Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle

by George R. R. Martin

  Lya? Hi, Lya. Where are you? You left me.

  I’m sorry. I had to. You understand, Robb. You have to. I didn’t want to be here anymore, ever, in this place, this awful place. I would have been, Robb. Men are always here, but for brief moments.

  A touch and a voice?

  Yes, Robb. Then darkness again, and a silence. And the darkling plain.

  You’re mixing two poems, Lya. But it’s OK. You know them better than I do. But aren’t you leaving out something? The earlier part. “Ah love, let us be true.…”

  Oh, Robb.

  Where are you?

  I’m—everywhere. But mostly in a cave. I was ready, Robb. I was already more open than the rest. I could skip the Gathering, and the Joining. My Talent made me used to sharing. It took me.

  Final Union?

  Yes.

  Oh, Lya.

  Robb. Please. Join us, join me. It’s happiness, you know? Forever and forever, and belonging and sharing and being together. I’m in love, Robb, I’m in love with a billion billion people, and I know all of them better than I ever knew you, and they know me, all of me, and they love me. And it will last forever. Me. Us. The Union. I’m still me, but I’m them too, you see? And they’re me. The Joined, the reading, opened me, and the Union called to me every night, because it loved me, you see? Oh, Robb, join us, join us. I love you.

  The Union. The Greeshka, you mean. I love you, Lya. Please come back. It can’t have absorbed you already. Tell me where you are. I’ll come to you.

  Yes, come to me. Come anywhere, Robb. The Greeshka is all one, the caves all connect under the hills, the little Greeshka are all part of the Union. Come to me and join me. Love me as you said you did. Join me. You’re so far away, I can hardly reach you, even with the Union. Come and be one with us.

  No. I will not be eaten. Please, Lya, tell me where you are.

  Poor Robb. Don’t worry, love. The body isn’t important. The Greeshka needs it for nourishment, and we need the Greeshka. But, oh Robb, the Union isn’t just the Greeshka, you see? The Greeshka isn’t important, it doesn’t even have a mind, it’s just the link, the medium, the Union is the Shkeen. A million billion billion Shkeen, all the Shkeen that have lived and Joined in fourteen thousand years, all together and loving and belonging, immortal. It’s beautiful, Robb, it’s more than we had, much more, and we were the lucky ones, remember? We were! But this is better.

  Lya. My Lya. I loved you. This isn’t for you, this isn’t for humans. Come back to me.

  This isn’t for humans? Oh, it IS! It’s what humans have always been looking for, searching for, crying for on lonely nights. It’s love, Robb, real love, and human love is only a pale imitation. You see?

  No.

  Come, Robb. Join. Or you’ll be alone forever, alone on the plain, with only a voice and a touch to keep you going. And in the end when your body dies, you won’t even have that. Just an eternity of empty blackness. The plain, Robb, forever and ever. And I won’t be able to reach you, not ever. But it doesn’t have to be.…

  No.

  Oh, Robb. I’m fading. Please come.

  No. Lya, don’t go. I love you, Lya. Don’t leave me.

  I love you, Robb. I did. I really did.…

  And then she was gone. I was alone on the plain again. A wind was blowing from somewhere, and it whipped her fading words away from me, out into the cold vastness of infinity.

  In the cheerless morning, the outer door was unlocked. I ascended the tower and found Valcarenghi alone in his office. “Do you believe in God?” I asked him.

  He looked up, smiled. “Sure.” Said lightly. I was reading him. It was a subject he’d never thought about.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Neither did Lya. Most Talents are atheists, you know. There was an experiment tried back on Old Earth fifty years ago. It was organized by a major Talent named Linnel, who was also devoutly religious. He thought that by using drugs, and linking together the minds of the world’s most potent Talents, he could reach something he called the Universal Yes-I-Live. Also known as God. The experiment was a dismal failure, but something happened. Linnel went mad, and the others came away with only a vision of a vast, dark, uncaring nothingness, a void without reason or form or meaning. Other Talents have felt the same way, and Normals too. Centuries ago there was a poet named Arnold, who wrote of a darkling plain. The poem’s in one of the old languages, but it’s worth reading. It shows—fear, I think. Something basic in man, some dread of being alone in the cosmos. Maybe it’s just fear of death, maybe it’s more. I don’t know. But it’s primal. All men are forever alone, but they don’t want to be. They’re always searching, trying to make contact, trying to reach others across the void. Some people never succeed, some break through occasionally. Lya and I were lucky. But it’s never permanent. In the end you’re alone again, back on the darkling plain. You see, Dino? Do you see?”

  He smiled an amused little smile. Not derisive—that wasn’t his style—just surprised and disbelieving. “No,” he said.

  “Look again, then. Always people are reaching for something, for someone, searching. Talk, Talent, love, sex, it’s all part of the same thing, the same search. And gods too. Man invents gods because he’s afraid of being alone, scared of an empty universe, scared of the darkling plain. That’s why your men are converting, Dino, that’s why people are going over. They’ve found God, or as much of a God as they’re ever likely to find. The Union is a mass-mind, an immortal mass-mind, many in one, all love. The Shkeen don’t die, dammit. No wonder they don’t have the concept of an afterlife. They know there’s a God. Maybe it didn’t create the universe, but it’s love, pure love, and they say that God is love, don’t they? Or maybe what we call love is a tiny piece of God. I don’t care, whatever it is, the Union is it. The end of the search for the Shkeen, and for Man too. We’re alike after all, we’re so alike it hurts.”

  Valcarenghi gave his exaggerated sigh. “Robb, you’re overwrought. You sound like one of the Joined.”

  “Maybe that’s just what I should be. Lya is. She’s part of the Union now.”

  He blinked. “How do you know that?”

  “She came to me last night, in a dream.”

  “Oh. A dream.”

  “It was true, dammit. It’s all true.”

  Valcarenghi stood, and smiled. “I believe you,” he said. “That is, I believe that the Greeshka uses a psi-lure, a love lure if you will, to draw in its prey, something so powerful that it convinces men—even you—that it’s God. Dangerous, of course. I’ll have to think about this before taking action. We could guard the caves to keep humans out, but there are too many caves. And sealing off the Greeshka wouldn’t help our relations with the Shkeen. But now it’s my problem. You’ve done your job.”

  I waited until he was through. “You’re wrong, Dino. This is real, no trick, no illusion. I felt it, and Lya too. The Greeshka hasn’t even a yes-I-live, let alone a psi-lure strong enough to bring in Shkeen and men.”

  “You expect me to believe that God is an animal who lives in the caves of Shkea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Robb, that’s absurd, and you know it. You think the Shkeen have found the answer to the mysteries of creation. But look at them. The oldest civilized race in known space, but they’ve been stuck in the Bronze Age for fourteen thousand years. We came to them. Where are their spaceships? Where are their Towers?”

  “Where are our bells?” I said. “And our joy? They’re happy, Dino. Are we? Maybe they’ve found what we’re still looking for. Why the hell is man so driven, anyway? Why is he out to conquer the galaxy, the universe, whatever? Looking for God, maybe …? Maybe. He can’t find him anywhere, though, so on he goes, on and on, always looking. But always back to the same darkling plain in the end.”

  “Compare the accomplishments. I’ll take humanity’s record.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “I think so.” He went to the window, and looked out. “We’ve got the only Tower on their world,�
�� he said, smiling, as he looked down through the clouds.

  “They’ve got the only God in our universe,” I told him. But he only smiled.

  “All right, Robb,” he said, when he finally turned from the window. “I’ll keep all this in mind. And we’ll find Lyanna for you.”

  My voice softened. “Lya is lost,” I said. “I know that now. I will be too, if I wait. I’m leaving tonight. I’ll book passage on the first ship out to Baldur.”

  He nodded. “If you like. I’ll have your money ready.” He grinned. “And we’ll send Lya after you, when we find her. I imagine she’ll be a little miffed, but that’s your worry.”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I shrugged, and headed for the tube. I was almost there when he stopped me.

  “Wait,” he said. “How about dinner tonight? You’ve done a good job for us. We’re having a farewell party anyway, Laurie and me. She’s leaving too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  His turn to shrug. “What for? Laurie’s a beautiful person, and I’ll miss her. But it’s no tragedy. There are other beautiful people. I think she was getting restless with Shkea, anyway.”

  I’d almost forgotten my Talent, in my heat and the pain of my loss. I remembered it now. I read him. There was no sorrow, no pain, just a vague disappointment. And below that, his wall. Always the wall, keeping him apart, this man who was a first-name friend to everyone and an intimate to none. And on it, it was almost as if there were a sign that read, THIS FAR YOU GO, and no further.

  “Come up,” he said. “It should be fun.” I nodded.

  I asked myself, when my ship lifted off, why I was leaving.

  Maybe to return home. We have a house on Baldur, away from the cities, on one of the undeveloped continents with only wilderness for a neighbor. It stands on a cliff, above a high waterfall that tumbles endlessly down into a shaded green pool. Lya and I swam there often, in the sunlit days between assignments. And afterwards we’d lie down nude in the shade of the orangespice trees, and make love on a carpet of silver moss. Maybe I’m returning to that. But it won’t be the same without Lya, lost Lya.…

  Lya whom I still could have. Whom I could have now. It would be easy, so easy. A slow stroll into a darkened cave, a short sleep. Then Lya with me for eternity, in me, sharing me, being me, and I her. Loving and knowing more of each other than men can ever do. Union and joy, and no darkness again, ever. God. If I believed that, what I told Valcarenghi, then why did I tell Lya no?

  Maybe because I’m not sure. Maybe I still hope, for something still greater and more loving than the Union, for the God they told me of so long ago. Maybe I’m taking a risk, because part of me still believes. But if I’m wrong … then the darkness, and the plain …

  But maybe it’s something else, something I saw in Valcarenghi, something that made me doubt what I had said.

  For man is more than Shkeen, somehow; there are men like Dino and Gourlay as well as Lya and Gustaffson, men who fear love and Union as much as they crave it. A dichotomy, then. Man has two primal urges, and the Shkeen only one? If so, perhaps there is a human answer, to reach and join and not be alone, and yet to still be men.

  I do not envy Valcarenghi. He cries behind his wall, I think, and no one knows, not even he. And no one will ever know, and in the end he’ll always be alone in smiling pain. No, I do not envy Dino.

  Yet there is something of him in me, Lya, as well as much of you. And that is why I ran, though I loved you.

  Laurie Blackburn was on the ship with me. I ate with her after liftoff, and we spent the evening talking over wine. Not a happy conversation, maybe, but a human one. Both of us needed someone, and we reached out.

  Afterwards, I took her back to my cabin, and made love to her as fiercely as I could. Then, the darkness softened, we held each other and talked away the night.

  THIS TOWER OF ASHES

  My tower is built of bricks, small soot-gray bricks mortared together with a shiny black substance that looks strangely like obsidian to my untrained eye, though it clearly cannot be obsidian. It sits by an arm of the Skinny Sea, twenty feet tall and sagging, the edge of the forest only a few feet away.

  I found the tower nearly four years ago, when Squirrel and I left Port Jamison in the silver aircar that now lies gutted and overgrown in the weeds outside my doorstep. To this day I know almost nothing about the structure, but I have my theories.

  I do not think it was built by men, for one. It clearly predates Port Jamison, and I often suspect it predates human spaceflight. The bricks (which are curiously small, less than a quarter the size of normal bricks) are tired and weathered and old, and they crumble visibly beneath my feet. Dust is everywhere and I know its source, for more than once I have pried loose a brick from the parapet on the roof and crushed it idly to fine dark powder in my naked fist. When the salt wind blows from the east, the tower flies a plume of ashes.

  Inside, the bricks are in better condition, since the wind and the rain have not touched them quite so much, but the tower is still far from pleasant. The interior is a single room full of dust and echoes, without windows; the only light comes from the circular opening in the center of the roof. A spiral stair, built of the same ancient brick as the rest, is part of the wall; around and around it circles, like the threading on a screw, before it reaches roof level. Squirrel, who is quite small as cats go, finds the stairs easy climbing, but for human feet they are narrow and awkward.

  But I still climb them. Each night I return from the cool forests, my arrows black with the caked blood of the dream-spiders and my bag heavy with their poison sacs, and I set aside my bow and wash my hands and then climb up to the roof to spend the last few hours before dawn. Across the narrow salt channel, the lights of Port Jamison burn on the island, and from up there it is not the city I remember. The square black buildings wear a bright romantic glow at night; the lights, all smoky orange and muted blue, speak of mystery and silent song and more than a little loneliness, while the starships rise and fall against the stars like the tireless wandering fireflies of my boyhood on Old Earth.

  “There are stories over there,” I told Korbec once, before I had learned better. “There are people behind every light, and each person has a life, a story. Only they lead those lives without ever touching us, so we’ll never know the stories.” I think I gestured then; I was, of course, quite drunk.

  Korbec answered with a toothy smile and a shake of his head. He was a great dark fleshy man, with a beard like knotted wire. Each month he came out from the city in his pitted black aircar to drop off my supplies and take the venom I had collected, and each month we went up to the roof and got drunk together. A track driver, that was all Korbec was, a seller of cut-rate dreams and secondhand rainbows. But he fancied himself a philosopher and a student of man.

  “Don’t fool yourself,” he said to me then, his face flush with wine and darkness, “you’re not missing nothin’. Lives are rotten stories, y’know. Real stories, now, they usually got a plot to ’em. They start and they go on a bit and when they end they’re over, unless the guy’s got a series goin’. People’s lives don’t do that no-how, they just kinda wander around and ramble and go on and on. Nothin’ ever finishes.”

  “People die,” I said. “That’s enough of a finish, I’d think.”

  Korbec made a loud noise. “Sure, but have you ever known anybody to die at the right time? No, don’t happen that way. Some guys fall over before their lives have properly gotten started, some right in the middle of the best part. Others kinda linger on after everything is really over.”

  Often when I sit up there alone, with Squirrel warm in my lap and a glass of wine by my side, I remember Korbec’s words and the heavy way he said them, his coarse voice oddly gentle. He is not a smart man, Korbec, but that night I think he spoke the truth, maybe never realizing it himself. But the weary realism that he offered me then is the only antidote there is for the dreams that spiders weave.

  But I am not Korbec, nor can I be, and w
hile I recognize his truth, I cannot live it.

  I was outside taking target practice in the late afternoon, wearing nothing but my quiver and a pair of cut-offs, when they came. It was closing on dusk and I was loosening up for my nightly foray into the forest—even in those early days I lived from twilight to dawn, as the dream-spiders do. The grass felt good under my bare feet, the double-curved silverwood bow felt even better in my hand, and I was shooting well.

  Then I heard them coming. I glanced over my shoulder toward the beach, and saw the dark blue aircar swelling rapidly against the eastern sky. Gerry, of course, I knew that from the sound; his aircar had been making noises as long as I had known him.

  I turned my back on them, drew another arrow—quite steady—and notched my first bull’s-eye of the day.

  Gerry set his aircar down in the weeds near the base of the tower, just a few feet from my own. Crystal was with him, slim and grave, her long gold hair full of red glints from the afternoon sun. They climbed out and started toward me.

  “Don’t stand near the target,” I told them, as I slipped another arrow into place and bent the bow. “How did you find me?” The twang of the arrow vibrating in the target punctuated my question.

  They circled well around my line of fire. “You’d mentioned spotting this place from the air once,” Gerry said, “and we knew you weren’t anywhere in Port Jamison. Figured it was worth a chance.” He stopped a few feet from me, with his hands on his hips, looking just as I remembered him: big, dark-haired, and very fit. Crystal came up beside him and put one hand lightly on his arm.

  I lowered my bow and turned to face them. “So. Well, you found me. Why?”

  “I was worried about you, Johnny,” Crystal said softly. But she avoided my eyes when I looked at her.

  Gerry put a hand around her waist, very possessively, and something flared within me. “Running away never solves anything,” he told me, his voice full of the strange mixture of friendly concern and patronizing arrogance he had been using on me for months.