The Birthgrave

by Tanith Lee

  “I cannot explain. I do not understand. I did not even know of your presence until the sound, and the Shadow on the beach. How can I have done all these things you say I have done? How?”

  “I think I could tell you,” he said.

  He stood in front of me, but I could no longer look at him. His voice, the voice of Darak and Vazkor, came to me distantly across great hills of exhausted misery.

  “The ship,” he said, “is more than a ship. It is built around a core of— Power is a word I think you will understand. This Power is like a great brain, linked into every part of the ship. We have our own words for this brain, but your world, as yet, has none. In the brain of each ship is endless information about every man who travels in her. These memories can be changed or wiped clean at any time, but they make life easier for us. Because of them the brain knows from our commands, actions, even our thoughts, what we need. A meal, a book, a chair, come when we want them. If a man is hurt in some inaccessible part of the ship, there’s no fear that he’ll go unattended, because the brain will send equipment to his aid. The brain also guides the ship, defends her, and takes her from world to world. All systems, in fact, are connected intimately with the brain, and the brain responds to the particular mind-patterns of her crew. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said dully.

  “Normally,” he said, “no mind-patterns outside those of her crew can interfere with the brain of the ship; the minds of our worlds are not powerful enough for that, nor have we found such power beyond our worlds—until now. It was an unforeseen circumstance that a mind, to which the brain had never before been given access, should suddenly reach out, make contact with it, and dominate. The brain was powerless. It obeyed you. It brought the ship down to the beach and killed the lizard.”

  “Obeyed me?” I said. “I did not call to your ship.”

  “You did,” he said. “The proof of that is our presence in this valley.”

  “I did not know I did it. When the Shadow came I was afraid.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “I believe you didn’t know. It was clear you didn’t understand when the ship responded to you a few minutes ago.”

  “Then let me free,” I said.

  He stood looking at me, and his eyes penetrated my tiredness. I looked up at him also. His face was absorbed, serious.

  “No,” he said. “It’s plain to me you have nothing to go to. It’s plain to me you are in distress and danger. In all the time that we’ve watched this world, our rule has been never to interfere with the frequently mistaken and bloody development of its human life. You have forced us to interfere. So let’s forget that rule as regards to you.”

  “I am unimportant.”

  “You don’t believe that,” he said. “Why expect me to believe it?”

  “I am a bringer of death,” I said. “The two men that you resemble died because of me. You will die if I stay near you.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think that you’ll bring death to me.”

  There was a stirring in me, a little trickle of hope and warmth that ran into my veins and thoughts. Darak had always believed me more than him, and feared me, and so the curse I carried had found him easy prey. Vazkor, in his power-lust and single-mindedness, had been even more afraid, perhaps, of the goddess on his right hand. But this man had no awe of me. No real awe for all he said. He sought to understand a mystery he imagined he had found in me; he who rode and was master of this great thinking ship. He had no fear.

  He smiled. He saw I had given up my will to his. It had no feel of chains or panic, but only of a great relief and quietness.

  “Beyond this room,” he said, “there is a room where you can bathe and sleep. Tell the door not to open to anyone else until it has your permission, and you’ll find it very private. You could have held these doors shut against me. I wonder why you didn’t. Anything you need, the ship will provide. In the morning—but that is the morning.”

  I turned to follow his instructions, but he said abruptly, “Why do you wear that mask?”

  “I am cursed with great ugliness of face,” I said. It did not occur to me to evade the question, or to lie.

  He said nothing in answer, and so I walked to the far wall once again, and moved along it until doors opened. I went through, and instructed them as he had told me. I did not see the room, except that there was a place to sleep. I lay down on it, and thought and sight and pain extinguished themselves like sudden lamps.

  2

  I woke, I thought, to full sunlight, but the glow spread across the ceiling, and not from any window. I lay still, remembering at once all that had happened to me, in a curious detached way. After a time I sat up and looked at the room about me.

  My bed was a dark blue circular couch, much larger than the one I had called up before, and quite opaque . . . yet it had the same resilient firmness that gave comfort without pampering. Like the couch, the room was circular, topped by its soft sunburst of a ceiling, with smooth walls the pale blue color of harebells, and a floor set with a pattern of little squares of dark blue and silver. On my right a painted dark blue symbol seemed to indicate doors other than those I had entered by. The artists of Ankurum insist that a room of blue colors can bring only melancholy, but they are very wrong. This room had warmth and security.

  I put my feet to the floor, and noticed it was smooth and softly heated. As I stood up, the bed retired gracefully into the wall. The symbolized doors opened before I was halfway to them. Beyond lay a tiny bathing apartment and, as in Ezlann, water ran hot as well as cold from silver beaks into the bath. Blue towels presented themselves as I left the bath, and a fan of warm air. A crystal tray slid from the wall, bearing crystal bottles of perfume, combs, and even cosmetics, while a long mirror sidled out behind me, and frightened me when I turned and saw myself so abruptly. It seemed oddly ungrateful to refuse such an ardent host. I could not help but think of it as something with feelings, though this made no sense. I washed and dried and combed out my hair, perfumed it and my body, and looked with distaste for the dirty tattered shift I had left on the floor. It was gone.

  I remembered then how Yomis Langort and my captors had discarded their silver clothing, and the wall had whisked it away. I looked appealingly at the walls, and nothing happened. Hastily I clipped on again the intermediary wristband.

  “My shift,” I said aloud, and still nothing happened. A smug silence hung over the room. “My clothing—what I was wearing—please give it back to me.” I had the distinct feeling that I was dealing with a mischievous animal or child. “Then I will go naked,” I said. But I did not want to. I also had learned by now the human superstition that nakedness is vulnerability.

  I walked back into the blue room, and there was a stand there, and on it hung a long dress which seemed to be made from hyacinth-blue silk, and a delicate array of blue undergarments such as I had worn in Ezlann. I put them on slowly, enjoying, despite everything, the luxury and comfort. When I lifted down the dress. I saw it was a model of that other dress I had worn in Ankurum, the white brocade in which I had sat through the agent’s supper, and in which, later, I had heard Darak give up both our lives to the Sagare. The dress had been beautiful, and somehow the brain of the ship had picked that information from my memories, yet, presumably because all the things in this room were blue, the dress was blue also, and I was glad of that one difference.

  A mirror came and nudged me. When I turned, I saw the long reflection of myself, and there was a kind of beauty there, all the whiteness held in its shimmer of blue silk. Only the black mask denied beauty. I put my hands to it, and then drew them helplessly away.

  “I am cursed with great ugliness of face,” I said.

  The mirror and the stand slid away. A circular chair came, and I sat on it and then a table with blue flagons of what seemed to be milk, and water, plates of what seemed to be new bread, and fruits like strawber
ries.

  I sipped the liquids and nibbled at the foods. The pains were not very bad. I walked about the room.

  He must know by now that I was awake, dressed, ready to speak to him. The ship would have told him. Yet I was not ready to speak to him. Despite all acquiescence, fear had come back with the day. Fear of him, and fear, yes, fear of myself and what he said I had done.

  And he did not come.

  * * *

  At last I turned away from the room, and went to the doors I had come in by on the day before. They opened for me, and beyond lay the glassy pillared space where I had waited. Someone else waited there now. I stopped still as the doors closed behind me. A man, rather older than Yomis Langort and the other men I had seen here, yet, like them, sparely and strongly built. Unlike them, he wore his whitish-blond hair to his shoulders. A belted white tunic hung to his knees over the familiar, palely metallic trousers and boots. On his left wrist was clipped a silver band with a winking bright green light.

  “Good morning. I am Ciorden Jathael, Computer Master of this ship.” He paused and eyed me with large gray eyes, shrewdly and swiftly taking in my appearance as if it were something he must quickly capture, store, take out again when I was gone, to examine more closely. “I see that you don’t understand. I believe Rarm—our captain—has told you of the brain which guides this ship? Computer is simply another name for it. But no matter. I am the guardian of the brain. I am able to link with it, gain a telepathic union with it. In order to do such a thing I must open my mind totally to the flow of information in the—brain. An ungifted and untrained man would be killed by such an act. I am blessed with the talent and instruction to survive the operation. Do not think I boast. I know my place. In times of danger, disaster, or malfunction I am invaluable. In a time of quiet and plenty, such as now, I am”—he smiled and made a gesture of amused self-negation—“very little.”

  “And why are you here, Ciorden Jathael?”

  “Because my captain sent me. Though I assure you, I am delighted to meet at last my rival in the computer—er—the brain’s affections.”

  “Why were you sent, Ciorden Jathael?”

  “Please,” he said kindly, “it’s quite unnecessary for you to call me by both names at once. Generally, it would be normal for you to address me by the second one, plus a suitable prefix, such as ‘Master.’ However, under the circumstances, Ciorden will do very well. Why was I sent? To take you to the computer’s core—the Hub.”

  “Why?”

  “Why.” He considered. “I’ve no idea,” he said finally with a look of slight despair.

  I laughed, and some of the tension drained out of me. He seemed both incongruous and real in this new world.

  “Well”—he smiled—“a better beginning than I hoped for. And do you also have a name?”

  “I have no name.”

  “Disturbing,” Ciorden said. “In our worlds, all things have names. Surely your planet isn’t immune from the nasty habit?” He held out his arm for me. We might have been in Ezlann or in Za, going in to some state occasion.

  “My name, like my beginning, is lost,” I said.

  A wall opened, and a pair of blue sandals emptied themselves onto the floor. Ciorden leaned down and picked them up. He sighed.

  “The computer is always overjoyed when the ship carries a passenger. Men who live in uniform and travel the same star-ways year after year bore it no end. There’s no excitement in guessing what they require. But you—not only new, but different, and a woman as well.”

  “Does this—computer—brain—think and feel as a man would?” I asked him. I had imagined from the tone in which Rarm spoke of it that it was inanimate and passionless.

  “Not as a man, perhaps. But as a being. Our scientists disagree with this. A machine, they say. But if there are no emotional quirks in the thing to begin with, it grows them. All Computer Masters would tell you the same. Now, don’t disappoint your admirer. Put on the sandals, and we’ll visit the Hub.”

  * * *

  The corridor beyond my rooms branched a little farther along into two fresh curving ways. Ciorden led me leftward, and a little farther on, when this corridor also branched, to the right. The walls and floors altered as we walked. There were no longer symbols indicating doors. Everything was silver as on the outside of the ship. The corridor ended apparently in a blank wall, but when we reached it, that section of floor and wall began to sink with us.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Ciorden said. “The Hub lies between this and the two lower decks. A flight of stairs would have done as well.”

  For a moment or so we remained in a cage of blank walls, falling, and then the vista of a new corridor slid into place in front of us and we were still. The corridor was white. At the far end a silver symbol on the closed wall.

  Ciorden went to the wall, and stood aside to let me enter first as the doors parted.

  It was a large oval room, held in a kind of luminous darkness. Each wall glowed metal, and the occasional eye of a light burned and extinguished itself. At the center of the room, a single metallic column reached for and obtained the ceiling. Colored panels smoldered like sleepy jewels across its surface. But I did not enter the room. I was afraid to touch the glittering spider’s web which threaded and cross-threaded over it, weaving every wall together without a break.

  “I cannot enter, Ciorden,” I said.

  “Oh”—Ciorden smiled—“I should explain. What you see are quite harmless light rays.” He stepped past me, and stood among them, his face and body abruptly latticed with color. “As you see. I don’t hurt them, neither do they hurt me. If, however, some intruder or madman ran in here to damage the Hub, the computer, reading his mind, would activate the rays to stun him and also to sound an alarm. A defense is essential here. It’s only in this one space that the computer stands vulnerable, naked, one might say, an opened heart revealing all its complexity of valves and mechanisms. Come.”

  I followed him then, and was absorbed also into the web of light. He walked about the gently purring column, stroking it with one hand. Panels ignited and darkened.

  “In here,” he murmured fondly, “endless knowledge, balanced judgment, and the intimate details of every life aboard this ship. We are at present fifty-two men. Each of our minds has a replica inside this metal covering, a much finer and more accurate mind than the one we carry inside our skulls. Every detail of our experience is caught here, the truth as it happened to us not as we think it happened after twenty years of forgetting. Babies cry in this column, boys climb trees, and fall in love, and dream of the spacemen they long to become. Fifty-two unblurred memories.” He paused and looked at me. “And of course, now yours also.”

  Tangled in the web, my skin chilled stiffly.

  “Mine? I am not of your worlds. How can I be—in there?”

  “Because your brain contacted, overruled even, the brain of the computer. To serve you, it had to understand you, as it has to understand the crew of the ship, in order to serve them. That is the way in which it was built. Imagine,” he said, “imagine that one year ago you were given a wonderful food on some far planet, and you thought it had a certain taste of this and that, but you had forgotten, and were wrong. The food which the computer brought you would also be wrong. Allow it to penetrate your mind, and find what it really tasted like one year ago, and it can give you what you want. That is perhaps a frivolous example, but the basic principle holds true from a chosen meal to a man lying injured and unconscious and in need of help.”

  “So,” I said, very softly, as if I might keep the thing from hearing me, “all my thought, memory, every atom of my life—is known to your computer.”

  “Yes,” Ciorden said. “Known better than you know it yourself. You told me that your name, like your beginning, was lost. Inside this column nothing of you is lost. If you have a name, it is here, and the beginning of your life, w
hich you have consciously forgotten, is remembered.”

  My beginning. My child’s life before I had woken under the Mountain. The things which came in dreams, the swan lakes, the marble stairways, the leaping evil of the flame. Panic filled me. I did not stop for a moment to think why. I turned to the doorway of the room to run away, and Rarm stood there, the doors shut behind him. I did not know how much he had heard. All of it, it seemed. His face appeared dark and emotionless and without compassion, the face of Vazkor.

  “You tricked me here,” I said to Ciorden. “And you also,” I said to the man in the doorway. I was terrified. I gripped my shaking hands together. “I never thought you gods. Now I see you are truly men, with all the petty curiosity of men. If I have given my brain to your machine I will give nothing further to you. Let me go. I will be no part of your out-world experiments on a race you consider inferior to your own.”

  “I’m afraid,” Rarm said, “that you can’t leave this ship now. In the past few minutes we’ve lifted from the valley, and are now in orbit around your world.”

  “I do not understand you,” I said. But I did.

  “Ciorden,” Rarm said.

  Ciorden brushed his hand along the column. The metal walls of the room melted. Only in a nightmare could I have believed such a thing to exist about me. On every side black skies filled with the searing white drops of stars. On every side, distance, the void, black walls pulling the soul outward through the eyes, to fall into limitless nothingness. And below, a bluish sphere hanging like a lantern. A world. The world that I had run through, which had seemed so solid and so huge to me.

  The need to cling to something stable was unbearable. I turned to the metal pillar and hid my face against it, shutting my eyes, holding to it, as if to let go would be to send myself spinning into the black emptiness forever.

  And under my hands, the pillar throbbed and whined.

  3

  Trees, growing from metallic channels in the floor, spread their green feathers against the high roof, dusted black feathers of shadows across the painted walls of this indoor garden of another planet. Elongated red flowers spilled like blood from urns of glass.