by Tanith Lee
“Come on, baby. You know what I’m supposed to be.”
Before I considered it, I’d snatched my hand away, and half got out of my chair. But he took my hand back and I sat down again.
I said feverishly, “There are too many coincidences. It’s absurd. Even to Cassi spotting Sand’s name in an ad, and recalling it from Easterly small-town gossip, which I guess is what happened. Or am I to assume the coincidences are deliberate. This planet dragging its survivors together again.”
Jace said, “If my goddam bastard of a father had stayed on in Easterly, you might not have had to make such a ballsup of your life till now.”
“Stop patronizing me,” I said. “All right, you know how to lay me. It doesn’t give you the right to treat me like a child.”
“That’s the way I have to treat you,” he said. “At least for now. And you sure as hell know why.”
“No,” I said.
But he stood up, drained the gold beer with swift gold undulations of the throat muscle that fascinated me, because I was reducing everything to detail, minutiae. Then he led me out of the bar.
On the street, he said to me, “For Christ’s sake, Bella, I’m not afraid of you.”
“I am. I am. You don’t know—”
“I can turn you out like a light,” he said. “Any time at all. And that’s all you need tell yourself.”
In the lift I started to shiver convulsively while the tinny music played. By the time we got to my room, I could hardly walk.
He sat on the bed and took me on his lap, and for all I’d cried I wasn’t a child, I was glad enough to rest there in his arms. And I thought of Sand’s descriptions—Jace the defender, the rock, Jace the comforter. And I wondered if these stories of Sand’s were true, and still I didn’t know just what love there had been between them, or hate, or if love could cancel all hatred, hatred all love.
Presently, Jace showed me the stone, which I’d left lying, and which he’d picked up.
“See,” he said gently. “Meant for you, not for me. The infallible meter. You’re almost out of gas.”
“I can’t.”
But he moved my head until my mouth was against his throat, and easily he lay back and pulled me with him.
“Do it,” he said.
So I did.
Instinct. And then, more than instinct. It isn’t the same. Not the old thing, the sense of breathing, it’s more than that, it’s—but I can’t say, I don’t have the words to say. It isn’t performed during love, that’s a snare for enemies, the robber’s way, the fool’s way. But it’s an act of love, nevertheless. And for the first time, I could kill a man only by excess of this, the drawing from the vein, the milking of life, and I would kill him out of love, not need. I could kill him then, but he said to me quietly, “That’s it, Sabella,” and I heard, and I wanted to leave him, but oh, I couldn’t leave him, couldn’t—and then he put his hands on my shoulders, and with his strength which was always greater than mine, just as he was generally a fraction swifter, he lifted me from him and held me away, and when the film of the great silence of the well I had been drinking at seeped off me, and my eyes unglazed, he put me down beside him, and for a while, we were quiet, as if after the other act of love.
“What,” I said to him at last, “did you feel?”
“You kissing me,” he said. “Very nice.”
“But you can control it. You can stop me.”
“Anytime.”
“Even if I took when we were making love?”
“You won’t.”
“But if I did?”
“Try it,” he said. “You won’t sit on your ass for a month.”
The stone was a drop of ruby in his hand, and he gave it back to me.
I was not afraid anymore.
* * *
* * *
I believe in God. I think I believe in Jesus Christ. That night in Ares, I knelt, and I begged someone who was above bargaining to help me. And see, I was helped.
* * *
* * *
I’ve thought about it, and I have a conclusion to offer, though Jace doesn’t care about it. It’s a fact for him, insane but self-demonstrating. I am a woman he wants, and I want him, and he’ll haul me with him to other worlds, or stay awhile here on this world which I perceive is ours, and which he takes as a stop-over point or a returning point, but which emotionally he views as just another hotel in space. Which makes me wonder if we are, in a way, still those two children who wandered into the grave-tunnel, not just exact copies of their bodies and their memories and their names. Certainly, we have no recollection of a past to set archaeologists and spiritualists squalling and turn the Revivalist Church on its ear. The last impulse of two lovers in a last lost tomb, that’s what formed us, and what pins us together, beyond sex and trauma and loneliness and need. We’re utterly unlike, opposed, embattled. We can fight all we want, and we do fight. But this nail passes through both of us, a bolt of light as in a picture of Mars, piercing, but not breaking, the vessels of glass we are. Which to Jace is an idea to laugh at, the same as to liken him to earth, and fire.
And for the conclusion? It’s all unround.
Before the Earth ships landed, started up their colonies, pumped oxygen into the air and water over the ground and planted things, acting like God in Eden, this planet was four-fifths dead. But before death came, what changes had occurred among a people who raised lily pillars and sealed death in an urn, a people whose technology was either so incredible or so obsolete that men can find no trace of it? I think when all but half the stores of the world were gone, they happened on, or evolved deliberately, a method of sharing. Of the little water and the little food there was, one would eat and drink, and when he was strong, the other would take from him the vital element which food and drink had made—his blood. So there were those who lived by feeding on the things of the earth, and those who lived by feeding upon them. It’s a situation that admits no intolerance. A system that requires a careful pairing, a creation of partners, who could permit in love what could never be permitted in hate or greed. Except that some were greedy or reluctant, forcing, taking, pillage and robbery, and so the process of seduction followed, the murderous snare I had practiced, not knowing (or could it be remembering?) another way. That destroyed them, or else, ultimately the planet had nothing left to give, even in half-shares. So the lovers had their tomb, and after them dust again filled all the urns.
It doesn’t frighten me anymore about the tomb, the possession Cassi set out to destroy, the possession which is me. And Jace, if she had known. As for guilt, I still feel it, I’m still culpable, but it’s become a familiar thing, a piece of me, no more. Because guilt is purposeless. I can undo nothing. Yet in the future, I can live without destruction. And more than that, simply, I can live.
We went to Hammerhead and tidied the house, heard the occasional cicadas and walked on the hills. Once three wolves came out in the dusk and briefly followed us, gilded by stars and blazoned with eyes. Jace whistled them and they came to him. To him they’re dogs. He would have thrown them a stick, I think, but they loped away before it occurred to him.
And yet, by that hole of a grave he dug for Sand, I’ve seen him stand in the sunlight, while I linger in the shade. I’ve seen his face, closed; I’ve seen him recall his life as a human man, knowing he is no longer that.
We won’t stay here forever, or even very long. I’ve never seen another planet. This is all I know. I tell him we’re the last New Martians, and he says sure, baby, forgetting graves, his light to my dark, his wide outward gaze to my introspection.
But we’re not human. No humans are as we are.
The last Martians.
He has to dominate me, that’s essential; for I take his life’s blood. The victim must be stronger than the oppressor—or he dies. He has to tell me when and how, and where to walk, and if I may, a
nd I obey him, but that’s not for always. I’ve been anchorless for years. I’ve wanted a discipline beyond myself, and needed it to show me how to master myself, and I’m learning this too, he’s teaching me. In the end, maybe I shall be the one to say that this planet is where we return to and where we remain.
And maybe the planet is a vampire too, taking from the life that moves over it, waiting for its resurrection from the deadness of a desert before it whispered to its inner dead in their obscure burial places, Come, rise up, taste of the oxygen in the skies, and the poured out waters, and the spilled dreams of men.
Men don’t own this world. And though the Federation of Earth leaves only replicates behind it, the bloodstone between my breasts is real. I’m not a woman in the human sense. A taker of blood, I don’t squander that gift at quarter season. But still it seems to me that I may not be infertile. This traveling man who has saved me, might not be of one mind with me as he blows between the stars, but I can hear destiny now in the whistling cry of the enduring wolves, the cry of survival. There may come a time that whatever brought us together will shout for its purpose to be fulfilled through us, the last of our kind.
You will have noted I must still walk in shadows, I’m still closer to the dark, the secret, the mystery. Don’t think me Jace’s slave, for if you do, you miss all truth in what I’ve told you, and you miss the promise that one day I may choose to make this man the father to our planet’s children.
And on that day, or night, the last shall be first.
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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