Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

  “But,” they replied, slightly thrown, “almost all of us were. After all, that fire was something worth seeing. Did you know,” they added, “there were nineteen dead?”

  As evening fell, Avly caught another individual public flyer. She rode south again, over into Yellow.

  She was growing tired, not exactly physically, but in a slow internal way. She was thinking now she would never find him, and so she believed she must. For yes, she was in love. And love gave her the right to find him. Even so, hers was a difficult task, almost like those set lovers in ancient legends and stories…

  The car alighted by one of the great parks of Yellow. Avly walked along dusk avenues between lemon-trees, across lawns bordered by giant primroses and saffrons.

  A scatter of other pedestrians passed her. Now she asked no one anything. None of them was him.

  Leaving the park at a wide gateway, Avly took a road lined by mansions of cream stucco. Already the delicate streetlamps were burning up on their stems, and windows warmed. All this seemed abruptly sad to Avly. Her eyes filled with tears, and deep, deep within herself she felt a fiery joy at her newminted depression.

  Then — then — she saw him.

  She froze to marble, there beneath a lamp-standard, its illumination full upon her.

  He was on the same side of the paved sidewalk, approaching her, the long cloak swinging as he strode. She saw his face properly because, one after another, the street lamps described it. It was a patrician, pale, terrible face — terrible in its flawless ordinariness. Was he handsome? Ugly? Avly could not be sure. His eyebrows were black, the eyes too seemed black. His hair and clothes were black also — as she recalled from the last time. He was gloved.

  While he approached swiftly nearer and nearer, Avly shrank away as if from too fierce a glare of light. But he — he glanced once at her, just as he reached her. Glanced once, and then away, striding on along the street.

  Avly shriveled from the seemingly amused contempt of this one brief look and reveled peculiarly in the comfortless thrill. There had, besides, been more to his glance, she thought. For such disdain seemed to come from foreknowledge. As if he knew her and so could discount her entirely. And of course he did not and could not know her. Thus it was for her to change his mind. It seemed to her, weirdly stranded, moth-like, under the lamp, that his very dismissal had been an invitation. So, it said, make me aware of you, make me take an interest in you. Show me something I have never seen in any other, for I too am bored here.

  Avly drew in a breath. She crept silently back from the lamps and in among the trees of the street. Once concealed in their shadows, she followed the man.

  Unlike her dreams, however, there was no need to go far. In less than three more minutes, he turned and mounted a long flight of steps. Above, a door opened for him, and he passed into the house.

  Shattered by her success, Avly leant back against a tree. This then, most probably, was where he lived, his apartment.

  She gazed up the length of the building. Amid the carvings and cornices, all the windows beamed with light. Which were his? The house was too high for her to be sure if the faint occasional traces of movement she saw cross the windows were, any of them, his. After a space of time, she went up the steps herself and keyed the panel by the door for the names of those who resided there. Having mechanically glimpsed her status in the city, the panel gave them up to her. But of course, of all the twenty-seven people living, in couples, trios, or singly in the mansion, only ten of them male, none had a name she knew or could know to be his.

  Impatient, curbing urgency, Avly withdrew to the watch-post of her tree.

  The night was young as she herself, so inevitably in party-prone Dophan, he would next come out again — either that or he would be sponsoring some festivity of his own in the house. Might she, if enough persons attended this, add herself independently to the guest-list?

  At the idea her head spun. Laughter welled in her mind and throat. I am happy! How bizarre.

  But, too, how wonderful the street, the lamps, the stars far above beyond the rainbow. His street, lamps, stars. That she had located him so quickly was certainly destiny.

  An hour went by. Avly took off her high-heeled shoes and stood barefoot. Then she sat down under the tree, as sluts and waifs did in the rough quarters of Dophan. Avly did not care.

  Another hour. Avly started awake — she had not meant to doze — had she missed him? No, impossible. Some invisible galvanic thread, which joined them, would have tugged at her if he had reappeared. What then had woken her so suddenly?

  Avly jumped to her feet and put on her shoes. She stood by the tree watching, in a kind of indifferent dismay, as a medical vehicle, siren mooing, dropped from the sky to the sidewalk.

  Savage white radiance exploded from its interior as two medics and a medical doll shaped like a trolley with ramps leaped out and plunged up the steps of the very house where he lived. Only then did Avly grow rigid with fright. Had something happened to him?

  Above, far up the facade of the mansion, one window filled with chaotic activity. In the vehicle itself machines chattered, and Avly heard a flat mechanical voice: “Seven people, you say? All the same? Poisoning? How rare. Yes, from the roof will be best.”

  Then the vehicle lifted up and sailed to the landing-pad on the house-top, presumably to ferry casualties via the roof elevator.

  Avly’s heart pounded. She decided she must herself run into the building.

  Before she could stir a muscle, the front door reopened. And it was the man who came out.

  He moved down the steps exactly as she had seen him do at the site of the fire. He was calm and self-contained. Gaining the pavement, he looked neither left nor right but turned south along the boulevard.

  Avly found she could not, after all, quite make herself follow him. She stared after his tall, spare figure, the swagger, the gloved hands. Realization had reached her. He did not live in this house at all. As the medical vehicle, siren loud and warning beacons flashing, rose from the roof with its — dying? — cargo, Avly put her hands and forehead against the trunk of the tree. She understood at last. The fire, and now — poison. Her lover was an assassin.

  How many drooping days went by, Avly knew precisely. She marked them on a calendar. There were seven. Perhaps, in some remote manner, she was observing an unconscious vigil for the seven poisoned dead from the Yellow Quarter.

  She had read about them, too, in the journals, for to die in this way was, as the voice of the vehicle had remarked, rare. It seemed the cause had been contained in some vintage alcohol they had drunk. Investigations were in progress.

  Did Avly consider reporting to the city authorities what she suspected, or rather, was sure of? That this was no vintner’s blunder, or domestic accident, just as the fire had not been, and that he was responsible for all the deaths? Momentarily she did. Then she saw she could not betray him. She was, for one thing, certain he would then reason exactly who had witnessed him and find her before officers of the law apprehended him. On the other hand, the notion of such a nightmare event brought her only one more perversely violent thrill. Common sense, meanwhile, instructed Avly that such a dangerous man’s retributive anger should be avoided at all costs.

  She could not stop thinking of him. Or dreaming of him.

  Every night of the seven days, she pursued him through a surreal Dophan which, in sleep, had become deserted and vegetal and jet-black, with narrow shimmering defiles, where he sprang forward, cat-like, and she slunk after, trembling with nerves and desire. She never caught up to him in the dreams. He never turned and looked at her. Yet at those times she knew he was aware of her, and that she had a right never to give up. However, something else then occurred.

  Information came to Avly, in a dream, of the assassin’s forthcoming whereabouts. This was on the seventh night, and the message — for such it must be — was entirely clear. Slinking after her lethal prey through the jungle of the dream-city, Avly beheld a tall tower
that loomed out of the darkness. It had a glacial azure globe on its roof, and Avly knew it in a dream-second as the Communications Building in Blue. Across the sky above it were littered two sparkling numerals: 9 and 35.

  When she woke on the eighth morning, Avly deduced that this had been relayed directly to her, by means of telepathy. Evidently he would be in the vicinity of the tower tonight — tonight, of course, since he was a nocturnal being. The hour was nine o’clock.

  The other number — thirty-five — almost paralyzed her with a sense of shock and dread that sank through her bones like syrupy spice. The other number, presumably, related to the tally of victims he expected to kill, by or near the tower.

  Avly did not entertain a moment’s doubt about this psychic signal from his brain to hers. But she did suspect he might not be aware that he had contacted her. Her acute interest in him had tuned her in, perhaps, to the frequency of his mind, which must after all blaze like a torch with its skills and crimes. Fate had taken a hand and sent her these facts, for her use.

  All day she lay about the apartment, not answering calls, not doing anything save brood and rehearse her now almost mystic role.

  I believe I am quite mad, she finally told herself.

  This seemed to liberate her entirely. She got up and went to make herself exceedingly beautiful for the coming night’s adventure.

  As Avly, dripping with rubies and scarlet, moved on foot through the city, experiencing all things in a sort of new wonder, Dophan blossomed to neon night.

  At last, in the Green Quarter, she caught an individual public flyer. It bore her north, into Blue. An oddly magical ride.

  Even the stars had a light navy color this evening, outside the iridescence of The Arch.

  On foot once more, music floated to her from bars, with the crystalline chink, like breaking thermometers, of goblets and bottles knocked together. Avly’s sober blood itself seemed aerated with the spangles of champagnist or vodsinthe.

  The crowds parted, smiling benignly, to let her through. She seemed to be the heroine of the drama, they obliging bit-players.

  How many would die? Thirty-five. A momentous figure. This would be a catastrophe. Was he paid to do this work, or was it only an act…of love?

  A vibration from some time-piece flittered out the essence of a quarter to nine, one minute after Avly had positioned herself in a wide plaza beneath the tower of the Communications Building. She stood looking up the tower’s tiered storeys. The windows were long and narrow, and it was sculpted from deep blue concrete, the globe from white sapphire.

  Someone paused beside her. Avly knew it was not the one she had come here for, but still she half-turned, made nosy at this ultimate juncture by her fellow humans.

  A blond young man stood close by, talking into a jeweled cell-phone the size and shape of a beetle, and set in a ring.

  “Naturally I know the tale. I read a screening of it only yesterday.”

  Avly’s attention left him. Would he be one of those who would die?

  “Yes, and she made this gesture that frightened him. So he ran to his employer,” droned on the young man, annoyingly, “and asked permission to escape to Bokhara.”

  What a pretty name, Avly inconsequently thought: Bokhara. Her knowledge of geography was limited.

  “But when the employer confronted her, she just denied everything. What? Oh, yes, I forgot. And that’s how it ends.”

  Avly’s eyes opened wide, gleaming like the edges of sharp knives. Across the square, she had seen him.

  Seen him.

  He was like a piece fallen out of the dark. His hair, his cloak and clothes. She watched him as intently as if she were a surveillance machine. And so she saw him cross the plaza, and as he passed, his arm, the cloak, brushed over someone, only as if, courteously, he ushered this other out of his way — but the man tottered, choking, and all at once crashed down.

  Avly caught her breath. He must be a genius at his art. Only that brushing of the arm and cloak, only that. Yet too, she was confused. She had anticipated a major disaster being caused, to account for the deaths of as many as thirty-five people. A bomb, perhaps. But no one else even collapsed, and the plaza was merely full of sightseers pressing forward to watch the fascinating spectacle of someone else dying on the paving.

  The assassin though had moved northward, away. Already his form dwindled in distance. Avly hurried from the square. Despite her gilded shoes, she ran. She did not mean to lose him now.

  He walked, and so therefore did she. It became like her dreams too, when they left the Blue Quarter after some twenty minutes and moved diagonally on into Violet. Here there were fewer and dimmer lights. The shells of unoccupied buildings stood like cliffs, open only on caves of blackness. Most of the streetlamps, even where they remained standing, were unlit. As for the rainbow Arch, this part of it seemed to have gone out, or to be obscured from below. It was only a colorless high ghostly bridge, arcing above, that, miles off, grew luminescent again astride other places. Weeds rioted from cracked pavement and walls, into enormous forests. So all her dreams, then, had been prescient. Did he not know she paced behind him? They had walked by then, he some eleven or twelve meters ahead, for over an hour. He never looked about at her, she never looked away from him. And if any lived in the surrounding houses, yards, and streets, tonight they had hidden. Unless it was only that, now, Avly had eyes for no other but one.

  They had reached a landing-station for public flyers. In the slums of Violet, Indigo, and Orange, these vehicles were never individualized, but served as many as a hundred people at a time. The landing-station was crowded, so much so that, even if Avly had until now been blind to everyone else, she could not choose but see them here.

  The poor had serious faces, or so she thought. Serious and hard, or, if any mirth broke out among them, it seemed raw and barbarous, and definitely too loud. Their garments had no attractiveness, in her opinion. She felt faintly sorry for them.

  If he had come here to kill some of these persons, probably he did them a favor, as he had previously with the fire. The sole puzzle was why any of them required killing. They had no power, no influence or money, and died quickly enough anyway.

  But everything he did intrigued her and appeared intellectually viable, if obscure. Any scruple about his work she had evaporated in the ecstasy of seeing him where she had believed she would, of following him along the lonely, jungled streets of Violet. She cared only for him. Tonight they must meet, must talk. Perhaps do more than talk.

  He and she. Destiny combined them. Avly knew this as absolutely as she knew her own exquisite image in a mirror. He might play at cat-and-mouse with her, but in the end, why should he not succumb? She had everything he must want.

  Out of the black sky — even stars did not show above these quarters — the dull-lighted, heavy-hulled flyer approached.

  It landed gracelessly on the pad, and the crowd milled forwards, thrusting itself into the interior, in and in, without any caution. Surely it was overloaded, and more than a hundred men and women were now inside the car?

  All this while of waiting at the station, Avly had kept sight of him although he roved through the crowd. This time he caused no disturbance, nor had anyone expired. She assumed his current murder plot involved the flyer and he would carry it out when everyone was assembled. Compunction warned her not to stand too close. She was about to retreat a little, when he too stepped into the vehicle.

  Avly knew one split second of reluctance. Then she burst forward and drew herself after him, and all the rest, into the hot and jumbled body of the car.

  There was nowhere left by now, naturally, to sit. But he also was standing, against the rail provided for patrons who had no seat.

  Some ten or so people had already wedged themselves between him and Avly.

  The muddy lights of the flyer dulled further, as it lifted, not very smoothly, back into the sky.

  It was apparently bound for the Indigo Quarter, and then for Orange, or so the
illuminated strip across the roof promised. But then, it did not matter where they went, it only mattered where he might go.

  What was he doing on this cumbersome thing? He seemed to have no concern about anyone aboard and stood like most of the rest who must do so, his face a blank.

  None of the flying cars, even these out in the slums, had drivers; they were operated by their own intricate mechanical intestines. This one lumbered through the air, and Avly frowned as slight turbulence seemed to hit the vehicle. None of the other passengers, needless to say, paid any attention, used to such inferior transport.

  Was he simply traveling, as the others were, to another area of Dophan? Yet he was rich. Why would he need to employ an unaesthetic public car — not to mention the sort of resentful squintings some had cast at Avly, boarding in her finery? No one seemed to react to him, however. Maybe he often came this way. Besides, now she studied him, although he was not dressed in the un-fashions of the poor, nor did he wear the gemmed attire of the wealthy classes. Perhaps this was the most clever form of disguise.

  His face drew her eyes again and again. She found it difficult to gaze at him for very long. Her vision blurred, her heart raced, waves of heat and cold chased up and down her body. Seldom — never — had she been so exhilarated or so terrified. She had begun to speak a mantra to him in her mind, enticing him, persuading him, making love to him. If nothing came of this partial meeting, Avly felt she would not be able to bear it. She would fall into some despairing abyss. His darkness lit the gloomy car for her like a smoky sun.

  They landed — bumpily — five times in the purlieus of Indigo, and much of the crowd streamed away. They were like ants, Avly thought, watching them mill down the ramps from the landing-stations, off into the dreary channels of their quarter.

  But eventually, after the fifth stop, only some thirty or so people remained on the flyer. Thirty-five? The fatal number? What now would he do?

  Before Avly could collect herself, he had left the rail, and as the flyer once more dragged itself skywards, he sat down on one of the long, otherwise empty seats.