by Tanith Lee
I sat among the flowers, smelling their strange scent, watching him look at me. I was not entirely sure how I had come here. There had been sound and burning lights, and alarms like the alarms of war. Their ship had responded to my horror until Ciorden presumably managed to quiet it. Then Rarm must have brought me to this place, as if these strange growing things could put an end to the hollow icy tension in the pit of my belly, which had come with the knowledge of the blackness all around me. I was glad to have inconvenienced them. Yet it was all the pleasure I had.
“You’re a risk to my ship,” Rarm said. “Your mind holds a power which you can’t or won’t control. You could kill us all.”
“Then let me go.”
He came and sat beside me, and I turned away from him, staring at the red flowers.
“Let me go,” I repeated.
“Can’t you see your own danger? Your life is misery to you. The computer can analyze all our minds, and that is what it has to say of you. If you let me, I can help you.”
“Why?”
“Not as an experiment, which is what you think.”
“I am,” I said, tasting the bitterness of the words, “inferior to your race.”
“Inferior is a word you misuse. Men of my worlds have watched your planet for many years, because it held men like themselves—human men. Primitive by our standards, perhaps. Our bloody struggles are in the past, yours are to come. Time is the barrier, only time. And time does not make superiors or inferiors, only differences. Let me help you.”
“What can you do?” I said coldly.
“Not what I can do. The computer.”
“No.”
“Why ‘No’? Ciorden believes there’s an answer to this thing which locks you out from yourself—and the computer has it.”
“No.”
“Yes. Are you afraid to be answered?”
“I am afraid,” I said. “That is enough.”
“Of what?” He grasped my shoulders suddenly, turning me toward him, his hands insistent, strong, well-remembered.
“You are Darak,” I murmured. “Darak in the inn-room at Ankurum, in the dark tent on the South Road.”
“Through the computer, with the help of Ciorden as your intermediary,” he said levelly, “you can relive, in the space of a few hours, your life from the moment of your birth.”
“No,” I said. I began to cry. “Let me go.”
Abruptly he stood up.
“Then I must do it,” he said.
He turned toward the doors. I ran after him. I shouted at him and tried to hold him back, but I did not seem to have any strength. I did not want him to know me as I knew myself, could not bear it. And then there was a barrier between us. I could neither feel nor see it, but neither could I pass by it. He had reached the doors.
“Before,” he said, “I was unprepared for you. Now I take no chances. I am the captain of this ship, and my final instruction overrides even your powers. That instruction has been given. Without a contrary order from me, you will not be allowed to follow me, though you may return to your room. Any attempt to undermine the computer with emotion will result in your instant anesthesia. Do you understand me?”
“Please—” I said.
But the doors had shut behind him.
For a long time I lingered in that garden room. I touched the flowers and they opened briefly. The shadow of the trees stirred in a little artificial breeze.
My thoughts came spasmodically. I longed to hide myself, to seek out a death I could not achieve. Shame and despair and the unknown dread pulled me down.
Finally I left the garden, and it let me. In the corridor I realized I did not know the way back to my rooms. At once a beam of light struck down from the ceiling, pointing ahead of me. I walked toward it numbly, and it moved away. It led me through many corridors, and upward on another of the moving floors. Twice I passed a group of men, who fell silent as I went by them, following the beam. I sensed intense interest, and little liking. I was a danger to them, yet rare and curious for all that, like the orchids of the north which will snap off a man’s finger for the meat. I reached the glassy place, crossed it, and entered the blue silence which was the only part of this ship I might be safe in.
The bed slid from the wall, and I went to it, my body heavy as lead.
I lay silent, thinking how he raped my mind in the light-webbed room. I thought of the emptiness and the void in me, terrible as the void which had swallowed the ship.
And then a new thought came, a little sharp thought, burning its way into my skull. I recalled what I had feared at their hands when they took me. Their power was vast, the power of the computer-brain seemed godlike.
“Kill me,” I whispered to the silence. “Let me die.”
A deep humming filled the room, a frenzied angry sound.
“Serve me,” I said. “Obey me. Death is what I want. Give me death.”
My bed trembled. There came the drone of distant thunder. A new, a limitless cold settled on me. My eyes darkened. Tears choked me. It had given me what I wanted. And perhaps it was strong enough, stronger than the swords of Vazkor’s soldiers, more lasting than the grave in the desert, and the fallen tower at Eshkorek.
Something glittered through the dark. A knife swooping down on me from the light-glow of the ceiling. I felt my breathing stop.
* * *
“Wake up,” Darak said to me impatiently.
“Let me alone,” I muttered. “I am dead.”
“No, you’re not dead, goddess. Drink this.”
Something forced itself under the fold of the shireen, and into my mouth. Thin cool fluid found my throat. I swallowed, and pushed the thing away. Without opening my eyes, I sat up. Whirling colors filled my brain. To escape them I opened my eyes after all. I saw the blue room, and could not remember where I was. I laughed stupidly at Darak’s angry face. I could not understand why he was so angry.
“Dead.” He tried the word contemptuously on his tongue. “Didn’t it occur to you that a machine especially programmed to bring comfort and life to its crew would also be programmed never to kill them? If you were a savage or a barbarian it would make some sense—but you can think and reason.” He stood up. “My whole ship damaged if I hadn’t blocked you with that one inspired order. Anesthesia the moment you presented the computer with an emotional problem.” He leaned over, took my shoulders, and shook me violently. “Couldn’t you trust me?”
“Darak,” I said.
“No, I’m not Darak Gold-Fisher, the hill-bandit charioteer. Neither am I Vazkor the murderer, the first successful step toward death and darkness that your planet has so far taken. I am Rarm Zavid, the fool. Up on your feet.” He lifted me, and held me upright. “Drink some more of this. Now walk.” We walked. I began to recall where I was and all that had happened. I tried very hard not to, but he would not allow me. Finally he let me go, and I saw his face clearly for the first time. It was strained, concentrated into a look of frustration and regret rather than anger. I remembered that he and Ciorden had lived in my mind in the Hub. And I hated them.
“Has my life brought you joy, Rarm?” I asked him, spitefully sweet in my shame.
“As much joy as it brought you, goddess.”
“Never call me that.”
“What, then, am I to call you? You say you have no name. No,” he said suddenly, “I shouldn’t be angry with you.”
“You have no right to be angry. You had no right to my mind.”
He looked at me, and again the helpless anger caught his face, then faded.
“Listen,” he said. “One thing I learned; the flame—the creature you saw in the stone bowl, what you call Karrakaz—told you you would be free, would regain your beauty and your powers, when and if you found your soul-kin, the Jade. If I assured you that the computer holds the solution to that quest, would yo
u do as I told you?”
My heart throbbed thickly. I stared at him.
“How—can it know?”
“Because you know. The answer is in your own mind. But it comes from the time before you woke under the volcano. That time—that short time—is all you have to relive in order to set yourself free forever.”
“I cannot believe you,” I whispered.
“Are you willing to let go by such a chance to find the Jade?”
I turned to him. Hate boiled in me. I gripped his arm.
“You tell me! You know!”
“I can’t tell you. Not until you understand. You must come to the computer.”
I half turned toward the doorway, half ready to go with him. But the unreasoning fear rose and engulfed me.
“The computer,” I repeated. I took one stiff step forward, and my knees melted. I fell, and found I could not get up. I could not move my legs, my feet, my arms or hands. Paralyzed, deadened, I cried out to him in despair. My eyes were almost blind: I could hardly speak. “Karrakaz,” I choked out, knowing now that the Jade lay within my reach, and that, seeing this, the demon of my race had risen to deprive me of it. “Karrakaz will destroy me.”
“No,” he said, though his voice seemed distant and almost meaningless. He had picked me up, but, numbed, deafened, blinded, in an incredible extremity of terror, I could not follow what happened to me, or where he took me, and at last the horrible darkness swept in like the hungry sea, and drowned me, and bore me away into itself, and I was lost.
4
Birth is pain. All emotions of sorrow, fear, and anguish begin in that struggle and rejection. After birth the world is abstract, senseless, yet peculiarly orderly. Nothing is logical, therefore illogicality is rational and sane. Suck, sleep, silences and sounds fill and refill a distorted plane where colors slide on the unfocused eyes. There is no time, yet time passes.
Out of the cloudiness things grew, and took on meaning. White swans moving across glittering water, stretching out their looping necks to be fed. A woman with long pale hair, who led me by the hand through ornate gardens leading to the sea, over the floors of incredible rooms where elegant men and women sat. Sometimes there would be others, large, uncouth, staring, dirty, their bodies brown and scarred. They made me afraid, for they were not like us. Like savage, ugly animals, they haunted the walks, their figures contorted to dig at the beds of flowers. Our slaves.
I must not speak to them, but I did, one, a man slave, axing down a slender tree. I asked him why he did it.
“The tree is diseased, princess,” he said, in the awkward grumble with which they stumbled out our tongue. Then he stared down at me from his great height. His face was hideous, distorted by a pain I could not understand, for he was smiling. “All diseased things,” he said, “must be cut down. And burned.” His eyes ate their way into mine. Frightened, I backed from him, and in that moment the prince who was my father came. The slave’s face altered to a look of moronic terror. The prince picked me up with one arm. With the other he summoned the four guards who came behind him. Two seized the man and brought him down on his face. Another stripped his shirt. A fourth stood ready, a metal-edged whip dripping from his hands.
“Now kill him,” said my father, stroking my hair. “But slowly. My royal daughter must see what happens to all those who dare insult us.”
The whip rose and fell monotonously. The man screamed and flopped and blood wriggled in the grass like snakes. I was glad at first, but soon I grew bored. I looked at my father’s soldiers, and they too were slaves, though, better treated and better clothed, they looked very different. It did not seem to matter to them that they whipped one of their own kind.
Soon the man died, and my father took me away.
* * *
Three years and many days of lily-lakes, marble-pillared rooms, entertainments of death and beauty. Then fear came. At first fear was only a transparent shadow thrown in the distance, a whisper, something hidden behind layers of thought and activity. Then fear grew deeper and closer, and lay inside the mouth, ready to be hinted at and half-spoken.
To begin with, I did not know the fear, only sensed it. I heard the word “plague” and it meant nothing to me. I heard of death, but that I rejected totally. We would live almost forever. Nothing could harm us. We were not slaves to die from sickness or a wound.
But then, a scarlet dawn, and my mother’s sister screaming and screaming, running through the palace walks naked, her pale hair flaming behind her, an insanity of whiteness against the blood-red sky. Her lover was dead of the Plague, had died lying across her. She had woken to find him, his flesh decomposing against hers. I did not know what was done, but, as the days passed. I came to know, for others died. A pyre was built beyond the lake, and here what remained of them, and of their clothes, was burned. If the corpse was discovered quickly enough, slaves could be sent in to make a cast of the body, and this would be painted and decked in jewels and buried in the owner’s tomb in place of their flesh. But often it was too late for that; the body would already be putrescent. And this was why the Plague was so damaging to us, for nothing would remain to heal itself, not flesh or sinew or any organ, not the brain, not even the bones. True annihilation had come among us at last.
There were no symptoms of the Plague in its victims before they succumbed to the coma, therefore, no warning. And the infection spread like rottenness.
My mother died. I could not understand why she should leave me. I was terrified, and wept with terror, not sorrow, as I walked behind her jeweled bier—empty, for she had been too quick for them. I stared at the painted pictures of her tomb deep in the vaults of the palace. The sleeping woman-shape under the mountain with its sky cloud, which was the symbol of birth and of the planet which supported it; the woman with her guard, and rods of office, a symbol of her temporal power; the woman holding the knife toward herself, symbol of her final acceptance of death. I hated these terrible paintings—the same in every tomb, save that in a man’s sepulcher a drawn man would replace the woman in them. I hated the traditional jade set in at the face, as though death had made my mother faceless.
My father came to me at dusk. The low lamplight picked out the small luminous triangle of green above and between his eyes, as he leaned toward my bed.
“Tomorrow you must be up early,” he said. “We are going on a journey.”
“Where?”
“To a place, a place underground, a temple. We shall be safe there.”
* * *
The summer too was dead, and rains and winds blew across the land as we traveled from the northern shore. Drifts of bronze leaves stagnated on the rivers and the lakes.
Members of other great houses came with us. The slaves drove our wagons, put up our tents at night, and saw to our needs much as they had done in our palaces. None of them took the Plague, nor did they seem to fear it. Only one man tried to run away. From my wagon flap I watched him blunder on spindly legs across the harvested fields of some village. One of the princes turned and looked hard at the running man. The man fell immediately, and did not rise. The power to kill had not come to me yet, nor the power to levitate my body from the ground. The slaves watched in terror any of us who did this: in their own abominable tongue they called us the Winged Ones, imagining we must have invisible wings, and that we flew.
A princess died on the fifth day of our journey. And, at a little mud-brick town they called Sirrainis, my father’s almost whole body was burned on the branches of forest trees.
My mother’s sister, who still lived, became my formal guardian, though she was frowned on for she had taken one of the human guard for her lover. To me he seemed as disgusting and as ugly as the rest, though he pleased her well enough.
Two days later we reached the mountain under which the temple lay. I did not fully comprehend the notion of gods, but that my people had occasionally worshiped them had
always been vaguely apparent to me. The great offering cups of the palace, holding always their undying flame, were the symbol of prayers unspoken. As in the tomb paintings, the mountain was the sign of the earth which had bred our might. It had seemed fitting to them, therefore, to hollow out their holy places under mountains, or rather to have them hollowed out by the slaves.
It was a black frowning height, which seemed to offer no comfort. Beyond the massive doors, dimly lit corridors and stairs had been chipped from the dark rock. White-robed men in golden masks chanted in a cavern about a huge rough-hewn stone bowl, fountaining flame. Dismal, cold, unwholesome place. I cried myself to sleep in my little rock cell, as I would cry myself to sleep for half a year.
* * *
In the first months there were few deaths from the Plague. Those few were consigned to a blazing crater higher in the mountain, reached by a narrow stair above the cavern. This crater, the white-robed men told us, was all that remained of the volcano it had once been. They were priests, these men, though they had not been so for long, perhaps. They gave an impression of impermanence, and stumbled sometimes over their chanting. They were of our race, and walked like the princes.
Our toll being lighter, a kind of optimism came. It seemed the holiness of the temple had indeed granted us sanctuary. We went three times each day to offer prayers to the nebulous gods I could not comprehend. Adults and children alike, we kneeled in the icy cavern about the bowl with the flame, entreating forgiveness for the hubris which had angered them. This also made no sense to me. Who were we to beg and wail on our knees, who had been masters of all men?
Apart from the prayers, there was little to fill my time. No entertainments were allowed. They gave me books to read, which I did not manage well for again they spoke of our gods. Some, the writings of princes and princesses, told only of our offenses and our punishment Those who admitted their guilt, however, might be saved, might escape even after the coma of death had claimed them, sleeping, but not dying, awaking whole after some indefinite period of time, to reclaim their powers.