The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  And the dreaming.

  Exquisite decadence, the dreams. . . in which some lost themselves and failed to return—dreams which, in the strange power of the machine, could become too real, which for those that fell too far within their power wrought real consequences on fleshly bodies.

  The days the Eternal City gave to mundane pursuits, for those who waked. . . the supervision of the dullard laborers who toiled in the catacomb depths of the City. The sun was a fearsome thing, and during most of the day the City stirred only beneath the ground, in the far-reaching windings of the tunnels, where mushrooms grew, and blind fishes, and yeasts and other such things; and by mornings and evenings, when the sun was kinder, the laborers tended the crops which still flourished on the edges of the sluggish River. Such men chose to work, and not to dream, amid the fearsome cruelties of their lords. The day belonged to them, and to the lesser nobles whose tedious duty it was to oversee, and to tally, and to arrange trade with the few ships which might chance to touch at the port across the River. The City had some mundane concerns, and labor existed, not because it had to, but because some men knew themselves doomed to be victims, and knew themselves less imaginative, and less fierce, and made themselves beasts of burden, because beasts toiled their little share and so fed themselves and so lived. Such were the days of the City.

  But the nights, the violet nights. . . then, up on the Palace hill, the delicate dreamers sank into the many-colored deviances, the eldritch pleasures, the past of the City which had been, empires long lost—the past which might have been; the true future and the future which could never be.

  The City exported dreams. This alone was enough to sustain its nobles, the glittering crowd which attended on the Tyrant. They dreamed; and when it pleased them, they sold those dreams, recorded tapes of a flavor and nature which alone could satisfy the jaded dreamtrippers of the Limb's decadent First Colonies (where law had long ago faded) or the illicit trade on younger worlds elsewhere. They were a commodity unique among expensive vices. . . expensive because they came from Earth, which was remote from important worlds; because they were rare (seldom would the Tyrant consent); and because they were purchased with lives.

  The Port of the City remained open for this trade alone, bringing in the mere food and drink and precious objects which kept the nobles of the City well-disposed and luxurious—bringing in, more rarely, that prize victim which could open the iron gates of the seventh hill, and secure a tape of such sport as would echo wealth across the stars, enriching the hands through which it passed.

  Hence Ginar, who lived in affluence in his mansion by the port, served by countless servants who found tending Ginar more comfortable than toiling for the lords of the City. . . lapped in the luxury of goods he siphoned off from those lords, who hardly missed them. Presidency of such a post had to offer some recompense in luxury, physically, for it meant exile from the civilized worlds, the young worlds, where life was, and some could not have endured that. But there was one luxury Ginar had here, besides his fine foods and his servants: he was himself of one of the First Colonies, and for many years he had been an addict, a dreamtripper, who lived for that pleasure which was nearer here than anywhere—and across the River, out of reach save when some tape could be brought from out of the City, bought at price.

  Hence Belat, who made the long ship runs, who had been very long in the trade, and whose well-being presently trembled on the brink.

  Belat started now across the bridge, when the sun was still at dawning, and safe—across the bridge which was the oldest and the last of the bridges of the City. On it, monoliths which had been statues stared down, marble pillars deprived by time of all feature, only hints of faces, like wide-mouthed screams and sunken eyes, and handless, outstretched arms.

  And beyond that. . . a slow walk through the City itself, through the catacombs, which were ruin piled on ruin, untended, for no one cared to repair what time had always, eternally, destroyed. Workers stared from eyes like those of the statues, pits of shadow, fear-haunted. Sometimes one would dart away, but most would stand wherever they were caught, trying, perhaps, to seem dull—for nightly what time there was no special game, the lords walked out among them and chose one of them for that fate, whatever one the lords judged guilty of imagination, whatever one promised sport.

  He never saw one defiant. Those who offered such looks would have been first chosen, most savored.

  He walked on, paying no great attention to them, not liking their eyes; he never had, in the many times he had walked this path.

  Seven hills, and the centermost was a cloven hill, where lightnings played most frequently in storms, a hill poised above ruins and split by the seam of an ancient fault. Gods had dwelt here once, and now the Tyrant did, at the end of a road which walked the ancient line of destruction, sleeping now, as the City slept, huddled on its hills. In this place had been an ancient ruin, and bits of white marble worked up lilce broken bone from the seam of this old wound, the only bare ground in all the City, surrounded by catacombs, the heaped up ruins of the millennia of the City's old age.

  An iron gate began that valley, where a Keeper stood, a lesser lord, on daywatch, with a shelter from the sun when it should rise, a gatehouse of jumbled bits of marble, aged and smooth, and twined about with vines. The Keeper's interest pricked at this visitation—which came but so very seldom, and Belat stood before the gates without touching them, hands folded, matching the hauteur of the guard himself.

  "I've a gift," Belat said. The Keeper regarded him a moment more from kohl-rimmed eyes, gave a languid, deadly smile.

  And with a touch the young lord loosed the gate. "Go on," he whispered, in that hoarse, hushed tone of the aristocracy of the City. None of the nobles spoke loudly; it was the mark of their peculiar art.

  He passed through, walked that way among the ruins. He felt the smile behind his back, a feral smile which followed him with lazy, kohl-rimmed eyes, and lusted for him, in one way or the other.

  The road wound on, over that field of broken bits of antiquity, with the catacombs looming down on the left, with a slow tide of them seeming to lap at this valley on his right. The road wound, for no apparent reason, but there might have been, once, in the long ago past, buildings which lay buried now. The Games were very old here. It was told that this place had known man's oldest and most dire vices, the ultimate sport of a species once hunters. . . to hunt itself.

  "I've a gift," he informed the Keeper of the second gate, who stood behind the iron grill, before a gatehouse likewise sheltered from the sun. Behind this rose the Way of a Thousand Steps, and the inmost gates. "Then," that one whispered, opening wide the gates, "there will be a good hunt tonight, won't there?"

  He climbed on, panting now, and with a weakness in his knees that was not all his lack of exercise, his habitude of ships. Above him the Lotus Dome of the palace loomed against the morning, far, far up the steps worn into hollows by the passage of feet, of the Keepers up and down, and of the victims. . . up.

  "I've a gift," he informed the Keeper of the third gate, the very doors.

  That one merely grinned, showing sharp blue teeth, and let him pass.

  Belat walked on, into the long inner halls of lotus-stem columns, which twisted their way up and writhed across vaulted ceilings; and far, into yet another hall, where the stems rose to stone lily pads and marble lotuses on the ceiling, stems behind which coy golden-scaled fishes lurked. . . beneath which a throne like one alabaster lotus flower, and languid golden limbs disposed upon it, and dark, kohl-smeared eyes regarding him. The Tyrant frowned at him, a cloud upon the youthful brow, a sudden quick movement of a jewel-nailed hand, a gesture to begone—mercy now twice given. Twelve years old was Elio DCCLII, petulant, spoiled. . . dangerous. "Go away," the boy whispered, "— foreigner. We sent you away last time. Do you think we forget? Do you think we forgive?"

  "I've brought you a gift," Belat said, and watched the old interest grow unwillingly in the Tyrant's eyes. . . interests like p
leasures which quickly came and quickly fled, which made this handsome, golden child the ruler he was—most skilled of dreamers, worker of finesses and deadly dangers the most jaded could not match, a coolness which insulated him from shocks and let him shape the dreams his way. Assassinations had been tried before—in vain.

  "Your last gift," the boy said, "failed."

  "This one," Belat said, venturing a step closer, "this one will not."

  "What have you brought us?" the boy-Tyrant whispered, leaning forward on the Lotus Throne. "Something—new?"

  "A dreamer," Belat whispered back, and before the pouting, painted lips could frame a word. . . "A different dreamer. A wild dreamer. Something you've not hunted, majesty, something Earth has never seen."

  The familiar petulance trembled on the childish lips, the frown gathered, deadly shadow in the kohl-smeared eyes. . . fresh from the night's hunt was Elio, and perhaps sated, or perhaps—disappointed. "You mean to stay," the Tyrant lisped, "and record this. . . with your machines. We should submit to this—distasteful intrusion in our sport. And you sell these things, do you not?"

  "I have to travel far," he said, cautious on this point "Consider only, majesty, that I search the worlds for you. . . to bring you such a gift. And the record makes it possible again."

  "You intrude."

  "Don't I bring you the rarest treasures, majesty? Can the dull creatures out there match mine? Don't I bring you always the most unusual, the greatest sport?"

  "You bored us, dream-stealer. You raised our hopes, and you failed them, and are there not others—seller of our pleasures—who would fill your place more cleverly? Ships would still come and go at the port. The factor would still be there. And perhaps the next trader would be more careful. . . might he not? You bored us. So long we waited for what you promised, and it failed. We let you go once. Not again."

  Belat sweated, resisted temptation to mop at his face and admit it. Rum was on the one side. On the other—"You'll take my gift," he whispered. "It's my expense, majesty. And if it pleases, the tape. . . to take with me."

  "Ill take it," the boy said ever so softly. "And let you make your tape; but, Belat, this time there will be no forgiving. We'll hunt you if it fails to please."

  He shivered, stared into the boyish eyes, and hated, smothering that hate, striving to smile. "I am confident," he said. "Would I risk coming here again—without cause to be?"

  The eyes took on suspicion, the least suspicion, quickly fled, and a childish hand waved him gone. Belat took his cue, gathered his life and his sanity into his two hands and walked velvet footed from the lotus-stem hall—walked the long way down, past curiosity horning in the Keepers' eyes, curiosity which itself was, in the Eternal City, a commodity precious more than gold.

  The sun climbed higher, and outside, the City sank into its daytime burrowings; and the Lotus Palace sank into its daily hush. Elio bathed, a lingering immersion in a golden bowl only slightly more gleaming than the limbs which curled in it, serpent-lithe and slender. He walked the cool, lily-stemmed halls, and stared restlessly out upon the only unshielded view in the Palace, upon the ruin-flecked valley below the hill, upon the catacombs sheened by the daystar's terrible radiations, and behind him his attendant lesser lords observed this madness with languid-lidded eyes, hoping for something bizarre. But he was not struck by the sun, nor did he leap to his death, as four Tyrants before him had done, when amusements failed; and he turned on them a look which in itself gave them a prized thrill of terror. . . remembering that to assuage the pangs of the last failed hunt—a minor lord had fallen to him in the Games, rare, rare sport.

  But he passed them by with that deadly look and walked on, absorbed in his anticipations, often raised, ever disappointed.

  The kill was always too swift. And he knew the whispers, that such power as his always burned itself out, that it grew more and more inward, lacking challenge, until at last nothing should suffice to stir him.

  He imagined. Such talent was rare. The sickness was on him, that came on the talented, the brilliant dreamers, who found no further challenges. At twelve, he foresaw a day not far removed when his own death would seem the only excitement yet untried. He knew the halls, each lotus stem and startled, golden fish. He knew the lords and ladies, knew them, not alone the faces, but the very souls, and drank in all their pleasures, fed by them, nourished on their darkest fantasies, and was bored.

  He probed the deaths of victims, and found even that tedious.

  He grew thin, pacing the halls by day, and exhausting his body in dreams at night.

  He terrorized captured laborers, but that waking sport palled, for the dreams were more, and deeper, and more colorful, unlimited in fantasy, save by the limits of the mind.

  And these he had paced and plumbed as well.

  At twelve he knew the limits of all about him, and had experienced all the pleasures, heritor of a thousand thousands of his sort, all of whom died young, in a City which found its Eternity a slow, slow death.

  Perhaps tonight, he thought, savoring the thought, I die.

  He sat much, in the cell. This day—if it was day—he knew that they were watching him, and they had not, before. This they were free to do, and he could not protest. He sat, and stared at his hands, and waited. There would come a time that they would insist he must eat and drink; or they would make him sleep and force this upon him. He sat still now, not betraying that he knew that they were there. He had had dignity once. They had none, who peeped and pried and did not come before his face, but that was his shame, who had fallen to the like of these. One day they must tire of this, he thought, when he let himself think at all, and then they must decide what they would do. Perhaps today, he thought, but did not let himself hold that thought, for that was ultimately to put himself in their power, and he would neither react nor think of them. He was alone. They had made him so. More than this they had to come and do to him. He would not help them.

  And then the weariness came on his limbs, and he sat, still possessed of his little dignity, while his limbs loosed, and he began to yield. They did this to him when they wished to handle him. They wished so now.

  But this time the limbs alone failed, and consciousness did not.

  The dying sun was sinking, and the engorged moon rose over the marshes by the river, touched the catacombs of the common hills and the Lotus Dome of the seventh.

  It was the hour.

  The procession left the port, a slow line of the servants of Ginar, bearing the recording devices, bearing a black plastic coffin. They crossed the bridge of featureless statues; by the time the last rim of the diseased sun was sinking, they were treading the ways of the catacombs, where laborers watched like statues, fearing, perhaps, for the direst dreams sometimes spilled beyond, and worked terror even here, a miasma from the Palace that infected even the City.

  They reached the first of the gates, and crossed the field of ruin; reached the second, and passed to the Way of the Thousand Steps, and up that height to the third. There the servants stayed, and set down the apparatus, and the coffin. Belat took up the apparatus, struggling with the weight; the Keepers and lords took up the coffin and bore it further, within the forbidden perimeters of the Lotus Palace, where only the privileged might go.

  And victims.

  Some, brought here, struggled at the last; some cried or cursed. This one did not, drugged, but not too far: Belat was sure of that. The coffin went ahead through the lotus-stem hall, and Belat walked last, incongruously like a mourner, head bowed with his load, panting after the measured steps of the Keepers who bore the case—into the inmost hall, of the lily-pad ceiling and the Lotus Throne.

  The dreams were prepared. The apparatus which was the Lotus Dome was soon to be engaged. And the Tyrant would have his precious surprise, a manic netang. . . a trap neatly laid, even legally: a primitive mind this, without the softness of the dreamtrippers who were his usual gifts, the addicts of the First Colonies who fell into his hands and disappeared, seek
ing the ultimate thrill—and finding it here, themselves become material for the City and its dreams, recorded, sold in turn, to lure others.

  Not this time. . . this time a surprise for his majesty Elio DCCLII, one which might serve a double turn. Belat's breath came short with more than the burden he carried, and his skin had a deathly clamminess; he grinned, a grimace round his panting—for it was the Tyrant who was the focus of the dreams, the Tyrant who led. . . who died, if things went wrong.

  Revenge, on the one hand, for the terrors he had suffered; and most of all—a new Tyrant to trade with, one more manageable, whereby he could keep his post. No more threats. No more humiliations. There were no more talents such as Elio's here—or the earlier assassinations would have succeeded. A manageable tyrant. . . well worth the price and risk.

  Or on the other hand. . . gratitude, if that word had currency here. Pleasure, a hunt the Tyrant would much savor. And ask another, and another, until he died.

  In either case a dream of special flavor, a unique prize which was his alone. Delicious murder, the wild netang with his savagery among these hunters, primitive innocence loosed among the jaded minds of the oldest city of man. . .

  Or the death of a Tyrant of this city, with all its sensitive agonies, for when Elio should falter, they would all turn on him, all.

  And the machines would capture it for him.

  There was no fighting, as there had been none before. They bore him where they chose, to do what they chose. He wept in his narrow prison. . . not violent weeping, only the helpless flow of a tear down his cheek, but his body was paralyzed and he could not wipe it away. It shamed him, but he had encountered many shames since he lost his name and himself.