Tales from the Sisters Grimmer and the 1986 Arkham House retrospective , Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and she has won two World Fantasy Awards for short fiction and the 1980 British Fantasy Award for her novel Death's Master.
Four of her plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio, and she has scripted two episodes of the cult BBC TV series Blakes 7, including the 1980 space vampire story, 'Sarcophagus' .
'So far I've written seven novels about vampires,' reveals the author, 'or types of vampire, and quite a lot of short stories of various lengths. Vampirism, to me, is one of those themes where somehow another idea or twist is always making itself known to me. The subject seems limitless, perhaps because the vampire seems somehow to have woven itself among the human psyche.
' 'Venus Rising on Water' came initially from a fascination with Venice, which may be seen in futurist, distorted form, in the venue. Ironically, the name Venus has since become my name for Venice in the cycle of books I'm currently writing for Overlook in America, of which only the last may at all be classed as science fiction. But this story is SF: it's about the clash between the future and the past — although the denouement, however odd or apparently fortuitous, demonstrates the hold everyday real life can get on the strangest matters .'
Like long hair, the weeds grew down the facades of the city, over ornate shutters and leaden doors, into the pale green silk of the lagoon. Ten hundred ancient mansions crumbled. Sometimes a flight of birds was exhaled from their crowded mass, or a thread of smoke was drawn up into the sky. Day long a mist bloomed on the water, out of which distant towers rose like snakes of deadly gold. Once in every month a boat passed, carving the lagoon that had seemed thickened beyond movement. Far less often, here and there, a shutter cracked open and the weed hair broke, a stream of plaster fell like a blue ray. Then, some faint face peered out, probably eclipsed by a mask. It was a place of veils. Visitors were occasional. They examined the decaying mosaics, loitered in the caves of arches, hunted phantoms through marble tunnels. And under the streets they took photographs: one bald flash scouring a century off the catacombs and sewers, the lacework coffins, the handful of albino rats perched up on them, caught in a second like ghosts of white hearts, mute, with waiting eyes.
The dawn star shone in the lagoon on a tail of jagged silver. The sun rose. There was an unsuitable noise — the boat was coming.
'There,' said the girl on the deck of the boat, 'stop there, please.'
The boat sidled to a pavement and stood on the water, trembling and murmuring. The girl left it with a clumsy gracefulness, and poised at the edge of the city with her single bag, cheerful and undaunted before the lonely cliffs of masonry, and all time's indifference.
She was small, about twenty-five, with ornately short fair hair, clad in old-fashioned jeans and a shirt. Her skin was fresh, her eyes bright with intelligent foolishness. She looked about, and upward. Her interest clearly centred on a particular house, which overhung the water like a face above a mirror, its eyes closed.
Presently the boat pulled away and went off across the lagoon, and only the girl and the silence remained.
She picked up her bag and walked along the pavement to an archway with a shut, leaden door. Here she knocked boldly, as if too stupid to understand the new silence must not yet be tampered with.
Her knocking sent hard blobs of sound careering round the vault of greenish crystal space that was the city's morning. They seemed to strike peeling walls and stone pilasters five miles off. From the house itself came no response, not even the vague sense of something stirring like a serpent in sleep.
'Now this is too bad,' said the girl to the silence, upbraiding it mildly. 'They told me a caretaker would be here, in time for the boat.'
She left her bag (subconscious acknowledgment of the emptiness and indifference) by the gate, and walked along under the leaning face of the house. From here she saw the floors of the balconies of flowered iron; she listened for a sudden snap of shutters. But only the water lapped under the pavement, component of silence. This house was called the Palace of the Planet. The girl knew all about it, and what she did not know she had come here to discover. She was writing a long essay that was necessary to her career of scholastic journalism. She was not afraid.
In the facade of the Palace of the Planet was another door, plated with green bronze. The weed had not choked it, and over its top leaned a marble woman with bare breasts and a dove in her hands. The girl reached out and rapped with a bronze knocker shaped like a fist. The house gave off a sound that after all succeeded in astonishing her. It must be a hollow shell, unfurnished, half its walls fallen
These old cities were museums now, kept for their history, made available on request to anyone not many who wished to view. They had their dwellers also, but in scarcity. Destitutes and eccentrics lived in them, monitored by the state. The girl, whose name was Jonquil Hare, had seen the register of this place. In all, there were 174 names, some queried, where once had teemed thousands, crushing each other in the ambition to survive.
The hollow howling of her knock faded in the house. Jonquil said, 'I'm coming in. I am .' And marched back to her bag beneath the leaden gate. She surveyed the gate, and the knotted weed which had come down on it. Jonquil Hare tried the weed. It resisted her strongly. She took up her bag, in which there was nothing breakable, seasoned traveller as she was, and flung it over the arch. She took the weed in her small strong hands and hauled herself up in her clumsy, graceful way, up to the arch, and sat there, looking in at a morning-twilight garden of shrubs that had not been pruned in a hundred years, and trees that became each other. A blue fountain shone dimly. Jonquil smiled upon it, and swung herself over in the weed and slithered down, into the environ of the house.
By midday, Jonquil had gone busily over most of the Palace of the Planet. Its geography was fixed in her head, but partly, confusedly for she liked the effect of a puzzle of rooms and corridors. Within the lower portion of the house a large hall gave on to a large enclosed inner courtyard, that in turn led to the garden. Above, chambers of the first storey would have opened on to the court, but their doors were sealed by the blue-green weed, which had smothered the court itself and so turned it into a strange undersea grotto where columns protruded like yellow coral. Above the lower floor, two long staircases drew up into apparently uncountable annexes and cells, and to a great salon with tarnished mirrors, also broken like spiderweb. The salon had tall windows that stared through their blind shutters at the lagoon.
There were carvings everywhere; lacking light, she did not study them now. And, as suspected, there was very little furniture a pair of desks with hollow drawers, spindly chairs, a divan in rotted ivory silk. In one oblong room was a bed-frame with vast tapering pillars like idle rockets. Cobwebby draperies shimmered from the canopy in a draught, while patches of bled emerald sunlight hovered on the floor.
Jonquil succeeded in opening a shutter in the salon. A block of afternoon fell in. Next door, in the adjacent chamber, she set up her inflatable mattress, her battery lamp and heater, some candles she had brought illegally in a padded tube. Sitting on her unrolled mat in the subaqueous light of a shuttered window which refused to give, she ate from her pack of food snacks and drank cola. Then she arranged some books and note-pads, pens and pencils, a magnifier, camera and unit, and a miniature recorder on the unfolded table.
