Songs of the Dying Earth

“Make up your mind if you want to come with us,” she said harshly. “We don’t have an extra megilla or extra saddle, but you’re skinny and light enough that you could ride behind me. If you hang on to me tight enough, you won’t fall off too many times.”

“That will be the day,” said Shrue the diabolist.

Derwe Coreme started to say something else, stopped herself, grabbed a loose scale, and swung herself easily up over the packs and scabbarded crossbows and swords to the tiny saddle. She kicked her boots into the stirrups with the absent ease of infinite experience, waved her hand to the Myrmazons, and the seven megillas leapt away toward the west.

Shrue watched them go until they were less than a dust cloud on the furthest ridge to the west. “The chances of any of you surviving this voyage,” he said to the distant dust cloud, “are nil minus one. The Dying Earth simply has too many sharp teeth.”

KirdriK came out of the Library carrying the things Shrue had requested. He laid the carpet out on the pine needles first — a good size, Shrue thought as he sat crosslegged in its center, five feet wide by nine feet long. Enough room to stretch out and take a nap on. Or to do other things on.

Then KirdriK set out the wicker hamper with Shrue’s warm lunch, a bucket holding three bottles of good wine set to chill, a sweater-cape should the day turn chilly, a book, and a larger chest. “It would have been a mixed metaphor of the worst sort,” said Shrue to no one in particular.

“Yes, Master Magus,” said KirdriK.

Shrue shook his head ruefully. “KirdriK,” he said softly. “I am a fool’s fool.”

“Yes, Master Magus,” said the daihak.

Without another word, Shrue extended his fingers, jinkered the old carpet’s flight threads into life, lifted it eight feet off the ground in a hover, turned to look sideways directly into the daihak’s disinterested — or at least noncommittal — yellow eyes, shook his head a final time, and commanded the carpet west, rising quickly over the trees, pursuing the disappearing dust cloud.

KirdriK watched the speck dwindle for a moment and then shambled bowleggedly into the Library to find something to do — or at least something interesting to read — until his new Master, Ulfant Banderoz, returned, either alone or with his other self.

Afterword:

The summer of 1960—I was 12 years old and visiting my much-older brother Ted and my Uncle Wally in Wally’s third-floor apartment on North Kildare Avenue just off Madison Street in Chicago. Most of the daylight was spent taking the El to museums or the Loop or North Avenue beach or to the beach near the planetarium or to movies, but some days — and many of the evenings — were spent with me sprawled on the daybed in Wally’s little dining room, under the open windows with the heat and street noises of Chicago coming in, reading Jack Vance.

Actually, I was reading a tall stack of my brother’s Ace Double Novels, old issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other paperbacks, but it was the Jack Vance that I remember most vividly. I remember the expansive, odyssiad power of Big Planet and the the narrative energy of The Rapparee (later known as Five Gold Bands) and my introduction to semantics through The Languages of Pao and the brooding fantasy brilliance of Marizian the Magician (later to be The Dying Earth) and the literary style that saturated To Live Forever.

Mostly, it was the style. My reading even then had already moved beyond a steady diet of SF and other genres, but as my tastes sharpened and my appetite for literature grew — as I encountered not just the stylistic power of the best in genre but also that of Proust and Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and Malcolm Lowry and all the others — what stayed with me was the memory of Jack Vance’s expansive, easy, powerful, dry, generous style, the cascades of indelible images leavened by the drollest of dialogue, all combined with the sure and certain lilt of language used to the limits of its imaginative powers.

When I finally returned to SF in the mid-1980’s, not only as a reader but as a writer working on my first SF novel Hyperion, it was to celebrate SF styles old and new, from space opera to cyberpunk, but most of all to acknowledge my love of SF and fantasy in an homage to Jack Vance’s work. Please note that I didn’t say in an attempt to imitate the style of Jack Vance; it’s no more possible to imitate the unique Vancean style than it is to reproduce the voice of his friend Poul Anderson or of my friend Harlan Ellison or any of the other true stylistic giants in our field or from literature in general.

Reading Jack Vance’s work today, I am transported back forty-eight years to the sounds and smells of Chicago coming in through that third-floor window on Kildare Avenue and I remember what it is like to be truly and totally and indelibly transported into a master magician’s mind and world.

— Dan Simmons

Howard Waldrop FROGSKIN CAP

Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, having been called “the resident Weird Mind of our generation” and an author “who writes like a honkytonk angel.” His famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who? All About Strange Monsters Of The Recent Past: Neat Stories By Howard Waldrop, Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories By Howard Waldrop, Going Home Again, the print version of his collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (formerly available only as in downloadable form online), and a collection of his stories written in collaboration with various other authors, Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, as well as the chapbook A Better World’s in Birth!. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moone World. His most recent book is a big retrospective collection, Things Will Never Be the Same: Selected Short Fiction 1980–2005. Having lived in Washington state for a number of years, Waldrop recently moved back to his former home town of Austin, Texas, something which caused celebrations and loud hurrahs to rise up from the rest of the population.

Here he takes us to a Dying Earth very near at last to the end of its span, to show us that the one thing that never ceases is the quest for knowledge.

The sun was having one of its good days.

It came up golden and buttery as if it were made of egg yolk. The dawn air was light blue and clear as water. The world seemed made new and fresh, like it must have seemed in previous times.

The man in the frogskin cap (whose given name was Tybalt) watched the freshened sun as it rose. He turned to the west and took a sighting on a minor star with his astrolabe. He tickled the womb of the mother with the spider, looked away from the finger and read off the figures to himself.

A change in light behind him gained his attention. He turned — no, not a cloud or a passing bird, something larger.

Something for which men had sometimes taken dangerous journeys of years’ duration, to the farthest places of this once green and blue planet, to see and record. Now it was just a matter of looking up.

The apparent size of a big copper coin held at arm’s length, a round dot was coming into, then crossing, the face of the morning sun.