Dying of the Light

the atmosphere freezes. Even the weather wardens of Darkdawn can't stop that.'

'It's…' Dirk, lost in the song, could find no words. 'It fits, somehow,' he finally said. 'A song for Worlorn.'

'It fits now,' Gwen said. 'It's a song of twilight and the coming of night, with no dawn again, ever. A song of endings. In the high day of the Festival the song was out of place. Kryne Lamiya-that was this city's name, Kryne Lamiya, although it was often called the Siren City, in much the same way that Larteyn was called the Firefort-well, it was never a popular place. It looks big, but it isn't really. It was built to house only a hundred thousand, and it was never more than a quarter full. Like Darkdawn itself, I suppose. How many travelers ever go to Darkdawn, right on the edge of the Great Black Sea? And how many go in whiter, when the Darkdawn sky is almost totally empty, with nothing to see by but the light of a few far galaxies? Not many. It takes a peculiar sort of person for that. Here too, to love Kryne Lamiya. People said the song disturbed them. And it never stopped. The Darklings didn't even soundproof the sleeping rooms.'

Dirk said nothing. He was looking at the fairy spires and listening to them sing.

'Do you want to land?' Gwen asked.

He nodded, and she spiraled down. They found an open landing slit in the side of one of the towers. Unlike the airlots in Challenge and Twelfth Dream, this one was not completely empty. Two other aircars rested there, a stub-winged red sportster and a tiny black-and-silver teardrop, both of them long abandoned. The windblown dust was thick on their hoods and canopies, and the cushions inside the sportster had gone to rot. Out of curiosity, Dirk tried them both. The sportster was dead, burned-out, its power vanished years ago. But the little teardrop still warmed under his touch, and the control panel lit up and flickered, showing that a small reserve of power was left. The huge gray manta from High Kavalaan was bigger and heavier than the two derelicts combined.

From the airlot they went out into a long gallery where gray-and-white light-murals swirled and spun in dim patterns that matched the echoing music. Then they climbed to a balcony they had spied when coming in.

Outside, the music was all around them, calling to them with unearthly voices, touching them and playing with their hair, booming and beckoning like passion-thunder. Dirk took Gwen's hand in his own and listened as he stared blindly out across the towers and domes and canals toward the forests and the mountains beyond. The music-wind seemed to pull at him as he stood there. It spoke to him softly, urging him to jump, it seemed-to end it all, all the silly and undignified and ultimately meaningless futility that he called his life.

Gwen saw it in his eyes. She squeezed his hand, and when he looked at her she said, 'During the Festival, more than two hundred people committed suicide in Kryne Lamiya. Ten times the number of any other city. Despite the fact that this city had the smallest population of all.'

Dirk nodded. 'Yes. I can feel it. The music.'

'A celebration of death,' Gwen said. 'Yet, you know, the Siren City itself is not dead, not like Musquel or Twelfth Dream at all. It still lives, stubbornly, if only to exalt despair and glorify the emptiness of the very life it clings to. Strange, eh?'

'Why would they build such a place? It's beautiful, but-'

'I have a theory,' Gwen said. 'The Darklings are black-humored nihilists, chiefly, and I think that Kryne Lamiya is their bitter joke on High Kavalaan and Wolfheim and Tober and the other worlds that pushed so hard for the Festival of the Fringe. The Darklings came, all right, and they built a city that said it was all worthless. All worthless-the Festival, human civilization, life itself. Think of it! What a trap for a smug tourist to walk into!' She threw back her head and began to laugh wildly, and Dirk briefly felt a sudden irrational fear, as if his Gwen had gone mad.

'And you wanted to live here?' he said.

Her laughter faded as abruptly as it had begun; the wind snatched it from her. Away on their right, a needle-tower sounded a brief piercing note that wavered like the wail of an animal in pain. Their own tower answered with the low mournful moan of a foghorn, lingering, lingering. The music swirled around them. Far off, Dirk thought he could hear the pounding of a single drum, short dull booms, evenly spaced.

'Yes,' Gwen said. 'I wanted to live here.' The foghorn faded; four reedy spires across the canal, tied together by drooping bridges, began to ululate wildly, each note higher than the one preceding, until they finally climbed up into the inaudible. The drum persisted, unchanging: boom, boom, boom.

Dirk sighed. 'I understand,' he said, in a voice very tired. 'I would live here too, I suppose, though I wonder how long I'd live if I did. Braque was a little like this, the faintest echo, mostly at night. Maybe that was why I lived there. I had gotten very weary, Gwen. Very. I guess I'd given up. In the old days, you know, I was always searching-for love, for fairy gold, for the secrets of the universe, whatever. But after you left me… I don't know, everything went wrong, turned sour in my mouth. And when something did go right, I'd find it didn't matter, didn't make any difference. It was all empty. I tried and tried, but all I got was tired and apathetic and cynical. Maybe that was why I came here. You… well, I was better then, when I was with you. I hadn't given up on quite so many things. I thought that maybe, if I found you again, maybe I could find me again as well. It hasn't worked quite that way. I don't know that it's working at all.'

'Listen to Lamiya-Bailis,' Gwen said, 'and her music will tell you that nothing works, that nothing means anything. I did want to live here', you know. I voted

… well, I didn't plan to vote this way, but we were talking it over when we first landed, and it just came out. It scared me. Maybe you and I are still a lot alike, Dirk. I've gotten tired too. Mostly it doesn't show. I have my work to keep me busy, and Arkin is my friend, and Jaan loves me. But then I come here… or sometimes I just slow down and think a bit too long, and then I wonder. It's not enough, the things I have. Not what I wanted.'

She turned toward him and took his hand in both of hers. 'Yes, I've thought of you. I've thought that things were better when you and I were together back on Avalon, and I've thought that maybe it was still you I loved and not Jaan, and I've thought that you and I could bring the magic back, make it all make sense again. But don't you see? It isn't so, Dirk, and all your pushing won't make it so. Listen to the city, listen to Kryne Lamiya. There's your truth. You think about me, and I sometimes about you, only because it's dead between us. That's the only reason it seems better. Happiness yesterday and happiness tomorrow, but never today, Dirk. It can't be, because it's only an illusion after all, and illusions only look real from a distance. We're over, my dreamy lost love, over, and that's the best thing of all, because it's the only thing that makes it good.'

She was weeping; slow tears moved trembling down her cheeks. Kryne Lamiya wept with her, the towers crying their lament. But it mocked her too, as if to say, Yes, I see your grief, but grief has no more meaning than anything else, pain is as empty as pleasure. The spires wailed, thin gratings laughed insanely, and the low far-off drum went: boom, boom, boom.

Again, more strongly this time, Dirk wanted to jump -off the balcony toward the pale stone and dark canals below. A dizzy fall, and then rest at last. But the city sang him for a fool: Rest? it sang, there is no rest in death. Only nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The drum, the winds, the wailings. He trembled, still holding

Gwen's hands. He looked down toward the ground below.

Something was moving down the canal. Bobbing and floating, drifting easily, coming toward him. A black barge, with a solitary pole-man. 'No,' he said.

Gwen blinked. 'No?' she repeated.

And suddenly the words came, the words that the other Dirk t'Larien would have said to his Jenny, and the words were in his mouth, and though he was no longer quite sure that he could believe them, he found himself saying them all the same. 'No!' he said, all but shouting it at the city, throwing a sudden rage back at the mocking music of Kryne Lamiya. 'Damn it, Gwen, all of us have something of this city in us, yes. The test is how we meet it. All this is frightening'-he let loose of her hands and gestured out at the darkness, the sweep of his hand taking in everything-'what it says is frightening, and worse is the fear you get when part of you agrees, when you feel that it's all true, that you belong here. But what do you do about it? If you're weak, you ignore it. Pretend it doesn't exist, you know, and maybe it'll go away. Busy yourself in the daylight with trivial tasks, and never think about the darkness outside. That's the way you let it win, Gwen. In the end it swallows you and all your trivia, and you and the other fools lie to each other blithely and welcome it. You can't be like that, Gwen, you can't be. You have to try. You're an ecologist, right? What's ecology all about? Life! You have to be on the side of life, everything you are