Nightflyers & Other Stories

by George R. R. Martin

  “It’s all one way,” I said. It was a statement. I knew.

  She nodded. “It’s not that he keeps secrets. He doesn’t. He’ll answer any question I ask. But the answers mean nothing. I ask him what he fears, and he says nothing, and makes me believe it. He’s very rational, very calm. He never gets angry, he never has. I asked him. He doesn’t hate people, he thinks hate is bad. He’s never felt pain, either, or he says he hasn’t. Emotional pain, I mean. Yet he understands me when I talk about my life. Once he said his biggest fault was laziness. But he’s not lazy at all, I know that. Is he really that perfect? He tells me he’s always sure of himself, because her knows he’s good, but he smiles when he says it, so I can’t even accuse him of being vain. He says he believes in God, but he never talks about it. If you try to talk seriously, he’ll listen patiently, or joke with you, or lead the conversation away. He says he loves me, but—”

  I nodded. I knew what was coming.

  It came. She looked up at me, eyes begging. “You’re a Talent,” she said. “You’ve read him, haven’t you? You know him? Tell me. Please tell me.”

  I was reading her. I could see how much she needed to know, how much she worried and feared, how much she loved. I couldn’t lie to her. Yet it was hard to give her the answer I had to.

  “I’ve read him,” I said. Slowly. Carefully. Measuring out my words like precious fluids. “And you, you too. I saw your love, on that first night, when we ate together.”

  “And Dino?”

  My words caught in my throat. “He’s—funny, Lya said once. I can read his surface emotions easily enough. Below that, nothing. He’s very self-contained, walled off. Almost as if his only emotions are the ones he—allows himself to feel. I’ve felt his confidence, his pleasure. I’ve felt worry too, but never real fear. He’s very affectionate toward you, very protective. He enjoys feeling protective.”

  “Is that all?” So hopeful. It hurt.

  “I’m afraid it is. He’s walled off, Laurie. He needs himself, only himself. If there’s love in him, it’s behind that wall, hidden. I can’t read it. He thinks a lot of you, Laurie. But love—well, it’s different. It’s stronger and more unreasoning and it comes in crashing floods. And Dino’s not like that, at least not out where I can read.”

  “Closed,” she said. “He’s closed to me. I opened myself to him, totally. But he didn’t. I was always afraid—even when he was with me, I felt sometimes that he wasn’t there at all—”

  She sighed. I read her despair, her welling loneliness. I didn’t know what to do. “Cry if you like,” I told her, inanely. “Sometimes it helps. I know. I’ve cried enough in my time.”

  She didn’t cry. She looked up, and laughed lightly. “No,” she said. “I can’t. Dino taught me never to cry. He said tears never solve anything.”

  A sad philosophy. Tears don’t solve anything, maybe, but they’re part of being human. I wanted to tell her so, but instead I just smiled at her.

  She smiled back, and cocked her head. “You cry,” she said suddenly, in a voice strangely delighted. “That’s funny. That’s more of an admission than I ever heard from Dino, in a way. Thank you, Robb. Thank you.”

  And Laurie stood on her toes and looked up, expectant. And I could read what she expected. So I took her and kissed her, and she pressed her body hard against mine. And all the while I thought of Lya, telling myself that she wouldn’t mind, that she’d be proud of me, that she’d understand.

  Afterwards, I stayed up in the office alone to watch the dawn come up. I was drained, but somehow content. The light that crept over the horizon was chasing the shadows before it, and suddenly all the fears that had seemed so threatening in the night were silly, unreasoning. We’d bridged it, I thought—Lya and I. Whatever it was, we’d handled it, and today we’d handle the Greeshka with the same ease, together.

  When I got back to our room, Lya was gone.

  * * *

  “We found the aircar in the middle of Shkeentown,” Valcarenghi was saying. He was cool, precise, reassuring. His voice told me, without words, that there was nothing to worry about. “I’ve got men out looking for her. But Shkeentown’s a big place. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

  “No,” I said, dully. “Not really. Maybe to see some more Joined. She seemed—well, almost obsessed by them. I don’t know.”

  “Well, we’ve got a good police force. We’ll find her. I’m certain of that. But it may take a while. Did you two have a fight?”

  “Yes. No. Sort of, but it wasn’t a real fight. It was strange.”

  “I see,” he said. But he didn’t. “Laurie tells me you came up here last night, alone.”

  “Yes. I needed to think.”

  “All right,” said Valcarenghi. “So let’s say Lya woke up, decided she wanted to think too. You came up here. She took a ride. Maybe she just wants a day off to wander around Shkeentown. She did something like that yesterday, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she’s doing it again. No problem. She’ll probably be back well before dinner.” He smiled.

  “Why did she go without telling me, then? Or leaving a note, or something?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not important.”

  Wasn’t it, though? Wasn’t it? I sat in the chair, head in my hands and a scowl on my face, and I was sweating. Suddenly I was very much afraid, of what I didn’t know. I should never have left her alone, I was telling myself. While I was up here with Laurie, Lyanna woke alone in a darkened room, and—and—and what? And left.

  “Meanwhile, though,” Valcarenghi said, “we’ve got work to do. The trip to the caves is all set.”

  I looked up, disbelieving. “The caves? I can’t go there, not now, not alone.”

  He gave a sigh of exasperation, exaggerated for effect. “Oh, come now, Robb. It’s not the end of the world. Lya will be all right. She seemed to be a perfectly sensible girl, and I’m sure she can take care of herself. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “Meanwhile, we’ll cover the caves. I still want to get to the bottom of this.”

  “It won’t do any good,” I protested. “Not without Lya. She’s the major Talent. I—I just read emotions. I can’t get down deep, as she can. I won’t solve anything for you.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe not. But the trip is on, and we’ve got nothing to lose. We can always make a second run after Lya comes back. Besides, this should do you good, get your mind off this other business. There’s nothing you can do for Lya now. I’ve got every available man out searching for her, and if they don’t find her you certainly won’t. So there’s no sense dwelling on it. Just get back into action, keep busy.” He turned, headed for the tube. “Come. There’s an aircar waiting for us. Nelse will go too.”

  Reluctantly, I stood. I was in no mood to consider the problems of the Shkeen, but Valcarenghi’s arguments made a certain amount of sense. Besides which, he’d hired Lyanna and me, and we still had obligations to him. I could try anyway, I thought.

  On the ride out, Valcarenghi sat in the front with the driver, a hulking police sergeant with a face chiseled out of granite. He’d selected a police car this time so we could keep posted on the search for Lya. Gourlay and I were in the back seat together. Gourlay had covered our laps with a big map, and he was telling me about the caves of Final Union.

  “Theory is the caves are the original home of the Greeshka,” he said. “Probably true, makes sense. Greeshka are a lot bigger there. You’ll see. The caves are all through the hills, away from our part of Shkeentown, where the country gets wilder. A regular little honeycomb. Greeshka in every one, too. Or so I’ve heard. Been in a few myself, Greeshka in all of them. So I believe what they say about the rest. The city, the sacred city, well, it was probably built because of the caves. Shkeen come here from all over the continent, you know, for Final Union. Here, this is the cave region.” He took out a pen, and made a big circle in red near the center of the map. It was meaningless to me. The map w
as getting me down. I hadn’t realized that the Shkeen city was so huge. How the hell could they find anyone who didn’t want to be found?

  Valcarenghi looked back from the front seat. “The cave we’re going to is a big one, as these places go. I’ve been there before. There’s no formality about Final Union, you understand. The Shkeen just pick a cave, and walk in, and lie down on top of the Greeshka. They’ll use whatever entrance is most convenient. Some of them are no bigger than sewer pipes, but if you went in far enough, theory says you’d run into a Greeshka, setting back in the dark and pulsing away. The biggest caves are lighted with torches, like the Great Hall, but that’s just a frill. It doesn’t play any real part in the Union.”

  “I take it we’re going to one of them?” I said.

  Valcarenghi nodded. “Right. I figured you’d want to see what a mature Greeshka is like. It’s not pretty, but it’s educational. So we need lighting.”

  Gourlay resumed his narrative then, but I tuned him out. I felt I knew quite enough about the Shkeen and the Greeshka, and I was still worried about Lyanna. After a while he wound down, and the rest of the trip was in silence. We covered more ground than we ever had before. Even the Tower—our shining steel landmark—had been swallowed by the hills behind us.

  The terrain got rougher, rockier, and more overgrown, and the hills rose higher and wilder. But the domes went on and on and on, and there were Shkeen everywhere. Lya could be down there, I thought, lost among those teeming millions. Looking for what? Thinking what?

  Finally we landed, in a wooded valley between two massive, rock-studded hills. Even here there were Shkeen, the red-brick domes rising from the undergrowth among the stubby trees. I had no trouble spotting the cave. It was halfway up one of the slopes, a dark yawn in the rock face, with a dusty road winding up to it.

  We set down in the valley and climbed that road. Gourlay ate up the distance with long, gawky strides, while Valcarenghi moved with an easy, untiring grace, and the policeman plodded on stolidly. I was the straggler. I dragged myself up, and I was half-winded by the time we got to the cave mouth.

  If I’d expected cave paintings, or an altar, or some kind of nature temple, I was sadly disappointed. It was an ordinary cave, with damp stone walls and low ceilings and cold, wet air. Cooler than most of Shkea, and less dusty, but that was about it. There was one long, winding passage through the rock, wide enough for the four of us to walk abreast yet low enough so Gourlay had to stoop. Torches were set along the walls at regular intervals, but only every fourth one or so was lit. They burned with an oily smoke that seemed to cling to the top of the cave and drift down into the depths before us. I wondered what was sucking it in.

  After about ten minutes of walking, most of it down a barely perceptible incline, the passage led us out into a high, brightly lit room, with a vaulting stone roof that was stained sooty by torch smoke. In the room, the Greeshka.

  Its color was a dull brownish-red, like old blood, not the bright near-translucent crimson of the small creatures that clung to the skulls of the Joined. There were spots of black, too, like burns or soot stains on the vast body. I could barely see the far side of the cave; the Greeshka was too huge, it towered above us so that there was only a thin crack between it and the roof. But it sloped down abruptly halfway across the chamber, like an immense jellied hill, and ended a good twenty feet from where we stood. Between us and the great bulk of the Greenshka was a forest of hanging, dangling red strands, a living cobweb of Greeshka tissue that came almost to our faces.

  And it pulsed. As one organism. Even the strands kept time, widening and then contracting again, moving to a silent beat that was one with the great Greeshka behind them.

  My stomach churned, but my companions seemed unmoved. They’d seen this before. “Come,” Valcarenghi said, switching on a flashlight he’d brought to augment the torchlight. The light, twisting around the pulsing web, gave the illusion of some weird haunted forest. Valcarenghi stepped into that forest. Lightly. Swinging the light and brushing aside the Greeshka.

  Gourlay followed him, but I recoiled. Valcarenghi looked back and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The Greeshka takes hours to attach itself, and it’s easily removed. It won’t grab you if you stumble against it.”

  I screwed up my courage, reached out, and touched one of the living strands. It was soft and wet, and there was a slimy feel to it. But that was all. It broke easily enough. I walked through it, reaching before me and bending and breaking the web to clear my path. The policeman walked silently behind me.

  Then we stood on the far side of the web, at the front of the great Greeshka. Valcarenghi studied it for a second, then pointed with his flashlight. “Look,” he said. “Final Union.”

  I looked. His bean had thrown a pool of light around one of the dark spots, a blemish on the reddish hulk. I looked closer. There was a head in the blemish. Centered in the dark spot, with just the face showing, and even that covered by a thin reddish film. But the features were unmistakable. An elderly Shkeen, wrinkled and big-eyed, his eyes closed now. But smiling. Smiling.

  * * *

  I moved closer. A little lower and to the right, a few fingertips hung out of the mass. But that was all. Most of the body was already gone, sunken into the Greeshka, dissolved or dissolving. The old Shkeen was dead, and the parasite was digesting his corpse.

  “Every one of the dark spots is a recent Union,” Valcarenghi was saying, moving his light around like a pointer. “The spots fade in time, of course. The Greeshka is growing steadily. In another hundred years it will fill this chamber, and start up the passageway.

  Then there was a rustle of movement behind us. I looked back. Someone else was coming through the web.

  She reached us soon, and smiled. A Shkeen woman, old, naked, breasts hanging past her waist. Joined, of course. Her Greeshka covered most of her head and hung lower than her breasts. It was still bright and translucent from its time in the sun. You could see through it, to where it was eating the skin off her back.

  “A candidate for Final Union,” Gourlay said.

  “This is a popular cave,” Valcarenghi added in a low, sardonic voice.

  The woman did not speak to us, nor us to her. Smiling, she walked past us. And lay down on the Greeshka.

  The little Greeshka, the one that rode her back, seemed almost to dissolve on contact, melting away into the great cave creature, so the Shkeen woman and the great Greeshka were joined as one. After that, nothing. She just closed her eyes, and lay peacefully, seemingly asleep.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Union,” said Valcarenghi. “It’ll be an hour before you’d notice anything, but the Greeshka is closing over her even now, swallowing her. A response to her body heat, I’m told. In a day she’ll be buried in it. In two, like him—” The flash found the half-dissolved face above us.

  “Can you read her?” Gourlay suggested. “Maybe that’d tell us something.”

  “All right,” I said, repelled but curious. I opened myself. And the mindstorm hit.

  But it’s wrong to call it a mindstorm. It was immense and awesome and intense, searing and blinding and choking. But it was peaceful too, and gentle with a gentleness that was more violent than human hate. It shrieked soft shrieks and siren calls and pulled at me seductively, and it washed over me in crimson waves of passion, and drew me to it. It filled me and emptied me all at once. And I heard the bells somewhere, clanging a harsh bronze song, a song of love and surrender and togetherness, of joining and union and never being alone.

  Storm, mindstorm, yes, it was that. But it was to an ordinary mindstorm as a supernova is to a hurricane, and its violence was the violence of love. It loved me, that mindstorm, and it wanted me, and its bells called to me, and sang its love, and I reached to it and touched, wanting to be with it, wanting to link, wanting never to be alone again. And suddenly I was on the crest of a great wave once again, a wave of fire that washed across the stars forever, and this time I knew t
he wave would never end, this time I would not be alone afterwards upon my darkling plain.

  But with that phrase I thought of Lya.

  And suddenly I was struggling, fighting it, battling back against the sea of sucking love. I ran, ran, ran, RAN … and closed my minddoor and hammered shut the latch and let the storm flail and howl against it while I held it with all my strength, resisting. Yet the door began to buckle and crack.

  I screamed. The door smashed open, and the storm whipped in and clutched at me, whirled me out and around and around. I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe.

  Then nothing.

  * * *

  I woke up back in my room, with a headache that was trying to tear my skull apart. Gourlay was sitting on a chair reading one of our books. He looked up when I groaned.

  Lya’s headache pills were still on the bedstand. I took one hastily, then struggled to sit up in bed.

  “You all right?” Gourlay asked.

  “Headache,” I said, rubbing my forehead. It throbbed, as if it was about to burst. Worse than the time I’d peered into Lya’s pain. “What happened?”

  He stood up. “You scared the hell out of us. After you began to read, all of a sudden you started trembling. Then you walked right into the goddamn Greeshka. And you screamed. Dino and the sergeant had to drag you out. You were stepping right in the thing, and it was up to your knees. Twitching, too. Weird. Dino hit you, knocked you out.”

  He shook his head, started for the door. “Where are you going?” I said.

  “To sleep,” he said. “You’ve been out for eight hours or so. Dino asked me to watch you till you came to. OK, you came to. Now get some rest, and I will too. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  “I want to talk about it now.”

  “It’s late,” he said, as he closed the bedroom door. I listened to his footsteps on the way out. And I’m sure I heard the outer door lock. Somebody was clearly afraid of Talents who steal away into the night. I wasn’t going anywhere.