by Tanith Lee
Planet 2 (Corvyra’s Cuddles) is far less featured than 3 (Fatgirl). And Planet 1 (Champion) is mostly a defunct ocean. But oh, we’ll change all that. I’ve already seen to it there are myriad atoms and organisms peri-dormantly at work on Planet 1. Even Cuddles has a chance.
Inevitably, since building, I’ve checked the sun, too, during the months we’ve been here. An unlit solar-disc is no problem for my kind. And when that alters, Mirandusa, and all of us, Vampire, Bee-Dees, robot crew, Main Comp, will be stood way off. Down in her jet-black chamber, like a nice cosy tomb, Anka will only watch her viewer. And what will I see? A vacant lot, where suddenly a gargantuan explosion happens: it is impressively spectacular, aqua, emerald, scarlet. And then, behind the display, a tiny fiery yellow dot is burning through, the eye of Things to Come …
And that’s the new sun alight.
One question is often asked, despite the images freely available. Until ignition, what does a solarity – a constructed sun – look like?
Picture a huge spider’s web spun from black sapphire, with sapphire rods, lobes and weird antennae poking out of it. It hangs there, this exquisite mechanised chemecular skeleton, immobile, to all intents and purposes quiescent, purposeless. Till I press that magic button.
Maybe you see a psychological analogy … The seemingly moribund solar disc, the solarity Simlon 12. Inert – then galvanised awake, on fire, radiating and incinerous, alive. But no. That isn’t like Vampiric life.
Do you know what it’s like? Like memories that don’t fit anymore, that won’t lie still. Like old love that is dead and mummified to corundum, but never can die because, after however many million centuries of forgetting, a moment’s recollected whisper or touch will raise it from the grave, and bring it back to searing, quenchless flame.
We have a communal evening on the ship later. I say evening, since the time-pieces aboard mark solar planet time in the ‘human’ crew areas. Corvyra and Heth eat steaks and green apples from the store, and drink white champagne. I eat and drink my synth versions of those items, all of which carry my essential nutrient, even in the alcohol.
After, we watch an old movie, I forget what it was. C and H pay little attention either, necking like a couple of kids. (I don’t mind this. Why should I? I can have sex with Heth whenever I think I’ll enjoy it.) When they go off together to combine, machines neatly tidy the room.
Back in my cabin I update my work-journal and send it off to the receptors at New Kroy.
I sit looking out of the port, watching the three planets infinitesimally turn, and the moons setting over their shoulders. My kind can see that sort of motion, just as we do the circling hands on an old clock.
And if there’s no sunrise to hide from, we never need sleep. Sleep is only our massive all-over shut-down in the face of an untenable foe – sunlight. So out here in Endless Night, we have a lot of extra time. Just what humans constantly say they crave.
But that much time needs to get filled.
That much time.
You think you’ll never have enough. But then, you do.
She had been his only constant ‘partner’ for a year, when they decided that he would ‘turn’ her. Anka had known for several months that this was what she wanted most.
Taras then spoke very seriously to her, with an intense and almost paternal manner he sometimes assumed – which, by then, made her insanely and amusedly happy. She knew she could change him back into a 35-year-old boy in seconds, into a sort of pantherine demiurge even. But she listened very carefully.
‘No,’ Anka said. ‘I don’t want to become what you are, for any of those reasons – longevity, strength – the power of levitating – God knows –’ (By then too she had caught his habit of profaning ‘God’.) ‘I’d probably get vertigo – no, don’t interrupt me, Taras. I heard you out. But I know these things, and you know I don’t give a fuck –’ (also an obsolete obscenity, but it had made him smile) ‘– I want to be what you are because of what I feel about you, for you – I want to live as you do. I want to – to –’
‘To be me?’ he asked her quietly. ‘The absolute in possession?’
‘No, no. Surely you must understand?’
She was only 20, and her eyes had filled with tears. Of course, it had been she who had instigated the conversation. He said to her, a decade afterward, that he could not have presumed. At the time he said, now, gravely, ‘You realise that I shall need other partners for blood? As indeed, sweetheart, will you.’
‘Yes, naturally I know that too.’
‘Will it offend you? Hurt you?’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘So long as we stay lovers. More importantly, so long as we still have this.’
At which he lowered his eyes, that nearly feminine response he sometimes gave her. ‘My kind, our kind if you join us, live a great while. Maybe not forever, but for centuries. And we do age a little, too. You’re 20, Anka. Perhaps in 150 years you’ll appear to be 30, 35. But inside, my love, you’ll have the experience and the passions of a woman far older. Will you still want me? Don’t forget, I’ll grow older too, and in both those same ways.’
But at this she laughed. ‘Does that mean you agree, then? Yes?’
The City Corps was pleased as well. They generally let such liaisons as hers with Taras continue well over term, in the hopes of a human deciding to ‘turn’. Vampires, now collated as they had been for some 27 years into the mortal Life-Way, were proving virtually hourly of more value, their practical scope and physical talents far exceeding those of the best of mankind. So, there was no difficulty, and indeed a legal civil ceremony took place, reminding Anka of an old-fashioned marriage, and followed by a party.
Nor was she afraid of what had come to be called D & R (Death and Resurrection). She fell asleep inside the fortress circle of his arms, and woke into the dawn of dark without a solitary regret.
Tonight, that is ship’s-night, I alone look at Anka in the mirror.
I know her pretty well after all this time, that dark-eyed, youngish woman of 212. So why look? Because, it sometimes seems to me, on these long nights amid the Endless Night, that I have an actual look of him. Of Taras. I dyed my hair black once, to enhance this illusion. That was about 17 years after we parted. But strangely – or logically perhaps – to me I seemed less like him, then. They say too, don’t they, people (even un-people?) who stay connected, come to resemble each other. Even people who don’t live together, as he and I never did. Yet are close, in some way together, a great while.
Down the corridors of the Mirandusa the other lovers are making their love. Different, we know, from the mere ecstatic delights of really good sex, the sort I get with Heth, and he with me. I’m fond of them, my Bee-Dees; it’s more than sustenance. We three have grown together too, I suppose, over the eight and a half years we’ve shared this peripatetic life. I remember once, one of the hull shields malfunctioned during a meteor storm. We worked with the machines, Corvyra, Heth and I, and got the thing patched up and saved our skins. And when it was all over, the three of us ran together, thoughtless as water-drops on a pane, there in the control room, under the Main Comp’s big blue benign maternal eye, and held each other close. Only for a moment. But it marks out that hour for Corvyra and Heth, for me, too. We are our own type of family. I never had one before I knew them. And with Taras, evidently, with him – ’God’ knows what unnamable entity we two formed. But those uncountable hours were marked indelibly. And it lasted. It lasted all of 71 years. This cabin, mine, is the only room that ever sees me cry now. I’ll cry tonight.
Chasing the moons over the saucer-rim of a world, Planet 1, the Champion. The exhilaration of it – to fly – yes, fly. I’m flying – skimming the wide lake of black space with its shimmers and shallow skerries of rippling particles, gaseous flumes – down to the sunless seabed, with canyons deep as any philosopher’s abyss, and all of it now a fallow field that, with the coming of great Light, may – will – must blossom, bloom and grow. In a quadrennium, less,
a fast-built home for humans, as they range forever outward through the stars.
But from here the stars aren’t suns. They’re friendly sprigs of neon hung in the night sky. And over there the big moon at full, and the smaller crescent that the planet’s shadow makes, even though the lunar fire is inside.
Where I’ve set down I stand, though my personally-engendered gravity already means I could run over the surface. I’ll be careful anyway, not to disturb the plantings.
Because I don’t breathe, there’s no waver to the vistas of space or landmass.
Despite the lack of breath, or air, a faint esoteric scent comes to me. The odour of an ancient past. The planet’s. My own.
I walk the world.
And through my mind my life spills, like a phantom of the planet’s ocean. My days, my years. And so I come again to Taras, and begin with and am with Taras, and at last, as it has to, the tide reaches its height, and brings to me that ultimate month we were together, when he told me we should part.
It wasn’t, he said, so tenderly and kindly, that he had ceased to love me, nor, he said, did he think I had yet grown tired of him. There was no other he wanted, or thought that I did. But this had been enough, he said. What, what did that mean? – I cried to him. Enough? Enough? But he only repeated, in his wonderful dark voice, the same litany. We must leave each other and go our separate ways. We must do it before our union, our love – if I preferred that name – was stale. What we had had, still had, must never be spoiled by becoming less.
I raged and begged. I mocked him. He said no more. I didn’t believe he had not found another he liked better than me. Much farther on, knowing him as I had, I did believe, however. There had been no replacement. Which made what happened worse. By the month’s finish I reckoned he had come around. I had arranged quite ordinarily to see him the next day, to which he seemed to agree. But when I went to his apartment, he was gone. It’s unachievable, to trace our kind, as you may be aware, if they legally refuse it. He did, it seems, so refuse. I never saw him, my Vampire lover, ever again. Except, you’ll guess, in my mind, the high tide of memory, by such and similar means.
If he lives still, or is dead, I don’t, I never shall, know.
And now –
Anka discovered the cave in the ravine wall almost inadvertently; her thoughts had been otherwise engaged. A warped black stalagmite pillar guarded the entrance.
Inside, lightglow arrested and astonished her.
With enormous care, she moved forward. The roof of the cave was quite high, and then the sides of it opened out. A sheer black chamber, bright at the centre with a chem-burner … reddish light.
There were other things in the cave, which plainly was being used as a sort of living-room. A rock – a chair? – on one side of the burner. (How had it been brought here?) A second chair waited back in the shadows. Moisture gleamed on the walls, but the scent in the cave was wholesome and quite dry.
He stood behind the light. A tall silhouette.
Having no breath to catch, her ribs involuntarily convulse as she catches it. Vacuum, for a split second, sucks at Anka’s lungs. She begins to double over, though already her Vampire stamina has corrected the silly physical mistake. And then from dark through light to dark he springs toward her, grips her – inexorable, gentle – in a hold that paralyses with its knownness.
‘How can you be here?’ she mutters into the shoulder of his coat. ‘Have I gone mad?’
She can speak without breath. She has needed to.
‘Oh, my love,’ he says, in such a tired, sad, gladdened voice. ‘We – our kind – can go anywhere, do anything – didn’t I teach you that?’
Then she’s herself again, the older wiser Anka he warned her of and promised, in the time before he left her. She straightens and stares up into his face. The face of Taras.
He is real, sentient. He is older. Now his hair is iced silver, his face everywhere finely lined. He looks … like a beautiful, hale, thin, indomitable man, perhaps 65, 67. His teeth – what else? – are flawless. His black eyes clear as space itself inside a lens. And he has not let her go.
He says, ‘We’ll drink geneva. Then.’
‘Then,’ she answers. ‘Then.’
Their entity formed, body to body, mouth to mouth, there could be, and was, no margin or necessity for any explanation or debate, no other element but this love, this truth, vaster than a world, more infinite than time. Life after death.
I cry my heart out, as I was aware I should. They leave me to myself, my Blood-Donors. My work is in-date, the program on target. They’ve learnt, after a few hours I’ll be back to normal. This has happened before.
I loved him so much, Taras. I’ll always love him like that. A dead coal in my guts that flares up like an igniting sun, just as Simlon will, in seven more months.
No-one can be blamed for their dreams. Particularly not us, the Vampire kind. Out here, in perpetual darkness where we never need to sleep … our dreams take on a specialised waking form. We hear them approach, like footsteps, but can’t hold them off. Conveyed by an awake consciousness, they have a potency, a realness as vital – more – than reality itself. Our dreams come true. While they last. And when they’re done, what’s left – is cobwebs. Dust.
Tonight we were lovers again, Taras and Anka. And I was alive as never otherwise I shall be, even if my body lasts forever.
This dream visits me quite often. I dread it. I welcome it. I pray to God it will come back.
But now, on and on, I shed my tears.
In Endless Night, the ghost of lost love shines so brightly it fades the stars. Such fire – is beyond the sun.
ON REFLECTION
THE EPILOGUE
You could not, now, really tell one horizon from the other. As you could not really tell the past from the future. The Earth … Centuries have passed. Then more than centuries. The sun, some while back, did the most extraordinary and vulgar thing, rather like an ill-treated and resultantly appalling child determined to ruin the adults’ party. It had burnt and gnawed the Earth’s globe, and then gone hysterically nova – but an aborted nova. It was, and is, something rare, this, hardly documented. A vast detonation that did not, contrary to expectation, destroy the immediate planets, and that inflicted true arson only on one, the Earth again, and that not by any means entire.
Aeonids after, when the sun was tiny if still vaguely alight, like a flickering and dim red electric bulb from a long lost era, the Earth planet remained, although it was not, and is not, naturally, as ever it had been, but ‘Fried to a crisp’ someone has said, using fashionably inexplicable historic jargon.
The other remaining orbs of the solar system that had survived (Mercury and Neptune were long gone due to other, antique cosmic disasters) had had by then, for enormous ages, their own individual and created man-made suns.
Nobody any more needed the light of the actual solar disc. So let it be a red bulb till it flickered out. ‘Granny’ some of them named it, a little unconvincingly, since by now human grannies of many hundred years are normally glamorous and sprightly.
A story soon rose though, like a ghostly moth from the cupboards of travellers’ tales, the yarns of astronauts and other space-voyagers.
One such man, going down to take a closer look at the scorched and ended Earth had, while wandering across the sands that had covered all its surface, stumbled – or rather the boot of his astrosuit had – on a piece of what, on inspection, seemed to be an ancient mirror. ‘Something the Victorian English might have made,’ he was later said to have said. ‘Or, could have been older – old as the Pyramids of Eg[2].’ He had peered into it, too, but been unable to catch any sort of reflection under the dull sun-ray, and through the immutably polarised visor of his suit. This man was part of a three-man expedition. That night, back in their shuttle, the Corkillus, something very weird happened. Or so the visitors declared. During the depth of the sun-gone night, the astrosuit the man who had found the mirror had worn – had got up, b
y itself, and started to blunder about the small vessel.
It seemed to be searching for something. The mirror fragment? Perhaps for that: it transpired the man who had found it had after all mislaid it again before re-entering the shuttle.
Finally the suit was crashing against the airlock, making strange grunting sounds. It seemed, the travellers said later, as if it ‘needed to go outside’! And well, what else, eventually they opened up the doors and let it free. Off it blundered, on two suit-feet, over the surface of the extinct world. Luckily the ship carried spare suits.
Inside half an hour, the suit had vanished from all view; even the mechanical optics of the shuttle failed to find it. Next morning, the three men and their shuttle took off for Mars, their home base.
Some believed the story, when told. Most did not believe it. Once science fiction became true, as the famous Professor Gullgren once phrased it, the best course was to disbelieve almost every word.
Now, if one stands upon the carapace of any of the surviving planets, Mars, Jupiter, Vulcan, Venus, Orcar (each lit by their own private artificial sun), a view is still feasible of the deceased mother globe, dead Earth, though from these far-off worlds she is small, a single dull overweight star. (In one era she seemed bigger – was bigger? – and shone blue: her seas. No longer. Today she is faded tawny or grey: the sand.)
When sand burns it makes glass. That is how glass was made, in the archaeological past. And the sands of Earth have burned and re-burned, and fused by now. The partial nova saw to that. The idea that anyone located a mirror there, ever, springs rather foolishly one surmises from this fact.
Although, of course, if the covering of the entire Earth is, at last, a mirror, then we – even from this vast distance – will be reflected in it. There was a superstition at one time. Vampires did not reflect in mirrors. (You will have heard of vampires? If not, please see the Iconic Reference on warp-page 00I0XY.) Or, otherwise, the vampire legend implied that certain mirrors were themselves vampires, and thus to reflect there – en-vampirised any person or thing so to do.