Dying of the Light Read online

  “You voted for Larteyn?” Dirk said. “To live in?”

  She shook her head. Her hair, unbound now, tossed gently, and touched Dirk with a smile. “No,” she said. “Jaan wanted that, and Garse. Me—well, I didn’t vote for Twelfth Dream either, I’m afraid. I could never have lived here. The scent of decay is too strong. I agree with Keats, you know. Nothing is quite so melancholy as the death of beauty. There was more beauty here than ever in Larteyn, though Jaan would growl to hear me say it. So this is the sadder place. Besides, in Larteyn there is some company, at least, if only Lorimaar and his sort. Here there’s no one left but ghosts.”

  Dirk looked out over the water, where the great red sun, drained and captured, bobbed eerily up and down in the slow roll of the waves. And he could almost see the ghosts she spoke of then, phantoms who pressed the riverbank on both sides and sang laments for things long lost. And another too, a ghost uniquely his: a Braque bargeman, advancing down the river, pushing a long black pole. He was coming for Dirk, that bargeman, coming on and on. And the black boat that he rode was low in the water, very full of emptiness.

  So he stood up and pulled Gwen up with him, saying nothing except he wanted to move on. And they ran from the ghosts, back to the terrace where the gray aircar waited.

  Then it took them up again, for a second interlude of wind and sky and silent thought. Gwen flew them farther south and then east, and Dirk watched and brooded and was quiet, and at intervals she would look over at him and, never meaning to, she would smile.

  They came at last to the sea.

  The city of the afternoon was built along the shore of a jagged bay where dark green waves crested to break against rotting wharfs. Once it was called Musquel-by-the-Sea, Gwen said as they circled above it in low, looping spirals. Though it had risen with the other cities of Worlorn, there was an air of the ancient about it. The streets of Musquel were broken-backed snakes, twisting cobbled alleys between leaning towers of multicolored bricks. It was a brick city. Blue bricks, red bricks, yellow, green, orange, bricks painted and striped and speckled, bricks slammed together with mortar as black as obsidian or as red as Satan above, slammed together in crazy clashing patterns. Even more gaudy were the painted canvas awnings of the merchant stalls that still lined the rambling streets and sat deserted on the abandoned wooden piers.

  They landed on a pier that looked stronger than most, listened to the breakers for a time, and then strolled into the city. All empty—all dust. The streets were windswept and vacant, the domes and onion towers deserted, and the fat red sun above washed out all the once-gay colors. The bricks crumbled as well; dust was everywhere, multicolored and choking. Musquel was not a well-built city, and now it was as dead as Twelfth Dream.

  “It’s primitive,” Dirk said, amid the remains. They stood at the juncture of two alleys where a deep well had been sunk and ringed with stone. Black water splashed below. “The whole feel is pre-space, and the signs say the same thing about the culture. Braque is like this, but not to this degree. They have a little of the old technology, bits and pieces where they aren’t forbidden by religion. Musquel looks as if it had nothing.”

  She nodded, running her hand lightly along the top of the well, sending a stream of dust and pebbles to tumble into darkness. The jade-and-silver shone dull red on her left arm, catching Dirk’s eye and making him wince and wonder once again. What was it? A slave’s mark, or a token of love, what? But he pushed the thought aside, reluctant to consider it.

  “The people who built Musquel had very little,” she was saying. “They came from the Forgotten Colony, which is sometimes called Letheland by the other outworlders, and is always called Earth by its own people. On High Kavalaan the people themselves are called the Lostfolk. Who they are, how they got to their world, where they came from . . .” She smiled and shrugged. “No one knows. They were here before the Kavalars, though, and possibly before the Mao Tse-tung, which history records as the first human starship to breach the Tempter’s Veil. The traditional Kavalars are certain all the Lostfolk are mockmen and Hrangan demons, but they have proved that they can interbreed with other human stocks from better-known worlds. But mostly the Forgotten Colony is a solitary globe, with not much interest in the rest of space. They have a Bronze Age culture, fisherfolk mostly, and they keep to themselves.”

  “I’m surprised they even came here at all then,” Dirk said, “or bothered to build a city.”

  “Ah,” she said, smiling and brushing loose more crumbling stone to fall into the well with tiny splashes. “But everyone had to build a city, all fourteen outworld cultures. That was the idea. Wolfheim had found the Forgotten Colony a few centuries ago, and so Wolfheim and Tober between them dragged the Lostfolk here. They had no starships of their own. Fisherfolk back on their homeworld so were they made fisherfolk here. Again it was Wolfheim, with the World of the Blackwine Ocean, who stocked the seas for them. They fished with woven nets from little boats, small black men and women bare to the waist, and they fried the catch in open pits for the visitors. They had bards and street singers to bring their alleys joy. Everyone stopped at Musquel during the Festival to listen to their odd myths and eat the fried fish and rent boats. But I don’t think the Lostfolk loved the city much. Within a month of the Festival’s end, every one of them was gone. They didn’t even take down their awnings, and you can still find fish knives and clothing and a bone or two if you prowl through the buildings.”

  “Have you?”

  “No. But I hear stories. Kirak Redsteel Cavis, the poet who lives in Larteyn, stayed here once and wandered and wrote some songs.”

  Dirk looked around, but there was nothing to see. Fading bricks and empty streets, unglassed windows like the sockets of a thousand blind eyes, painted awnings flapping loudly in the wind. Nothing. “Another city of ghosts,” he commented.

  “No,” Gwen said. “No, I don’t think so. The Lostfolk never gave their souls to Musquel, or to Worlorn. Their ghosts all went home with them.”

  Dirk shivered, and the city felt suddenly even emptier than it had a moment before. Emptier than empty. It was a strange idea. “Is Larteyn the only city that has any life at all?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, turning from the wall. They walked down the alley together, back in the direction of the waterfront. “No, I’ll show you life now, if you’d like. Come on.”

  Airborne again, they were on another ride through the gathering gloom. They had consumed most of the afternoon reaching Musquel and wandering through it; Fat Satan was low on the western horizon, and one of the four yellow attendants had already sunk out of sight. It was twilight again, in fact as well as in appearance.

  Very restless, Dirk took the controls this time, while Gwen sat at his side with her arm resting very lightly on his, giving curt directions. Most of the day was gone already, and he had so much to say, so much to ask, so many things to decide. Yet he had done none of it. Soon, though, he promised himself as he flew. Soon.

  The aircar purred very softly, almost inaudibly, beneath his gentle touch. The ground grew dark below, and the kilometers raced by. Life, Gwen told him, would be found ahead, west, due west, toward the sunset.

  The city of the evening was a single silver building with its feet in the rolling hills far beneath them and its head in the clouds two kilometers up. It was a city of light, its flanks metallic and windowless and shimmering with white-hot brilliance. Coruscating, flashing, the light climbed the vaulting shaft in waves, beginning at the far bottom where the city was anchored deep into the primal rock, then climbing and climbing and growing steadily brighter as the city rose and narrowed like the vast needle it was. Faster and higher the wave of light would ascend, up all that incredible climb, until it reached that cloud-crusted silver spire in a burst of blinding glory. And by then, three later waves had already begun to follow it up.

  “Challenge,” Gwen named the city as they approached. Its name and its intent. It was built by the urbanites of ai-Emerel, whose home cities ar
e black steel towers set amid rolling plains. Each Emereli city was a nation-state, all in a single tower, and most Emereli never left the building they were born in (although those that did, Gwen said, often became the greatest wanderers in all of space). Challenge was all those Emereli towers in one, silver-white instead of black, twice as haughty and three times as tall—ai-Emerel’s archaeological philosophy embodied in metal and plastic—fusion-powered, automatic, computerized, and self-repairing. The Emereli boasted that it was immortal, a final proof that the glories of Fringe technology (or Emereli technology, at any rate) gleamed no less bright than that of Newholme or Avalon or even Old Earth itself.

  There were dark horizontal slashes in the body of the city—airlot landing decks, each ten levels from the last. Dirk homed in on one, and when he reached it the black slit blazed into light for his approach. The opening was easily ten meters high; he had no trouble setting them down in the vast airlot on the hundredth level.

  As they climbed out, a deep bass voice spoke to them from nowhere. “Welcome,” it said. “I am the Voice of Challenge. May I entertain you?”

  Dirk glanced back over his shoulder, and Gwen laughed at him. “The city brain,” she explained. “A supercomputer. I told you this city still lived.”

  “May I entertain you?” the Voice repeated. It came from the walls.

  “Maybe,” Dirk said tentatively. “I think we’re probably hungry. Can you feed us?”

  The Voice did not answer, but a wall panel rolled back several meters away and a silent cushioned vehicle moved out and stopped before them. They got in and the vehicle moved off through another obliging wall.

  They rolled on soft balloon tires through a succession of spotless white corridors, past countless rows of numbered doors, while music played soothingly around them. Dirk remarked briefly that the white lights were a harsh contrast to the dim evening sky of Worlorn, and instantly the corridors became a soft, muted blue.

  The fat-tired car let them off at a restaurant, and a robowaiter who sounded much like the Voice offered them menus and wine lists. Both selections were extensive, not limited to cuisine from ai-Emerel or even to the outworlds, but including famous dishes and vintage wines from all the scattered worlds of the manrealm, including a few that Dirk had never heard of. Each dish had its world of origin printed in small type beneath it on the menu. They mulled the selection for a long time. Finally Dirk chose sand dragon broiled in butter, from Jamison’s World, and Gwen ordered bluespawn-in-cheese, from Old Poseidon.

  The wine they picked was clear and white. The robot brought it frozen in a cube of ice and cracked it free, and somehow it was still liquid and quite cold. That, the Voice insisted, was the way it should be served. Dinner came on warm plates of silver and bone. Dirk pulled a clawed leg from his entree, peeled back the shell, and tasted the white, buttery meat.

  “This is incredible,” he said, nodding down at his plate. “I lived on Jamison’s World for a while, and those Jamies do love their fresh-broiled sand dragon, and this is as good as any I had. Frozen? Frozen and shipped here? Hell, the Emereli must have needed a fleet to move all the food they’d need for this place.”

  “Not frozen,” came the reply. It wasn’t Gwen, though she stared at him with a bemused grin. The Voice answered him. “Before the Festival, the trading ship Blue Plate Special from ai-Emerel visited as many worlds as it could reach, collecting and preserving samples of their finest foodstuffs. The voyage, long planned, took some forty-three standard years, under four captains and as many crews. Finally the ship came to Worlorn, and in the kitchens and biotanks of Challenge the collected samples were cloned and recloned to feed the multitudes. Thus were the fishes and loaves multiplied by no false prophet but by the scientists of ai-Emerel.”

  “It sounds very smug,” Gwen said with a giggle.

  “It sounds like a set speech,” Dirk said. Then he shrugged and went back to his dinner, as did Gwen. The two of them ate alone, except for their robowaiter and the Voice, in the center of the restaurant built to hold hundreds. All around them, empty but immaculate, other tables sat waiting with dark red tablecloths and bright silver dinnerware. The customers were gone a decade ago; but the Voice and the city had infinite patience.

  Afterwards, over coffee (black and thick with cream and spices, a blend from Avalon of fond memory), Dirk felt mellow and relaxed, perhaps more at ease than he had been since coming to Worlorn. Jaan Vikary and the jade-and-silver—it gleamed dark and beautiful in the dim lights of the restaurant, exquisitely wrought yet oddly drained of menace and meaning—had shrunk somehow in importance now that he was back with Gwen. Across from him, sipping from a white china mug and smiling her dreamy faraway smile, she looked very approachable, very like the Jenny that he had known and loved once, the lady of the whisperjewel.

  “Nice,” he said, nodding, meaning everything around them.

  And Gwen nodded back at him. “Nice,” she agreed, smiling, and Dirk ached for her, Guinevere of the wide green eyes and the endless black hair, she who had cared, his lost soulmate.

  He leaned forward and stared down into his cup. There were no omens in the coffee. He had to talk to her. “It’s all been nice tonight,” he said. “Like Avalon.”

  When she murmured, agreeing yet again, he continued. “Is there anything left, Gwen?”

  She regarded him levelly and sipped at her coffee. “Not a fair question, Dirk, you know that. There is always something left. If what you had was real to begin with. If not, well, then it doesn’t matter. But if it was real, then something, a chunk of love, a cup of hate, despair, resentment, lust. Whatever. But something.”

  “I don’t know,” Dirk t’Larien said, sighing. His eyes looked down and inward. “Maybe you’re the only reality I’ve had, then.”

  “Sad,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess.” His eyes came up. “I’ve got a lot left, Gwen. Love, hate, resentment, all of that. Like you said. Lust.” He laughed.

  She only smiled. “Sad,” she said again.

  He was not willing to let it go. “And you? Something, Gwen?”

  “Yes. Can’t deny it. Something. And it’s been growing, off and on.”

  “Love?”

  “You’re pressing,” she said gently, setting down her cup. The robowaiter at her elbow filled it again, already creamed and spiced. “I asked you not to.”

  “I have to,” he said. “Hard enough to be so close to you, and talk about Worlorn or Kavalar customs or even hunters. That’s not what I want to talk about!”

  “I know. Two old lovers standing together talking. That’s a common situation and a common strain. Both of them afraid, not knowing whether to try to open old gates again, not knowing if the other one wants them to reawaken those sleeping thoughts or let them go. Every time I think a thought of Avalon and almost say it, I wonder, does he want me to talk about it or is he praying that I won’t?”

  “I suppose that depends on what you were going to say. Once I tried to start it all again. Remember? Just afterwards. I sent you my whisperjewel. You never answered, never came.” His voice was even, with a faint tinge of reproach and regret, but no anger. Somehow he had lost his anger, just for now.

  “Did you ever think why?” Gwen said. “I got the jewel and cried. I was still alone then, hadn’t met Jaan yet, and I wanted someone so badly. I would have gone back to you if you’d called me.”

  “I did call you. You didn’t come.”

  A grim smile. “Ah, Dirk. The whisperjewel came in a small box, and taped to it was a note. ‘Please,’ the note said, ‘come back to me now. I need you, Jenny.’ That was what it said. I cried and cried. If you’d only written ‘Gwen,’ if you’d only loved Gwen, me. But no, it was always Jenny, even afterwards, even then.”

  Dirk remembered, and winced. “Yes,” he admitted after a short silence. “I guess I did write that. I’m sorry. I never understood. But I do now. Is it too late?”

  “I said so. In the woods. Too late, Dirk, it’s a
ll dead. You’ll hurt us if you press.”

  “All dead? You said something was left, and growing. Just now you said it. Make up your mind, Gwen. I don’t want to hurt you, or me. But I want—”

  “I know what you want. It can’t be. It’s gone.”

  “Why?” he asked. He pointed across the table at her bracelet. “Because of that? Jade-and-silver forever and ever, is that it?”

  “Maybe,” she said. Her voice faltered, uncertain. “I don’t know. We . . . that is, I . . .”

  Dirk remembered all the things that Ruark had told him. “I know it’s not easy to talk about,” he said carefully, gently. “And I promised to wait. But some things can’t wait. You said Jaan is your husband, right? What is Garse? What does betheyn mean?”

  “Heldwife,” she said. “But you don’t understand. Jaan is different than other Kavalars, stronger and wiser and more decent. He is changing things, he alone. The old ties, of betheyn to highbond, our ties are not like that. Jaan doesn’t believe that, no more than he believes in hunting mockmen.”

  “He believes in High Kavalaan,” Dirk said, “and in code duello. Maybe he’s atypical, but he’s still a Kavalar.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Gwen only grinned at him and rallied. “Pfui,” she said. “Now you sound like Arkin.”

  “Do I? Maybe Arkin is right, though. One other thing. You say Jaan doesn’t believe in many of the old ways, right?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “Fine. What about Garse, then? I haven’t had as much a chance to talk to him. Garse is equally enlightened, no doubt?”

  That stopped her. “Garse . . .” she began. She stopped and shook her head dubiously. “Well, Garse is more conservative.”