Dying of the Light Read online

  Dirk said nothing. He was looking at the fairy spires and listening to them sing.

  “Do you want to land?” Gwen asked.

  He nodded, and she spiraled down. They found an open landing slit in the side of one of the towers. Unlike the airlots in Challenge and Twelfth Dream, this one was not completely empty. Two other aircars rested there, a stub-winged red sportster and a tiny black-and-silver teardrop, both of them long abandoned. The windblown dust was thick on their hoods and canopies, and the cushions inside the sportster had gone to rot. Out of curiosity, Dirk tried them both. The sportster was dead, burned-out, its power vanished years ago. But the little teardrop still warmed under his touch, and the control panel lit up and flickered, showing that a small reserve of power was left. The huge gray manta from High Kavalaan was bigger and heavier than the two derelicts combined.

  From the airlot they went out into a long gallery where gray-and-white light-murals swirled and spun in dim patterns that matched the echoing music. Then they climbed to a balcony they had spied when coming in.

  Outside, the music was all around them, calling to them with unearthly voices, touching them and playing with their hair, booming and beckoning like passion-thunder. Dirk took Gwen’s hand in his own and listened as he stared blindly out across the towers and domes and canals toward the forests and the mountains beyond. The music-wind seemed to pull at him as he stood there. It spoke to him softly, urging him to jump, it seemed—to end it all, all the silly and undignified and ultimately meaningless futility that he called his life.

  Gwen saw it in his eyes. She squeezed his hand, and when he looked at her she said, “During the Festival, more than two hundred people committed suicide in Kryne Lamiya. Ten times the number of any other city. Despite the fact that this city had the smallest population of all.”

  Dlrk nodded. “Yes. I can feel it. The music.”

  “A celebration of death,” Gwen said. “Yet, you know, the Siren City itself is not dead, not like Musquel or Twelfth Dream at all. It still lives, stubbornly, if only to exalt despair and glorify the emptiness of the very life it clings to. Strange, eh?”

  “Why would they build such a place? It’s beautiful, but—”

  “I have a theory,” Gwen said. “The Darklings are black-humored nihilists, chiefly, and I think that Kryne Lamiya is their bitter joke on High Kavalaan and Wolfheim and Tober and the other worlds that pushed so hard for the Festival of the Fringe. The Darklings came, all right, and they built a city that said it was all worthless. All worthless—the Festival, human civilization, life itself. Think of it! What a trap for a smug tourist to walk into!” She threw back her head and began to laugh wildly, and Dirk briefly felt a sudden irrational fear, as if his Gwen had gone mad.

  “And you wanted to live here?” he said.

  Her laughter faded as abruptly as it had begun; the wind snatched it from her. Away on their right, a needle-tower sounded a brief piercing note that wavered like the wail of an animal in pain. Their own tower answered with the low mournful moan of a foghorn, lingering, lingering. The music swirled around them. Far off, Dirk thought he could hear the pounding of a single drum, short dull booms, evenly spaced.

  “Yes,” Gwen said. “I wanted to live here.” The foghorn faded; four reedy spires across the canal, tied together by drooping bridges, began to ululate wildly, each note higher than the one preceding, until they finally climbed up into the inaudible. The drum persisted, unchanging: boom, boom, boom.

  Dirk sighed. “I understand,” he said, in a voice very tired. “I would live here too, I suppose, though I wonder how long I’d live if I did. Braque was a little like this, the faintest echo, mostly at night. Maybe that was why I lived there. I had gotten very weary, Gwen. Very. I guess I’d given up. In the old days, you know, I was always searching—for love, for fairy gold, for the secrets of the universe, whatever. But after you left me . . . I don’t know, everything went wrong, turned sour in my mouth. And when something did go right, I’d find it didn’t matter, didn’t make any difference. It was all empty. I tried and tried but all I got was tired and apathetic and cynical. Maybe that was why I came here. You . . . well, I was better then, when I was with you. I hadn’t given up on quite so many things. I thought that maybe, if I found you again, maybe I could find me again as well. It hasn’t worked quite that way. I don’t know that it’s working at all.”

  “Listen to Lamiya-Bailis,” Gwen said, “and her music will tell you that nothing works, that nothing means anything. I did want to live here, you know. I voted . . . well, I didn’t plan to vote this way, but we were talking it over when we first landed, and it just came out. It scared me. Maybe you and I are still a lot alike, Dirk. I’ve gotten tired too. Mostly it doesn’t show. I have my work to keep me busy, and Arkin is my friend, and Jaan loves me. But then I come here . . . or sometimes I just slow down and think a bit too long, and then I wonder. It’s not enough, the things I have. Not what I wanted.”

  She turned toward him and took his hand in both of hers. “Yes, I’ve thought of you. I’ve thought that things were better when you and I were together back on Avalon, and I’ve thought that maybe it was still you I loved and not Jaan, and I’ve thought that you and I could bring the magic back, make it all make sense again. But don’t you see? It isn’t so, Dirk, and all your pushing won’t make it so. Listen to the city, listen to Kryne Lamiya. There’s your truth. You think about me, and I sometimes about you, only because it’s dead between us. That’s the only reason it seems better. Happiness yesterday and happiness tomorrow, but never today, Dirk. It can’t be, because it’s only an illusion after all, and illusions only look real from a distance. We’re over, my dreamy lost love, over, and that’s the best thing of all, because it’s the only thing that makes it good.”

  She was weeping; slow tears moved trembling down her cheeks. Kryne Lamiya wept with her, the towers crying their lament. But it mocked her too, as if to say, Yes, I see your grief, but grief has no more meaning than anything else, pain is as empty as pleasure. The spires wailed, thin gratings laughed insanely, and the low far-off drum went: boom, boom, boom.

  Again, more strongly this time, Dirk wanted to jump—off the balcony toward the pale stone and dark canals below. A dizzy fall, and then rest at last. But the city sang him for a fool: Rest? it sang, there is no rest in death. Only nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The drum, the winds, the wailings. He trembled, still holding Gwen’s hands. He looked down toward the ground below.

  Something was moving down the canal. Bobbing and floating, drifting easily, coming toward him. A black barge, with a solitary pole-man. “No,” he said.

  Gwen blinked. “No?” she repeated.

  And suddenly the words came, the words that the other Dirk t’Larien would have said to his Jenny, and the words were in his mouth, and though he was no longer quite sure that he could believe them, he found himself saying them all the same. “No!” he said, all but shouting it at the city, throwing a sudden rage back at the mocking music of Kryne Lamiya. “Damn it, Gwen, all of us have something of this city in us, yes. The test is how we meet it. All this is frightening”—he let loose of her hands and gestured out at the darkness, the sweep of his hand taking in everything—“what it says is frightening, and worse is the fear you get when part of you agrees, when you feel that it’s all true, that you belong here. But what do you do about it? If you’re weak, you ignore it. Pretend it doesn’t exist, you know, and maybe it’ll go away. Busy yourself in the daylight with trivial tasks, and never think about the darkness outside. That’s the way you let it win, Gwen. In the end it swallows you and all your trivia, and you and the other fools lie to each other blithely and welcome it. You can’t be like that, Gwen, you can’t be. You have to try. You’re an ecologist, right? What’s ecology all about? Life! You have to be on the side of life, everything you are says so. This city, this damn bone-white city with its death hymn, denies everything you believe in, everything you are. If you’re strong, you’ll face it and fight it
and call it by name. Defy it.”

  Gwen had stopped weeping. “It is no use,” she said, shaking her head.

  “You’re wrong,” he answered. “About this city, and about us. It’s all tied up, you see? You say you want to live here? Fine! Live here! To live in this city would be a victory all in itself, a philosophical victory. But live here because you know that life itself refutes Lamiya-Bailis, live here and laugh at this absurd music of hers, don’t live here and agree with this damn wailing lie.” He took her hand again.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I do,” he said, lying.

  “Do you really think that . . . that we could make it work again? Better than before?”

  “You won’t be Jenny,” he promised. “Never again.”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated in a low whisper.

  He took her face in both hands and raised it so her eyes looked at his. He kissed her, very lightly, the barest driest touching of their lips. Kryne Lamiya moaned. The foghorn sounded deep and sorrowing around them, the distant towers screamed and keened, and the solitary drum kept up its dull, meaningless booming.

  After the kiss they stood amid the music and stared at each other. “Gwen,” he finally said, in a voice not one half as strong and sure as it had been just a moment before. “I don’t know either, I guess. But maybe it would be worth it just to try . . .”

  “Maybe,” she said, and her wide green eyes looked away and down again. “It would be hard, Dirk. And there’s Jaan to think of, and Garse, so many problems. And we don’t even know if it would be worth it. We don’t know if it will make the slightest bit of difference.”

  “No, we don’t,” he said. “Lots of times in these last few years I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter, that it’s not worth trying. I don’t feel good then, just tired, endlessly tired. Gwen, if we don’t try, we’ll never know.”

  She nodded. “Maybe,” she said, and nothing more. The wind blew cold and strong; the music of the Darkling madness rose and fell. They went inside, then down the stairs from the balcony, past the fading, flickering walls of gray-white light, to where the solid sanity of their aircar rested, waiting to carry them back to Larteyn.

  5

  They flew from the white towers of Kryne Lamiya to the fading fires of Larteyn in a lonely silence, not touching, both thinking their own thoughts. Gwen left the aircar in its usual place on the roof, and Dirk followed her downstairs to her door. “Wait,” she said in a quick whisper, when he had expected her to say good night. She vanished inside; he waited, puzzled. There were noises from the other side of the door—voices—then abruptly Gwen was back, pressing a thick manuscript into his hand, an impressively heavy mass of paper hand-bound in black leather. Jaan’s thesis. He had almost forgotten. “Read it,” she whispered, leaning out the door. “Come up tomorrow morning, and we’ll talk some more.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek and closed the heavy door with a small click. Dirk stood for a moment turning the bound manuscript over in his hands, then turned toward the tubes.

  He was only a few steps down the hall when he heard the first shout. Then, somehow, he could not continue; the sounds drew him back, and he stood listening at Gwen’s door.

  The walls were thick, and very little of what was said came through. The words and the meanings he lost entirely, but the voices themselves carried, and the tones. Gwen’s voice dominated: loud, sharp-edged—at times she was shouting—close to the edge of hysteria. In his mind Dirk could see her pacing the living room before the gargoyles, the way she always paced when she was angry. Both of the Kavalars would be present, berating her—Dirk was sure he heard two other voices—one quiet and sure, without anger, questioning relentlessly. That had to be Jaan Vikary. His cadence gave him away, the rhythms of his speech distinctive even through the wall. The third voice, Garse Janacek, spoke infrequently at first, then more and more, with increasing volume and anger. After a time the quiet male voice was virtually silent, while Gwen and Garse screamed at one another. Then it said something, a sharp command. And Dirk heard a noise, a fleshy thud. A blow. Someone hitting someone, it could be nothing else.

  Finally Vikary giving orders, followed by silence. The light went off inside the room.

  Dirk stood quietly, holding Vikary’s manuscript and wondering what to do. There did not seem to be anything he could do, except talk to Gwen the next morning and find out who had hit her, and why. It had to be Janacek, he thought.

  Ignoring the tubes, he decided to walk downstairs to Ruark’s rooms.

  Once in bed, Dirk found he was immensely tired and badly shaken by the events of the day. So much all at once, he could hardly cope with it. The Kavalar hunters and their mockmen, the strange bitter life Gwen lived with Vikary and Janacek, the sudden dizzy possibility of her return. Unable to sleep, he thought about it all for a long time. Ruark was already asleep; there was no one to talk to. Finally Dirk picked up the thick manuscript Gwen had given him and began to leaf through the first few pages. There was nothing like a good chunk of scholarly writing to put a man to sleep, he reflected.

  Four hours and a half-dozen cups of coffee later, he put down the manuscript, yawned, and rubbed his eyes. Then he shut off the light and stared at the darkness.

  Jaan Vikary’s thesis—Myth and History: Origins of Holdfast Society as Based on an Interpretation of the Demonsong Cycle of Jamis-Lion Taal—was a worse indictment of his people than anything that Arkin Ruark could possibly say, Dirk thought. He had laid it all out, with sources and documentation from the computer banks on Avalon, with lengthy quotations from the poetry of Jamis-Lion Taal and even lengthier dissertations on what Jamis Taal had meant. All of the things that he and Gwen had told Dirk that morning were there, in detail. Vikary supplied theories on theories, attempted to explain everything. He even explained the mockmen, more or less. He argued that during the Time of Fire and Demons some survivors from the cities had reached the mining camps and sought shelter. Once taken in, however, they proved dangerous. Some were victims of radiation sickness; they died slowly and horribly, and possibly passed the poison on to those who nursed them. Others, seemingly healthy, lived and became part of the proto-holdfast, until they married and produced children. Then the taint of radiation showed up. It was all conjecture on Vikary’s part, with not even a line or two from Jamis-Lion to support it, yet it seemed a glib and plausible rationalization of the mockman myth.

  Vikary also wrote at length of the event the Kavalars called the Sorrowing Plague—and what he carefully called “the shift to contemporary Kavalar sexual-familial patterns.”

  According to his hypothesis, the Hrangans had returned to High Kavalan approximately a century after their first raid. The cities they had bombed were still slag; there was no sign of new building on the part of the humans. Yet the three slaveraces they had dropped to seed the planet were nowhere in evidence: decimated, extinct. Undoubtedly the Hrangan Mind commanding concluded that some of the humans still lived. To effect a final wiping up, the Hrangans dropped plague bombs. That was Vikary’s theory.

  Jamis-Lion’s poems had no mention of Hrangans, but many mentions of sickness. All the surviving Kavalar accounts agreed on that. There was a Sorrowing Plague, a long period when one horrible epidemic after another swept through the holdfasts. Each turn of the season brought a new and more dreadful disease—the ultimate demon-enemy, one the Kavalars could not fight or kill.

  Ninety men died out of every hundred. Ninety men, and ninety-nine women.

  One of the many plagues, it seemed, was female-selective. The medical specialists Vikary had consulted on Avalon had told him that, based on the meager evidence he gave them—a few ancient poems and songs—it seemed likely that the female sex hormones acted as a catalyst for the disease. Jamis-Lion Taal had written that young maids were spared the bloody wasting because of their innocence, while the rutting eyn-kethi were struck down horribly and died in shuddering convulsions. Vikary interpreted this to mean that prepubescent girls were left
untouched, while sexually mature women were devastated. An entire generation was wiped out. Worse, the disease lingered; no sooner did girl children reach puberty than the plague struck. Jamis-Lion made this a truth of vast religious significance.

  Some women escaped—the naturally immune. Very few at first. More later; because they lived, producing sons and daughters, many of whom were also immune, while those who did not share the resistance died at puberty. Eventually all Kavalars were immune, with rare exceptions. The Sorrowing Plague ended.

  But the damage had been done. Entire holdfasts had been wiped out; those that clung to life had seen their populations decline far below the numbers necessary to maintain a viable society. And the social structure and sexual roles had been warped irrevocably away from the monogamous egalitarianism of the early Taran colonists. Generations had grown to maturity in which men outnumbered women ten to one; little girls lived all through childhood with the knowledge that puberty might mean death. It was a grim time. On that both Jaan Vikary and Jamis-Lion Taal spoke with one voice.

  Jamis-Lion wrote that sin had finally passed from High Kavalaan when the eyn-kethi were safely locked away from the daylight, back in the caves from which they had issued, where their shame could not be seen. Vikary wrote that the Kavalar survivors had fought back as best they could. They no longer had the technological skills to construct airtight sterilized chambers; but no doubt rumors of such places had drifted down the years to them, and they still hoped that such places could be proof against disease. So the surviving women were secured in prisonlike hospitals deep under the ground, in the safest part of the holdfast, the farthest from the contaminated wind and rain and water. Men who had once roamed and hunted and warred with their wives by their sides now teamed with other men, both grieving for lost partners. To relieve the sexual tensions—and maintain the gene pool as best they could, if they even understood such things—the men who lived through the Sorrowing Plague made their women sexual property of all. To insure as many children as possible, they made them perpetual breeders who lived their lives safe from danger and in constant pregnancy. The holdfasts that did not adopt such measures failed to survive; those that did passed on a cultural heritage.