Awake in the Night Land (12 page)

I remember it was a twelvemonth before my Naming Day, when he first spoke of this to me; for I was in my older sister’s room, seated before her looking glass, wearing her dancing uniform and pinning up my hair. The uniform was a white tunic and bright red pantaloons whose leggings were wider than a skirt. I was curious to see what I might look like this time next year, once I could wear my hair up, as a grown woman can, to show the line of my neck. I had the glass viewpoint adjusted to show me from behind, so I could only see Polynices from the back, and I was looking over his shoulder at first one coiffeur of mine, then the next.

I said to him lightly: “Impossible that men once walked abroad! The Night-Hounds would have eaten them. And can men live in eternal gloom, with only scattered firepits for light, and only moss-bush and sand to eat? You cannot tell me they drank from the waters of the Cold Venom Sea.”

“I mean,” he said patiently, “Our ancestors once walked abroad, in a time when things were not as now.”

“Your ancestors and mine? Of course! We know there was a second race of humanity living elsewhere. In the Lesser Redoubt. Nine hundred thousand years ago it fell, but here is the proof that it once reared a tower above a land of endless darkness.” I plucked a hair from my head and waved it, giggling.

“Beautiful hair, mistress,” murmured the indentured girl helping me brush and comb. She was older than I was, but I don’t recall her name. I think she was from a city somewhere in the four hundreds. The air pressure there is different, because of a failure of the machines in ages past, and her folk are said to have acuter hearing than those of us who live on highest decks.

Polynices was not impressed. His hair was as dark as mine, his cheek as high, his eyes as slanted. “No,” said he, “I mean the ancestors of all the men of all the cities of the Great Redoubt. We walked abroad, and farmed, and rode. All men. I saw it.”

I said, “You no doubt recovered a dream from a braver day than this, if all the men tested their boldness by venturing into the Dark! Perhaps the numbers of mankind were fewer, or the sources of metal more, to equip every jack and squire with arms and armor, and Earth-Current flowing without meter or without rationing, to charge the weapons and weave the broad gray cloaks that keep the deadly chill of Everlasting Night away. Ah! You must have seen a wondrous time indeed!”

I remembered being delighted with the fancy, speculating what men must have been like, in that long-lost era, when folk still ventured from the Pyramid; men like Andros.

I said sadly: “Weren’t the gates sealed and fused shut years ago?”

Now I stand on the balcony and study the creatures guarding my brother’s body. When atmospheric conditions are right, long range microphones can pick out the noise of their cries. Usually it is but one, rather than both; and they go away for weeks at a time. But always they come back, barking and wagging their poisonous tails, as if expecting him to rise again, and feed them from his hand. When he does not rise, they throw back their heads and utter their mournful cry.

There is a noise like that in my heart, a whining howl that goes on and on.

I should not envy them. And yet they stand within a few yards of him. They can see his features, his brave face, which the angle of his fall hides from me.

How foolish the brutes are. He will never rise again. Not for them.

If only I could stand where they stand.

The men of my father’s generation were too timid to venture Out.

The encampment of Dun Giants did not exist in ages past. Some power feeds an unnatural life in them, so that they need not scatter in search of the unwholesome moss or fungi and deadly meats that sustain them in the dark. Well fed, they are able to maintain an unceasing watch against our doors, and rise up in many numbers should any of us emerge from our armored fastness.

My grandfather Laius once told me the tale of Cyrus and Darius venturing forth. He said it happened in his youth that the pair went forth together. One year when subterranean vapors sent the Dun Giants into a stupor, they found an opportunity to slip the leaguer. They meant to gather aetheric photographs of the black aura surrounding the Great Northwest Watching Thing, and perhaps creep close enough to the Blue Shining Plain to measure what the shining substance was, or discover why it was so deadly.

The two adventurers entered the Blue Plain, and were lost from sight for many weeks, and thought dead, for no person had ever entered that place and lived. But then, beyond all hope, long-range spy glasses detected two figures emerging from the silent blue fires on the far side of the plain. They were spotted once and twice again, dark silhouettes crossing patches of white ice, heading north and west.

Then, in the fiftieth hour after they had been seen to emerge, an unexpected eruption of a volcano spread a red and beating light, and revealed their position. The Great Northwest Watching Thing had not moved in perhaps a million years, but it tilted its head toward the two adventurers, who stood, still as posts in the sudden glare, in the midst of a flat and open place.

At once all the Night Land was filled with voices, and the Land Whence Comes Great Laughter began to yammer and shout. Beasts climbed from their pits and holes that dot the dark plain between the Place Where the Silent Ones Are Not and the diseased plateau above which burn the Seven Unwinking Torches.

The two men dashed away from the volcano-firelight and entered the Broken Land, a place of pits and escarpments. Hours turned into weeks as the monsters prowled and hunted the two adventurers, and millions watched from the balconies of the Great Redoubt for some sign of them.

One was eaten by a Night-Hound. Grandfather said the Night-Hound dragged the body very near to our gates, and sat on its haunches and playing with the corpse, dandling the body from its paws and ripping it, while harquebusiers shot ineffective lances of fire at the monster from lower windows.

The other adventurer was making his cautious way back toward the pyramid. Grandfather told me that schoolboys and matrons returned every waking-period to the Viewing Table chambers for their cities, to see if the Great Spy Glass or any lesser glasses had caught a glimpse of the surviving adventurer in his gray armor sneaking from moss-bush to moss-bush, or darting across the baked mud of exposed ground.

Eventually the report came that he was seen, pale in the gloom, running naked toward the House of Silence, his head hanging oddly as he ran, his armor and weapons gone. He entered the Doors that have never closed since the beginning of Eternity.

Some observers stared at the House for many hours and days afterwards, hoping to catch perhaps a glimpse of the lost man through the uncased windows of that place, and these observers had to be sedated later, for they saw the beckoning dreams and heard the soft voices that those who stare for too long at the House sometimes see and hear, and it was clear their mind-training had not been sufficient to defend them.

I don’t remember which one, Darius or Cyrus, was slain by the Night-Hound and which one was called into the House of Silence and Destroyed.

I remember Polynices’ answer, that time when we spoke in my sister’s chambers. He said, “The gates are not fast shut. A man could walk out into the Land our ancestors walked freely, every one of them.”

My brother’s words inspired me. I tried to imagine a time when every man was as brave as Andros. Surely in such an age, every woman would have been as fair as Mirdath, or so I concluded in my girlish certainty.

“Such bold men!” I said again, “To tempt death so gallantly.”

“All men and women too. I do not mean each man ventured forth on one brief mission as a test of strength. I mean we walked the Land and it was our own. Many folk lived in houses and cities not far from the Great Pyramid, each one surrounded by its own Electric Circle of protective energy, its own sheath of Air-Clog to dispel the voices and beguilements and stench. So much light was shed by the lower balconies in those days, that green gardens grew in the open air, along the long angles of light from the lower windows.”

“Foolish! No woman has ever trod the poisoned black grit of the Night Land, save Mirdath the Beautiful. Our laws forbid it.”

“This is a time before that law, before the Siege of Man.”

“Some dreams are merely figments: impressions from our daily toil and pleasure, combined and recombined in our fancy when our waking nature retires.” Since my brother was older than me, I enjoyed correcting him.

He shook his head slowly. “I sleep beneath a dreaming glass. The glass showed the images had a time-depth of over five million years. I saw a flock of pigeons fly out from the windows of one great balcony, their wings supported by the thick, warm air of those lost ages, and fly back into others. The birds carried trinkets and letters or stamps of perfume from lover to beloved, loves forbidden by the eugeneticists or stricter parents of those aeons. That image was from a previous life, long before the Seven Hundred Year famine, when all megafauna of our underground parks were hunted to extinction, long before the Time of the Weakening, before when any pets or livestock above the insect level of organization began to be sensitive to influences from the Nine Iron Towers, and had to be slain.”

I said, “Then your glass was untuned! The winged shape we see in decorations was never based on a real creature: birds are as mythical as stars. The atmosphere beyond the Air-Clog is too weak to support a kite, or a living kite creature. And beside, you said you saw humans riding! If we rode between these scattered houses gathered around the skirts of the great Redoubt, where are the remains? We should see rolling glide-ways here and there between points where human ruins once had been.”

“I do not mean we rode moving carpets like those that link our cities. I mean we rode on the backs of monsters. A creature called a hippos. It had the body of a Centaur and the head of a Gandharva. Other monsters ran along the ground before us and behind, in a pack. They would bay and give tongue when a monster who was a foe of man appeared, and the young men would direct his pack against such foes, or slay them with a spear charged with the Earth-Current.”

“Fantasy! Monsters kill us. We cannot ride their backs.”

“These creatures loved us.”

I noticed then that my lady’s maid was regarding Polynices with a wary look half-hidden in her eye, and so I excused her.

After she had gone, I hissed at him: “She is going to report you to the Remonstrators! Do you want the Masters of the Pale White Chamber to come examine you? Honest folk have been put under the Mind Glass for less than that! Do you care to draw the attentions of the Crowned Watcher to your words? The mental-influence insulation of the Great Redoubt cannot be made more perfect than the virtue of those within it will support.”

He was staring thoughtfully at the hatch where the maid had excused herself. He said slowly: “I fear no summons to the Pale White Chamber.”

“Why? Are your thoughts so pure? Our father’s rank will not protect us.”

He shook his head slowly. “Those who are undergoing the Preparation are immune from summons. So says the antique law.”

I pouted at him. “Did you find that in some old book? Surely the Watch was disbanded generations ago.”

“It still exists. Cadets in Preparation are considered members, and are hence immune from legal process, except by Writ from the Lord High Officer of the Watch.”

“Silly! Your cannot hide in the Preparation Chambers for more than sixteen sleeping-periods. After that, the Proctor will see you do not mean to go Out, and will thrust you from their preparation school, send you back to your home city and level, and place you back under the authority of the local Deacon. Then it is the Pale White Chamber for you. You will be cleansed there of this thought that the Devourers once were our friends: the thought is treason, blasphemy and suicide all at once!”

“I mean to go Out.”

The blood of Mirdath is in me. I am no Dreamer, like my brother, but I had a visualization then. At that moment, staring at my brother’s reflection in the glass, I also saw him, in my mind, as he would soon be: laying on black salt, his weapon to one side, his hand outflung to the other, his tangled hair spilled from his helmetless head: prone, motionless, dead.

I rose from my chair, dropping the combs and pins I played with, and reached up to grasp his broad shoulders. I do not recall what I said, or screamed, or wept, or even if I made a human noise at all. Perhaps I spoke in calm and measured tones of reason; perhaps I begged and vowed. I don’t recall. Eventually, he took my wrists lightly in his grip and shrugged me away. I swooned. My hands were too weak to keep my brother with me.

The long straight hair I had plucked from my head, proof that in elder times men walked abroad from the Pyramid, lay visible against the bright metal fabric of my sister’s carpet.

The hair of my cousins is dark as the sky, as are many in my phylum. We are descended from the Last Daughter, whom the histories call Naäni, but we who are of her blood call her by the name she bore in her former life in the Days of Light: Mirdath the Beautiful. The first ancestor of the Andrides recovered her from the wreckage of her people’s shattered fortress, which was called the Lesser Redoubt; so called, for it rose no more than a mile in height, a pyramid of three sides, each side three quarters of a mile along its base. The main race of humanity were fairer of hue and hair than Mirdath had been, perhaps because the Earth-Current surged more strongly through her conduits and wall-segments, perhaps due to genetic meddling in the Lesser Pyramid of a type which the Masters of Life-Knowledge in the Great Pyramid have always forbidden.

I remember a tutor once telling me how history showed, during the days when men still dared the Outside, that the Sons of Andros were hardier to endure the cold, and stubborner to rebuke the Mind-Whispers than others who ventured in the Night Lands.

“The Lesser Redoubt, if ancient records are true, was settled by many who were restless of spirit, and went forth from the Great Redoubt, in a time before the Watching Things came from the Outer Darkness to beleaguer us. Eschatologists, who study the extinctions of those creatures, the insects, pets or livestock which once dwelt here in the Pyramid with us, call this pattern ‘self-selection.’ The stock of those who were restless to depart Our Mighty Home, and hardy enough to cross the Cold Waste and found another house, would preserve by that Diaspora, that very characteristic removed from the common stock by their departure.”