Day by Night Read online

  Suddenly the black corridor, pressed against the open door, fluttered into a chilly lemon sheen. All the art objects, metal tapestries and iridescent carvings of Klovez burst into their accustomed relief.

  Vitra sighed and put down her shaking hands. Her jeweled forehead was clammy and her heart drummed. Vyen, too, appeared to be breathing, though he had not appeared to be before. Like scared babies rescued from the frigid black night of that nether world, they smiled their predatory smiles at each other.

  “Now tell me,” he said, “why you were so afraid?”

  “Now tell me,” she said, “why you waited so long to rectify the fault?”

  “I thought if it was your joke, you’d want to enjoy it fully.”

  Vitra watched him narrowly. Vyen began to juggle expertly with the three fiddle-toys.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Don’t you?” He looked down his nose at her and said, “Well, I did send a robot to attend to the trouble previously, but it never came back and the lights never reappeared—except in this room, which is illuminated differently, as you know. So then I sent a robot to intercept you below. Have you noticed,” he added, “how cool the house has grown?”

  Vitra shivered involuntarily in her gauzy dress, and at that moment a robot, either the first, second or third Vyen had dispatched, rolled back into the chamber. It was emitting, quietly but unmistakably, a curious bubbling noise.

  Halfway across the glass floor it faltered, spun about, began to retreat, faltered once more and finally froze.

  Vyen tapped knobs in the chair arm impatiently.

  “Go back into the wall, fool.”

  The robot took no notice. The bubbling noise decreased. Suddenly one of its dexterous attachments shot forth from it, becoming unattached as it did so. The metal rod landed with a clank on the floor.

  Both Vyen and Vitra started to their feet. Never in their lives had they heard of, or witnessed, such a bizarre happening.

  After a few seconds Vyen went forward to examine the robot with distaste. Not that Vyen possessed any of the minor technical skills, as some of the aristocratic houses did. The phenomenon of the stalled machine was to him quite impenetrable. It was really a sort of scared awe that drew him closer, the same emotion which kept Vitra away.

  Eventually, Vyen kicked the robot with a white plastavel shoe, and the thing skidded and revolved across the room before crashing into the farther wall.

  “Whrrp,” said the dry metallic voice. “Whrra-prr.”

  “Be quiet!” shouted Vyen.

  “Whrra,” said the defunct robot, in an amazed tone, and was silent.

  Vitra covered her face with her hands and moaned.

  “Now what is it?” demanded Vyen, paler even than he had been.

  Vitra, her eyes shut, was seeing visions of the ruined estate of Ceedres Yune Thar, the encroaching dusts, the swamps, the motionless machines glittering like dead blue flies in the eternal sky.

  “I,” she whispered, “somehow, I—”

  “Somehow you? Speak logically.”

  “The technology of Klovez is about to collapse,” Vitra cried in a thin high wail.

  Vyen swallowed.

  “Insanity.”

  “No—somehow my Fabulism has caused this to happen—Ah!” This last scream erupted as once more the lamps in the corridor extinguished.

  In panic, brother and sister glared at the midnight beyond the door. Unlike the more primitive culture of the invented Yunea, they had no gods to pray to. In such minutes of terror, they were therefore forced back upon arcane obscenities and vague inner howlings for help to some faceless blank niche which had once been occupied by a religion.

  For Vitra, the panic was, if anything, worse. It truly seemed to her that her fabulism, the scope of her imagination, had brought this upon them. Was there a remedy? It appeared unlikely. No princely house of the Residencia had ever lost its means of mechanical support. Theirs would be the first. What would become of them? Would the computers of the city, when appealed to, spare precious energy and machines to correct the lapse? Or would they be cast destitute on society, having to beg for shelter, food, clothing—or, more dreadful yet, unthinkable, would Vitra and Vyen themselves be forced to enter the Subterior, to join the ranks of the slave-workers, the worms? The Slumopolis should ultimately have been the fate of Ceedres, a fate he was fair set to avoid in Vitra’s story. But this was not a story, a fantasy of a dome chamber. This was real.

  Shriveled of spirit, the heirs of Klovez crept together and held each other’s cold hands. In a trembling mutter, Vitra told Vyen all the plot, so far, of her Fabulism. When the corridor lights were once more abruptly resumed, the pair merely glanced at them, as if at artful deceivers.

  Finally, Vyen announced, “I still say you’re mad, to think your invented world could in any way influence this one. Maybe this is yet some joke another house is playing—Olvia, perhaps. She could be empty-brained enough.”

  “No, no. My talent’s overrun the bounds of my mind. Brimmed through into reality.”

  “Don’t be so vain,” said Vyen peevishly. “It’s only some extraordinary coincidence. And everything will resolve itself. Even that fool of a robot can be repaired.” He shot a look at the corridor. The lamps beamed on. “There’s to be a theatrical performance at Derle,” he added nonchalantly. “Will you come? Shedri Klur asked for you especially.”

  “Yes, I’ll come,” said Vitra quickly.

  She did not wish to remain either in her ancestral home, or by herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  The theatrical drama at Derle concerned princely love and violent death, the only form of death to be feared among the long-lived aristocrats. As a Fabulast, convinced she was capable of inventing better romances, Vitra scorned the performance. The actors, who had risen from the ranks of the Subterine workers, to be fêted for talent and good looks, she scorned equally. Shedri Klur’s mistress was currently an actress. Her hair was streaked with cobalt dye, proof of a worker’s continued obsession with bright colors, and she was not included in the supper party at the Klur palace.

  Vitra strove to fascinate Shedri, who was already fascinated by her. She strove to fascinate others, and succeeded, since they too had long been attracted to her mercurial, one-dimensional magic. She was exactly what a woman of her class in the Residencia should be. Brittle, sharp porcelain, glittering with spangles.

  All the while, scornful, fascinating and busy, the spike scratched at the back of Vitra’s soul. What of Klovez? What of the technology of Klovez?

  Sometimes the thought would come to her distinctly clear and restorative: a fantasy of the mind could never bear upon the events of the animate world. But then again, a doubt would nibble at her. Suppose, it said. Only suppose. Then she said to herself, with friable humor, But if that is the case, then surely everything must soon be rectified. Ceedres Yune Thar has incriminated his hapless victim by mysterious devices. He will gain her estate and all will be well, for him. If Klovez had incredibly linked itself to the fortunes of Thar, then Klovez also would shortly be well again.

  In the first hour of the new Jate, J’ara burned to ashes in the lamps and wines and filigree drug-inhalers, Vitra and Vyen returned to their palace and entered the shadowy hall, where no lights lit, and no robots came. And despite the frantic cawing of brother and sister, their running about on modishly shod feet, and thrusting down of buttons and switches with their tastefully jeweled fingers, still no lights lit, and no robots came.

  There they huddled in the black, the lift before them which suddenly would not work, the whole house, this house which had been so familiar, so friendly to them since their infancy, dimly echoing like a mournful and deserted cave.

  “If this is your fault,” said Vyen, “then damn you.”

  At which Vitra slapped his face, and an iota of the
ir equilibrium was restored.

  Sometime after, having manually ascended to the third floor by a ramp the robots used—or had used—they found Vyen’s apartment also in darkness. So they fumbled a way into Vitra’s rooms. Here, in her bedchamber, the gleams of Rise Uta occasionally struck. There were, besides, a collection of self-igniting flame-lights, curios given her long since by an admirer.

  The flames winged up, violet, gray and rose, bathing the exotic chamber in an attractive twilight. Vitra sat on the silken divan and caught sight of her face, petrified and small between its black leaves of hair, in the mirror of her cosmetics table.

  Her genius appalled her. Her genius which had undone Klovez. Nevertheless, it was genius, was it not, to activate such a miracle of destruction? Then she began to cry neurotically. The room was freezing. Only the ambient warmth of the city preserved them now, all self-generated heat had gone out of the palace. Even the air was stale. Unlike Thar, the collapse had been instant and utter. Like Thar, it seemed irremediable.

  “Well, wise sister,” said Vyen, striving to control his shudders, “what shall we do next?”

  “Oh, how can I tell?” exclaimed Vitra.

  “Since you say all this is your doing, I’d hoped you might.”

  Vitra wept, and Vyen paced about, fiddle-toys awhirl and eyes staring at nothing.

  In a short while he and she forced open the windows of the room to refresh the air, and heard the stir of city Jate traffic on the thoroughfares.

  “We shall have,” said Vyen at last, “to approach the city computers. I don’t credit your belief that that will mean immediate exile to the Subterior. Such a thing would be ridiculous.”

  “The whole structure of the Klave is carefully planned,” sniveled Vitra. “We were taught about it in our adolescence. The population is controlled, and the balance is finely maintained between the workers and the aristocrats. Nothing can be spared to aid us.”

  “Then if the balance is so fine, how was Klarn able to take a condemned worker girl to himself?”

  “Because Temal was accounted dead. She was about to die for having murdered another—but was exonerated.”

  “If a murdering clot of a worker can be protected, I’m sure you and I are secure enough,” said Vyen. But he was not sure. Temal, the girl Casrus had rescued from death, had had several witnesses who swore she had slain her attacker, a man from the Subterior, to save herself from a brutal assault. In fact Casrus himself had been partially involved, having been in an adjacent Subterine alley, his machines shoring up some of the sagging hovels there. Temal’s assailant had begged wine from the prince and Casrus had permitted him to drink. The subsequent attack upon the girl could well have been a result of this act. That Temal was beautiful, in the thin tubercular fashion of the Subterines, might also, it was conceded, have prompted Casrus’ defense of her.

  All these items, together with Vitra’s complicated Fabulism, smeared through Vyen’s febrilely exercising mind, restless as the fiddle-toys. And then, all at once, coalesced.

  “Vitra,” he breathed.

  Vitra raised her head.

  “What now?”

  “A solution, now.”

  “Oh, some madness of yours won’t do—”

  “Yes it will. Attend to me. The inane tale of your unintelligent princess—Thel Vaidis—”

  “Vel Thaidis,” Vitra snapped automatically.

  “Their laws being based upon our own. As your Ceedres is based on our adored Casrus.”

  “Well? Don’t you think the Fabulism has damaged us sufficiently?”

  “That,” said Vyen with a lofty about-face, “I’m not certain of. But this I do know. Ceedres’ plan, or what you told me of it, can be very ably adapted to suit us.”

  Vitra gazed at her brother, mouth and eyes stretched.

  “Firstly,” said Vyen, “take me to the dome chamber and play me the recording of all the Fabulism so far. And then I will decide how the strands can be rearranged to fit our needs.”

  “Vyen, you’ve taken leave of your senses—”

  “Hardly. Ceedres wanted the Hirz estate and tricked the blind Jaida-Vaidis into the semblance of a criminal deed so heinous the Law will deprive her of her property and render said property to her victim. Am I correct? Well then, Prince Klarn is just as blind and hopelessly uncunning as your Vaida. Could we not trick him as subtly, and won’t our Law be as harsh, or more harsh, than the Law of the invented Solar side. There are two of us, never forget, one of Casrus. And we were always witty children, weren’t we?”

  Vitra sat gasping.

  Presently she sat gasping in the chariot car, which, to their mutual relief, still ran efficiently on its runners. Not until they were hurtling up the spiral road of Rise Iu did she protest again. But Vyen gave a feral grin and would not answer. The city was far warmer than the house had become. She foresaw a future of beggary or terminus, and as the terrace loomed, she ceased to argue. With congealed eyes, she slunk before Vyen into the complex, and let them both into the Fabulast’s chamber with a narrow, trembling, resolute hand.

  * * *

  • • •

  Temal, the former Subterine, was arranging her hair, ashy dark with one broad streak of palest vermilion lying to either side of the central parting and mingling thereafter with the many slender braids she was weaving. Temal spent much time attending to her hair, as she spent time in bathing, enameling her nails, perfuming herself. All these activities had been denied her in the Subterior. There she had frozen and toiled and groaned with fatigue and hunger along with all the rest. Even now, she had confessed to dreaming of such years, while even as she indulged herself with clean hair and scent, she would admit guilt swam in her heart like a tiny tireless animal.

  She had been a water-carrier. Every Jate, and much of every Maram, she had borne empty pitchers to the great machine-supplied cisterns of her sector, and then borne them back, up and down the enclosed, icicle-strung alleyways, to the doors of hovels, kitchens, and in at the gaping jaws of mines. Her mistress, an Upperling of the Subterior, that is, one of the profitless lower class who had yet managed to profit somewhat by putting others to work in their stead, had a chain of such girls and young men. Water was limited in the Subterior. All who labored were allotted a ration each Jate, but never enough. Mostly the inhabitants made up their allowance with boiled ice, and risked sundry viral infections. But for those thirsty ones who had saved enough to buy, there were the water carriers. The master or mistress of each pitcher chain leased a cistern, the chain plied its wares, and brought home the plastic chips that passed for money. In exchange, the members of the chain were rendered scraps to eat, a hole to sleep in, a few of the precious chips for pay.

  One Maram, Temal was abroad late, staggering as if half dead from lack of sleep and all else, when a drunken man, dreaming of some Fabulism he had just experienced, set on her. Her wares were spilled, and she spilled after them on the dark stone of a long and winding alley, scarcely wider than the width of both their bodies. Other persons, drearily abroad, saw, but paid no attention to the girl’s plight. Some indeed stepped over the struggling pair. Temal herself did not scream or cry aloud. It would have been useless, a waste of action. Instead, she had found one of the horrible iron-stiff icicles at hand, and wrenched it free, even as the man beat her and tore at the layers of her rags. The ice burned her hand terribly, and when she came to pluck it from her grasp later, her skin went with it. But before that had occurred, she had stabbed the man in the eye. It was a vicious dreadful blow, but one which she delivered without pause, for this was the education the Subterior gave its inhabitants. Survival meant, quite simply and on all occasions, some kind of violent triumph over others.

  Thereafter, Temal lay on the stone, awaiting the robots of the Law who must surely come for her. A crowd had gathered and stared at her, as if at a screen of Fabulism—for such was only to be expected. But the
n a man came through the crowd, dressed not in gaudy rags like the rest, nor swaggering and plain as an Upperling. He had not been one of the watchers. She might dimly have comprehended that if he had been present, he would have helped her. Then, in her dazed state, she recognized, she afterward said, a prince of the Residencia. She had heard of him. Casrus of house Klarn, who ministered to the Subterines where he could, ignoring their jibes, fawning, treachery and despair, himself quite ruthless and single-minded in his acts of clemency. A strange man, an unlikely man. And so she must have found him.

  For a year and a fortyjate she had lived here, in his palace (wondrous to a Subterine, mystic as Kaneka-heaven), as sometimes the favored of the Subterior might come to live, under the good auspices of an aristocrat. Casrus was gentle, generous and considerate, and yet it was hard to discover, really, anything of him at all. She might have hoped to be a consolation to him, but she could not seem to talk to him. Despite his attempts to educate her, and all of her class who dwelled in Klarn, they were slow to learn, and slower to adapt. It was not a matter of intelligence, merely that their intelligence had long ago been twisted to a particular shape and hardened in it, and was now unable to reform. She demonstrated that she loved Casrus, but as one might love a god. It was not her humility or his remoteness which caused it, but apparently her need to worship for her security’s sake; Casrus was elected her religion. And she for him? A fine tapestry, perhaps, reclaimed from the cold slime of the Subterior.

  Her hair bound ornately, Temal rose, crossed the room and descended by one of the several non-moving staircases of Klarn. Soon she was entering an unusual salon for the Residencia, for it was filled with intense golden light. This, Casrus had told her, being an emulation of sunlight, a softer equivalent of the fierce unceasing solar fires of the planet’s far side. But Temal had shied away from the notions of the planet’s roundness, talk of its black night side, its bright day side, and the twilight zones that partitioned each from the other. Her world, she had explained, was only the city. Its extraneous environs had for her, too, the nature of a myth, even though, unlikely Kaneka, she said, she believed them to exist.