Awake in the Night Land (13 page)

And, of course, Mirdath was revived when her body was lowered in its crystal coffin into the Crack beneath the foundations of our Pyramid, that Crack from whence the Earth-Current pours forth. Her exposure to those salubrious rays broke the trance, or coma, or little death encompassing her, and her lover, astonished to tears by the miracle, clasped her in his arms.

It may have been some strange quirk of her genetic code that enabled her to resist the deadly Powers and the thought-pressures of the Uncouth Things in the darkness of the Land. It may have been the love, eternal and potent, of Andros.

In my blood, the capacity for love such as his must yet dwell, since I am of the lineage of Andros. A sister’s love for her brother burns with a fire as divine as any man’s for his bride. In my brother’s blood, the fortitude to resist the Powers surely cannot be less than that of our great ancestress, and the capacity for resurrection must exist, for he is of the lineage of Mirdath.

My heart tells me this is so. I have no other evidences; but then, no other evidences are at hand.

I remember how solemn, how quiet, was the ceremony before the Seventy-Seven ventured to the Lower Gate, and Out into the Night Land.

The men wore the stern gray armor and unadorned helmets, wore the living cloaks and carried the heavy weapons of our ancestors. For close foes, each man wore at his belt a fully-charged Dirk; for close friends, an uncharged Misericord, which poets call the mercy-knife. Each man carried a scrip with tablets, a horn of water-powder, a purification bowl, a home-pointing needle, a heat-stone and a basilisk-glass, just the same as any man of our race would have carried from any period in the last six millions of years. They carried no lanterns, no thinking-disks, no voice instruments that disturb the aether.

Down the great stairs they trod. The lower landings were snuffed of all light, and only the Masters of the Watch lined the stairs below that last landing, standing silently in their dun armor, their weapons held in salute. The other high-born stood with me above the lower landing, for even we were not permitted so close to the lower gate. All the stairs above were lined with crowds, multitudes without number.

How quiet we all were. The only noise I heard was Father’s serving woman, Optimina, who was quietly telling him what sights she saw as the men filed past, quiet as ghosts.

How handsome my brother looked in his armor, and how serene. All the brave young men following him had looks as brave and steady, and their eyes shined with pride.

A year later he returned alone.

So strange to think back on that interval of time; to realize how much of my life I lived without him. I ended my novitiate with the spiritualists, and was proved both for invasions of the memory and dream. I was taught to use the fan, which is thought to be too alluring for little girls to handle. I was qualified in the use of both needle and wand, and selected my personal colors with the herald.

The palestra drilled me in the Quadrille, and the long-awaited ceremony commenced: all the maidens of my city performed our figures on a ten-acre-wide plate of energy, with a plate oppositely charged hanging above, a thousand athletic virgins filled with vitality, our fair young limbs flew up with bacchant cries; our skirts and streaming hairs were banners; our slender feet were thunder.

We wove our youth and purity into the ancient energy pattern, while stored force of a million years rippled across the motions of our contredanse. When I stepped from the plate, and the Sanguinarians confirmed I was fertile, the Humanitarians that I was un-deviant; and the Judge of Change offered the paten. We all pulled up our hair, girls no longer, and waited to be Presented.

The only mar was that I had not yet been Named. My House still kept the calendar of the Lesser Redoubt, and so the Quarter Cusp (as we reckoned it) was still a month and two days away, despite that I was Presented with my troupe. It was an awkward protocol: I was carrying a fan, but had to drink children’s wine, which is nine-tenths water. I had a needle in my sash-case, but it was uncharged. Little things like that.

So much had changed.

When Polynices left, Haemon had been no more than one of several friends of my brother before he left. A year later, he and I were promised to each other, waiting only for my Naming-Day to wed.

The last time I saw my father alive was when he came to visit me in prison. I was high born, and so my prison consisted of my word that I would not leave my chambers. I suppose in times when the art of the Mind Glass was forgotten, or the deceptions of the Thaumaturges were remembered, a lady’s unsupported word could not be trusted. But as it was, my word was enough, and so all my books and memory-globes, dresses and thinking disks were here to amuse me, had I been able to be amused. All my soft furniture, silk hangings and serene light-images were the same to me as if they had been the bare steel walls of a penance cell.

Naturally, I was livid with rage when my father entered the chamber. He was led by the hand by Optimina, a woman even older than he is.

He coughed, and said to her softly, “Is that noise my daughter?”

She murmured, “Yes, lord.”

“Find me a chair. Not near enough for her to bite.”

“No, lord.” And the old woman led him over to a large chair. He felt the arms and sides for a moment so that he knew which way it was facing, and gingerly lowered himself into it.

I said in a ringing voice, “Has civilization reached a deepest nadir, then, that the innocent are kept in chains for speaking no more than simple truth?”

Father muttered to Optimina, “Is she in chains?”

She lowered her head to his ear. “No, lord. She is using an expression.”

“Ah. I was about to commend my partisans for their zeal.” He raised his head and said, “Why did you imagine that, being of a privileged bloodline, you should be allowed to dispute the law, which binds all others in the Last Redoubt?”

I said, “What law? There is but an edict of your own, saying Polynices may not return. Inhuman! You condemned him. It would have been only matter of hours before some Manticore sniffing the dun air would scent the blood of all the giants he has slain, or one of the Silent Ones would pause in its errands along the great road, and turn its hood toward where he hid. Once discovered, some Great Power of the darkness would come to drink his soul like rice wine. Your word doomed him to Destruction.”

He shook his head wearily. “That opinion, worthy of a girl of your tender years and unremarkable accomplishments, would have contravened no law, had you kept it within your boudoir. Instead you spoke it to a pamphleteer, and it was passed to the hour-slips, and soon became the talk of all the cities of mankind. Of course there were those, eager for the approval of so high-born a lady, who took your weightless words as weightiest commands: a group of bullies from the North Pantry-works rushed the gate, and beat the Night Watch into submission: the valve-wheel was turned, and, in a moment, without the lanterns being doused or the thoughts of men disciplined to silence, both airlocks and thought-locks stood wide. They cheered.”

He almost smiled then, but forced his lips into a line instead. Father’s organization had been telling the people for months what a hero Polynices was. Of course they cheered him. No one was allowed to tell any other version of the tale.

Yet it still pleased him.

Father finished in a grim voice: “The idiots cheered your brother, and their voices rang out into the Night. Your brother and his two monsters entered, while the Dun Giants stood blinking in astonishment, no doubt fearing a trap.”

“I am pleased to see that there are men of red blood still living in this decayed and unspirited age!”

Father listened silently and nodded slowly. “Your words confirm that you willed the outcome of the event your speeches set in motion. All the elements of a charge of sedition to inhumanity are present.”

“I am free born, my family is not in debt to the water-works or air-pump, the power-house nor the mess. I am not indentured. How then can any law presume to rule my lips, when no law can rule my spirit?”

“If men were wise enough not to open doors to monsters, we would need no law to make it unlawful to urge so horrid an act.”

To my surprise, Optimina, his servant woman, spoke up: “Young mistress, hear me. There have been ages, many of them, when the mind-science was much advanced. Men of those happy times lived without the need for law, nor was there a Castellan; nor were men split into high ranks and low, for men served each man zealously, without any need to reward his heirs with dignities. An age like ours is very rare, along all the great aeons since the Pyramid arose, and we await some Dreamer of times past or times to come to recollect the lost sciences of mind-perfection to us. Until then, our Pyramid is divided into high and low, and the high are like the lamps and gongs which call us to quarters; they are the alarms that say where a breach has been made. Your voice, even yours, my lady, must be governed by the law, lest you give out a false alarm, and call brave men to dark and reckless deeds.”

I was aghast for a moment. “Father? Will this crone upbraid me?”

He pursed his lips and sucked his teeth to keep himself from smiling. “She is not high born and may say what she would. Unlike you. And she will speak wise words. Unlike you. Come! I have prepared an encyclical, which you must sign, and give out to the hour-slips, to post in all the hatches of the drinking houses and public rotundas. It reviles your brother and condemns those who aided him. There is little else I can do. We may be able to scrape enough sewage from your name to make you presentable for an alliance of marriage of some sort, perhaps not so grand as once I had hoped.”

I said stiffly: “I will publish no ill of my brother.”

“Come: his rank is gone. Eteocles will take his place, and be my heir.”

“Dawn will come before I sign!”

Father slowly climbed to his feet. He tilted his head toward the door: a circuit must have caught his thought-sending, for the door chimed and opened, and Uncle Creon entered, followed by two legates, Kratos and Bia.

They bowed to him.

Father said, “The girl is reticent. Her crime is Conspiracy to Breach, a deed which threatens the integrity of the Pyramid and the survival of the human race. What is within my power to do?”

Creon said with surprise, “Liege? Surely the crime is accessory, not conspiracy.”

“We are lucky my son had wit enough to upbraid the rioters this foolish girl stirred up and drive his beasts into the Quarantine Chamber: we can still claim he did not bring them fully inside the Last Redoubt. The Chamber is hollowed out from the hundred-yard thick armor plate itself, inside the outer lock but not within the inner; a subtle point of law which might allow us to pardon him, if public sentiment permits. It is a slender thread, and all we have. At the moment, we can call the crime attempted, rather than complete. This will allow me to deflect the full force of the law from my children; but I still need a sufficient penalty for the lesser crime to convince the multitude that my justice is fair. What is within my power?”

Kratos answered, “The ancient practice was to use a mental correction. But the last Soul Glass was shattered six hundred years ago.”

Father said, “Tell me not what I cannot do, but what I can.”

Kratos said, “The penalties affixed to nobles are reduction, humiliation, rationing, abnegation and cloister. Or you may issue a Bill of Attainder, which revokes generation privileges.”

“Gah! You are speaking of my unborn grandchildren. I will not corrupt my own blood. And do not bother to say I can blot her family shield, for that escutcheon is mine own as well. With such a stigma, I would be lucky to wed her to a sewer worker or pamphleteer.”

Bia spoke up. His voice was soft and sinister. “Were she common born, there is branding, marring, and flogging. All are quickly accomplished without drain of public resource.”

“It is not meet that any principle of correction should shape to the making of human signposts of pain for the benefit of others.”

Bia said, “Exulted, your beneficence does you credit, but you stand at the tower-top of a tradition more ancient and bloody than such nice scruples know. The flayed skin of one who attempted to exit the pyramid unprepared still hangs on the inward face the Greater Gate, a horrid warning to all.”

“And the era which did that deed is still reviled for its nearly nightlandish inhumanity. I will not make the memory of our age even darker, by putting the fairer skin of a female beside the hide of a criminal, and mine own daughter. Historians have enough to condemn when comparing our aeon to others.”

Creon said heavily, “Sir, history will recall that few other ages, aside from this, suffered the gene-darkening due to influences from the Quiet City, and few had their mathematicians confirm that the degeneration of the race into abhumanism was already much advanced. Without the eugenics laws, in a mere twenty thousand years, we would have de-evolved into beast-things, and more cities would be deserted than they are: without the hierarchy, we could not enforce the eugenics laws.”

Father turned his ear: “What would you do, brother?”

“You are always too lax, brother.”

Father said, “We dare not use the law to kill. For human to kill human is unheard of in civilized times: an abomination. It will pollute the thought-streams for ninety generations, both consciously and subconsciously, and mar the cycle of incarnation and reincarnation.”

“Then let her be locked in an empty city, without water or victual.”

“Death is not a penalty our laws inflict.”

“But it would not be inflicted! Oh no. It would merely be…” and now Creon smiled his toothy smile, “…allowed. To cut off feed and water is not to execute: it imposes only gentle slumber. She has betrayed the safety of the pyramid. Why should we take extraordinary measures to keep her alive?”

“Impossible,” said father curtly.

Creon did not like being crossed. If father had been able to see the look on Creon’s face at that moment, he would have locked Creon into a dark and empty city on some deserted level, and left him to starve.