by Tanith Lee
From there he looked back, directly at her.
Avly felt her physical body drop through itself on to the floor, while heart and soul rushed upward.
His face was no longer blank. His eyes, very obviously, saw her. He nodded. As if this were their arrangement, and they had both come here deliberately to meet.
Avly, in a half trance, also left the rail. His gaze stayed on her as, shaken about and clinging to handholds, she made her precarious way to the seat. She sat down beside him.
“Where are you going?” she asked him, when he did not say a word.
Still he looked at her, taking in everything about her, she believed, noting her appearance, her jewels, how she had dressed and scented herself to appeal to him.
Then he said quietly, for her ears alone, “Where do you think.”
His voice too was dark. It was musical and rhythmic.
It made her reckless. Breathlessly she said, “With me?”
“Ah.” The pause hung like a scorching wire in the air between them. He added, softly, “Or is it that you are coming with me?”
Rather than being forced now by her emotions to turn away from him, Avly could not take her eyes from his. They were black, his eyes, a silvered black, deep to depthlessness, yet inaccessible. She longed to fall into them and drown, but as yet they would not let her.
The flyer gave a lurch and began again to descend. Below, only half seen on the rim of sight, lightless Orange swelled to meet it.
“This is the last southbound stop,” he said.
The car barged home on its landing-pad. Avly expected him to rise, as the other passengers were doing. He ignored them and the opened doors. Presently the car was empty but for he and she, and the doors closed.
“But,” she said, “don’t you have to follow them?”
“Why should I?” His wonderful voice hypnotized her, as his eyes had done.
“But they — they were the thirty-five, surely, the ones you intend to destroy —”
She did not care she had revealed her knowledge. And he — he laughed.
His laugh. She stared, enraptured and transfixed. It was like the most astounding symphony, distilled to a single cadence. The laughter ended. He said, quite gently, “You have applied the idea of thirty-five wrongly. Thirty-five is the number of the last one to die in Dophan, tonight. You see, thirty-four are already dead.”
Something cool and static was in Avly’s mind and changed everything in her, excitement, hope, lust — bone, sinew, blood — to a fluid silence.
She looked away from him as if it had always been easy.
The flyer, returning now to its shed in Indigo, was rising once again, more steadily than before. It chugged over the unlit buildings, and far beyond and behind Avly noticed, indifferently, the bright towers and mansions of the better quarters, bangled with their lamps.
“And I,” she whispered, “am to be the thirty-fifth person. I’m the last one who will die tonight.” Then she gazed back at him. He too seemed further off, but curiously, also near. She knew him, after all. Perhaps she had done so from the first. Doubtless anyone would.
Nevertheless she asked, “Who are you?”
“Death,” he responded.
The next moment the failing flyer, its systems most unusually, but not quite impossibly, breaking down, plummeted from the sky to smash a vast crater in the wilderness of weeds and ruins at the edge of the Orange Quarter.
No one resided immediately in the neighborhood, either to be fatally struck by the car, or to witness the solitary passenger who left the wreckage and strode away without a backward glance. He was a tall man with long dark hair, and a cloak as black as the grave.
The Ancient Myth
A servant ran to his master, a merchant, in great fear, saying that he had met Death in the marketplace, and she had made a threatening gesture at him. The servant begged the merchant to let him fly at once to Bokhara, many miles away. The merchant agreed, and the servant speedily rode off. Later that same day the merchant himself happened to see Death in the city. He drew her aside and asked why she had frightened his servant with a gesture of threat. “No, he mistook me,” said Death. “The gesture I made was in fact one of surprise at seeing him here — for tonight I have an appointment with him, in Bokhara.”
The Thousand Nights and a Night
Dead Yellow
This was my wedding dress. At the time people remarked on my choice of color, but with my hair the way I had it then, it worked. I remember there were daffodils blooming. But I won’t show you the photographs. No point now, is there?
When did it start? Officially in 2036. But the papers had been reporting curious anomalies for years before that. And people spotting things. Thinking at first the fault was in them and getting frightened — so many medical case-notes.
And I? Oh, I think I first properly noticed that day when we walked in the park. We often did that, then. It was a nice park, lots of trees, wild areas. But I heard a child (it’s funny, isn’t it, the way children always ask the truly awful question?) this child said to some adult, “Why are all the trees going all brown?” And it was late May, you understand, early summer, and the leaves flooding out and the grass high and everything lush. What did the adult reply? I can’t recall. But as we walked on, the scales, as they say, dropped from my eyes. I wished they hadn’t. I began to see it too.
It wasn’t like it is nowadays. Then it was only just establishing itself, the — what did they call it? — the Phenomenon.
It was almost like looking through a photographic lens. Except, obviously, this lens didn’t completely change everything, as normally it would.
Neither of us said anything to the other. But I realized he, my husband, had also in those moments begun to see. We kept talking and joking, we even stopped for coffee and a doughnut at the park café. But an uneasy shadow was settling over us, and a silence.
We didn’t actually discuss anything for several weeks. One evening we were making dinner, and — I remember so vividly — he was suddenly staring at the counter and he said, “What color is that pepper, would you say?”
“Sort of orange, I suppose,” I said, “an orange pepper.”
“No,” he said, “it’s a brown pepper. And the lettuce, that’s a pale brown lettuce, only its edges are…pale blue.” And we had become two statues, while the cooker bubbled carelessly, and then he said, “Someone at work went for his eye-test today. He’d told me he was afraid he was going blind. But his problem isn’t caused by any defect in his vision. The optician said, apparently, the problem is becoming universal.”
And then, as if we must, we looked around us, at all and everything: at the brown curtains that had been a deep green, and the green trees beyond the windows that were the color of sludge, yes, even in the evening light where the blue sky was somehow wrong and the west such a dark and sullen red. In the clear glass bottle the white wine gleamed colorless as water, but the mustard in the jar was mud. And on my hand my gold wedding ring had altered to the dull metal of a tarnished, ancient penny.
“What is it?” I said.
“God knows,” he said.
But I don’t think God, if there is God, does know either, any more than the rest of us.
We all comprehend by now; or I assume most of us must do. It’s world-wide after all. Hardly anyone talks about it. Aside from very young people like yourself, who never watched it happen. It’s meant a lot of make-overs, home decor, clothing — good for commerce then. Even I had my corn-blonde hair bleached dead white. Better than the stagnant pond shade it had become. (Like my wedding dress, as you see.) And if no one wants black-brown-blue cabbages and lettuces, or eggs with blind-brown centers, or the quite fresh yet decayed-looking brownish peaches and apricots, there are still things to eat. Apples and tomatoes like an old wound, doughnuts like excrement. The jewel-trade suffered. Who buys a topaz? A cut emerald the size of a cat’s (brown/grey) eye, is worth less than nine euro-dollars — less than the price of a bott
le of good (stale-tea color) Pinot Grigio. Or black Merlot.
It’s worse for animals. Those brown leopards that had lost their camouflage, the brown canaries that stopped breeding and died out — as the leopards and the tigers did. And overhead the sun is molten white or murky crimson, and the moon ashes that sometimes curdle into blood.
Because yellow was a primary color it didn’t die alone. It took green and orange with it, and virtually every other shade lost some nuance or definition. How strange. Who could ever have guessed? They said some kind of spectrum-microbe caused this. It attacked only that one element, the color yellow. Nothing dangerous, no need for alarm, can’t harm us. Just… hurts. No, I won’t show you the photos. It effects photographs too, of course. That brown girl and the brown and bone-white daffodils…
My husband? I’m afraid he died young.
Thank you for your visit. Yes, isn’t it a dramatic sunset.
Apocalyptic, you could say.
Part V
Exiles
By Crystal Light Beneath One Star
Six thousand miles is not too far
To hurry home to you
By crystal light beneath one star
It seems
I haul across the world
These dreams
— Michael Pennington
It’s true. There is a strange kind of beauty in this place. For one thing, the terrible beauty of exile. There’s a sweetness to pain.
Today, if it can be called Day (no, it can’t, but we do, I shall), I must have walked for miles, through the realm of darkness. I don’t, and I never will, understand about the dark, and the way the dark is light. I only see the ebony landscape, not quite black, under the sky — black neither — and that the light is there like panes of most fragile crystal, sharp enough to cut, razors and diamonds, and everything so piercingly clear. And yet so completely, softly, voluminously dark. It hangs, this world of daylit night, from a single nail — the Star. Dull and pale, the Star gives scarcely any illumination. Only in the hours before Shift does the Star brighten. Then it’s more like a noise than a light — a sort of roaring whistle. And I get the old panic, which is nothing to do with an impending Shift, its moments of slight discomfort for us, its bland routine for the machines that order it. It’s a psychological horror I feel, probably, since the brightening of the Star indicates the true dawn is approaching this vast nocturnal dock; the Earth is catching us up.
“Why do you think about it?” Edvey said to me this morning (which was no morning, but I shall call it so.) “You’ll never go back.”
“You think not.”
“Not you. You won’t fit. Take me,” said Edvey, which means I’ll have to, no choice, I’m to be awarded his autobiography, again. “A wife, a second-law wife, five children between them. My parents were gone, of course, but I had three sisters.”
“Just like Andrew Prozorov,” I murmured, but he wasn’t to be stopped. He never was.
“Cousins, nephews — all of that. And a couple of good apartments in the cities, and a house, a real show-place, up east of the Centerline. Wonderful land, you could do anything with it, grow coffee, raise horses, dig minerals out of it. And then I had my work. My God, Calle, I had two careers, didn’t I? I had everything.” He sat down across from me at the small window table, where I had been playing three-handed chess-against myself and myself. “Christ, if I start to think about all that — I’d go crazy, Calle. I’d start petitioning and arguing, like some of them, causing trouble. I’d probably get something on with the wires, or just plain rig up a line and hang myself.”
“The machines that run this place would never let it happen.”
“Oh, there are ways,” he said. “There have to be ways. But I’m not a potential suicide. I never was. I was always positive.”
“And you’re still positive.”
“You bet I am, Calle.”
He picked up one of the red bishops and started to play with it. I thought of taking it away from him — he was messing up the game — but what did it matter anyway?
“What I say is this. I serve my term. And then I get back.”
“Which term?”
“You know what I mean. I do my graft.”
“Your what?”
“Calle, don’t try to be clever. I do it, then I get sent home.”
“Home,” I said. “The wives and horses and coffee and sisters.”
“That’s it.”
“How long do you think you still have to serve?”
He glared at me. He was sweating, and his eyes looked wet and full of tearful menace. We all harbor our own versions of the truth. Nobody likes to hear the other version.
“You don’t know,” he said to me, “any more than I do, how long you’ve been here.”
“I didn’t say I did.”
“But I,” he said, “keep count. Yes, sir. From the first day I arrived. Oh, it’s a crude method. No watch or chronometer is going to record it, right? So I just keep a journal, and every night, before I turn in, I damn well make sure I write something on a fresh new page. And every one of those goddamn pages has a number to it. And every goddamn damned number is a day here.”
“How many pages?” I asked.
I knew he would know exactly. He did.
“Seven hundred and thirty-nine,” he said. He was smug, for a second.
“That must be a very large book.”
“It’s more than one book. Come on. And the machines issue me a new one whenever I ask. Allowed stationery. No problem. I have a regular stack of them.”
“Just over two years,” I said. “If you go by the Standard Calendar.”
“Thirteen-month calendar, right,” he said. “Just over two years. I mean, that’s quite a while. They don’t want heart’s blood, after all. It won’t be long now.”
I took the bishop back for something to do mostly, so I wouldn’t tell him the thing he knew already, that maybe tomorrow he and I would meet and he’d have two thousand pages in his books, or only two pages. He didn’t want to see it. He wasn’t about to see it. Whenever or whatever, he had filled seven hundred and thirty-nine numbers, so seven hundred and thirty-nine times, at least, he had refused to see it. So there he was.
It seemed I could remember meeting him the first time I ever did, the first time I was ever told about the sisters and wives and horses — though specific memory is always hazy here — and he had only been in the place a seven-day Standard week. He had said, “What did I do? I was making a film. There was nothing controversial in it. It was about families and how society can work well under an ordered, structured government system.”
“They may have suspected heavy irony,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “But then they had that wrong. I believe in the system. I always did. It was good to me.”
“Until now.”
“Oh, they have some reason. I trust them. I’ll sit it out.”
Edvey was not the only one to think — or to say he thought — in this fashion. Sometimes, when they said these things, their eyes flashed this way and that, unconsciously checking for the scanners that would record their pliancy, their willingness to conform. But I —
“What did you do, eh, Calle? Something silly, I guess.”
“Very silly.”
“You’re a writer, eh, Calle? I should know, writers do damn stupid things. What was it?”
“I’d rather not bore you with it.”
“I’ll find out.”
“Yes, if you like.”
When he did find out (not from me, someone else must have mentioned what they half-knew), he showily eschewed my company a long time — until time itself put us out of synch and he forgot. And when he remembered again, it was hazy, and he began to tell me once more, and more and more, about the sisters and horses.
In fact, I am here for writing a short, slammed-together story, which I published myself on a private press long since melted into slag. The small book was entitled Realm of Darkness: A F
inal Siberia. It was an imaginary account of this place where I now am, and which I no longer need to imagine. I had heard the tales, I had managed to get access to some classified data leaked by a man who presently blasted out his brains. I wonder how many people on Earth read smuggled copies of that slender volume, or are reading it now — except Now is a concept I sometimes try to forget.
Today, I thought about Merah.
Lest it be supposed I emulate Edvey, or Stenressy, Dorf or Marlin or Wyld, or any of the countless others among us who keep journals, numbered or un-, this is no journal. But sometimes the sweet pain of exile…cries out for words, even, audaciously, for print.
I believe, in the normal course of events, Merah would have faded by now simply into a prototype, or a dream. But Merah has not been allowed to do that, for me. Did I love the person called Merah? We were lovers; there was the closeness that can come from that, and a kind of telemetry of ideas, pleasing to us both, abrasive when it failed us — fallings-off, re-unitings, all the ordinary material of a relationship.
But now (in the non-existing now of here), now I think I do love Merah, for Merah has become the immediate symbol of what has been lost to me. They took care that should happen. Should I be flattered they reckon me threat enough still to use this added emotional lever against me? Oh, yes, I flush with embarrassed pride. I must have bothered them. Does that connectively mean, then, that I achieved anything worthwhile, before they sent me here to the night-land under the dull Star?
I had been here what might have been six months Standard, if it were possible to assess. It seemed about that period, though there were already jumps forward, and then sequentially back. I had lived through my first day of arrival three times, I was fairly certain of that, for the dim hazy memory, like the dim unhazy Star, shines on and does not quite let go of all pertinent matters. Six months, then, and on waking in the comfortable private room we are each of us allotted, I heard the machine speaking at me from the wall.
