Songs of the Dying Earth

“Then Lady Lith…come back to my world.”

Slowly, she turned her head and looked at him with her great golden eyes. She seemed older suddenly, fine lines showing at the corners of those eyes and dark smudges beneath. Or perhaps, he thought, that was only because she had been awake all night. “Ariventa is mine,” she said. “I will not abandon it.”

“But if no one is here—”

“I will not abandon it!” she shouted, and she slapped him full across the face, her nails raking his cheek like so many talons. “Go away! Ariventa is mine!”

He leaped up, one hand pressed against the starting blood. “I only meant to help you.”

“Go away, boy!”

Without another word, he began to back down the golden path, and at the edge of the village, he turned and ran. By the time he burst through the tapestry, his lungs were afire, and he fell to his knees, gasping, on the plain that was the cushion. Two repetitions of the Second Evolution restored his full height, and he rolled to the floor. When he looked up at the tapestry, it had already dwindled to the size of his thumb, and a moment later, it disappeared entirely. Around him, the house began to shake as in a high wind, and he was barely able to stumble out the door before the entire place collapsed into a pile of rubble.

Two nights later, he was at Miir, and this time Rianna was waiting for him at the gate.

“Is it over?” she asked as he handed his reins to the groom.

“Yes,” he murmured.

“Truly over?”

He nodded.

“Good. Now you can begin to wait for me.”

“To wait for you?”

She tucked her hand into the bend of his elbow. “To grow up, of course.” She smiled with just a corner of her mouth. “Come along now. We’ve saved some supper for you. With no mushrooms at all.”

He took a deep breath and answered her smile with his own. Together, they walked into Castle Miir.

Afterword:

I first read Jack Vance’s fiction when I was around ten years old. I was working my way through my older brother’s science fiction collection, picking up whatever looked interesting, when I reached his cache of pulp magazines: a handful of coverless copies of Planet, Space, and Startling. The stories sucked me right in, especially three of them: a Brackett, a Williamson…and Vance’s “Planet of the Damned,” a kind of mean-streets space opera featuring one of his trademark enigmatic imperious women. I realized I wanted to read a lot more stories like this one. However, back then Vance books seemed hard to come by. By the time I was a junior in high school, I’d read only a couple more of his novels and a scattering of his shorter fiction. And then I found The Dying Earth.

In spite of the fact that it was a legendary book, known to every dyed-in-the-wool fantasy fan, I had never heard of it. But the byline alone was enough to make me dig up 75 cents for that Lancer paperback with the odd leathery cover. Only many years later did I learn that this was its first printing since the scarce 1950 Hillman edition. I can’t say I read it; rather, I inhaled it. It was fantasy, it was science fiction; it was a wonderful amalgam of the two. I was sixteen, already collecting rejection slips from the magazines, and I realized I’d found the target I should aim at. I couldn’t duplicate Vance, of course. But when I finally wrote my first Alaric story half a dozen years later, my mantra was “Think Jack Vance,” and so it has remained throughout that series. Echoes of The Dying Earth also crop up elsewhere in my fiction. Sometimes I’m surprised to recognize them, years later, and I’m reminded once more of how much Vance has influenced my writing.

So, when I was invited to join this voyage back to the Dying Earth, it wasn’t possible for me to say no. And not because I thought it would be easy: you don’t assume the cape of The Master without trepidation. It’s been a special challenge to revisit the esoteric sunset world that Jack Vance minted half a century ago, but in the end, an exceedingly rewarding one. For this is a world — of danger, wonder, and delight — that has been impressed on our imaginations as few others have.

— Phyllis Eisenstein

Elizabeth Moon AN INCIDENT IN USKVOSK

Elizabeth Moon has degrees in history and biology and served in the US Marine Corps. Her novels include The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, Divided Allegiance, Oath of Gold, Sassinak and Generation Warriors (written with Anne McCaffrey), Surrender None, Liar’s Oath, The Planet Pirates (with Jody Lynn Nye and Anne McCaffery), Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, Winning Colors, Once a Hero, Rules of Engagement, Change of Command, Against the Odds, Trading in Danger, Remnant Population, Marque and Reprisal, and Engaging the Enemy. Her short fiction has been collected in Lunar Activity, Phases, and Moon Flights, and she has edited the anthologies Military SF 1 and Military SF 2. Her novel The Speed of Dark won a Nebula Award in 2004. Her most recent book is a new novel, Victory Conditions.

Here she gives us ringside seats for an exciting day at the races — Dying Earth style.

Once a mighty city rose beside the head of a deep gulf in the Sea of Sighs, and its ships plied their trade, and the magnificence of its buildings proved its wealth…but in these latter days, only a dusty town remained, buildings shabby, patched with stones from its earlier grandeur. Unimportant to most, a minor port, a stop on the caravan route across the land, Uskvosk had shrunk and faded in the bleak millennia of the sun’s decay, and its population held many idiosyncratic beliefs with ferocious tenacity.

Midafternoon in the dry season, with the bloated sun hanging sullenly over the town, and most folk with nothing better to do than slump by a window and watch passersby, was not the best time for an assignation. It was, however, the only time that Petry, general dogsbody at the Bilge & Belly, the locals’ name for Herimar’s First-class Drinking & Dining, Superior Rooms Available, Sea Views Extra, could be sure his chosen outbuilding was empty.

In caravan season, the stable would have been full and busy, but caravan season was a quarter year away. Now the partitions intended to keep beasts separate made private nooks, suitable, Petry thought, for an afternoon’s exploration of the town lady of pleasure he most favored. He had saved enough for her reputed fee, in battered copper slugs stolen, one by careful one, from under the beds of drunken merchants, while removing their stinking chamberpots. She would not be busy at this hour. And surely she would rather lie with him, a sweet innocent lad as he appeared, than with the kind of men who came to the Bilge & Belly before attending Aunt Meridel’s Treasure-house, the high-walled establishment in which the fairest of the town’s professional ladies spent their evenings.

Now Emeraldine stood in the doorway, all ripe lips and riper body, golden curls tumbling to her plump shoulders, but scowling instead of smiling — eyes narrowed to slits, chin jutting, arms folded stiffly. “What’s this? The stable? Where’s my surprise?”

“In here,” Petry said, doffing his boy’s cap and making a broad gesture, such as storytellers made. “Ten coppers’ worth, I’m telling you truly.” He opened his hand so she could see the coppers.

Her face relaxed a little, but she did not step forward, despite his bow and second flourish of the cap. “Petry — you’re a sweet boy, but I fear you have mistook me. Pillow companion I am, and will be till the day I die, but I do not lie with children. You are but half-grown, lad. Talk to me again in a year or two, when you’ve some growth and we can both take pleasure in it.”