Awake in the Night Land (44 page)

I drew back from her. “You think it is a sin, don’t you? A mortal sin.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at me closely. She said, “I know you, Reginald. Your father, he believe in nothing, he like to go fishing on Sundays, so he let you skip church. Then you listen to college boys, and you decide to be the fool, in his heart, who says there is no God, eh? Fine. Maybe there is, maybe there is not. Many men, many brave good men, believe this thing, many years. But suppose it is a lie. Why is it so convincing? Why so many men believe this lie, all these years? Good men and wise. Every country, even pagans, some sort of heaven, some sort of God.”

I said, “All men fear death. All men regret that there is no justice in the world. All men are horrified to imagine that this, all of life, is an empty abyss.” And I remembered the words of Crystals-of-Bliss. He, too, had been another incarnation of mine, hadn’t he? “So they invent a story to make it all make sense.”

She pursed her lips. “So. This story, if men were cowardly little things, they would have a cowardly little story, yes? If the story tells you, ‘Man, he is too fine a thing, like an angel, a thing like fire, divine fire, he is too fine for you to kill him’ that is not a little story. That is big story, yes? What kind of man listen to that kind of story? Big man.” She reached and pulled the cigarette from my fingers to take a puff.

Her left hand was gripping her right elbow, and her right hand was near her face. Her hips were cocked to one side in a relaxed posture. She seemed so golden, like a cornstalk, so supple, like a steel épée, and the smoke drifted above her, catching stray rays of sunlight that pierced the stitching in the tent, and turning to golden motes.

Lisa continued: “Maybe story is not true, maybe it is. I think about that later.” She shrugged. “But this story, it tells you life is good, life is
sacred
, then it is not a bad story, no? Because a good story, it gives you the heart to do the right thing when the wrong thing seems wise and brave. So?”

I shook my head. There was no point in trying to explain things to a woman, even a woman as Amazonian as Lisa. I said, “There are things more sacred than one’s own life. Ask any soldier.”

“It is an insult to all that lives, you know.”

I said, “What is?”

“To kill yourself. You are saying to the bird: Sing no more to me. You are saying to the sun: Shine no more on me. You are saying to the tree: I need no shade of you, do not stand. No drink from the stream, no twinkle from the star, no smile from a human face, no bark from the dog who is loyal. To everything, you say: I hate you.”

I rose to my feet. “But this is a dream. I am being shown what I am about to lose. The birds and suns and stars, everything we thought eternal, it is all gone.”

She jabbed the cigarette toward me an in angry gesture. “Then what is worth fighting for, eh? You are alone in the universe. Everyone dead. Nothing is real. No one is watching. What is worth fighting for? What is worth dying for?”

I squinted at her. “So tell me.”

She sniffed. “Same as before. Same things as when you were alive. You remember you are a man, yes? You know what it means to be a man?”

I opened my mouth to answer her, but the dream faded. Lisa evaporated like cigarette smoke. The warm African sun, the savage and beautiful golden plains; it all vanished.

It seemed to me I hovered in the void, above a vast, limitless, plain. Nothing on earth could be so large as that: the plain had no end. All was drenched in an unpleasant reddish light, as if from the coal of a dying fire. Above me was a black circle, vast as the sun, and from the edges of this disk were arms of fire. It looked perhaps like an eclipse, perhaps like the burning atmosphere of a dead sun.

Directly below the dead sun was an impact crater, marring the flat perfection of the ruby plain. As I dropped my gaze, my point of view dropped. Swift as a falcon stooping, I was thrown down through miles of air into the crater.

The crater was larger than the Earth. A planet the size of Jupiter, falling, could have made such a place. The debris thrown up from the crater was taller than the mountains to each side. The Himalayas, Mt. Everest itself, would have been less than a foothill, compared to these terrible slopes. The peaks were hundreds of miles high.

So deep was the crater, that, even at my speed, many minutes passed before the floor came into view: a land larger than Texas, made all of cracks and canyons, pock-marks from lesser craters, long-cold lava-flows, dead volcanoes, hills of ash and soot. It was a sterile world of lifelessness. No drop of water, no blade of grass, no midge, no mite, no smallest thing was here.

Except, suddenly, in the middle of the crater floor, rising atop a lonely peak, was a house of greenish jade. It was a strange and massive house, built of cyclopean blocks, like the Great Wall of China, or the circle at Stonehenge. The house was circular in form, and had three stories, with walls of shining green brick and barred windows built between the massive cyclopean columns. But the oddest architectural feature was the little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames, that rose from each wall. The rooftops had curved and crooked eaves, giving it a look something like that of a Viking longhouse, or a Chinese pagoda.

I looked up, and saw something suggestive in the black sun hanging directly overhead. If there had been a light burning under the silent house, and a vast ceiling above it, it would have cast a shadow shaped something like the disk overhead, and all the flame-shaped pinnacles and eaves would have cast the flaming corona.

The doors of the house were barred and locked, and every window as well.

Kitimil was sitting on the doorstep of the house. The front door was a low arch, and a heavy roof, held up by thick posts, formed the porch, and continued upward to form the second floor, that overhung the first. The whole porch was countersunk into the façade of the house, so that to enter the main doors, one had to pass through a low-roofed tunnel.

It was cold, bitterly cold here, and my lungs heaved but drew no breath. Almost without thinking, I rotated into being around me the arms and armor I remember from my life as Ydmos. The Living Steel clasped my chest; the gray cloak emitted heat; I took up the cup from my pouch and held it over my mouth and nose, and the substance of the metal in the cup somehow turned into fresh air.

In my other hand, the Diskos, that terrible weapon. The disk-shaped blade was motionless, but, beneath my gauntlet, the haft of the weapon tingled and throbbed. There was something achingly familiar about it; a sense of ferocious loyalty. Pepper? Could a futuristic weapon be haunted by the ghost of a long-dead hound? The idea was silly, and yet….

Kitimil was seated as I have seen Tibetans sit, with his heels on the ground and his rump resting on his ankles. He was dressed in his wolf-skins. In one paw was his bone truncheon; in his other, was a fist-sized statuette of a big-bosomed and pregnant woman, very crudely carved. Kitimil was rubbing the big belly of the mother-stone, and crooning to himself.

I stepped toward him. “Where is this place?”

He looked up. “This–” He gestured toward the outer gloom of blood-colored light. “This is the scaffolding of the new universe.”

“We are not in the universe?”

“No. There must be some outside place for the scaffold to stand.”

“And this house?”

“This is the House of Silence. In your era, it stands in the west of Ireland, near a village called Kraighten. It is swallowed by the Earth, so that, in the time of Ydmos, it will be present when the earth is shattered to her core. There will be a great valley, warmed by the last ember of dying geothermal heat, where the Last Redoubt rises; and the House of Silence stands on a small hill to the north. Their poets say the doors of this house have never been closed since all eternity: but there are many times, years and centuries at a time, when the doors close and nothing from the Night World enters the three dimensions occupied by man. Each time, the doors open for you.”

“What is in this house?”

“Everything. The seed of all time and space is within, waiting to begin its growth. And outside …”

He made a gesture, pointing to the slopes.

At first, I thought they were statues, sphinxes built of an unimaginable scale. I could not calculate the size; they were on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the crater, and so must have been hundreds or thousands of miles away from me. Something as far off as the Moon is visible to the naked eye, but only if it is as large as the Moon.

But no; they were not statues. Every few miles, peering from behind the Everest-sized hills and hillocks of those endless, immense slopes that surrounded the crater, were vast and inhuman faces, staring eyes. Godlike visages, you could call them, but only if gods were bent utterly on cruel and dark and inhuman purposes. One of them had the head of a jackal; another wore a necklace of skulls, and held up many weapons in many arms. Others looked like the monsters and grotesques from Polynesian totems, or the squat and ugly carvings from buried Aztec temples.

I said, “They are waiting to enter in. I will not open the door for them.”

He shook his head, and showed his fangs: an expression of sardonic pity. “I have said before: you are not the one who opens it. It cannot be opened from this side. It is opened for you.”

I heard, very softly, a footstep behind the door, as if some slight figure were coming down the stairs to a main hall, approaching.

A woman’s footstep.

I remembered the horrid image of the iron spaceship hull, surrounding me, closing in. I thought once again of what a two-dimensional man, living in the surface of a balloon, might see, how it might look to him, if the balloon were turned inside-out.

I said, “If it is larger on the inside, then, no matter what this seems to look like, these—these giant blocks—these are the inner walls. This endless plain out here is not the outside. It is the inside, a tomb, perhaps, or a prison-cell.”

He pointed with his bone truncheon. In the far distance, with no noise at all, the jackal-headed giant, taller than the tallest mountain of earth, had risen to its monstrous feet. The other huge and terrible figures were still recumbent. I cannot express how inhuman, even now, when one of them had moved, was the sense of the pressure of eternity here: the utter, absolute stillness of the watchers was oppressive, like staring at the dark place between the stars on a moonless night, and realizing your eyes were showing you a night with no further shore to it, an abyss without bounds. If that abyss could turn and look at you, it would wear such as face as these watching things.

“These are gods. Who could imprison them?”

I said, “Who indeed? There is a way out of this trap.”

“No. Even if you kill yourself, you only end up back here. This is where those who kill themselves are sent.”

I pointed at the hideous outer gods watching us with unblinking eyes from the vast slopes of the red-lit crater walls. “And them?”

“They destroyed the first universe, and themselves, because they hated it. Call that rebellion, if you wish, but it is something far worse. It is the malice that is utterly selfless, willing to die, merely so that the object of your malice might suffer.”

I remembered what Lisa said about the insult to all life a suicide committed. “Life threw them out of her house.”

“You think it is a punishment? A river is not punished for falling downhill to merge and be swallowed by the sea.”

I said, “And you and I are here because…”

“We trafficked with them. We made a bargain. When you were Enoch. When I was Uj. We stepped outside of time, and they were waiting there. So, is there a way out of the trap? This trap is the size of the universe.”

“I could kill you. You said your memories were needed to complete the recreation, to make the new universe like the old one.”

“And so you could have done, back aboard the Spirit of Man. But here? My part of this work was done. I called the ghost aboard the ship; you embraced her. Nothing more is needed.”

“At least you will pay for your part in this!” I lift up the heavy pole. The disk in the tines at the head of the pole-arm began to spin, and it made a low, rumbling roar. White light flashed from the spinning blade, revealing, for a moment, the hideous redness all around us. In the white light, the face of Kitimil seemed young, unlined, untroubled. He showed his fangs and laughed.

“They granted me that I should live again, ever and forever, and that Magigi would come to me again. Strike! I am unarmed.” He threw the bone truncheon from his hand, so that it fell down the steps of the porch and landed in the ash of the red crater floor.

I doused the weapon and lowered it. I had the memories of Ydmos in me: the wrongness of using this weapon against anything but a monster stayed my hand.

I looked out at the giants, the fallen gods, the creatures of darkness. Even Ydmos would not take up his weapon where he was so overmatched. Smiting a Night-Hound was possible; smiting a creature the size of a mountain was comical; smiting a four- or five- or thousand-dimensional being was inconceivable. It would be like trying to hit Time with a stick, or the abstract concept of Life, or shoot the Color Blue, or snare the blast from a trumpet in a fisherman’s net.

There was a noise from behind the low, thick door to the House. A scrape of metal; as if someone were fumbling with the key.

In the remote distance, the jackal-headed god had raised his hand. A company of abhuman creatures, swine-headed and loathsome to the eye, came trotting around the wing of the House. They walked on two feet, like men, and carried axes and maces in their paws. When the leader of the band saw me, it threw back its snout and gave a high-pitched squeal of rage and hate. The other abhumans snorted and grunted with pleasure and bloodlust, and the group broke into a run, coming for the stairs to the porch.

I put the Diskos to one side. It stood upright, hovering a half inch off the ground, waiting. I rotated my other weapon into being in my hands, raised my trusty Holland and Holland rifle, took aim at the leader of the swine-things, and shot.