Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  THE TESTAMENT OF ANTIGONE. The scrivener applied the words, and the witnesses applied their seals. That terrible and insulting name now would be preserved as long as history; as long as the Last Redoubt should stand. I raised my eyes to see the great calendar that hangs above the Archives. Four million years of history remained to be recorded, and the blank books on their pedestals, numbered and arranged, stood to my left, many fewer than the filled books of history to my right.

  In the Vestry, after the ceremony was done, I asked the prentice Monstruwacan who escorted me about all this: how could I, who had disgraced every law of mankind, be granted so honorable a mention, my name written in the books of eternity?

  The young prentice just smiled. “Oh, we don’t care about that jabber,” said he, meaning my treason, all my adventures. “These records are meant to last.”

  He meant last beyond the time when every rumor of our era, all our accomplishments and follies, had been utterly forgotten.

  There is something comforting about the Monstruwacans. Their studies set them apart from the petty and quotidian concerns of other men.

  93.

  The Master Monstruwacan himself came down to interview me once. His was the shortest interview of all.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well, what?” I said, wishing there was a more original way to phrase that question.

  “You know what I wish to know.”

  “Ah!” I nodded.

  I described the second figure standing behind the leaf of the door in the House of Silence, its hood turned toward the first figure. The second figure has its hand stretched out, palm inward, as if beckoning or entreating the first figure, but hanging oddly just above the tips of its thin fingers is a pinpoint of colorless strange light, motionless, unflickering.

  I told him. “The Bianitorianist theory is correct.”

  He nodded. “We will move the observation of Aetius into the endorsed category.”

  There was nothing else he wanted from me. He gathered his dark robes about him and stood, departing without a word. My life or death was too brief an event to interest him.

  So perhaps there is something not so comforting about the Monstruwacans after all.

  94.

  I do not even know why Creon went through the meaningless ritual of an Inquest. The three magistrates of the Tribunal were all his men, puppets who owed their places to him. The common people (whose love of ancient tradition is always greater than that of the rich, for poverty makes men fearful, and fear breeds caution) were demanding I be skinned alive, and my flesh nailed up next to the felon whose hide is still displayed, a grim sight, on metal pegs on the inner side of the Great Gate.

  Even his half-mythic crime was not so heinous as mine: for I had violated the prohibition against women, and also I had invited the enemy across the protections. Some electrospiritualists believed that the weakness of the boundary was permanent, lodged in the racial unconsciousness, and certain to influence the energy flows of the machinery feeding the White Tube from henceforth.

  The nobles had no reason to speak on my behalf. I had brought a shame on my phylum; indeed, some said I discredited the whole theory of dividing mankind into phyla. A thousand or two thousand years from now, my name would be used as the final word in any argument against entrusting the high-born with special privileges to compensate for their special duties.

  So there they sat, the magistrates, foolish looking in their antique tall caps, reciting in tedious detail the facts we all knew to be the case, driving to the decision we all knew must come forth. Our laws forbid the penalty of death, since it is not right that man should kill man, not in a world where the dark creatures are so eager to make us inhuman. But I knew they would find some way.

  When it was my turn to speak, I spoke my many bitter thoughts, and condemned the cowardice of all my kin. Oh, I poured my scorn on them, these Watchman of the law who had no loyalty to the law. They were not even as loyal to the law as the Night-Hound I had seen die by his master.

  I said the many things no well-bred lady is ever meant to say; but I knew they meant my death, and so I had no reason to hold my tongue. I called upon them all to end this farce, and ask Creon, in his tyrannical, untrammeled power, how my death would be accomplished.

  There was a man in the court who took notes to tell the hour-slips the news. He was the only one who smiled at my speech; but he was relishing the fame his lurid account would bring to him, I am sure.

  Creon took me at my word, and stood, and spoke. He pretended he was merely advising the court. It was within their power to limit my movements; a punishment called cloister, but also called by its older name of incarceration. He said there were cities on many levels of the pyramid, which had been lacking in light and power, heat and mess distribution, for centuries.

  Up until that moment, I expected them to call for my voluntary suicide by some graceful means, a stiletto-stroke to the neck. Or I thought they would have the physicians prepare a room awash with deadly radiations, into which I would walk of my own accord, and lay down painlessly as if for sleep.

  But Creon grimaced at me, and spoke of the sanctity of life, and of how it was forbidden that any should exanimate a human soul.

  Oh, that terrible smile. He finally had his way. He finally won the dispute he’d begun with my father so long ago. I was not to be executed. I was to be deprived of food and light, and simply be allowed to die.

  Even the Magistrates were shocked. “Must so terrible a sentence be executed? The girl is of tender years...”

  Creon said, “There is no evil worse than disobedience.”

  The look in his eyes was so glad and so terrible! And yet I saw, or thought I saw, the look of piercing shame in them as well, as if even he were astonished by the enormity of what he was about to do.

  Who am I to blame him? That restlessness which made the second race of man venture forth to found the Lesser Redoubt, which made Mirdath able to cross the Night Land when all others of her people perished, which made Polynices or Labdacus our ancestor willing to dare what no one else dared: that is what I saw in his eye. There are some walls never meant to be breached, lest the darkness enter in and destroy us. I was too much like him, Uncle Creon. When our gazes met for the last time, I think he saw that thought in me, and knew it to be true. It was his gaze that wavered and dropped, despite that I was led away in chains, and he in pomp.

  How had Andros done it? The first ancestor of our line had been possessed of this same restless, anarchic spirit, the pride that will not bow. He dared what no others would. How had he tamed that spirit, and rode its back as if on a monster, to glory, and not to shame?

  They took me to a dark, large place, a dead city, and buried me alive, sealing large slabs of armor across the doorways and lifts.

  The city was named Ventral Southwest Nine.

  95.

  The city where I have been banished is empty. The doors and hatches leading in and out of this aeons-old metropolis were sealed shut sixty years ago, with me alive inside.

  There are other cities above and below me, to the north and south and east and west, but whatever the noises of their multitudes, their celebrations and lamentations, their duties and their leisure, I am cut off. I neither hear their solemn paeans during the Contemplation, nor their gay applause during the Games. There are no windows and no openings peering Out: this is one of the interior cities, near the axis of the Last Redoubt.

  They meant me to die, of course, the long, slow, painful death of starvation. They meant for me to go mad in the place without lights, where I could keep no count of time. But the air is sweet here, and the water in the public fountains and baths is pure, and so I conclude that the eternity-circuits have been set to replenish the air and water. They did not mean me to die of dehydration or asphyxiation: such would have been too quick.

  Neither did they search carefully this city, and discover all its sealed and buried secrets. Creon assumed, as we all did, that the supplies and
the power cores, the granaries and stock-templates would all be kept in some central strong house, protected by the civic guard, as they are in all the cities on the other inhabited levels of the Pyramid in the current aeon. So, after sweeping the main public buildings in the center of the square with their wands, the gaolers declared the space uninhabitable, empty of victual, that the terms of my short exile be complete.

  And perhaps the search was less than thorough. With listless steps and sullen glances the young recruits went through their motions. They were of that age when their nature is to be courteous and doting, shy and bold, and their martial instincts told them to protect women and children and gentle-born ladies; and I was all three. Their sense of chivalry told them to admire the heroes who walk the Night Lands; and I was one of these as well.

  A clerk whose name I did not even know was the last human person to speak to me. He read the proclamation: “You, who have betrayed and rejected the service and society of mankind, breaching our quarantine and trafficking with powers devoted to the destruction of all mortal life, are by these presences banished and exiled beyond the reach of humanity for weal or woe.”

  And then, with a gesture, the clerk ordered the company to douse their lamps. I heard their footsteps march away; I heard the clang of the portal being shut; the process they used to seal the armored slab in place made no noise, of course.

  96.

  So many years ago, that was.

  The month I had spent in beneath the ground in utter darkness, in the Place Where the Silent Ones are Never, in a city much older and more horrific than this, had given me the skills, the temper of mind, I needed to survive here. I was not without hope, for I knew nowhere in the whole Last Redoubt is entirely free from the protective flows of the Earth Current. Somewhere in this sealed-off city, I would find a working circuit; somehow, I would find or build a lamp.

  The people who once lived here had ways strange to ours, lives not so regular. I imagined it was a time of peace and prosperity: for each mansion, each cotter’s cabin, practically each cell, has its own independent power supply, its own storeroom filled with tablets of nutriment, or fruits or life-paste turned sideway in time so that it cannot rot.

  It was twenty months of work, all by myself, crawling without light through ancient libraries, puzzling out their languages and thought-forms, to find texts on lantern and power technology. It had to be written to instruct a layman, and coded to be read by the blind.

  My first two or three decades of loneliness were occupied, as you might expect, with survival chores. It was years to learn the basic arts of farming once I had the lamps burning in the ancient greenhouses, and the soil-nitrate generators sweeping the black hydroponic beds with their healing rays. I broke open preservation cells to get at fruits and grain, and found the enzymes and long-chained molecules I needed in little airless nodules in a biochemical museum.

  97.

  For many years, I survived as might any prisoner with nothing but time to torment her.

  I draw calendars on the walls, and pictures, and wrote notes in the endpapers of books I found in the library.

  Of course I went mad.

  98.

  I studied the dead city, inventing the names of those who must have lived there, making up details about their lives and histories based on the ancient artifacts I found, or any thought-archives still working after a million years of non-use.

  Soon I was hallucinating them, telling them my tale, and these phantoms seemed as real to me as my life before.

  I had a celebration when I turned Two-and-Thirty, for, at that date, I had spent as many years in solitary prison as I had in freedom up until then. I was a maiden of sixteen when they buried me alive in here.

  I intended to end my celebration by hanging myself from the chandelier of some ancient magnate’s feasting hall I’d found, and I had the harness ready for my neck, when the imaginary people I’d been eating with asked me to wait, and the ghosts I saw asked me, first, to tell them the tale of how I came here.

  I have dreams that I am riding swiftly through the Land of Darkness, on the back of a monster, with my brother’s corpse slung across the great beast’s neck. To have such a dream as this is my greatest joy, for I delight in the sensation of the ride, the power of the mount, the swift motion across the cursed landscape. In the dream, my brother’s head rotates oddly on its neck, and smiles at me vacantly, and touches my face with his cold fingers, telling me I will soon be with him. Nonetheless, the sensation of freedom and escape which this wild ride promises make such dreams precious to me.

  99.

  What was your question, again?

  No, child, that was years ago.

  When I turned Four-and-Sixty, I made up my mind again to do myself in, and seek another life, if the tales of reincarnation are not lies. And so I bit down on my forearm where those who venture Out have their capsule implanted. My teeth could not find it, and so I bit again and again, until my arm is as you see it now.

  No, I did not gnaw it clean off: what a foolish question. I found the infirmary many years ago, and restored its basic circuits to operation. The voices in my head told me the wound showed gangrene, and I told the automatic surgeon to amputate.

  That is a strange thing to say. You are an hallucination yourself. You exist only in my eyes, only in my imagination.

  Well, I do not mind telling you how I know. My dream about you began as other dreams have: a month ago, I found a spot on the great wall separating this city from the next, warm to the touch. After a week or so, a little red dot of fire appeared in the middle of the slab, and it grew over the next period of time, bigger each time I came back.

  I decided to have a celebration to welcome you when you broke through the walls, and that is why I have gathered my treasures here.

  Rubbish? Why, what a thing to say, child.

  Here is my collection of metal needles. You must know how hard these are to find. I used to have ladies to sew for me, and I had to learn all this myself. This stick is from my first apple tree. This cup of earthworms is not rubbish: my life comes from these humble insects, for without them, the soil in my gardens would still be sterile. These are my friends. I have given them names.

  You simply do not know what is important, Little Boy.

  Yes, I will look at your treasures.

  What kind of glass is that? I see. You are hallucinating also, I suppose. The Soul Glass is a forgotten art. We have no way to restore the mind to sanity, the spirit to temperance and virtue. The last of these was broken six hundred years ago. Certainly I will look.

  I see the face of a strange old woman wearing a sack. Her eyes are so wild, and her hair, what a mess! No, that is not my face, for my hair is dark, not white, and it shines like dark ink. It is one of the signs of my bloodline.

  And my teeth are white and fine, not yellow crooked stubs like that. My fiancée is Haemon; he would never kiss a mouth like that. He will come for me, some time, you know.

  I see my nervous system now. The dark areas do indicate a need for repair.

  That light! Is that my essential self? It is corroded like a ripe fruit. Vanity, ambition, willfulness, I see. But what is that golden thing shining in the depth, that beautiful color?

  I see my memories. Years of darkness, years of bitter imprisonment. And before that? A time of joy. I was to be married to a handsome lad; my brother was a hero, the greatest of our age. My father was the Castellan.

  Yes, I will tell you the tale.

  The monsters still howled for him, months after he fell…

  100.

  The boy has told me who he is, but the broken thing in my head makes me forget. The joy is too much, and my mind rejects it.

  Now he focuses his glass upon me, and his words come sharp and clear, in a fashion I can neither misunderstand, nor forget. Already I feel my wits returning.

  The clarity is nothing but pain. I wish myself blinded with pride again.

  Ah me! What have I done? Did I near
ly destroy all the millions of man merely to save but one?

  101.

  Antigone, hear me. In a former life, I was your brother Polynices.

  That light you see in the deep places of your soul is that love, that selfless love, you had for me in life. Once you are whole, you will see the flaw in your spirit, a restless pride and heedlessness; but I will not condemn you, for love purifies flaw, and sets all to rights.

  Pride is our legacy from Mirdath the Beautiful; devotion is our legacy from Andros. His blessing is meant to annul her curse.

  Because of your love for me, I was permitted to return here ten thousand years before the appointed time. All unknowing, you and you alone drew me across the abyss, and I was born again within the same generation. The exposure of my corpse to the Earth Current gave me the strength. Had I been Destroyed by the powers in the Night, no life of mine would ever have returned, not in any aeon.

  For you, it has been seven decades. For me, seventy lifetimes, spent both in the immensity of the future and the immensity of the past.

  In one of those lifetimes, I was an adept of the Soul Glass; in another, an artisan who made them; in the third, a Mind-Doctor; then a fourth, a prophet and seer. Armed with much lore of past and future lives, I am born now into this time to undo the harm done by me and mine.

  This time, this last time, our tragedy, repeated in many ancient lives, ends more happily, for I mean to bring a sip of hope to wash away the oceans of despair.

  For I am the long-awaited messenger to this era.

  The age of the Castellans shall pass. I know the things past and the things to come, and shall teach this generation what it has forgotten. No more will men rule men: we return to the ancient ways, the sanity that needs no law other than right reason to govern it.

  Although I am of tender years, already there are some who follow my message. My men are burning wider that small hole through which I came, and they bring machines to open the armored wall. See! Already this tomb is being pulled wide.