by Tanith Lee
The machines had gone away. When they returned, they had gifted him with their summons. He must present himself at the designated computer complex. Others had also been questioned. A verdict had been arrived at, and awaited him. Shortly, the robots of the computer complex entered Klarn.
“Wh—wh,” said Vyen. He giggled, remembering Vitra’s giggle. “What if I w-won’t g-go?”
“You will be required to go.”
“You m-mean I-I shall be forced-forced to?”
Vyen rose. He leaned on the arm of his chair. A Klarn robot came to support him.
When he was five years old, he had been acrobatically tilting himself over the rail of a chariot-car, and tipped on the ground. He had sat on an avenue, retching and terrified, with a discolored thumb which pointed the wrong way. Vitra, who was six, had held his head, and when the hurt and the disfigurement had been corrected, Vitra fed him candies. They had sat together and watched the erratic light of Rise Uta skim the ceiling of the room. They had told each other macabre stories in the unlit everlasting dusk.
He wanted Vitra to be with him now. But he had killed her. She was a silver urn.
The way down into the planet was cumbersome and symbolically desolate amid its cold metals, cold tiles, cold grumblings of machinery.
There was an Upperling in the Subterior. His name was Dorte. He had been apprehended. At first he had refuted the charge of murder, but when it was proven, he had agreed vehemently that two aristos had certainly coerced him, bullied him, into illegal homicide.
They were building lies against Vyen, as he had once built lies.
(Had any of Vitra’s little-girl stories ever mentioned the planet’s hot-side, a golden veldt, jade-green sky, tindery hills?)
He was in the chamber where he had rendered the fabrication against Casrus Klarn.
He sat on the cushioned couch, smiling and shivering. He tried to pour and drink the liquor that stood at hand, but the liquor spilled, just like his life, through his fingers.
The platinum ovoid spoke to him. It told him all that had been discovered and the tests applied to the discoveries, and the results. Then it told him he was condemned.
Vyen went on smiling, shivering, spilling the liquor, not glancing up, or anywhere.
“Vyen Klovez,” said the machine, “in accordance with that which has gone before, your murder of Prince Klarn and of your sister Vitra, there can be no clemency, no appeal. The sentence is final, and it is death.”
Vyen cried, and the tears married with the wine. His long lashes, sticky black with wetness, stuck to his cheeks.
“But,” said the machine, “we do not allocate the harsh dishonorable death of exposure at the surface, the death of oxygen deprivation in the vacuum. You are granted, if you will, a more tender execution, here in the Residencia.”
Vyen went on crying, a child that was not to be placated with a shadow play.
The robots of the Law carried him to the little cell and laid him on the divan. Here he curled himself tightly together, screwing up his face, winding his arms about it. In this position, he cried aloud for Vitra until the room was flooded with an invisible, odorless, painless poisoned gas.
In the screens of the Fabulism, the sun-side drama went on. It was unquestioned, by human or by machine. Only Hejerdi was perplexed, only he was properly aware it had been Vitra’s. Could it be some other aristo Fabulast had adopted it, or had some mechanism of the Fabulast chambers run amok? There had been a jeweled insectile aircraft darting through the feathery cirrus of the green sky. Velday Yune Hirz had reclined within the craft, and Tilaia, the J’ara girl, had kneeled to him with a dish of cakes. He had taken her to live in Hirz. He had acquired a taste for her, or for her homage. But in the Slumopolis, their taste was for revenge, furiously submerged. An aristo had avoided justice as no Slum-dweller ever had. Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz had fled into the dusk beyond the sun, but who believed she had died there? She was a princess, and the Law had allowed her the privilege of life no zenen or zenena could have bought, once saddled with crimes of Vel Thaidis’ magnitude. Seeds of revolt had been tossed upon the dusty and infertile land. The sun might shrivel them, or it might not—
But how could such seeds, scattered across the Subterior’s frigid rock, find any spot to root in?
Conscious of strange undercurrents murmuring all about him, Hejerdi marveled, flinched, meditated. Other strange things had happened, the strangest only half a Jate ago. The computers, which had reached into the princely city to penalize, had reached out again to Hejerdi, and grasping him firmly in the toils of the Law, assured him he was not to be disciplined in any form for retaining his evidence, nor for seeking to profit by it. His adverse circumstances had been accepted as excuse sufficient. But Dorte had been deprived of his status as Upperling; he had been tattooed on the forehead with the mark of a pardoned assassin. He had no work, and might well starve. The man who had helped Zuse imprison Klarn in the “temple” building had been beaten with steel, but not Zuse himself—
Hejerdi mused over the wholesome wine the Center had provided him. He had been told to recruit men for surface work. If he were canny, he might aspire to be an Upperling himself. The jump in his fortunes was fantastic. He had begun almost to suspect some destiny. . . .
Yet not a destiny as another Dorte. There were enough of those. Casrus Klarn had taught him something. He must search within himself for what it was. His extraordinary cascade of luck influenced him. When a woman came and plucked his sleeve, he lifted his hand to cuff her, then stayed his hand.
“You were with Klarn,” she said. “I know it. Will you do as he did? Spare me a credit chip.”
Her face was hollows and stark bones.
“Casrus was mad,” Hejerdi said. He pried a chip, his advance wage, from its ring, and gave it to her. Her face became smooth and beautiful. And he—he became Casrus Klarn.
An intolerable humbleness and joy went through and through him. Probably the wine made him susceptible, but already he had inaugurated the avalanche. There was no path back.
Later, he gave away another chip. Later still, he took on three men for a surface gang, and asked no tip from them for his goodness in putting the work their way.
He had been awarded Casrus’ hovel in Aita-Slink. He went there, and looked at the drawn cat pouncing in the firelight on the wall, and felt the seeds of metamorphosis putting their roots into the bare stones all about.
Next Jate, a man rushed Hejerdi. Hejerdi broke his nose, then sent him to a center for healing and left him credit.
Two men who had never met Klarn face-to-face, sought Hejerdi out and inquired what Klarn had been like.
Hejerdi had become an interpreter, a prophet, more or less through wild quirks of fate. The hour for a leader, a messiah, had not yet arrived, for the seeds were barely rooted. In the dark or in the sun, they would need a margin to grow.
CHAPTER NINE
“So even Casrus was not immune to the wish for vengeance. That surprises me, in particular as regards the girl. He had impressed me as chivalrous to the point of banality.”
“You mistake him. I studied him more closely than you. I think his plan was otherwise, but the reality of what he could achieve with the screen disturbed him. He relinquished control of his characters some moments too long.”
“Explain.”
“Oh, it’s simple. Casrus worked on Hejerdi’s limited mentality, persuading him to send the message to the Klovez. Vitra was intended to allow Hejerdi into the Klovez-Klarn palace, where he would flounder in luxury, granted whatever he wished in return for his silence. Vyen would hold himself aloof, and Vitra would try to pretend Hejerdi wasn’t battening on them. Then Casrus would introduce compunction into Hejerdi’s brain. He would feel bound to do as Casrus did, take over Klarn machines to aid the Subterior. In that way, Hejerdi would be in the supreme position, a foot in both camps, to offer himself a
s spy or messiah, when the full germ of rebellion takes hold—perhaps two or three years from now. An interesting gambit.”
“I see. Yes, that’s more like Casrus. What happened?”
“I surmise he controlled the emotions of the brother and sister inadequately. They became hysterical and brought death on themselves. Hejerdi’s betrayal of Vitra’s boasts to Casrus, which made sure of Vyen’s execution—I think that, too, was Hejerdi’s own fright rather than manipulation. In a short time, Casrus will probably have the computers of the Residencia gift Hejerdi with certain robots of Klarn—a reward, say, for his brave confession, that brought wrongdoers to justice. Then the plan will go on as before.”
“Vel Thaidis, on the other hand, took her revenge with enchanting ruthlessness.”
“Yes. Did you relish it, brother?”
“It was—educational. More so than your own cowardly and uninventive method, darling sister.”
“I disdain to comment on the word ‘cowardly.’ It was a logical act and appealed to my masochistic persona at the time. As to invention, I think myself to have been more inventive than yourself. Consider the reprojection via my screen here at Deneder, and that eerie fulsome little message—How strange, too. I might almost have been prophesying that Vitra—”
“Oh, don’t become a mystic, my dear. I really could not bear it.”
“Very well. Our protégés shall be mystical for us both. They have resolved on a future uprising, possibly on a messiah. In the Slum and in the Subterior. Two guilty aristos paying out their peers, those peers who left them to the wolves.”
“Ideal. Apt.”
“Yes. I suggest we have been talented.”
“Are we not always so?”
“Certainly we always assume we are.”
The man laughed. The woman watched him, pleased by, but not joining him in his brief mirth.
They were, in either case, physically similar to the persons they had projected, actually impersonated, if physical was a condition that might be attributed to them, for their nature was not quite that. . . .
“You know,” he said a length, “I think Deneder is more attractive than Kaneka, though Kaneka is the larger of the ruling domes. Kaneka’s more gaudy. Better for the newcomers.”
The woman turned her smile to the open doors. Beyond this chamber of screens, marbles and gems, spread a garden-park, unlike the garden of Kaneka in many ways. Here days and nights were prolonged, the stars moved over the dark, and a white globe occasionally arose, altering its contours phase by phase for the enjoyment of watchers. There was grass in Deneder, and curious trees. Few robots moved here; instead animals padded the walks, as flying things circled the sky, which, by day, was not the color of the sky of the Yunea. Whether these creatures were mechanical or not was moot.
Dere-nentem-dere, three hundred and three, abbreviated to Deneder, was the somewhat smaller sister dome of the planet’s twilight zone. Its function, in common with all the rest, concerned the upkeep of atmosphere; its inner function, as with Kaneka, was to provide a haven, a paradise. But it was situated at a distant juncture of the world-ringing zone from Kaneka. It had not passed into the mythos either of light or dark side, since it had been in existence a mere thirty years.
The slightly physically natured brother and sister (the original “players” who had inhabited Kaneka and operated their game through its two screens and left their chairs behind there to perturb the two who came after) had caused Deneder to be constructed when they contemplated their game’s newest innovations.
They had been playing a great while, first bringing their human toys to this world, causing them mostly to forget their origins, next experimenting with various forms of civilization for them, then choosing the hierarchies that presently obtained. But the dual societies, darkside and light, locked in their changeless environments, began to deteriorate. Their machinery ran down, their virtues diluted—initially this promised action, upheaval. When none came, the brother and the sister began to weary of their gaming boards, the stagnant dark, the fruitless light, which had even ceased to worship them properly as half-remembered gods.
When the first innovation occurred to these gods, and then the second, Deneder was made in readiness, and complex fore-programming took place in Kaneka itself.
Rather than observe and direct, the gods would put on mortal flesh. They would participate in the worlds they had fashioned.
By a form of emancipated psychic projection, they launched themselves from their protective domes and into the matrixed embryos they had put ready for themselves (they had organized the matrixes for centuries, and the appearance of what came from them), one on the cold side, one on the hot. Their own supernal bodies were discarded, and mechanically borne to Deneder, to be resumed on their psychic return. The instant of which return each knew exactly, since each also knew, with a self-tolerant delight in wild adventure, that, as humans, they would die shocking deaths. They had actually chosen and designed these deaths, just as they had chosen and designed their temporary mortal forms, as infant, man and woman. Just as they had chosen and designed the pre-programmed impulses which would still be fed in at the screens, in their absence, to turn the wheels of lives, to perpetuate the story line through its desired stages.
With their astounding abilities of mechanized and telepathic control, it had been inevitable they would seek for something extra. To dwell as men, and act mankind’s fear, arrogance and foolishness, titillated them, but even that would, of course, pall. To that end, the death of each had been arranged to afford escape. And to that second end, the second innovation had been programmed.
The second innovation being the propulsion into Kaneka of Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz and Casrus Klarn.
The woman had glided from the marble chamber onto the broad green lawn. She gazed toward the blue hills that rose, apparently miles off, in the direction known as “Travel.” She and her brother were free to leave the screens whenever they wished. Usually the programming their wills had previously enforced would continue, whether they took note or not. But at this time, neither exerted any influence at all on Yunea of Klave. They left the game to Casrus and to Vel Thaidis.
For now.
Therein lay the second innovation, the reason for the making of Deneder, and for the birth, manipulation, summoning and installation of a prince and princess in the master dome. The game that had once been so engagingly played singly, might resume its energy when played against another. One against one for the existences and fates of the dark-side. One against one for the existences and fates of the sun-side. Even if Casrus did not know it, nor Vel Thaidis guess, as yet, that they were not alone in their rule, that they had opponents.
“I do think,” said the woman, gazing on the hills to Travel of the marble chamber, “trees might improve the prospect of that ridge.”
“Have them planted from the seed bank,” said the man.
The sun, which really dawned and set in Deneder, glinted on his gilded hair. Her hair, black against the blue of the sky, was more silken than it had been in her “life.” But they were much the same. Anyone would have known them, and if not by their looks, by their names, which it had been their irony to have themselves given in the world.
“When shall we recommence with the screens, Ceedres?” she asked him.
“Tomorrow? Or the next day, perhaps.”
She smiled once more. He was to play against Vel Thaidis as in the Yunea, though currently unknown to her. And she, Temal, would play against Casrus, who, with his matrixed resemblance to her brother, intrigued her very much.
It had amused and tantalized her to love Casrus, to die for Casrus. The reprojection of her “ghost” to appall Vitra, the impassioned post mortem note—Temal had rejoiced in those, yet partly she wished now the story had gone on for her, in the life, as it were. Just a little longer. . . . But there might be a future occasion when she could indulge
that fancy, even yet.
Ceedres, proud, stimulated by the rending of the claws of lionag, recalled the event with a dazzled, agonized sensation, very nearly nostalgia. To live. To die. Such depths and summits of expression.
They did not think beyond these things, only of next day, or next. Or backward, to the adventure they had lived, the pains and traumas and the strange human emotions. Naturally, in the end, either Casrus or Vel Thaidis, replaying former actions from the story on their screens, would come to see that, of all the characters, only Ceedres and Temal did not give off a true aura of emotion, that now and then, they, and they alone, were quite indecipherable and might only be presumed to have, or deduced to have, felt anything.
They were long live in their own essence, that essence not quite physical. There were eons before them, and behind. They had to have such toys, Temal and Ceedres, the true tyrants of this overshadowed and malignly fortuned planet. Destruction they would wreak heedlessly, torture and despondency. For, beyond the opulence and the tyranny, was not their situation worse than any other’s?
One day, or night, one Jate or Maram or J’ara, might come the end of all the roads, the going out of all the lamps. One day, every game might stale, every innovation pall.
One day, like human aristocrats three hundred years of age, they too might die of boredom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tanith Lee (1947–2015) was a legend in science fiction and fantasy writing. She wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories, and was the winner of multiple World Fantasy Awards, a British Fantasy Society Derleth Award, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror.
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