Dying of the Light

by George R. R. Martin

  Vikary glanced at him and bid him silent with a short chopping motion of his right hand. “Think of us as late tourists,” he told Dirk. “We study and we wander, we drift through the forests and the dead cities, we amuse ourselves. We would cage banshees so they might be brought back to High Kavalaan, except that we have not been able to find any banshees.” He rose, draining his mug as he did so. “The day ages and we sit,” he said after he had set it back on the table. “If you would go off to the wild, you should do it soon. It will take time to cross the mountains, even by aircar, and it is not wise to stay out after dark.”

  “Oh?” Dirk finished his own beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Napkins did not seem to be part of a Kavalar table setting.

  “The banshees were never the only predator on Worlorn,” Vikary said. “There are slayers and stalkers from fourteen worlds in the forests, and they are the least of it. The humans are the worst. Worlorn is an easy, empty world today, and its shadows and its barrens are full of strangeness.”

  “You would do best to go armed,” Janacek said. “Or better still, Jaan and I should go with you, for the sake of your safety.”

  But Vikary shook his head. “No, Garse. They must go alone, and talk. It is better that way, do you understand? It is my wish.” Then he picked up an armful of plates and walked toward the kitchen. But near the door he paused and glanced back over his shoulder, and briefly his eyes met Dirk’s.

  And Dirk remembered his words, out on the rooftop at dawn. I do exist, Jaan had said. Remember that.

  “How long since you rode a sky-scoot?” Gwen asked him a short time later when they met on the roof. She had changed into a one-piece chameleon cloth coverall, a belted garment that covered her from boots to neck in dusky grayish red. The headband that held her black hair in place was the same fabric.

  “Not since I was a child,” Dirk said. His own clothing was twin to hers; she’d given it to him so they could blend into the forest. “Since Avalon. But I’m willing to try. I used to be pretty good.”

  “You’re on, then,” Gwen said. “We won’t be able to go very far or very fast, but that shouldn’t matter.” She opened the storage trunk on the gray manta-shaped aircar and took out two small silvery packages and two pairs of boots.

  Dirk sat on the aircar wing again while he changed into the new boots and laced them up. Gwen unfolded the scoots, two small platforms of soft tissue-thin metal barely large enough to stand upon. When she spread them on the ground, Dirk could trace the crosshatched wires of the gravity grids built into their undersides. He stepped on one, positioning his feet carefully, and the metal soles of his boots locked tightly in place as the platform went rigid. Gwen handed him the control device and he strapped it around his wrist so that it flipped out into the palm of his hand.

  “Arkin and I use the scoots to get around the forests,” Gwen told him while she knelt to lace up her own boots. “An aircar has ten times the speed, of course, but it isn’t always easy to find a clearing big enough to land. The scoots are good for close-in detail work, as long as we don’t try to carry too much equipment or get in too much of a hurry. Garse says they’re toys, but . . .” She stood up, stepped onto her platform, and smiled. “Ready?”

  “You bet,” Dirk said, and his finger brushed the silver wafer in the palm of his right hand. Just a little too hard. The scoot shot up and out, dragging his feet with it and whipping him upside down when the rest of him lagged behind. He barely missed cracking his head on the roof as he flipped, and ascended into the sky laughing wildly and dangling from underneath his platform.

  Gwen came after him, standing on her platform and climbing up the twilight wind with skill born of long practice, like some outworld djinn riding a silver carpet remnant. By the time she reached Dirk, he had played with the controls long enough to right himself, though he was still flailing back and forth in a wild effort to keep his balance. Unlike aircars, sky-scoots had no gyros.

  “Wheeee,” he shouted as she closed. Laughing, Gwen moved in behind him and slapped him heartily on the back. That was all he needed to flip over again, and he began careening through the sky above Larteyn in a mad cartwheel.

  Gwen was behind him, shouting something. Dirk blinked and noticed that he was about to crash into the side of a tall ebony tower. He played with his controls and shot straight up, still fighting to steady himself.

  He was high above the city and standing upright when she caught him. “Stay away,” he warned with a grin, feeling stupid and clumsy and playful. “Knock me over again and I’ll get the flying tank and laser you out of the sky, woman!” He tilted to one side, caught himself, then overcompensated and swung to the other side yelping.

  “You’re drunk,” Gwen shouted at him through the keening wind. “Too much beer for breakfast.” She was above him now, arms folded against her chest, watching his struggles with mock disapproval.

  “These things seem much more stable when you hang from them upside down,” Dirk said. He had finally achieved a semblance of balance, although the way he held his arms out to either side made it clear that he was dubious about maintaining it.

  Gwen settled down to his level and moved in beside him, surefooted and confident, her dark hair streaming behind her like a wild black banner. “How you doing?” she yelled as they flew side by side.

  “I think I’ve got it!” Dirk announced. He was still upright.

  “Good. Look down!”

  He looked down, past the meager security of the platform under his feet. Larteyn with its dark towers and faded glowstone streets was no longer beneath him. Instead there was a long long drop through an empty twilight sky to the Common far below. He glimpsed a river down there, a thread of wandering dark water in the dim-lit greenery. Then his head swam dizzily, his hands tightened, and he flipped over again.

  This time Gwen dipped underneath him as he hung upside down. She crossed her arms again and smirked up at him. “You sure are a dumb shit, t’Larien,” she told him. “Why don’t you fly right side up?”

  He growled at her, or tried to growl, but the wind took away his breath and he could only make faces. Then he turned himself over. His legs were getting sore from all of this. “There!” he shouted, and looked down defiantly to prove that the height would not spook him a second time.

  Gwen was beside him again. She looked him over and nodded. “You are a disgrace to the children of Avalon, and sky-scooters everywhere,” she said. “But you’ll probably survive. Now, do you want to see the wild?”

  “Lead me, Jenny!”

  “Then turn. We’re going the wrong way. We have to clear the mountains.” She held out her free hand and took his and together they swung around in a wide spiral, up and back, to face Larteyn and the mountain-wall. The city looked gray and washed-out from a distance, its proud glowstones a sun-doused black. The mountains were a looming darkness.

  They rode toward them together, gaining altitude steadily until they were far over the Firefort, high enough to clear the peaks. That was about top altitude for the sky-scoots; an aircar, of course, could ascend much higher. But it was high enough for Dirk. The chameleon cloth coveralls they wore had gone all gray and white, and he was thankful for their warmth; the wind was chill and the dubious day of Worlorn not much hotter than its night.

  Holding hands and shouting infrequent comments, leaning this way and that into the wind, Gwen and Dirk rode up over one mountain and down its far slope into a shadowed rocky valley, then up and down another and still another, past dagger-sharp outcroppings of green and black rock, past high narrow waterfalls and higher precipices. At one point Gwen challenged him to race, and he shouted his acceptance, and then they streaked forward as fast as the scoots and their skill could take them until finally Gwen took pity on him and came back to take his hand again.

  The range dropped off as suddenly to the west as it had risen in the east, throwing up a tall barrier to shield the wild from the light of the still-climbing Wheel. “Down,” Gwen said
, and he nodded, and they began a slow descent toward the jumbled dark greenery below. By then they had been up for more than an hour; Dirk was half-numb from the bite of the Worlorn wind, and most of his body was protesting this maltreatment.

  They landed well inside the forest, beside a lake they had seen as they came down. Gwen swooped down gracefully in a gentle curve that left her standing on a mossy beach beside the water’s edge. Dirk, afraid of smashing into the ground and breaking a leg, flicked off his grid a moment too soon and fell the last meter.

  Gwen helped him detach his boots from the skyscoot, and together they brushed damp sand and moss from his clothes and from his hair. Then she sat down beside him and smiled. He smiled back and kissed her.

  Or tried to. As he reached and put his arm around her, she pulled away, and he remembered. His hands fell, and the shadows swept across his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, mumbling. He looked away from her, toward the lake. The water was an oily green, and islands of violet fungus dotted the still surface. The only motion was the half-seen stirrings of insects skimming the shallows nearby. The forest was even darker than the city, for the mountains still hid most of Fat Satan’s disc.

  Gwen reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “No,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. I forgot too. It was almost like Avalon.”

  He looked at her and forced a faint smile, feeling lost. “Yes. Almost. I’ve missed you, Gwen, despite it all. Or should I be saying that?”

  “Probably not,” she said. Her eyes avoided his again and went wandering from him, out across the lake. The far side was lost in haze. She gazed into the distance for a long time, not moving except once, when she shivered briefly from the cold. Dirk watched her clothing slowly fade to a mottled off-white and green to match the shade of the ground she sat upon.

  Finally he reached to touch her, his hand unsure. She shrugged it away. “No,” she said.

  Dirk sighed and picked up a handful of cool sand, running it through his fingers as he thought. “Gwen.” He hesitated. “Jenny, I don’t know . . .”

  She glanced at him and frowned. “That’s not my name, Dirk. It never was. No one ever called me that except you.”

  He winced, hurt. “But why—”

  “Because it isn’t me!”

  “No one else,” he said. “It just came to me, back on Avalon, and it fit you and I called you that. I thought you liked it.”

  She shook her head. “Once. You don’t understand. You never understand. It came to mean more to me than it did at first, Dirk. More and more and more, and the things that name meant to me were not good things. I tried to tell you, even then. But that was a long time ago. I was younger, a child. I didn’t have the words.”

  “And now?” His voice was edged with overtones of anger. “Do you have the words now, Gwen?”

  “Yes. For you, Dirk. More words than I can use.” She smiled at some secret joke and shook her head so her hair tossed in the wind. “Listen, private names are fine. They can be a special sharing. With Jaan it is like that. The highbonds have long names because they fill many roles. He can be Jaan Vikary to a Wolfman friend on Avalon, and high-Ironjade in the councils of Gathering, and still Riv in worship and Wolf in highwar and yet another name in bed, a private name. And there is a rightness to it, because all those names are him. I recognize that. I like some of him better than other parts, like Jaan more than Wolf or high-Ironjade, but they are all true for him. The Kavalars have a saying, that a man is the sum of all his names. Names are very important on High Kavalaan. Names are very important everywhere, but the Kavalars know that truth better than most. A thing without a name has no substance. If it existed, it would have a name. And, likewise, if you give a thing a name, somewhere, on some level, the thing named will exist, will come to be. That’s another Kavalar saying. Do you understand, Dirk?”

  “No.”

  She laughed. “You’re as muddled as ever. Listen, when Jaan came to Avalon he was Jaantony Ironjade Vikary. That was his name, his whole name. The most important part of it was the first two words—Jaantony is his true name, his birth name, and Ironjade is his holdfast and his alliance. Vikary is a made-up name he took at puberty. All of the Kavalars take such names, usually the names of highbonds they admire, or mythic figures, or personal heroes. A lot of Old Earth surnames have survived that way. The thought is that by taking the name of a hero the boy will gain some of the man’s qualities. On High Kavalaan it actually seems to work.

  “Jaan’s chosen name, Vikary, is a bit unusual in several respects. It sounds like an Old Earth hand-me-down, but it isn’t. From all accounts Jaan was an odd child—dreamy, very moody, much too introspective. He liked to listen to the eyn-kethi sing and tell stories when he was very little, which is bad for a Kavalar boy. The eyn-kethi are the breeding women, the perpetual mothers of the holdfast, and a normal child is not supposed to associate with them any more than he has to. When Jaan was older he spent all his time alone, exploring caves and abandoned mines in the mountains. Safely away from his holdfast-brothers. I don’t blame him. He was always an object of torment, essentially friendless, until he met Garse. Who is notably younger, but still wound up as Jaan’s protector through the later stages of his childhood. Eventually that all changed. When Jaan approached the age when he would be subject to the code duello, he turned his attention to weaponry and mastered it very quickly. He is really a fantastic study; today he is terribly fast and considered deadly, better even than Garse, whose skill is mainly instinctual.

  “It wasn’t always like that, however. Anyway, when it came time for Jaantony to choose a name, he had two great heroes, but he did not dare name either one to the highbonds. Neither of them were Ironjades, and worse, both were semi-pariahs, villains of Kavalar history, charismatic leaders whose causes had lost and then been subjected to generations of oral abuse. So Jaan sort of shoved their names together and juggled the sounds around until the product looked like an old family name imported from Earth. The highbonds accepted it without a thought. It was only his chosen name, the least important part of his identity. It’s the part that comes last, after all.”

  She frowned. “Which is the point of this whole story. Jaantony Ironjade Vikary came to Avalon, and he was mostly Jaantony Ironjade. Except that Avalon is a surname-conscious world, and there he found that he was mostly Vikary. The Academy registered him under that name, and his instructors called him Vikary, and it was a name he had to live by for two years. Pretty soon he became Jaan Vikary, in addition to being Jaantony Ironjade. I think he rather liked it. He’s always tried to stay Jaan Vikary ever since, although it was not easy after we returned to High Kavalaan. To the Kavalars he’ll always be Jaantony.”

  “Where did he get all the other names?” Dirk found himself asking, despite himself. Her story fascinated him and seemed to offer new insights into what Jaan Vikary had said that dawn, up on the roof.

  “When we were married, he brought me back to Ironjade with him and became a highbond, automatically a member of the highbond council,” she said. “That put a ‘high’ in his name, and gave him the right to own private property independent of the holdfast, and to make religious sacrifices, and to lead his kethi, his holdfast-brothers, in war. So he got a war name, sort of a rank, and a religious name. Once those kinds of names were very important. Not so much anymore, but the customs linger.”

  “I see,” Dirk said, although he didn’t, not completely. The Kavalars seemed to set unusually great store on marriage. “What has this got to do with us?”

  “A lot,” Gwen said, becoming very serious again. “When Jaan reached Avalon and people started calling him Vikary, he changed. He became Vikary, a hybrid of his own iconoclastic idols. That’s what names can do, Dirk. And that was our downfall. I loved you, yes. Much. I loved you, and you loved Jenny.”

  “You were Jenny!”

  “Yes, no. Your Jenny, your Guinevere. You said that, over and over again. You called me those names as often as you called me Gwen, but you were rig
ht. They were your names. Yes, I liked it. What did I know of names or naming? Jenny is pretty enough, and Guinevere has the glow of legend. What did I know?

  “But I learned, even if I never had the words for it. The problem was that you loved Jenny—only Jenny wasn’t me. Based on me, perhaps, but mostly she was a phantom, a wish, a dream you’d fashioned all on your own. You fastened her on me and loved us both, and in time I found myself becoming Jenny. Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be. All truth is in naming, and all lies as well, for nothing distorts like a false name can, a false name that changes the reality as well as the seeming.

  “I wanted you to love me, not her. I was Gwen Delvano, and I wanted to be the best Gwen Delvano I could be, but still myself. I fought being Jenny, and you fought to keep her, and never understood. And that was why I left you.” She finished in a cool, even voice, her face a mask, and then she looked away from him again.

  And he did understand, at last. For seven years he never had, but now, briefly, he grasped it. This then, he thought, was why she sent the whisperjewel. Not to call him back, no, not that. But to tell him, finally, why she had sent him away. And there was a sense to it. His anger had suddenly faded into weary melancholy. Sand ran cold and unheeded through his fingers.

  She saw his face, and her voice softened. “I’m sorry, Dirk,” she said. “But you called me Jenny again. And I had to tell you the truth. I have never forgotten, and I can’t imagine you have, and I’ve thought of it over the years. It was so good, when it was good, I kept thinking. How could it go wrong? It scared me, Dirk. It really scared me. I thought, if we could go wrong, Dirk and I, then nothing is sure, nothing can be counted on. That fear crippled me for two years. But finally, with Jaan, I understood. And now it came out, the answer I found. I’m sorry if it is a painful answer for you. But you had to know.”

  “I had hoped . . .”

  “Don’t,” she warned. “Don’t start it, Dirk. Not again. Don’t even try. We’re over. Recognize that. We’ll kill ourselves if we try.”