, why stint them? Their avarice and callousness would be gargantuan. We can hardly fail to see that. Besides, the myths of Klave and Yunea, the stories of wars, the traces of religions, even traces of Kaneka itself mixed in the law and semantics of our people. Yes, they brought us to this world and scientifically aided us in evolving to fit its scheme, eternal night, endless day. They generously gave us our stilted social hierarchies, dreamed up for us our slums and our palaces. The slums got worse and wider by their own graces, the technocrats more esoteric and dependent—something they must have predicted and counted on. For further amusement. But now, these gods—either they died, and choke some urn together, or else—”
An emerald fish leaped in the channel.
“Or else,” she said, “they found some other exercise, and grew tired of this one.”
She looked down, able now to turn from him without avoidance. She saw his image in the aqua when the fish had passed, and was soothed by it. She had loved Ceedres and denied herself in anguish. But here was a Ceedres from whom she need not withdraw in shame or self-denial. The beloved in the person of this good and honorable man. Her prosaic evaluation of romance also was comforting. That the processes of Kaneka had surely mated them was no more than a pale shadow in the recesses of her awareness.
Only awareness of vengeance, of worlds to be shaken and shattered, brought, for an instant, a far-off roar of fear that deafened her.
Only for an instant.
Robots were advancing through the tall mosses, bringing caffea. The silver stream drifted from the vessels of gold. She had lost all this, she had lived in despair and anticipated death.
His face was preoccupied. She studied it with a still and tentative joy. We have been hero and heroine. And now how long before we learn the mechanisms, before we are god and goddess?
Again, the vague note of fear, dying in the sound of leaves.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Part One
Velday, the last heir of Hirz, struggled to his feet. His attackers slipped from him, but in that moment, he realized they were no more than the silks of the divan. The lake of smoke and blood, in which he had seemed to be drowning, only the shade of the Maram chamber.
He stood, marooned, in the midst of the floor, and could not recollect coming here. Rarely did he keep Maram. The dream-wash was sufficient, and the intoxicated naps he slid in and out of during J’ara. The only picture that would come to his mind was of a dinner at Mansion Nu in the Slum. . . . Ceedres had presided. A woman with crimped creamy hair, had pressed a wreath of striped foliage onto Velday’s brow, and held a wineglass to his lips. And then. . . . A door drifting aside, one of Ceedres’ trained hierarchs bowing before him. Ceedres laughing. Ceedres was drunk too, but Ceedres drunk was a drunken god, no less. Women seemed to hang from him like flowers from a tree. A mouthpiece of onyx was between Velday’s lips. He did not remember taking it up, but still he sucked in the fine granules of drugged dust. Ceedres’ hierarch groveled to Velday now. Velday could scarcely see him.
“My lord the prince,” said the hierarch, “says I should tell you.”
“Tell m
e what?” Velday heard his own voice, far off, along an avenue of pavra, white caffea, wine and beauty.
“Your sister has escaped the Law.”
“My sister?” His brain, which the pavra had expanded to a huge thrumming vault, focused on her more accurately than his eyes would focus on the sycophant. But what had Vaidi to do with the Law? Was she not at home, in Hirz—or no, not at home, and yet—
“Vel Thaidis has borrowed the chariot of the Yune Chures. She fled outwards to the Fading Lands. The Law lost her, gave her up.”
“She has genius.” The clear bronze of the voice, Ceedres’ voice, filled Velday with pride, and with dismay. He tried to straighten himself, compose his face in lines of intelligence. To be worthy of Ceedres, to become Ceedres. Ceedres’ golden cup was lifted. “To Vel Thaidis, last princess of Hirz!” It was a toast. Velday fumbled his glass and drank. Something worried at his thoughts, too feebly to bother him.
“How generous you are, Prince,” one of the women was saying to Ceedres. “This is the second time she would have killed you. She’s mad, for sure, that one.”
“Gently,” said Ceedres. “Not in the presence of her brother. I don’t want to distress him.” The laugh was low this time. The woman laughed with him. Velday, foolishly, laughed also, he did not know at what.
Now he knew. He had laughed at Vel Thaidis, his sister, who had grown insane. And Ceedres’ laughter—that he had imagined or mistaken. Ceedres’ heart was scourged by Vel Thaidis’ plight, this much Velday understood. It was Velday’s own guilt, his inadequacy and lack of strength that made him misinterpret the actions of others.
The dinner at Nu had run over into two or three J’aras, the Jates between spent in sport of hunting. Another incoherent memory: a robot approaching them as they paused in the bird chariot, offering a ridiculous admonition that the country beyond Hirz was being despoiled, over-hunted. What a ludicrous fancy. (A sudden image of Omevia Yune Ond clad in Ceedres’ gift, a flowing garment fashioned from the bleached skins of immature antelines, mechanically sewn together with green jewels of Hirz.)