Day by Night Page 2
As so often in the past, Vel Thaidis felt herself shut from the feast, an eavesdropper and misfit.
The salon was reached by an escalator, and was located near the roof on the zenith side of the palace. The salon’s zenith wall was all one great painted window, and so a reflected tracery of crimson, lavender and topaz flowers lay draped like ghosts across the whole chamber. Scattered about, Velday’s guests lolled at their individual tables, while the service robots helped them to hot and cold dishes, wine, steaming caffea, sweets, from the opened food hatches to the rear.
A voice-service robot came to Vel Thaidis as she entered. It too, like her attendants, was attractively styled and had a pleasant tone.
“Shall I set a place for you, Vel Thaidis?”
She had already eaten, but refused the robot in the Courteous Address, and asked for a goblet of fruit juice mixed with the amber Hirz wine. Velday’s guests were now calling to her, in their own mechanically courteous way, trying to propitiate her. How strange, she thought, taking the cut-crystal glass in one hand, the paw of Kewel Yune Chure in the other, I am wary of these people, and they are equally wary of me. How stupid it is.
Aside from Kewel, Darvu Yune Chure was also present. Chure was an extensive family, Kewel and Darvu cousins, attached as brothers, and both idiots—so Vel Thaidis classified them. Another idiot, this time a feminine example, Omevia Yune Ond, reclined against Ceedres’ shoulder. An attendant Ond robot waited beside her chair and a live feline sprawled in her lap, its spine under her elegant brassy hand with its black lacquer nails. Ceedres similarly affected the “danger” color of the Yunes—the black of his draped tunic, which had been masked on the shore beneath a white suncloak.
Velday lounged at the other side of Ceedres. Sometimes he pushed morsels to Omevia’s feline, which eagerly bit at them, nearly taking his fingers with the food. Velday and Ceedres were telling each other a long and complicated joke, and seemed drunk. Everyone did.
“What then?” Velday said to Ceedres.
“Then,” said Ceedres. He paused to make a dramatic, eloquent gesture. “The god forced her to bypass the five hundred and five gates of paradise, and drew her under the ground, and she found herself in a black and unbearable place of nothing. White fires blazed overhead and white venoms underfoot. She could neither breathe, nor speak, nor plead with him. At which the god whispered in her ear: ‘You requested it. Now you have it. Savor.’ ”
Velday and Omevia were both vociferous with amusement.
“You fool,” said Velday, delightedly.
Vel Thaidis, victim of paranoia, concluded that the story, whatever it was, had in some fashion been intended to mock her with its female protagonist. The background details appeared to have to do with ancient Yunean mythology, long-outgrown, concerning a floral heaven and a black hell beneath the planet, into which the gods of science plunged malefactors. Probably Ceedres’ black garment had given rise to the tale.
Ceedres now got to his feet. He raised his cup to her.
“I drink to Velday’s beautiful sister, who hates me.”
He drank, dropped the cup, and cried in a strangled voice: “I’ll die young after all.”
“Why, whatever is the matter?” demanded Omevia.
Ceedres sank down again beside her, murmured in her ear and “died” gently on her breast. Omevia laughed.
“He says I must inform Vel Thaidis that he has swallowed his tongue.”
Dark-skinned as they were, blushes went generally unnoticed in the Yunea. Yet Vel Thaidis felt her cheeks scald.
“I suppose,” she said, measuring out the words, “that the house of Thar, having reduced itself to one madman in the past seven hundred years, could be extinguished so easily.”
No laughter answered Vel Thaidis’ jest. It was vitriol, and in very bad taste. The slow and apparently hopeless fall of the Thar estate, brought about by an ill fortune that struck rarely, yet could strike nevertheless anyone of the princely families, was not usually referred to.
Vel Thaidis noted Velday’s remorse and was almost contrite. Then Ceedres sat up and looked at her. She was prepared to be alarmed and defiant before his anger, or abashed before his pride and anguish. Instead, he again simply copied her expression—which she saw was stony, with wide, hard eyes.
“Your scorn acted like a blow between the shoulders,” he said, “and, as you see, I’ve revived. For my house, as you know, a good marriage would save it. What do you say?”
The breath went out of her as it had gone out of the girl in the story. Abruptly, the accustomed triangular garment, which would never be altered, had evaporated. And, as abruptly, she knew what she had had to fear all along.
There was a still, still silence.
Velday broke it, saying, very lightly while smiling, “Can this be a marriage proposal to my sister, Ceedres? Or are you and she in combat to determine who has the least tact?”
“Oh, a genuine marriage proposal,” Ceedres replied, now adopting Velday’s smiling, cautious face, “uttered from unrequited love (was there ever anything so sad?) and in complete fore-acceptance of her refusal.”
Kewel Yune Chure giggled, and threw a candy to Omevia’s feline, which sprang to catch it.
Vel Thaidis watched the painted, motionless sun and window pattern reflected on all of them and on herself. The sun did not change, but everything else—
She was in her twenty-first year, her eyes were full of tears and she did not know where to hide herself. She had realized at least how much she distrusted Ceedres Yune Thar, and how much she was allergic to his ambitions and his whims. And that she loved him.
* * *
• • •
“Let me in,” Velday said outside her door.
“Let him in,” she told the door. It drew silkenly aside, and her brother walked into the spacious apartment, delicately, as if she had carpeted the floor with crystal eggs.
“They’ve gone,” said Velday. “All of them.” He looked at the tall golden chame she had been playing, the six-foot strings and the carved panel of buttons and stops below, where her hands rested. “What he said,” said Velday, “was reprehensible, and what you said to him concerning Thar equally so. Couldn’t you, for once, reckon your accounts level, and let him alone?”
“Did he mention it to you in private?” she asked, before she could prevent herself.
“He suggested I should apologize for him to you, and he would send you anything of Thar you might care for, in recompense. Though probably there was nothing worth having at Thar now, he said, and naturally, you knew as much, the way you spoke of it.”
She shivered.
“I must have scored a hit against his vanity after all, then,” she said, and let her finger lick at the strings. They had been playing the rhythm of her heart for three hours, ever since she left the uneasy party above, in the salon. They would have considered it no more than her right to flounce from the room, she supposed, as they would have considered it Ceedres’ right to leave following her own remark. Ceedres, however, did not have the pride to do that. Could not afford the pride. “I behaved badly,” she now said. It was easy, after all, to hide behind the old folly. “You know that he angers me.”
“Can’t you ever remember our childhood together?”
“Yes,” she flared. “How he took you away from me—to ride and hunt, to activities I didn’t wish to join, and later to keep J’ara in the Slumopolis, where I was forbidden to venture.”
“Oh,” Velday said. He went to the open window and stared across the lake, fixedly spangled under the immovable disc of the sun. Little streaks of temporary atmospheric cirrus feathered the sky. There might be a brief dry rain in the thirteenth or fourteenth hour. “There’s to be a hunt on the Thar lands at the eighteenth hour in Maram—that is, a J’ara hunt.”
“A hunt, using the hunting robots of the Hirz, no doubt.”
“He is a parasite,” Vel Thaidis said.
Velday flung around on her and shouted: “How else is he to live!”
“In the Slumopolis!” she shouted back. “Where others of his kind have been forced to go.”
“Perhaps they had no friends.”
“Perhaps their friends were not fools, as the friends of Ceedres are.”
“I was going to say,” Velday said rigidly, “or perhaps they had friends like Vel Thaidis, who cares for nothing and no one except to be mistress of her palace. Suppose our own Hirz technology were to fail—a mere accident of bad luck, as it was for the Thars in the time of Ceedres’ father, old Yune Thar. We would have no more means of repairing it than he had or Ceedres has. We too should have to see our home and estate decline into ruin, powerless to prevent it, with exile to the Slumopolis as the end. How can you blame Ceedres for clinging on to what he has, for letting us help him with our own technologies, robots and equipment.”
“I blame him for his manner, for his smiling schemes to use us—”
“He makes himself amusing, likable, so that we will want to assist him and not regret it. You forget. You don’t think, my sister. When he cracked a rib last year on the Domm hunt, he joked all the way to the house, he had us in fits of laughter—and he was in great pain. I asked him how he managed it, after. ‘I didn’t dare omit clowning,’ Ceedres said. He’d been paying for Domm medical treatment, because he could get none at home.”
“You love him, he’s your friend, your brother,” she said bitterly.
“I admit that. But I also love you. You’ve always squabbled, the two of you. Yet suddenly it has become vehement, murderous. And what he said to you—”
“Concerning what?”
“Concerning marriage, Hirz with Thar. It was clumsy and unfortunate, but there was a reality under it.”
Her rings bit into her fingers as she clenched her hands on the carved panel of the chame.
“Well?”
“Well, if you should soften to him—”
Quickly she said, “You’d persuade me to marry him, thereby taking my half-share of the Hirz technology into the Thar palace. True, they would be my machineries, not his, but as his wife, I’d be bound to employ them to renovate the Thar estate. Meanwhile, he would be at liberty to live inside these walls. Which would be the only reason he’d want me.”
“Oh Vaidi—”
“No. You’re too innocent, Velday, and your friend plays on it, as I play this chame.” She struck several buttons, producing a discord of many notes.
“All right,” Velday said, “I see you’re adamant. But you’ll come to see the J’ara hunt.”
“You know I seldom keep J’ara. You know I shrink from hunting things.”
“For my sake, then, Vaidi? Omevia Yune Ond will gossip, and the Chures are worse. I’d rather the rest of the princely houses didn’t conclude there was bad blood between Hirz and Thar. Particularly not public rage between Ceedres and you.”
“You want a garden where no leaves ever fall,” she said.
“Maybe. But will you come?”
One of her rings had now cut so deep that blood speckled the rim of it, amber blood, the color of the Hirz last-chosen wine. Vel Thaidis felt the loss of her self-ignorance with raw emotion.
She would join the Thar hunt.
How could she keep away?
Part Two
A black place, white fires. . . .
This black, these fires, rested upon the transparent vanes of the great dome, as they rested on the whole of the planet’s contra-solar surface. They were, in fact, a skylessness of pure black space, seared with bright cold droplets of stars.
Within the dome, in a circular chamber, seated amid the tall banks of the machinery and apparently unmindful of space, a girl in a silver garment was flickering her white hands daintily over a tray of keys. However, perhaps ironically, the hair of the girl (framing a beautiful face, naturally pale as powder,) was a strange abbreviated complement to the eternal void outside and above; black hair, flecked with silver beads, cut straight as a rule two inches from her shoulders.
A vague murmur filled the chamber from the ranks of the machines. In a little round screen a couple of spans before the girl’s eyes a bizarre picture exerted itself. Many hundred persons stretched on a cushioned platform, gaping. All looked partly asleep, or rather, mesmerized. All looked wasted, grimy and forlorn. Like hers, their flesh was white; unlike hers, unluminous. Their clothing was piecemeal, murkily dyed and bundled onto them as if to conceal as much of their gray-white human tissue as possible. They were not an attractive or a wholesome sight, and this the girl seemed entirely aware of. Suddenly her hands left her tray of keys and swam to her mouth to cradle a melancholy yawn.
The round screen faded and darkened. The murmur of the machinery retreated a tone or two. At the periphery of the room, a door hissed wide.
“Here you are at last,” said the girl clearly. “Come to spy upon the people’s storyteller, Vyen?”
“Of course,” said Vyen, emerging into the colorless chimes of the light intensifiers, pale as the girl, dark as she, and as slim. In both, it was a hard, a spare, almost a harsh slenderness, yet with something fragile in it, pointed by the delicate metallic ornaments and ornamental clothes both, as aristocrats, adopted. “My sister, Vitra Klovez, Fabulast to the People,” said her brother Vyen mockingly, and rotated a silver fiddle-toy between his long thin fingers.
They gazed at each other cruelly. There was always this appearance to them of a pair of affectionate predatory animals staring across a morsel of prey.
Klovez, one of the foremost of the princely houses, had genetically bred Vitra and Vyen as its last two heirs. They were aware of the onus on them and displayed the awareness in many ways. Their method of walking was a graceful stalk; their heads were permanently thrown back, gazing ever down upon the mainly subsurface landscape of their world—a world extremely unlike the burning golden-green outdoor environment Vitra had just been creating in her Fabulism, to entertain the people—or rather the slaves—of the lower echelons of Klave.
“I fear my heroine is going to prove an utter fool,” said Vitra now, neatly licking a frozen glass-like alcohol stick.
“Your heroine? You’ve decided on a female protagonist?”
“You didn’t catch a glimpse of her, then? Her name is Vel Thaidis. Behold my invention!”
With the smallest of the strong and versatile fingers of her right hand, Vitra depressed a key in the tray. In midair, just above the blanked viewing screen, an image evolved. It was that of a young woman only about fourteen inches high for purposes of reproduction, but of a different, voluptuous, full-breasted slimness, golden-skinned, green-haired, clad in elegant curious draperies, and with an odd darkening over the eyes.
“I have been meticulous, you see,” said Vitra. “Notice the polarizing inner lids to protect vision from the ghastly ever-present sun. All my characters possess them. And the glamorous metallic tan. She’s lovely, Vyen, isn’t she? But such a simpleton. I fear I’ll lose patience with her all too quickly.”
“The polarizing lids are very interesting,” said Vyen, examining the image with his own cold gray eyes—the same shape and tint as Vitra’s. “Not so interesting, to set the drama on the hot side of the planet, which, in reality, is an uncharted airless desert, uninhabitable by beast or man.”
“To use the desert was a challenge. Other Fabulasts make up worlds with no sense to them at all. But this has subtle sarcasm. And my ingenuity is perfectly equal to all impossibilities. An airless, scorched desert—in my Fabulism, machinery provides an atmosphere, just as it does for us, and even water.” Vitra pressed another key. A view emerged of exotic gardens leading to a jade-green spill of lake.
“How imaginative,” said Vyen. The fiddle-toy, so necessary to nervous fingers, trembled and twisted. His voice had remained mocking. That his sister had been computer-selected for the role of Fabulast, an essential figment of the tradition of their world, tickled and irritated him. That Vitra was twenty-one, a year his senior, and that this was her first Fabulism, had also influenced his attitude.
“But why do you say the girl is a fool?” he remonstrated now. “She hasn’t a foolish face.”
“Oh, she’s intelligent enough. But emotionally an idiot. I suppose she has to be to fulfill any sort of story. The story, you understand, little brother, which pours irrepressibly into me and through me, such is my huge talent.”
“There have been theories that the machinery of a Fabulism chamber makes the story itself. That the Fabulast merely receives, transmits and translates.”
“Nonsense!” said Vitra acidly. “If that were the case, why was I chosen Fabulast for my imaginative powers? House Klovez has often produced Fabulasts, which you’ll agree is useful. Ours is one of the best technologically equipped residences in the Klave, the reward for genius. No, the machines merely stimulate and assist in visualizing. Their main activity is to project the story to the watching rabble, who lie on their cushions and feed from it like the worms they are.”
“Who could anyway expect a machine to outthink my wise and clever sister?”
“Be quiet, Vyen. My tongue’s as sharp as yours, and my brain. Sharper. And, to instruct your puerile ignorance, if you suppose machines invent the story I tell, how do you account for this?”
Another key was depressed.
On the air, replacing the Vel Thaidis image and the view of the green lake, two male figures leapt into relief. One was quite clearly Vyen (though given the name of Velday), but a Vyen much altered, bronzed, athletically muscular, gold-haired, polarized of eye, the sneer replaced by a smiling openness of countenance.