Awake in the Night Land (7 page)

Perithoös said, “Telemachos will be against it, no matter what the South Bay Window scholars suggest. All new things pucker up his mouth, for they are sour to his taste.”

“Only when they are worse than the old things.” I said.

Perithoös tossed a leaf at me: “For you, that is each time.”

“Almost each time. Mostly, what is called ‘new’ is nothing more than old mistakes decked out in new garb.”

“The New Learning is revolutionary and hopeful. Come! Shake off the old horrors of old dreams! The world is less hideous than we thought. These studies prove that the outside was never meant for man; do you see the implication?”

I shook my head.

He said happily: “It implies that our ancestors did not come from the Night Lands. We are not the last of a defeated people, no, but the first of a race destined to conquer! The Bay scholars claim that we have always dwelt in this pyramid, and deny the old myths. Look at the size and shape of the doors and door-handles. It was clear that men first evolved from marmosets and other creatures in the zoological gardens. Our ancestors kept other creatures who bore live young, cats and dogs and homunculi, you see, in special houses, this was back before the Second Age of Starvation. I assume our ancestors ate them to extinction.”

I blinked at him, wondering if he had lost his mind, or if I had lost my ability to tell when he was joking. “ ‘Evolved’?”

“By natural selection. Blind chance. We were the first animals who were of a size and stature to pass easily down these corridors and enter and exist in the places here. Other creatures were too large or too small, and these were cast out in the Night Land after many unrecorded wars of prehistory. The New Learning allows us hope to escape from the promise of universal death for our race: We need merely wait for the time when we will evolve to be suited to fit the environment outside; and we will be changed; and those horrors will no longer seem hideous to the changed brains of the creatures we shall become.”

I said sternly: “The Old Learning speaks of such a possibility as well. It is hinted that the abhumans were once True Men, before the House of Silence altered them. The tradition of the Capsule of Release is not without roots.”

“Prejudice! Antique parochialism! The only reason why what we think of as True Men prevailed, is because our hands were best fitted to work the controls of the lifts and valves, our eyes best adapted to the lighting conditions, and we were small enough to enter the crawlspaces if giants chased us. Those giants outside are outside because they were too big for these chambers.”

“And if we never dwelt in any place except this pyramid, whence came the ancestress of Hellenore? Whence came Mirdath? Or does your book prove she does not exist as well?”

He opened his mouth, glanced at Hellenore (who gave him an arch look), and closed it again. He dismissed the question with an airy wave of his hand. “Whatever might be the case here, skepticism will break down all the old rules and old ways, and leave us free. To live as we wish and love as we wish! Who could not long for such a thing?”

“Those who know the barren places where such wishful thinking leads,” I said heavily, climbing to my feet.

Unexpectedly, Perithoös seemed angry. He shook his finger at me. “And where does thinking like
yours
lead, Telemachos? Are we always to be frozen in place, living the lives our ancestors lived?”

I did not then guess (though I should have) what provoked him. The traditional way of arranging a marriage, and so, by extension, the traditional way of doing anything, could not have had much appeal for him, not just then.

I spoke more sternly than I should have: “We are men born in a land of eternal darkness. We grope where we cannot see clearly. Why mistrust what ancient books say? Why mistrust what our souls say? Our forefathers gave us this lamp, and the flame was lit in brighter days, when men saw further. I agree the lamp-light of such far-off lore, is dim for us; but surely that proves it to be folly, not wisdom, to cast the lamp aside: for then we are blind.”

He said: “What use is light to us, if all it shows us is images of horror?”

I said, “There are still great deeds to be done; there will be heroes in times to come.” And I did not say aloud, but surely Perithoös saw my thought:
unless this generation makes all its children to forget what heroism is.

“Bah!” said Perithoös. His anger was hidden now, smothered somewhat beneath a show of light-heartedness. He smiled. “Will our writings be published in any other place than within these walls? Why will we do praiseworthy acts, when we know there will be nothing and no one left to sing our praises? Even you, who claim you will be born once more, will have no place left to be born into, when this redoubt falls.”

I said, “Do not be jealous. I am not unlike you. This life could be my final one. You both have had others you forget; but this could be the first you will remember next time.”

Perithoös looked troubled when I said this; I saw on his face how eerie my words (which seemed so normal to me) must have sounded to him.

Hellenore said eagerly, “What do you remember of us? Were Perithoös and I–” But then she broke off and finished haltingly; “How did the three of us know each other before?”

I said, “You were one of Usire’s company, and lived in a strong place, a place of encampment, in a valley our telescopes no longer see, for the Watching Thing of the Northwest moved to block the view, once the House of Silence smothered the area with its influence. You, milady, were an architect, for women studied the liberal arts in those strange times; and you were possessed of the same gift you have now. In those times, you saw these ages now, and you sculpted one of the
orichalcum
doors before the main museum of Usire’s stronghold, and wrought the door-panels with images of things to come.”

Perithoös smiled sourly. “What Telemachos is not willing to say is ….”

I interrupted him. “Madame, I was favored by you then, though I was of high rank and you were not. I helped sculpt the other door with images of things that had been.”

Hellenore looked embarrassed. I hope my face did not show the shame I felt.

I turned to Perithoös, but I continued speaking to Hellenore, though I did not look at her. “What Perithoös is not willing to say is—since we are being honest and free with each other’s secrets—he cannot fathom why I am not jealous of your love for him, even though he can see in my mind that I am not. He sees it, but he does not believe it. But that is the answer. Last time, he lost. This time, me. It does not mean we are not friends and always will be.”

Hellenore was disquieted: I could see the look in her eye. “So I have not loved the same man in all ages, in every life…”

She was no doubt thinking of Mirdath the Beautiful, whose own true love was constant through all time.

I said awkwardly: “You have always loved noble men.”

But she was looking doubtfully at Perithoös, and he was looking angrily at me. Odd that he was now angry. Surely I had said no more than what he had been about to say was in my mind. But perhaps he did not expect Hellenore to take seriously the thought that they were not eternal lovers.

Perithoös said: “No doubt if we three are born in some remote age in the future, and find ourselves the very last left living of mankind, you will seek to do the noble deed of poisoning minds against me, and worming your way into intimacies where you are not wanted! Is this the kind of praiseworthy and noble things you practice, Telemachos?”

Angry answers rose to my lips, but I knew that, even if I did not say them aloud, Perithoös would see them burning in my heart. With no more than a nod, and a muttered apology (how glad I was later to have uttered it, even if they did not hear!) I spun on my heel and marched from the grove, dashing the wet ferns away from my face with awkward gestures. The scattered drops dripped down my cheeks.

Behind me, I heard Hellenore saying, “Don’t speak ill of Telemachos!”

Perithoös spoke in a voice of surprise. “What is this?” (which I took to be a sign that she had not had in her mind what to say before she spoke).

She said, “I foresee that my family will bring more pressure to bear against Telemachos, for my father suspects he knows the secret places where we meet. He will bear it manfully, and not betray us, though his family will suffer for it—you have chosen your friend well, Perithoös.”

Perithoös said, “Ah. Well, he actually chose me.”

She murmured something softly back. By then I was out of ear-shot.

My dial marked sixty hours passing while I descended the icy slope into this land, Place Where the Silent Ones Kill, and I slept twice and ate of the tablets three times. The altimeter built into the dial measured the descent to be twenty-two thousand feet. During the middle part of that time, I passed through an area of cold mists where the air was unhealthy, and left me dazed and sick.

This area of bad mist was a low-hanging layer of cloud. The cloud formed an unseen ceiling over a dark land of ash cones, craters, and dry riverbeds, lit now and again by strange, slow flares of gray light from overhead. The ash cones in this area were tall enough to be decapitated by the low-hanging clouds. I spent another thirty hours wandering at random in this land, hoping to stumble across some feature or landmark I would know from my memory-dreams.

Once, a flickering gray light of particular intensity trembled through the clouds above. I saw the silhouette of what I thought (at first) was yet one more ash cone; but it had a profile; I saw heavy brows, slanting cheeks, the muzzle and mouth-parts of a Behemoth, but huge, far more huge than any of his cousins ever seen near the Last Redoubt. A new breed of them, perhaps? It was as still as a Watching Thing, and a terrible awareness, a sense of sleepless vigilance came from it. It was taller than a Fixed Giant, for the dread face was wrapped partly in the low-hanging clouds, and wisps blew across its burning, horrible eyes. How one of that kind had come to be here, or why, was a mystery before which I am mute.

I looked left and right. In the dim and seething half-light of the cloud overhead, it seemed to me that there were other Behemoths here; two more I saw staring north, their eyes unwinking. I traveled along the bottoms of the dead river-beds after that, hoping to avoid the gaze of the Behemoths: but now I knew the place I sought lay in the direction the giant creatures faced.

The gray light faded, and I walked in darkness for thirty-five hours. A briefer flare of gray light came again; and I saw, in the distance, a great inhuman face gazing toward me, and yet I saw nearer at hand, another Behemoth to my left facing toward him. By these signs, I knew the massive shadow rising between me and that far Behemoth was what I sought.

The colorless light-flare ended, and all was dark as a tomb. But I felt a faint pressure, as of extraterrestrial thought reaching out, and I feared the Behemoth facing me, over all those miles, had seen me.

I crept forward more warily. The ground here was becoming irregular underfoot, sloping downward. I walked and crawled across the jagged slabs of broken rock I found beneath my feet and fingers, ever downward. I could not see enough to confirm whether this was a crater-lip.

After another mile, ground changed under my hands. Here there was ash and sand underfoot, for soft debris, over the aeons, had filled this crater-bottom. I was able to stand and move without much noise, and I waved the haft of my weapon before me in the dark as I walked, the blade unlit, like a blind-man’s cane, hoping it would warn me of rocks or sudden pits or the legs of motionless giants.

After an hour’s walk or two, under my boot, I felt smooth and hard stones. Stooping, I traced their shape in the dark. They were square, fitted together. Manmade. A road. A few more steps along, I felt something looming in the utter dark near me: by touch, I found it was a stele, a mile-stone cut with letters of an ancient language.

I knew the glyphs from former lives: the name spelled USIRE.

One hundred, two hundred paces further on, and my fingers touched the pillars and post of a great gate. I touched a bent shape that had once been a hinge: I touched the broken gate-bars, the shattered cylinders that had once been pistons holding these doors shut against the night.

Beyond the doors, I felt nothing but more sand, and here and there a slab of stone or huge column of bent and rusted metal. I sensed nothing alive here; no Earth-Current pulsing through power-lines; no throb of living metal. The place where wholesome men dwell often will carry a sense in the aether, like the perfume of a beautiful woman who has just left the chamber, a hint that something wholesome and fair had once been here: there was nothing like that here.

Instead, I felt a coldness. I felt no horror or fear in my heart, and I realized how strange that must be.

I was surely near the center of where a ring of the Behemoths bent their gazes; even in the dark, I should have felt it as a weight on my heart, a sense of suffocation in my soul. Instead I was at ease.

Or else benumbed.

How very silent it was here!

Slowly at first, and then with greater speed, I backed away from the broken gates that once had housed the stronghold of Usire. Blind in the utter dark, I ran.

I was still in the open when the gray light came again, and slowly trembled from cloud to cloud overhead, lighting the ground below with fits and starts, a dull beam touching here, a momentary curtain of light falling there, allowing colorless images to appear and disappear.

I beheld a mighty ruin where once had been a metropolis; its dome was shattered and rent, and its towers were utterly dark. Here and there among the towers were shapes that were not towers, and their expressionless eyes were turned down; watching the ruins at their feet, waiting with eternal, immortal patience, for some further sign of the life that had been quenched here, countless ages ago.

More than merely giants stood waiting here. The gray light shifted through the clouds, and beams fell near me.

A great company of hooded figures, shrouded in long gray veils, stood without noise or motion facing the broken walls. They were tall as tall men, but more slender. The nearest was not more than twelve feet from me, but its hood was facing away.