Woman Who Loved the Moon (13 page)

Ares-Ak

Kimbel 28

Sotoko told me!

We went to the Great Temple. I wanted to see it again before leaving. Terra has nothing left that’s old. The Great Temple of Ares-Ak is four thousand years old. It’s attended by priests, and visited daily by throngs of devotees who come to question the Wheel. Pir could not take me, and Sotoko, with more sensitivity than I have come to expect from him, offered to be my escort.

The Temple is a cavernous mandala of a building. It has eight long hallway entrances, like octopus arms, to lead the visitor inward towards the center. In the center, under a dome, is the Oracle Wheel. It is eight feet in diameter, brass, and polished bright with constant touching. Sotoko studies how to divine the future from its intricate glyphs. Pir is a master at it. He says: “All that can be known of the universe is contained here.” It looks to me like a giant roulette wheel. I’ve seen it work. The comparison is apt. First, you tell the priest your question. Then you stand at one of the eight compass points, and the priest spins the Wheel. Where it stops is your answer, its meaning modified by the meaning of the compass point you chose. There are obvious possibilities for abuse in the system. The priests could get fat selling answers. They don’t. It has happened—I have read it in the histories—but at this time, whatever corruptions attach to the Wheel are temporarily out of order.

Sotoko said to me, as we walked away from the Wheel, “I asked the Wheel a question about you.”

I was surprised.

“It said you should be told what you want to know.”

I looked at him, not yet understanding.

He said: “You want to know about the Saints. You want to know how they become Saints.”

I said, “Yes. I do.”

“It is a drug.”

I managed not to stop conspicuously dead in the hallway. A drug! I know of substances that simulate physiologically a spiritual condition: peyote, DMSO, certain forms of Base-LSD. Their enlightenment fades. This drug is much more potent.

It also seems to be immensely toxic.

I wonder where they get it.

I’ll talk with Pir at sunset tomorrow, when I go to tell the old man good-bye.

* * *

Ares-Ak

Kimbel 29, Midnight.

Mary is dead.

She collapsed at dinner, convulsing, febrile, scorched like a piece of fluff in a candle flame. She went swiftly into coma. She died in three hours. We have just finished burying her, shoveled into the treacherous alien sand with haste. Bodies decay fast on Driman. The ship will be here tomorrow. I have never before understood the true meaning of the word “irony.” It is like iron—a barbarous weight, too heavy to bear. I
must
write about this evening at the temple—but the weight is too heavy. If Morgan walks in on me now I will throw this book at him—or else I will cry. I have not yet been able to cry.

The seed of my act lies within me now, ripening, ripening...

* * *

The Daffyd ap Llewellyn

Ship’s time: night.

The ship is in Hyperspace, hopping around in the Hype like a busy mechanical flea. We have been to three other solar systems, and are just now heading for home. My sense of time is wrecked. It doesn’t matter.

I couldn’t eat dinner, again. Occasionally I’m thirsty; but 50 cc. of water is enough to quench my thirst. I’ve lost three kilograms. I itch. It doesn’t matter.

Morgan said to me this morning, over the breakfast I didn’t eat, “You’ve changed, Lex.” I know to what he attributes it. I am mellow, like a melon—I am ripening. I ripen into death.

I had expected it to be a pill, or a sacramental wafer. But what Pir handed me was a little rectangle of cake, brown at the edges, like shortbread. “Do what you wish,” he said to me, and then he went away. I took out the sterile tube I so carefully saved out of my last-minute packing. I thought of Alice with a piece of mushroom in her fist. I thought of Marie Curie, studying the radiation burns on her own hands. What strange symbols imagination uses to speak with consciousness! I ate the cake. It tasted bitter. I put a crumb of it into the tube. Were Sotoko and Pir peering out from behind a pillar, watching their experiment walk down the hall? I didn’t see them. I left.

I have a list of questions written down. I will try to remember to answer them. I will try to keep records of how much I drink, how much weight I lose, what my symptoms are. There are tiny scaly lesions on my torso and my upper arms. My mouth is always dry. I sweat a lot. My heart pounds. I smile. I hope the crumb, safe in its labelled tube, contains enough of the drug for analysis. I suspect it acts on the central nervous system, rather like our amphetamines. I’ll never know for sure.

I just had a thought. Will my body remain uncorrupted for weeks after I die? The lab won’t have to pickle the remains. That should confuse them.

* * *

The Daffyd ap Llewellyn

Another time.

I cannot tell how much time has passed since my last set of notes. My temperature is normal. I do not eat. I do not drink. I smile. My skin is paper-dry: my body withers. I hold the pen with difficulty; my fingers forget. What is my name? My mind cannot recall. What am I doing this for? Oh yes—I know. I wanted to record the change. Within me something is working. I am being drained of life: How do I record that? Hold me up to the mirror of other faces and my life like light reflects in them: I am their sun.

I burn. Like a smiling sun I burn away.

I am alone in a room. They do not talk to me anymore. They have taken away my thermometer and my charts, and stuck a long needle into my arm. They visit me—like a sacred relic.

I am empty, and I burn. My face in rictus smiles, and they smile back. They give names to what I am becoming, never seeing truly what I am. I am their sacrifice.

How much longer can this go on?

Until there is nothing left.

Now I know the answer, if anyone is asking: the Saints of Driman dream of death.

It is dark.

The center is emptied. The center is emptied.

The Light...!

I Dream of a Fish, I Dream of a Bird

This was the first story I sold to an sf magazine. I was inordinately proud of it. It appeared in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
in the summer of 1977. Originally it had been a rather unwieldy novella, but after that was rejected a few times I took it back, cut it to bits, and entirely restructured the story.

The imagery of the story came from two specific sources. It’s rare that I can pinpoint the creative moment so precisely. The first source was a dream I had. I had just read Robert Silverberg’s novel
The World Inside,
and that night I dreamed about his 1000 storey towers, the urban monads. But in my dream, the towers were set in the sea.

The second source was a song written by David Crosby and Stephen Stills, and recorded by them and by The Jefferson Airplane: “Wooden Ships.” I liked the Airplane’s version better, and listened to it constantly. There is a line in it which goes “Silver people on the shoreline, leave us be...” and though the sense of the line in the song is very different from what the image became in my story, that is where the image of Illis originated.

It’s one of the few stories I’ve written about the doings of science, and it’s been pointed out to me that it’s misleading: most discoveries in science are made when the discoverer was looking the other way. I know that researchers rarely find what they are looking for (though they often find something else); nevertheless it has happened. We don’t, by the way, have an artificial skin, yet, and when we do it probably won’t be made of fish scales. But the chemistry is not impossible, only unlikely, and I want to thank Katherine MacLean (thanks, Katie!) for suggesting it.

* * *

Forty miles off the coast, anchored in the sea floor, Vancouver stood.

It had been designed and built before the Change, for bored, rich land-dwellers to play in. Sixty years after the Change, it was a tower filled with refugees. Pictures in the library showed the abandoned land: brown, bleak, and ruined, with skeletal steel buildings twisted and broken across it, like the torn masts of wrecked ships. War, disease, famine, and madness had created that.

The names of the lost cities—New York, Boston, Ellay, Tokyo, Cairo, Capetown—and the burnt lands, were a litany of lament in their history lessons.

Where the radiation levels let them get to it, the shards of steel engraving the gullied lands were City salvage—a needed, dangerous harvest.

* * *

Illis swung on the handle of the door, and pushed. It opened grudgingly, silently, as he thrust his weight against it. Smooth metal felt cold on his palms. He slipped through the narrow space into the dark hallway. This made the fifth time he had sneaked out into the sleeping skyscraper, to climb the webway. He was not supposed to go out of the Children’s Floor at night.

But it was hard to stay still in bed, when dreams left him with a dry mouth, twitching muscles, and visions winging through his brain.

He ran to the window at the end of the corridor, and looked out—and down. Waves beneath him humped and bumped in dark, endless circles.

Nose against the cold glass, he looked east, towards land. On clear bright days he saw it, or thought he saw it. He dreamed about it: only in his dreams it was green, and there were birds. He had never seen a bird; there were none, but in his dreams they soared against the clouds in graceful spirals, making odd mewing sounds.
I want to be a bird.

He had told his mother Janna about the birds in his dreams. “Maybe there is memory in your blood,” she’d said. “I dream of birds, too.”

“Have you seen one!”

But no, she had shaken her head.

He walked back down the hall. Set in the wall, like a mosaic or a painting, was the round, rainbow-colored webway door.

Illis wiped his palms on his jumpsuit. “A climbing fool,” Janna called him. She was one, too; she had taught him to climb. He liked sailing. He was good at handling the boats, careful and attentive, though he was only ten, and uncomfortably small for his age. But he was a City child, and his delight was in climbing.

Even on tiptoe, he couldn’t hold down the release set at the top of the door. It was there on purpose, he well knew, so that small children could not finger it curiously and by mistake open the door. There was no one in the shadowy hall to stop him. He took a breath, and jumped for the release, holding with both hands, hanging from the handle, pulling it sideways with his weight. The door slid back. He looked down.

Imagine a spider, trapped in a long vertical pipe, spinning web after web at regular intervals from the bottom to the top of the pipe. Look down the pipe. You will see layer upon layer of web, until the layers blend to your eyes. Look up. It looks the same. Illis checked to see that there was no one at the net beneath him. Then he hooked his fingers over the rope that dangled from just inside the entrance.

He swung out, twisting around to touch the red button that opened and closed the door from the inside. Then he set his feet against the lip of the doorway and kicked off into the center of the web.

Falling—falling—sproong! He landed bouncing, curling his body like a ball to take the shock. The net bucked and quivered. He balanced on it and looked around for a “hole.” There was one, a meter away. He slid easily through it, hung one-handed from the rope next to it, and dropped. SPROONG.

The webway was playground, gymnasium, and stairway to the skyscraper city. Illis couldn’t see why anyone bothered to use the lifts, except for going up. Climbing up on the webway, going up the knotted ropes, hauling himself back up through the holes, made his arms ache. But going down was like flying! He dropped again. That was three. The farther he got from his floor, the harder it was for him to get back there. The danger of being caught excited him almost as much as the webway itself.

Above him the door slid back.

Illis looked up, counting. Go in! he thought at the net-obscured form. Be lazy. Take the lift! But the person was not being lazy. Illis’s jumpsuit felt suddenly tight and hot. He scuttled for the webway door and punched the inside button. The door opened and he swung through it. He pressed against the wall by the hole in the wall, listening to the steady descent. I’ll wait till there’s no one there, he thought. Then I’ll get back on the web and I’ll climb home, to the Children’s Floor.

“What are
you
up to?” asked an amused voice above his intent head.

Illis looked up. Leaning over him was a very tall woman, with black hair and brown skin and amber eyes. She looked exactly like his mother. “Nothing,” he said, and ducked under her arm. He ran down the hall. A door came slapping in front of him. He hauled on the handle with all his strength, and scooted inside. It smelled of soap, and fish. It was cold. He heard water running. Around him the tall bulk of machinery gleamed metal. He searched for a corner to hide in, careful as he went scrambling to keep his elbows in.