Dying of the Light

'We can change it,' Dirk said quickly. 'Come back to me.' He sounded inane, hopeful, despairing, triumphant, concerned; his tone was everything at once.

At first Gwen did not answer. Finger by finger, very slowly, she unclenched her fists and stared at her hands solemnly, breathing deeply, turning her hands over and over again as if they were some strange artifacts that had been set before her for inspection. Then she put them flat on the table and pushed, rising to her feet. 'Why?' she said, and the calm control had come back to her voice. 'Why, Dirk? So you can make me Jenny again? Is that why? Because I loved you once, because something may be left?'

'Yes! No, I mean. You confuse me.' He rose too.

She smiled. 'Ah, but I loved Jaan once also, more recently than you. And with him now there are other ties, all the obligations of jade-and-silver. With you, well, only memories, Dirk.' When he did not reply– he stood and waited-Gwen started toward the door. He followed her.

The robowaiter intercepted them and blocked the way, its face a featureless metal ovoid. 'The charge,' it said. 'I require the number of your Festival accounts.'

Gwen frowned. 'Larteyn billing, Ironjade 797-742-677,' she snapped. 'Register both meals to that number.'

'Registered,' the robot said as it moved out of their way. Behind them the restaurant went dark.

The Voice had their car waiting for them. Gwen told it to take them back to the airlot, and it set off through corridors that suddenly swam with cheerful colors and happy music. 'The damn computer registered tension in our voices,' she said, a little angrily. 'Now it's trying to cheer us up.'

'It's not doing a very good job,' Dirk said, but he smiled as he said it. Then, 'Thank you for the meal. I converted my standards to Festival scrip before I arrived, but it didn't come to much, I'm afraid.'

'Ironjade is not poor,' Gwen said. 'And there isn't much to pay for on Worlorn, in any case.'

'Hmm. Yes. I never thought there would be, until now.'

'Festival programming,' Gwen said. 'This is the only city that still runs that way. The others are all shut down. Once a year ai-Emerel sends a man to clear all charges from the banks. Although soon it will reach the point where the trip will cost more than he picks up.'

'I'm surprised that it doesn't already.'

'Voice!' she said. 'How many people live in Challenge today?'

The walls answered. 'Presently I have three hundred and nine legal residents and forty-two guests, including yourselves. You may, if you wish, become residents. The charge is quite reasonable.'

'Three hundred nine?' Dirk said. 'Where?'

'Challenge was built to hold twenty million,' Gwen said. 'You can hardly expect to run into them, but they're here. In the other cities as well, though not as many as in Challenge. The living is easiest here. The dying will be easy too, if the highbonds of Braith ever think to begin hunting the cities instead of the wild. That has always been Jaan's great fear.'

'Who are they?' Dirk demanded, curious. 'How do they live? I don't understand at all. Doesn't Challenge lose a fortune every day?'

'Yes. A fortune in energy, wasted, squandered. But that was the point of Challenge and Larteyn and the whole Festival. Waste, defiant waste, to prove that the Fringe was rich and strong, waste on a grand scale such as the manrealm had never before known, a whole planet shaped and then abandoned. You see? As for Challenge, well, if truth be known, its life is all empty motion now. It powers itself from fusion reactors and throws off the energy in fireworks no one sees. It harvests tons of food every day with its huge farming mechs, but no one eats except the handful– hermits, religious cultists, lost children turned savage, whatever dregs remain from the Festival. It still sends a boat to Musquel every day to pick up fish. There are never any fish, of course.'

'The Voice doesn't rewrite the program?'

'Ah, the crux of the matter! The Voice is an idiot. It can't really think, can't program itself. Oh, yes, the Emereli wanted to impress people, and the Voice is big, to be sure. But really it's very primitive compared to the Academy computers on Avalon or the Artificial Intelligences of Old Earth. It can't think, or change very well. It does what it was told, and the Emereli told it to go on, to withstand the cold as long as it could. It will.'

She looked at Dirk. 'Like you,' she said, 'it keeps on long after its persistence has lost point and meaning, it keeps on pushing-for nothing-after everything is dead.'

'Oh?' said Dirk. 'But, until everything is dead, you have to push. That's the point, Gwen. There is no other way, is there? I rather admire the city, even if it is an overgrown idiot like you say.'

She shook her head. 'You would.'

'There's more,' he said. 'You bury everything too soon, Gwen. Worlorn may be dying, but it isn't dead yet. And us, well, we don't have to be dead either. What you said back at the restaurant, about Jaan and me, I think you should think about it. Decide what's left, for me, for him. How heavy that bracelet weighs on your arm'-he pointed-''and what name you like best, or rather who is more likely to give you your own name. You see? Then tell me what's dead and what's alive!'

He felt very 'satisfied with the little speech. Surely, he thought, she could see that he could give up Jenny and let her be Gwen far more easily than Jaantony Vikary could make her a female teyn instead of a mere betheyn. It seemed very clear. But she only looked at him, saying nothing, until they reached the airlot.

Then she got out of the vehicle. 'When the four of us chose where we would live on Worlorn, Garse and Jaan voted for Larteyn and Arkin for Twelfth Dream,' she said. 'I voted for neither. Nor for Challenge, for all its life. I don't like living in a warren. You want to know what's dead and what's alive? Come, then, I'll show you my city.'

Then they were outside once more, Gwen tight-lipped and silent behind the controls, the sudden cold of the night air all around them, Challenge's shining shaft vanishing behind. Now it was deep darkness again, as it had been on the night when the Shuddering of Forgotten Enemies had brought Dirk t'Larien to Worlorn. Only a dozen lonely stars swung through the sky, and half of those were hidden by the churning clouds. The suns had all set.

The city of the night was vast and intricate, with only a few scattered lights to pierce the darkness it was set in, as a pale jewel is set on soft black felt. Alone among the cities it stood in the wild beyond the mountainwall, and it belonged there, in the forests of chokers and ghost trees and blue widowers. From the dark of the wood, its slim white towers rose wraithlike toward the stars, linked by graceful spun bridges that glittered like frozen spiderwebs. Low domes stood lonely vigils amid a network of canals whose waters caught the tower lights and the twinkle of infrequent far-off stars, and ringing the city were a number of strange buildings that looked like thin- fleshed angular hands clutching up at the sky. The trees, such as there were, were outworld trees; there was no grass, only thick carpets of dimly glowing phosphorescent moss.

And the city had a song.

It was like no music Dirk had ever heard. It was eerie and wild and almost inhuman, and it rose and fell and shifted constantly. It was a dark symphony of the void, of starless nights and troubled dreams. It was made of moans and whispers and howls, and a strange low note that could only be the sound of sadness. For all of this, it was music.

Dirk looked at Gwen, wonder in his eyes. 'How?'

She was listening as she flew, but his question tore her loose from the drifting strains, and she smiled faintly. 'Darkdawn built this city, and the Darklings are a strange people. There is a gap in the mountains. Their weather wardens made the winds blow through it. Then they built the spires, and in the crest of each there is an aperture. The wind plays the city like an instrument. The same song, over and over. The weather control devices shift the winds, and with each shift, some towers sound their notes while others fall silent.

'The music-the symphony was written on Dark-dawn, centuries ago, by a composer named Lamiya-Bailis. A computer plays it, they say, by running the wind machines. The odd thing about it is that the Darklings never used computers much and have very little of the technology. Another story was popular during the days of the Festival. A legend, say. It claimed that Darkdawn was a world always perilously close to the edge of sanity, and that the music of Lamiya-Bailis, the greatest of the Darkling dreamers, pushed the whole culture over into madness and despair. In punishment, they say, her brain was kept alive, and can now be found deep under the mountains of Worlorn, hooked up to the wind machines and playing her own masterpiece over and over, forever.' She shivered. 'Or at least until