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 himse
lf 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 while 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.
“I did not run away,” I said, my voice strained. “Damn it. You should never have come.”
Crystal glanced at Gerry, looking very sad, and it was clear that suddenly she was thinking the same thing. Gerry just frowned. I don’t think he ever once understood why I said the things I said, or did the things I did; whenever we discussed the subject, which was infrequently, he would only tell me with vague puzzlement what he would have done if our roles had been reversed. It seemed infinitely strange to him that anyone could possibly do anything differently in the same position.
His frown did not touch me, but he’d already done his damage. For the month I’d been in my self-imposed exile at the tower, I had been trying to come to terms with my actions and my moods, and it had been far from easy. Crystal and I had been together for a long time—nearly four years—when we came to Jamison’s World, trying to track down some unique silver and obsidian artifacts that we’d picked up on Baldur. I had loved her all that time, and I still loved her, even now, after she had left me for Gerry. When I was feeling good about myself, it seemed to me that the impulse that had driven me out of Port Jamison was a noble and unselfish one. I wanted Crys to be happy, simply, and she could not be happy with me there. My wounds were too deep, and I wasn’t good at hiding them; my presence put the damper of guilt on the newborn joy she’d found with Gerry. And since she could not bear to cut me off completely, I felt compelled to cut myself off. For them. For her.
Or so I liked to tell myself. But there were hours when that bright rationalization broke down, dark hours of self-loathing. Were those the real reasons? Or was I simply out to hurt myself in a fit of angry immaturity, and by doing so, punish them—like a willful child who plays with thoughts of suicide as a form of revenge?
I honestly didn’t know. For a month I’d fluctuated from one belief to the other while I tried to understand myself and decide what I’d do next. I wanted to think myself a hero, willing to make a sacrifice for the happiness of the woman I loved. But Gerry’s words made it clear that he didn’t see it that way at all.
“Why do you have to be so damned dramatic about everything?” he said, looking stubborn. He had been determined all along to be very civilized, and seemed perpetually annoyed at me because I wouldn’t shape up and heal my wounds so that everybody could be friends. Nothing annoyed me quite so much as his annoyance; I thought I was handling the situation pretty well, all things considered, and I resented the inference that I wasn’t.
But Gerry was determined to convert me, and my best withering look was wasted on him. “We’re going to stay here and talk things out until you agree to fly back to Port Jamison with us,” he told me, in his most forceful now-I’m-getting-tough tone.
“Like shit,” I said, turning sharply away from them and yanking an arrow from my quiver. I slid it into place, pulled, and released, all too quickly. The arrow missed the target by a good foot and buried itself in the soft dark brick of my crumbling tower.
“What is this place, anyway?” Crys asked, looking at the tower as if she’d just seen it for the first time. It’s possible that she had—that it took the incongruous sight of my arrow lodging in stone to make her notice the ancient structure. More likely, though, it was a premeditated change of subject, designed to cool the argument that was building between Gerry and me.
I lowered my bow again and walked up to the target to recover the arrows I’d expended. “I’m really not sure,” I said, somewhat mollified and anxious to pick up the cue she’d thrown me. “A watchtower, I think, of nonhuman origin. Jamison’s World has never been thoroughly explored. It may have had a sentient race once.” I walked around the target to the tower, and yanked loose the final arrow from the crumbling brick. “It still may, actually. We know very little of what goes on on the mainland.”
“A damn gloomy place to live, if you ask me,” Gerry put in, looking over the tower. “Could fall in any moment, from the way it looks.”
I gave him a bemused smile. “The thought had occurred to me. But when I first came out here, I was past caring.” As soon as the words were out, I regretted saying them; Crys winced visibly. That had been the whole story of my final weeks in Port Jamison. Try as I might, it had seemed that I had only two choices; I could lie, or I could hurt her. Neither appealed to me, so here I was. But here they were too, so the whole impossible situation was back.
Gerry had another comment ready, but he never got to say it. Just then Squirrel came bounding out from between the weeds, straight at Crystal.
She smiled at him and knelt, and an instant later he was at her feet, licking her hand and chewing on her fingers. Squirrel was in a good mood, clearly. He liked life near the tower. Back in Port Jamison, his life had been constr
ained by Crystal’s fears that he’d be eaten by alleysnarls or chased by dogs or strung up by local children. Out here I let him run free, which was much more to his liking. The brush around the tower was overrun by whipping-mice, a native rodent with a hairless tail three times its own body length. The tail packed a mild sting, but Squirrel didn’t care, even though he swelled up and got grouchy every time a tail connected. He liked stalking whipping-mice all day. Squirrel always fancied himself a great hunter, and there’s no skill involved in chasing down a bowl of cat-food.
He’d been with me even longer than Crys had, but she’d become suitably fond of him during our time together. I often suspected that Crystal would have gone with Gerry even sooner than she did, except that she was upset at the idea of leaving Squirrel. Not that he was any great beauty. He was a small, thin, scuffy-looking cat, with ears like a fox and fur a scroungy gray-brown color, and a big bushy tail two sizes too big for him. The friend who gave him to me back on Avalon informed me gravely that Squirrel was the illegitimate offspring of a genetically-engineered psicat and a mangy alley tom. But if Squirrel could read his owner’s mind, he didn’t pay much attention. When he wanted affection, he’d do things like climb right up on the book I was reading and knock it away and begin biting my chin: when he wanted to be let alone, it was dangerous folly to try to pet him.
As Crystal knelt by him and stroked him and Squirrel nuzzled up to her hand, she seemed very much the woman I’d traveled with and loved and talked to at endless length and slept with every night, and I suddenly realized how I’d missed her. I think I smiled; the sight of her, even under these conditions, still gave me a cloud-shadowed joy. Maybe I was being silly and stupid and vindictive to send them away, I thought, after they had come so far to see me. Crys was still Crys, and Gerry could hardly be so bad, since she loved him.