Dying of the Light

by George R. R. Martin

  “Yes,” said Dirk. Suddenly he seemed to have it all. “Yes, I think he is, and that’s a big part of your problem, isn’t it? On High Kavalaan it’s not man and woman. No, it’s man and man and maybe woman, but even then she’s not so terribly important. You may love Jaan, but you don’t care for Garse Janacek all that damn much, do you?”

  “I feel a lot of affection for—”

  “Do you?”

  Gwen’s face went hard. “Stop it,” she said.

  Her voice frightened him. He drew back, suddenly and sickeningly aware of the way he had been leaning across the table, pressing, pushing, jabbing, attacking, and taunting her, he who had come to care and to help. “I’m sorry,” he blurted.

  Silence. She was staring at him, her lower lip trembling, while she drew herself together and gathered strength. “You’re right,” she finally said. “Partly, anyway. I’m not . . . well . . . not entirely happy with my lot.” She gave a forced ironic chuckle. “I guess I fool myself a lot. A bad idea, fooling yourself. Everyone does it, though, everyone. I wear the jade-and-silver and tell myself I’m more than a heldwife, more than other Kavalar women. Why? Just because Jaan says so? Jaan Vikary is a good man, Dirk, really he is, in many ways the best man I have ever known. I did love him, maybe I still do. I don’t know. I’m very confused right now. But whether I love him or not, I owe him. Debt and obligation, those are the Kavalar bonds. Love is only something Jaan picked up on Avalon, and I’m not quite sure he’s mastered it yet, either. I would have been his teyn, if I could. But he already had a teyn. Besides, not even Jaan would go that far against the customs of his world. You heard what he said about the duels—and all because he searched some old computer banks and found out one of their Kavalar folk heroes had tits.” She smiled grimly. “Imagine what would happen if he took me to teyn! He would lose everything, just everything. Ironjade is relatively tolerant, yes, but it will be centuries before any holdfast is ready for that. No woman has ever worn the iron-and-glowstone.”

  “Why?” Dirk said. “I don’t understand. All of you keep making these comments—about breeding women and heldwives and women hiding in caves afraid to come out, all that stuff. And I keep not quite believing it. How did High Kavalaan get so twisted up anyway? What do they have against women? Why is it so critical that the founder of Ironjade was female? Lots of people are, you know.”

  Gwen gave him a wan smile and rubbed her temples gently with her fingertips, as if she had a headache she was hoping to massage away. “You should have let Jaan finish,” she said. “Then you’d know as much as we do. He was only warming up. He hadn’t even gotten to the Sorrowing Plague.” She sighed. “It is all a very long story, Dirk, and right now I don’t have the goddamn energy. Wait till we get back to Larteyn. I’ll hunt up a copy of Jaan’s thesis and you can read it all for yourself.”

  “All right,” Dirk said. “But there are a few things I’m not going to be able to read in any thesis. A few minutes ago you said you weren’t sure if you loved Jaan anymore. You certainly don’t love High Kavalaan. I think you hate Garse. So why are you doing all this to yourself?”

  “You have a way of asking nasty questions,” she said sourly. “But before I answer, let me correct you on a few points. I may hate Garse, as you say. Sometimes I’m quite sure that I hate Garse, though it would kill Jaan to hear me say that. At other times, however—I wasn’t lying before when I told you that I feel considerable affection for him. When I first arrived on High Kavalaan, I was as dewy-eyed and innocent and vulnerable as I could be. Jaan had explained everything to me beforehand, of course, very patiently, very thoroughly, and I had accepted it. I was from Avalon, after all, and you can’t get more sophisticated than Avalon, can you? Not unless you’re an Earther. I’d studied all the weird cultures humanity has spread among the stars, and I knew that anyone who steps into a starship has got to be prepared to adapt to widely different social systems and moralities. I knew that sexual-familial customs vary and that Avalon was not necessarily wiser than High Kavalaan in that area. I was very wise, I thought.

  “But I wasn’t ready for the Kavalars, oh no. As long as I live I will never forget a second of the fear and the trauma of my first day and night in the holdfasts of Ironjade, as Jaan Vikary’s betheyn. Especially the first night.” She laughed. “Jaan had warned me, of course, and—hell, I just wasn’t ready to be shared. What can I say? It was bad, but I lived. Garse helped. He was honestly concerned for me, and very much for Jaan. You might even say he was tender. I confided in him; he listened and cared. And the next morning the verbal abuse started. I was frightened and hurt; Jaan was baffled and gloriously angry. He threw Garse halfway across the room the first time he called me betheyn-bitch. Garse was quiet for a little while after that. He rests fairly often, but he never stops. He is truly remarkable, in a way. He would challenge and kill any Kavalar who insulted me half so badly as he does. He knows that his jokes enrage Jaan and provoke terrible quarrels—or at least they did. By now Jaan has become dulled to it all. Yet he persists. Maybe he can’t help himself, or maybe he honestly loathes me, or maybe he just enjoys inflicting pain. If so, I haven’t given him much joy these past few years. One of the first things I decided was that I wasn’t going to let him make me cry anymore. I haven’t. Even when he comes out and says something that makes me want to split his head with an axe, I just smile and grit my teeth and try to think of something unpleasant to say back to him. Once or twice I’ve managed to throw him off his stride. Usually he leaves me feeling like a crushed bug.

  “Yet, in spite of everything, there are other moments as well. Truces, little cease-fires in our never-ending war, times of surprising warmth and compassion. Many of them at night. They always shock me when they come. They’re too intense. Once, believe it or not, I told Garse I loved him. He laughed at me. He did not love me, he said loudly, rather I was cro-betheyn to him and he treated me as he was obliged to treat me by the bond that existed between us. That was the last time I even came close to crying. I fought and I fought, and I won. I did not cry. I just shouted something at him and rushed out into the corridor. We lived underground, you know. Everyone lives underground on High Kavalaan. I wasn’t wearing much except my bracelet, and I ran around crazy, and finally this man tried to stop me—a drunk, an idiot, a blind man who could not see the jade-and-silver, I don’t know. I was so furious I pulled his sidearm out of its holster and smashed him across the face with it, the first time I’d ever hit another human being in anger, and just then Jaan and Garse arrived. Jaan seemed calm, but he was very upset. Garse was almost happy, and spoiling for a fight. As if the man I’d overpowered hadn’t been insulted enough, Garse had to tell me that I should pick up all the teeth I’d knocked out and hand them back, that I had quite enough already. They were lucky to avoid a duel over that comment.”

  “How the hell did you ever get involved in a situation like this, Gwen?” Dirk demanded. He was struggling to keep his voice from breaking. He was angry with her, hurt for her, and yet oddly—or perhaps not so oddly—elated. It was all true, everything Ruark had told him. The Kimdissi was her good friend and her confidant; no wonder she had sent for him. Her life was a misery, she was a slave, and he could set it right, him. “You must have had some idea what it would be like.”

  She shrugged. “I lied to myself,” she said, “and I let Jaan lie to me, although I think he honestly believes all the lovely falsehoods he tells me. If I had it to do over—but I don’t. I was ready for him, Dirk, and I needed him, and I loved him. And he had no iron-and-fire to give me. That he had given already, so he gave me jade-and-silver, and I took it just to be near him, with only the vaguest knowledge of what it meant. I’d lost you not long before. I didn’t want Jaan to go as well. So I put on the pretty little bracelet and said very loudly, ‘I am more than betheyn,’ as if that made a difference. Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be. To Garse, I am Jaan’s betheyn and his cro-betheyn and that is all. The names define the bonds and duties. What
more could there possibly be? To every other Kavalar it is the same. When I try to grow, to step beyond the name, Garse is there, angry, shouting betheyn! at me. Jaan is different, only Jaan, and sometimes I can’t help myself and I begin to wonder how he really feels.”

  Her hands came up on the tablecloth and became two small fists, side by side. “The same damn thing, Dirk. You wanted to make me into Jenny, and I saved myself by rejecting the name. But like a fool I took the jade-and-silver, and now I am heldwife and all the denials I can utter won’t change that. The same damn thing!” Her voice was shrill, her fists clutched so tightly the knuckles were turning white.

  “We can change it,” Dirk said quickly. “Come back to me.” He sounded inane, hopeful, despairing, triumphant, concerned; his tone was everything at once.

  At first Gwen did not answer. Finger by finger, very slowly, she unclenched her fists and stared at her hands solemnly, breathing deeply, turning her hands over and over again as if they were some strange artifacts that had been set before her for inspection. Then she put them flat on the table and pushed, rising to her feet. “Why?” she said, and the calm control had come back to her voice. “Why, Dirk? So you can make me Jenny again? Is that why? Because I loved you once, because something may be left?”

  “Yes! No, I mean. You confuse me.” He rose too.

  She smiled. “Ah, but I loved Jaan once also, more recently than you. And with him now there are other ties, all the obligations of jade-and-silver. With you, well, only memories, Dirk.” When he did not reply—he stood and waited—Gwen started toward the door. He followed her.

  The robowaiter intercepted them and blocked the way, its face a featureless metal ovoid. “The charge,” it said. “I require the number of your Festival accounts.”

  Gwen frowned. “Larteyn billing, Ironjade 797-742-677,” she snapped. “Register both meals to that number.”

  “Registered,” the robot said as it moved out of their way. Behind them the restaurant went dark.

  The Voice had their car waiting for them. Gwen told it to take them back to the airlot, and it set off through corridors that suddenly swam with cheerful colors and happy music. “The damn computer registered tension in our voices,” she said, a little angrily. “Now it’s trying to cheer us up.”

  “It’s not doing a very good job,” Dirk said, but he smiled as he said it. Then, “Thank you for the meal. I converted my standards to Festival scrip before I arrived, but it didn’t come to much, I’m afraid.”

  “Ironjade is not poor,” Gwen said. “And there isn’t much to pay for on Worlorn, in any case.”

  “Hmm. Yes. I never thought there would be, until now.”

  “Festival programming,” Gwen said. “This is the only city that still runs that way. The others are all shut down. Once a year ai-Emerel sends a man to clear all charges from the banks. Although soon it will reach the point where the trip will cost more than he picks up.”

  “I’m surprised that it doesn’t already.”

  “Voice!” she said. “How many people live in Challenge today?”

  The walls answered. “Presently I have three hundred and nine legal residents and forty-two guests, including yourselves. You may, if you wish, become residents. The charge is quite reasonable.”

  “Three hundred nine?” Dirk said. “Where?”

  “Challenge was built to hold twenty million,” Gwen said. “You can hardly expect to run into them, but they’re here. In the other cities as well, though not as many as in Challenge. The living is easiest here. The dying will be easy too, if the highbonds of Braith ever think to begin hunting the cities instead of the wild. That has always been Jaan’s great fear.”

  “Who are they?” Dirk demanded, curious. “How do they live? I don’t understand at all. Doesn’t Challenge lose a fortune every day?”

  “Yes. A fortune in energy, wasted, squandered. But that was the point of Challenge and Larteyn and the whole Festival. Waste, defiant waste, to prove that the Fringe was rich and strong, waste on a grand scale such as the manrealm had never before known, a whole planet shaped and then abandoned. You see? As for Challenge, well, if truth be known, its life is all empty motion now. It powers itself from fusion reactors and throws off the energy in fireworks no one sees. It harvests tons of food every day with its huge farming mechs, but no one eats except the handful—hermits, religious cultists, lost children turned savage, whatever dregs remain from the Festival. It still sends a boat to Musquel every day to pick up fish. There are never any fish, of course.”

  “The Voice doesn’t rewrite the program?”

  “Ah, the crux of the matter! The Voice is an idiot. It can’t really think, can’t program itself. Oh, yes, the Emereli wanted to impress people, and the Voice is big, to be sure. But really it’s very primitive compared to the Academy computers on Avalon or the Artificial Intelligences of Old Earth. It can’t think, or change very well. It does what it was told, and the Emereli told it to go on, to withstand the cold as long as it could. It will.”

  She looked at Dirk. “Like you,” she said, “it keeps on long after its persistence has lost point and meaning, it keeps on pushing—for nothing—after everything is dead.”

  “Oh?” said Dirk. “But, until everything is dead, you have to push. That’s the point, Gwen. There is no other way, is there? I rather admire the city, even if it is an overgrown idiot like you say.”

  She shook her head. “You would.”

  “There’s more,” he said. “You bury everything too soon, Gwen. Worlorn may be dying, but it isn’t dead yet. And us, well, we don’t have to be dead either. What you said back at the restaurant, about Jaan and me, I think you should think about it. Decide what’s left, for me, for him. How heavy that bracelet weighs on your arm”—he pointed—“and what name you like best, or rather who is more likely to give you your own name. You see? Then tell me what’s dead and what’s alive!”

  He felt very satisfied with the little speech. Surely, he thought, she could see that he could give up Jenny and let her be Gwen far more easily than Jaantony Vikary could make her a female teyn instead of a mere betheyn. It seemed very clear. But she only looked at him, saying nothing, until they reached the airlot.

  Then she got out of the vehicle. “When the four of us chose where we would live on Worlorn, Garse and Jaan voted for Larteyn and Arkin for Twelfth Dream,” she said. “I voted for neither. Nor for Challenge, for all its life. I don’t like living in a warren. You want to know what’s dead and what’s alive? Come, then, I’ll show you my city.”

  Then they were outside once more, Gwen tight-lipped and silent behind the controls, the sudden cold of the night air all around them, Challenge’s shining shaft vanishing behind. Now it was deep darkness again, as it had been on the night when the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies had brought Dirk t’Larien to Worlorn. Only a dozen lonely stars swung through the sky, and half of those were hidden by the churning clouds. The suns had all set.

  The city of the night was vast and intricate, with only a few scattered lights to pierce the darkness it was set in, as a pale jewel is set on soft black felt. Alone among the cities it stood in the wild beyond the mountainwall, and it belonged there, in the forests of chokers and ghost trees and blue widowers. From the dark of the wood, its slim white towers rose wraithlike toward the stars, linked by graceful spun bridges that glittered like frozen spiderwebs. Low domes stood lonely vigils amid a network of canals whose waters caught the tower lights and the twinkle of infrequent far-off stars, and ringing the city were a number of strange buildings that looked like thin-fleshed angular hands clutching up at the sky. The trees, such as there were, were outworld trees; there was no grass, only thick carpets of dimly glowing phosphorescent moss.

  And the city had a song.

  It was like no music Dirk had ever heard. It was eerie and wild and almost inhuman, and it rose and fell and shifted constantly. It was a dark symphony of the void, of starless nights and troubled dreams. It was made of moans and whis
pers and howls, and a strange low note that could only be the sound of sadness. For all of this, it was music.

  Dirk looked at Gwen, wonder in his eyes. “How?”

  She was listening as she flew, but his question tore her loose from the drifting strains, and she smiled faintly. “Darkdawn built this city, and the Darklings are a strange people. There is a gap in the mountains. Their weather wardens made the winds blow through it. Then they built the spires, and in the crest of each there is an aperture. The wind plays the city like an instrument. The same song, over and over. The weather control devices shift the winds, and with each shift, some towers sound their notes while others fall silent.

  “The music—the symphony was written on Darkdawn, centuries ago, by a composer named Lamiya-Bailis. A computer plays it, they say, by running the wind machines. The odd thing about it is that the Darklings never used computers much and have very little of the technology. Another story was popular during the days of the Festival. A legend, say. It claimed that Darkdawn was a world always perilously close to the edge of sanity, and that the music of Lamiya-Bailis, the greatest of the Darkling dreamers, pushed the whole culture over into madness and despair. In punishment, they say, her brain was kept alive, and can now be found deep under the mountains of Worlorn, hooked up to the wind machines and playing her own masterpiece over and over, forever.” She shivered. “Or at least until the atmosphere freezes. Even the weather wardens of Darkdawn can’t stop that.”

  “It’s . . .” Dirk, lost in the song, could find no words. “It fits, somehow,” he finally said. “A song for Worlorn.”

  “It fits now,” Gwen said. “It’s a song of twilight and the coming of night, with no dawn again, ever. A song of endings. In the high day of the Festival the song was out of place. Kryne Lamiya—that was this city’s name, Kryne Lamiya, although it was often called the Siren City, in much the same way that Larteyn was called the Firefort—well, it was never a popular place. It looks big, but it isn’t really. It was built to house only a hundred thousand, and it was never more than a quarter full. Like Darkdawn itself, I suppose. How many travelers ever go to Darkdawn, right on the edge of the Great Black Sea? And how many go in winter, when the Darkdawn sky is almost totally empty, with nothing to see by but the light of a few far galaxies? Not many. It takes a peculiar sort of person for that. Here too, to love Kryne Lamiya. People said the song disturbed them. And it never stopped. The Darklings didn’t even soundproof the sleeping rooms.”