Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  As I nodded, half-awake, softly there came what seemed to be the voice of Perithoös into my sad and idle thoughts. I was called by my name.

  “Telemachos, Telemachos! Undo for me the door as once I did for you; return the good deed you said you would. If vows are nothing, what is anything?”

  I did not move or raise my head, but my brain elements sent this message softly out into the night, even though my lips did not move. “Perithoös, closer than a brother, I wept when I heard your company was overwhelmed by the monsters. What became of the maiden you set out to rescue?”

  “Maiden no more I found her. Dead, dead, horribly dead, and by my hand. Herself and her child; and I had not the courage to join them.”

  “How are you alive after all these years?”

  “I cannot make the door to open.”

  “Call to the gate-warden, Perithoös, and he will lower a speaking tube from a Meurtriere and you may whisper the Master-Word into it, and so prove your human soul has not been destroyed, and I will be the first to welcome you.”

  The Master-Word did not come. Instead, mere words, such as any fell creature of the night could impersonate, now whispered in my brain: “Telemachos, son of Amphion! I am still human, I still remember life, but I cannot say the Master-Word.”

  “You lie. That cannot be.”

  And yet I felt a tear stinging in my eye, and I knew, somehow, that this voice did not lie: he was still human. But how could he forget the Word?

  “Though it has never been before, in the name of the blood we shed together as boys, the gruel in which we bound our silly oath, I call on you to believe and know that a new sorrow has appeared in this old, sad world, like fresh blood from an old scar; it is possible to forget what it means to be a man, and yet remain one. I have lost the Master-Word; I have my very self. Let me through the door. I am so cold.”

  I did no longer answer him, but stirred my heavy limbs.

  Though my hands and feet felt like lead, I moved and trembled and slid from my desk where I slumbered, and fell to the floor heavily enough to jar myself awake.

  How long I lay I do not know. My memory is dark, and perhaps time was not for me then flowing as it should have been. I remember being cold, but not having the strength to rise and shut the window; and this was a part of the library, so there were no thought-switches I could close just by wishing them closed.

  My thoughts drifted with the cold wind from the window.

  This wing of the library had been deserted for half a million of years. No one came into this wing, since no one could read the language, or understand the thoughts, of the long-forgotten peoples who had sent Usire out to found a new stronghold. Only I knew the real name of those ancient folk; modern antiquarians called them the Orichalcum people, because they were the only ones who knew the secret of that metal; and no other trace of them survived.

  And so the Air Masters, during the last two hundred years of power-outages, had lowered the ventilation budget in this wing to a minimum. I had needed vasculum of breathing-leaf just to get in here, and would have fainted with the window shut.

  Nor were failures of the ventilations rare. Most windows of most of the middle-level cities stood open, these days, no matter what the wise traditions of elder times required.

  It was two miles above the Night Land. No monster could cross the White Circle, and nothing has climbed so high since the Incursions of four hundred thousand years ago; and even if they did, this window was too small to admit them.

  I remembered wings. In my dreams I see doves, or the machines used by ancient men to impersonate them. But the air is thin, and even the dark and famished things have no wings to mount so high.

  I thought there was no danger to have the window open. Stinging insects, vapors, or particles would be surely stopped by the Air Clog. But what if the power losses over the last few centuries were greater than is publicly admitted by the Aediles or the Castellan? But it had not stopped the Mind-Call, as it should have done.

  Many Foretellers have dreamt that it is five million years before the final extinction of mankind. Most of the visions agree on certain basic elements, though much is in dispute. Five million years. We are supposed to have that long. I wondered, not for the first time, if those who say that they can see the shape of fate are wrong.

  I came awake when there was a movement, a clang, behind me as the hatch swung open. Here was a Master of the Watch, clad from head to toe in full armor, and carrying in hand that terrible weapon called the Diskos.

  I knew better than to wonder why a Watchman was here. He came into the chamber, his blade extending before him as he stepped, and his eyes never left me. The shaft was extended. The blade was lit and spinning. The furious noise of the weapon filled the room. Flickering shadows fled up and down the walls and bookshelves as eerie sparks snapped, and I felt the hair on my head, the little hairs on my naked arms, stir and stand up. I smelled ozone.

  Without rising, I raised my hands. “I am a man! I am human!”

  His voice was very deep, a rumble of gravel. “They all say that, those that talk.”

  Slowly, loudly, clearly, I said the Master-Word, both aloud with reverent lips, and by sending it with my brain-elements.

  It seemed so dark in the chamber when he doused his blade, but his smile of relief was bright.

  6.

  My youth had been a solitary one. To hold one’s ancestors in honor, and to love the lore of half-forgotten things, has never been in fashion among schoolboys. The pride of young men requires that they seem wise, despite their inexperience, and the only way to appear all-knowing without going to the tedium of acquiring knowledge, is to hold all knowledge in weary-seeming contempt. Students and apprentices (and, yes, teachers also) bestowed on me their well-practiced sneers; but when my dreams began, and ghosts of other lives came softly into my brain as I slept, then I was marked as a pariah, and was made the butt of every prank and cruelty boyish imagination could invent.

  Perithoös was as popular as I was unpopular. He was an alarming boy to have as a schoolmate, for he had the gift of the Night-Hearing, and he could hear unspoken thoughts. All secrets were open to him; he knew passwords to open locked doors and cabinets, and could avoid orderlies after lights-out. He knew the answers to tests before the schoolmasters gave them, and the plays of the opposing team on the tourney field. He was good at everything, feared nothing, and anarchy and confusion spread from his wake. What was there for a schoolboy not to love?

  Once, when the Head Boy and his gang had me locked in the cable-wheel closet, so that I would be absent from the feast-day assembly and gift-giving, Perithoös left the assembly (a thing forbidden by the headmaster’s rules), took a practice blade from the arm’s-locker and spun the charged blade against the closet door hinges, shattering the panel with a blast of noise.

  Not just school proctors, but civic rectors and men of the Corridor Guard arrived. To use one of the Great Weapons while inside the pyramid was a grave offense; and neither one of us would admit who did it, even though they surely knew.

  We both were scourged by the headmaster and given triple duty, and had porridge for our holiday feast, while the other boys dined on viands and candied peaches.

  Perithoös and I ate alone in the staff commissary, our shirts off (so that our backs would heal) and shivering in the cold of the unheated room. We were not allowed to speak, but I tipped my bowl onto the board and wrote in the porridge letters from the set-speech: shed blood makes us brothers–I shall return this deed.

  Even at that age, he was taller than the other lads, broad of shoulder and quick of eye and hand, the victor of every sport and contest, the darling of those who wagered on gymnastics games. He was as well-liked as I was ill-liked. So I expected to see doubt, or, worse, a look of patronizing kindness in his eye.

  But he merely nodded, wiped away the porridge-stain with his hand quickly, so that the proctor would not see the message. Under the table, with perfect seriousness, he clasped my ha
nd with his, and we shook on it. Porridge dripped through our fingers, but, nonetheless, that handclasp was sacred, and he and I were friends.

  At that time, neither one of us knew Hellenore of High Aerie.

  7.

  I was found, stunned, in the library by proctors of the Watch, whose instruments had detected the aetheric disturbance sent by the voice in the Night.

  The Monstruwacans kept me for a time as a guest in their tower, and I drank their potions, and held the sensitive grips of their machines, while they muttered in their white beards and looked doubtful. More than once I slept beneath their oneirometers, or was examined inch by inch by a physician’s glass.

  I told them many times of my mind-speech with Perithoös, and they did not look pleased; but the physician’s glass said my soul was without taint, and my nervous system seemed sound, and besides, both the Archivist (the head of my guild) and the Master of Architects (the head of my father’s) sent letters urging my release, or else demanding that an inquest be convened at once.

  I spent the remainder of my convalescence in Darklairstead, my father’s mansions on level Fourscore-and-Five. Ever since, a generation ago, the power failed along this stretch of corridor, (half the country receiving from the sub-station at Bountigrace is dark), it has been a quiet and restful place.

  8.

  Among my very earliest memories was one dream, repeated so many times in my childhood that I filled a whole diary with scrawled word and clumsy sketches trying to capture what I saw.

  When I was seven years, my mother died, and her shining coffin was lowered into the silvery rays of the Great Chasm. My father became strange and cold. He sent my brother Arion to prentice with the Structural Stress Masters. Tmelos, (who is younger than me), was sent to the quarters of my Aunt Elegia, in Forecourtshire, for her to raise. Patricia took holy orders, and Phthia stayed with Father to run the house and rule the servants. Me, I was sent to board at a school in Longnorthhall of Floor 601, where the landing of the Boreal Stair reaches for many shining marble acres under lamps of the elder days, and potted Redwoods grow. When I left home for school, the dream left me.

  As I recovered at my father’s manse, the dream came once again, and it no longer frightened me, for nothing that reminds one of childhood, even ill things, can be utterly without a certain charm.

  It was a dream of doors.

  I saw tall doors made of a substance that gleamed like bronze and red gold (which I later found to be a metal called Orichalcum, an alloy made by a secret only the ancients knew). The doors were carven with many strange scenes of things that had been and things that would be.

  In the dream I would be terrified that they would open.

  9.

  Father and I would dine alone, without servants. The dining chamber is a pillared hall, wide and gloomy. Out of the hatch window, I would often see, across the air shaft from me, little candles dancing in the hatches of some of my neighbors. Once, candles had been used only for the most solemn ceremonies, back when the ancient rules against open flames in the pyramid had been enforced: the sight of candles used as candles always saddened me.

  Some nights there was a hint of music from some city far overhead, echoing down the shaft, and, once, the hiss of a bat-winged machine carrying a courier-boy, (only boys are small enough), down the airshaft on some business of the Life Support House, or perhaps the Castellan, too urgent to wait for the lifts.

  Our table was made from a tree felled down in the underground country, by a craftsman whose art is the cutting and jointing of living material, an art called Carpentry. Such is Father’s prestige he can have such things brought up the lifts for him, but he has never moved the family to better quarters.

  My father is a big, tall man, with fierce, penetrating eyes in an otherwise very mild face. He shaves his chin, but has a moustache that bristles, and this gives his penetrating eyes a strange and savage look.

  I have dreamed of other lives, and once, in a prehistoric world, a dusky savage who was me, strong and lean of limb, and braver than I ever hoped to be, died beneath the claws of a tiger. The great cat was more bright of hue than anything in our world is, shining orange and black as it slunk through dripping jungles beneath a sun as hot as the muzzle of a culverin. I wonder what became of that species, that lived on some continent long since swallowed by the seas, before the seas dried up, before the sun died. I have always thought that extinct beast looked something like my father.

  His bald head was growing back in new hair, as sometimes happens to men of his order, for men who work near the Earth-Current, their vitality is greater than normal.

  After dinner, we brought out carafes of water and wine, which glistened in the candlelight, and mixed them in our bowls. I am sparing with the wine and he is sparing of the water, but he is sober even when he drinks deep and shows no levity nor thickwittedness. Perhaps exposure to the Earth-Current helps here too.

  He sat with his bowl in his hand, staring out the air-shaft. He spoke without turning his head. “You know the tale of Andros and Naäni. You were raised on it. I am sure I hate it as much as you adore it.”

  I said, “Andrew Eddins of Kent, and Christina Lynn Mirdath the Beautiful. The tale shows that, even in a world as dark as ours, there is light.”

  Father shook his head. “False light. Will-o’-Wisp light! I do not blame the hero for his deeds. They were great, and he was a mighty man, high-hearted and without vice. But the hope he brought served us ill. Perithoös was no Andros, go into the Night. And that high-born girl who toyed with your affections; Hellenore. She was no Mirdath the Beautiful. Hellenore the Vain, I should call her.”

  “Please speak no ill of the dead, father. They cannot answer you.”

  He raised his bowl with a graceful gesture and took a silent sip, and paused to admire the taste. “Hm. Neither can they hear me, and so they will not flinch. She is not the first of the dead who have served the living poorly. He did us ill, whichever forefather first thought it would be wise to leave us tales and songs that tell young boys to go be brave and die, or to perish for a gesture.”

  I said, “Keeping a promise counts for more than mere gesture, Father.”

  “Does keeping a promise count more than preserving flesh or soul?”

  I said, “Those who study such matters say that souls are born again in later ages, even if the conscious memories are lost; poets claim that oath-breakers are reborn into lives accursed with turmoil and bitter anguish. If so, then each man in his present life must take care to die spotlessly, his soul still pure.”

  Father smiled bitterly. He did not read poets. “What point is the punishment, if, in his next life, each criminal has forgotten what crime he did?”

  I said, “So that even men who are stoical and hard in this life will fear to break their word; for, in their next, they will be young and green again; and suffering that comes unannounced, for reasons that seem reasonless, are surely the hardest pains of all to bear.”

  “A pretty tale. Must you die for an idle fiction?”

  “Sir, it is not a fiction.”

  He said: “Must you die, fiction or not?”

  “I had no other friend in my school days.”

  “Perithoös was no true friend!”

  “And yet I gave my word to him, friend or not. Now I am called to fulfill it.”

  “Who calls? There are Powers in the dark who can mock our voices and our thoughts, and deceive even the wisest of us. Only the Master-Word is one the Horrors cannot utter, for it represents a concept that they cannot understand, an essence that does not dwell in them. If what called to you did not call out the Master-Word, you know our law commands you not to heed it.”

  I answered: “Despite the law, despite all wisdom, still, a hope possesses me that he is alive, and undestroyed, somehow.”

  He said grimly: “A true man would not call out to you.”

  I did not know if he meant that a man of honor would die before he let himself be used to lure a friend out int
o the darkness; or if he meant that what called out to me had not been human at all. Perhaps both.

  I said: “What sort of man would I be, if it truly were Perithoös calling, and I did not answer?”

  He said: “It is your death calling.”

  And I had no answer back for that. I knew it was so.

  After a space of silence, eventually he spoke again: “Do you see any cause for hope you say has taken possession of you?”

  “I see no cause.”

  “But–?”

  “But hope fills me up, father, nonetheless, and it burns in my heart like a lamp, and makes my limbs light. There are many ugly things we do not see in this dark land that surrounds us, father, horrors unseen. And there are said to be good powers as well, whose strange benevolence works wonders, though never in a way humans can know. And they also are not seen, or only rarely. There are many things, which, although unseen, are real. More real than the imperishable metal of our pyramid, more potent that the living power of the Earth-Current. More real than fire. So, I admit, I see no cause for hope. And yet it fills me.”

  He was silent for a while, and puffed his pipe. He is a rational man, who solved problems by means of square and chisel, stone and steel, measured currents of energy, knowing the strengths of structures and what load each support can bear. I knew my words meant little to him.

  He reached his hand and doused the lantern, so that I could not see the pain in his face. He voice hovered in the dark, and he tried to make his words cold: “I will not forbid you to venture into the Night Lands…”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “…. Since I have other sons to carry on my name.”

  10.

  Visions, pulmenoscopy, and extra-temporal manifestations are not unknown to the people of the Last Redoubt. The greatest among us are known to have the Gift; and at least one of the Lesser Redoubt also was endowed with the Night-Hearing, and memory-dreams.

  Mirdath the Beautiful is the only woman known to have crossed the Night Lands, and her nine scrolls of the histories and customs of the Lesser Redoubt are the only record of any kind we have for the history, literature, folkways and sciences of that long-lost race of mankind. All the mathematical theories of Galois we know only from her memory; the plays of Euryphaean, and the music of an instrument called a pianoforte, infinite resistance coil and the sanity glass, and all the inventions that sprang from them, are due to her recollection. Her people were a frugal folk, and the energy-saving circuits they used, the methods of storing battery power, were known to them a million years ago, and greatly conserved our wealth. Much of what she knew of farming and crops we could not use, for the livestock and seed of our buried fields were strange to her.