Awake in the Night Land (17 page)

“Six hundred years is nothing. Some say the Pyramid is Six Million years old; some say Nine Million. Our way of life, our violence, our intrigues, our endless fear of race-degeneration, our licensing of marriages and undue pride in bloodline, and all restless yearning which drives young women to impersonate the deeds of young men, and a young man to impersonate the deeds of a Night Huntsman, all this is the trifle of a single second, an eyeblink, a sneeze, in an otherwise healthy and wholesome people.

“It will not be long before the fit will pass. I have seen it. Someone will come for our age, a Messenger of Time, even as Andros came in his age to tell the despairing peoples of the Last Redoubt that the myths of the sunlit elder world were true, and to describe the beasts and men of those times, and say the meaning of ancient words whose use had been forgotten. He was sent to put the heart in them, and to save the last of the Lesser Redoubt.

“I have seen it. Someone will come, either from the past or the future, and be born among us as a child, but will remember the mind-sciences we have forgotten, and banish madness and ambition from us once again. And in that time, we will follow the perfect ways each of us from love and duty, without any need for Castellans to tell us right and wrong. It will be soon, such a one shall be born, and he will cast for us a Soul Glass, for deep as well as surface thoughts, and teach us the art of its making.

“Creon’s falsehoods will be made the truth then, and all the forbidden weapons will be returned to locked museums, and foolish gene tampering and breeding for the Night Hearing will be condemned. And young women will stop dreaming of how to be more manly than young men.”

“Breeding? Did you say,
breeding
for the Night Hearing?”

“The Eugenicist College does not seek merely to weed out the unfit. They think that talents such as mine are carried in the blood rather than in the spirit. For three hundred years, they have been forbidding or assenting to matches based only on such imaginary principles. Fools. As if two artists mating could produce a greater artist! It was this meddling by doctors in olden times which brought these genetic diseases upon us. It was not the Outer Beings.”

Since Triptolemus was the one, in times past, who told me that the Sun of ancient legend was no more than the name for a great searchlight of immense power once used to illuminate the Land back when the Pyramid was newly raised, I am never sure how far to trust these tales of other times.

In any case, I said, “Yet why this slight against all women? The monsters without us are so great, that mere strength cannot prevail against them; and the most dangerous are not made of matter at all, and cannot be smitten with an axe.”

“Young men must test themselves against the Darkness, if they are to retain their masculine nature; and also they can be expended without great loss. Women need not indulge in such extravagant gambles with suicide to maintain their mental health. Nor would I trust the sound-mindedness of menfolk who would expose their mothers, wives and daughters to such dangers: they would be soft men, men without honor, full of self-conceit.”

“Is what is sane for men insane for women? Surely justice requires the law treat all with equal dignity.”

He smiled at that. “Strange words for an aristocrat. If we were utterly sane, no one would venture Out, not ever. There is nothing more the Monstruwacans really need to know. The date of the failure of the Earth Current is calculated: the death of the human race is known, and dreamers of the far future have seen the Last Times. But we are human beings, and so we do mad things, and invent excuses to make ourselves believe that common sense compels us.”

I smiled sweetly at him, though his condescension irked me bitterly: “Since I am a woman, you can tell me the secret. How did Polynices get the Night-Hounds across the Circle?”

He frowned when I spoke my brother’s name, but did not correct me. He had no love for Creon, after all.

“He invited them.”

“Is that all?”

“That is all, young Antigone. All this metal and energy, all these walls and weapons are merely the outer and material form of a spiritual battle, and they are the least important element in that battle. Once we say to the Outer Darkness:
come in with me, I welcome you
, then all this will not prevail to keep them out. So it is with all things, human or not, which try to eat our souls.”

He advised me to cease my staring from the balconies so steadfastly at the body of my brother: he was sure it was perilous to health and sanity.

I thanked him for his counsel, but did not follow it, of course.

My months of waiting ended when, once, there came a filmy light flickering in the eyepiece of the spyglass, and I put my eye to it.

The Man of Mist was standing on the edge of the little cup of salty soil where my brother lay. I could not tell where its feet were placed, so it might have been anywhere from twenty to forty feet tall. It seemed semi-solid, but a blue radiation shined from its wispy body, stronger at its trailing fingers and those strange streamers from its crown which looked so much like hair. There were three dark spots in its skull, which looked much like human eyes and mouth, if a mouth were wide indeed and hanging open jawlessly.

These entities are rare denizens of the outer miles of the Night Land. None had been seen so close to the Last Redoubt before, all previous sightings had been along the slopes of the glacier land north of the Quiet City; but this one made as if to approach my brother for a second time.

The mist-man bent at the trunk and lowered its skull toward my brother. Its arms and fingers elongated oddly as it reached toward him.

Its shining hands cast a light across my brother’s right side. For a moment, the wheel of his weapon was plainly visible in the spy glass.

Connected to the main housing of the spyglass, a recording plate had been long prepared to receive an image: I hopped down from the stool to throw the little contact lever, and a minuscule trickle of the Earth-Current strengthened the light and the thought-energy gathered by the spy glass, to inscribe the scene onto the surface of the plate.

Haemon, who was watching through the repeater lens, said calmly: “Take a second plate: you will record a strangeness.”

I did as he said, sliding a second plate into the clamp, adjusting the charge, and closing the small brass lever that activated the works.

“What are you seeing?”

Instead of answering, he plucked me up by both elbows as if I were a child and held me before the eyepiece. My tiptoes trembled on the stool.

A dark monster, larger than one of my brother’s mythical dray-horses of the ancient world, came lumbering out of the shadows on the far side of the salt circle. By the light of the Man of Mist, by the tumbling flare of the smoke-hole, I saw the monster clearly, and saw the markings along its huge neck and massive, ugly jaws. It was a Night-Hound, of a breed striped gray and black, with a ruff of uncouth bristles running along its neck and shoulders. Ropes of saliva dripped from pale jaws, and the flesh of the monster was scaly and scabrous in some places, reptilian, but bristly and hairy in others.

The male hounds have a bigger ruff. This was a bitch, Dracaina.

She leapt into the middle part of the Man. I expected her to scatter it, but the Mist Man was solid enough to make her rebound from its chest. It stroked her with a gentle flutter of its long, thin fingers, and her foreleg on that side went out from under her, as if his lightest touch made her numb. As she fell, her teeth closed on the thin and semi-transparent arm. The black spot on its skull that represented its mouth now sagged alarmingly. With a slow, huge motion, the mist-man toppled back, dragged the half-paralyzed Night-Hound with it. The fume from the smoke hole suddenly spurted up, black and thick, and I lost any further clear sight of the fight. I saw a dim light grow brighter and dimmer, as if the two horrors were rolling down some unseen slope away from me, the opaque body of the Night-Hound now above and now below the strange Man of Mist.

My brother’s body had not been disturbed. When the trail of smoke from the hole began to blot out the scene, I saw that the blade of his disk was pale against the black sand, whereas before it had been dark.

I worked the small brass lever to inscribe a final plate before the image was lost to me.

My audience with the Master Monstruwacan was granted. The air in the Tower of Observation is rarefied, even for one who lives in the upper cities: the steward gave me a phial of aerial-water, in case I should grow faint, and also a breathing bell as small and dainty as a rose on a stem, to hold to my nose. A special garment and cap of dun color I must wear to enter the chamber, for the Forces and Powers of the Night Land direct many of their thoughts at the Observers whose watchfulness thwarts them. The fabric is insulated, and the dull hue is thought to make it difficult for the Southwest Watching Thing to count the number of men manning the instruments.

In the very center of the chamber, surrounded by curving armatures like an armillary sphere, was the Great Spy Glass, held some two hundred feet off the surface of the deck. Many ladders climbed up its immense sides, and along the service catwalks and balconies clinging to it were little metal huts, pressurized and insulated, with bunks and mess for off-duty observers. The glass itself was ancient, a hundred yards across, and hung overhead like the full moon of the ancient world. Bus-bars and energy tubes the size of redwoods connected the base of the Great Spy Glass to the deck of the tower, and it was rumored that ancient architects had driven a straight shaft, which appears on no maps or diagrams, directly to the Earth Current crack far below, with dedicated lines leading here, so that, even should all other power fail, the Great Spy Glass would ever be watchful against our terrible foes.

In a circle all around the platform of the Spy Glass was the track and the engine to turn the machine clockwise and counterclockwise. The engine crew were sitting bundled on the dash, huddled near a samovar of steaming drink, looking up now and again at the signal lamps hanging from the small house near the eyepiece of the great glass.

The tower was open in all directions, the view broken only by great pillars to hold up the cupola. The outer surfaces of these pillars did not go to waste, for lesser spyglasses had been built in the hollow areas of their capitals, and lesser versions of those same famous machines that forever watch the foe and guard against surprise.

Microphones and ultraphones as long as the horns of behemoths leaned out from the crowded machicolations; and here were aetherometers in their delicate crystal shells, so sensitive to taint that only technicians vowed to celibacy and temperance could approach them. Magentometers and infravisuals peered from ledges in various directions. Long range thermometers registered the flux both from the body heat of the Great South Watching Thing and the Deliberately Moving Ice. Geometers and hypergeometers detected the trace changes to local disturbances in the plenum of time and space, their needles quaking whenever one of the Doors from the distant Country of Doors That Open made a void of nothingness in mid-darkness. Momosometers tracked the clamor from the Land of the Great Laughter; pneumographs traced the changes in the spirit-pressure; volcanometers registered the changes to underground electrothermal flows, perhaps a sign that the Ungainly Buried Thing was slowly clawing its way to the surface; thanatometers clicked to themselves, measuring the unseen radiations from the Blue Shining Place. The machines are made of black and dull gray metals, as if better to hide their purposes, and their lights and cylinders are dim and muted.

It was the quiet of the place that surprised me. I saw at least five hundred men at their stations. Many were Monstruwacans, but others were technicians and machine-tenders, fulgrators, spiritualists, psychometricians and other experts in the sciences. The Captain of the Watch was here, in full battle armor, with his tall disk-axe in his gauntlet, standing next to the speaking bells, in case messages must be sent at once to the Corps or the Gate. Fuglemen in gray and black stood by the switches and plungers which operated the machinery of the Home Call and the Set Speech, so that, by blasts of sound or floods of light patterns, messages could be sent abroad to any adventurers. Yet of all these gathered here, and more who were resting between their duties in this place, every voice was hushed, every motion was quiet and controlled.

When I stepped from the readying chamber into the Tower of Observation itself, I could see why all talk was hushed in this place.

The five faces of the Great Watching Things that surround our mighty home could all be seen at once from this vantage. The left eye of the Southwest Watcher hung in the shadows of it ungainly silhouette, clearly visible; the proud and impassive gaze of the terrible Great South Watcher; the bell-like ear of the Crowned Watcher; the dark unlit shape of the Northwest Watching Thing, its head still nodded in surprise at the footstep of men from two generations ago; the tall form of the Southeast Watcher, dimly visible by the glare of those strange lights we call the Silver Torches. The Thing That Nods, for the last ten thousand years, had been crouched on a cold hillside not far from the Steaming Vent, and, when my father was young, volcanic action made slender gray-white lights appear in the depth of the Vent, and by that reflected glare, a light caught the edge of the cheek of the Thing That Nods, and the muscles of its muzzle were bunched so that it seemed to be smiling at the Last Redoubt.

To my relief, I saw that my interview with the Master Monstruwacan was not to be held in this vast and silent chamber, watched by the huge and inhuman faces below us in the eternal gloom. With a polite bow, a clerk took me past where two aureneticists in earphones were noting the voice-pattern oscillations in the threats shouted out by the Lesser Upright Speaking Object. The clerk opened a hatch in what I thought was the energy-pile for a long-range thought-gathering instrument. But no, the chamber within was mostly empty space, and the gathering mechanism was dull, all its dials blank. Here the Monstruwacan had set up a presence chamber far more spartan and austere than my uncle’s opulent reception hall: merely a few chairs of insulated metal next to a large glass table. There was a thought-scribing box with caps on extending arms held above the table, for scribes to make notes of what they viewed. No images were projected on the table at the moment, or perhaps it was focused on a part of the Night Land illumined by no smoke holes.