Dying of the Light

says so. This city, this damn bone-white city with its death hymn, denies everything you believe in, everything you are. If you're strong, you'll face it and fight it and call it by name. Defy it.'

Gwen had stopped weeping. 'It is no use,' she said, shaking her head.

'You're wrong,' he answered. 'About this city, and about us. It's all tied up, you see? You say you want to live here? Fine! Live here! To live in this city would be a victory all in itself, a philosophical victory. But live here because you know that life itself refutes

Lamiya-Bailis, live here and laugh at this absurd music of hers, don't live here and agree with this damn wailing lie.' He took her hand again.

'I don't know,' she said.

'I do,' he said, lying.

'Do you really think that… that we could make it work again? Better than before?'

'You won't be Jenny,' he promised. 'Never again.'

'I don't know,' she repeated in a low whisper.

He took her face in both hands and raised it so her eyes looked at his. He kissed her, very lightly, the barest driest touching of their lips. Kryne Lamiya moaned. The foghorn sounded deep and sorrowing around them, the distant towers screamed and keened, and the solitary drum kept up its dull, meaningless booming.

After the kiss they stood amid the music and stared at each other. 'Gwen,' he finally said, in a voice not one half as strong and sure as it had been just a moment before. 'I don't know either, I guess. But maybe it would be worth it just to try…'

'Maybe,' she said, and her wide green eyes looked away and down again. 'It would be hard, Dirk. And there's Jaan to think of, and Garse, so many problems. And we don't even know if it would be worth it. We don't know if it will make the slightest bit of difference.'

'No, we don't,' he said. 'Lots of times in these last few years I've decided that it doesn't matter, that it's not worth trying. I don't feel good then, just tired, endlessly tired. Gwen, if we don't try, we'll never know.'

She nodded. 'Maybe,' she said, and nothing more. The wind blew cold and strong; the music of the Darkling madness rose and fell. They went inside, then down the stairs from the balcony, past the fading, flickering walls of gray-white light, to where the solid sanity of their aircar rested, waiting to carry them back to Larteyn.

Chapter 5

They flew from the white towers of Kryne Lamiya to the fading fires of Larteyn in a lonely silence, not touching, both thinking their own thoughts. Gwen left the aircar in its usual place on the roof, and Dirk followed her downstairs to her door. 'Wait,' she said in a quick whisper, when he had expected her to say good night. She vanished inside; he waited, puzzled. There were noises from the other side of the door -voices-then abruptly Gwen was back, pressing a thick manuscript into his hand, an impressively heavy mass of paper hand-bound in black leather. Jaan's thesis. He had almost forgotten. 'Read it,' she whispered, leaning out the door. 'Come up tomorrow morning, and we'll talk some more.' She kissed him lightly on the cheek and closed the heavy door with a small click. Dirk stood for a moment turning the bound manuscript over in his hands, then turned toward the tubes.

He was only a few steps down the hall when he heard the first shout. Then, somehow, he could not continue; the sounds drew him back, and he stood listening at Gwen's door.

The walls were thick, and very little of what was said came through. The words and the meanings he lost entirely, but the voices themselves carried, and the tones. Gwen's voice dominated: loud, sharp-edged– at times she was shouting-close to the edge of hysteria. In his mind Dirk could see her pacing the living room before the gargoyles, the way she always paced when she was angry. Both of the Kavalars would be present, berating her-Dirk was sure he heard two other voices-one quiet and sure, without anger, questioning relentlessly. That had to be Jaan Vikary. His cadence gave him away, the rhythms of his speech distinctive even through the wall. The third voice, Garse Janacek, spoke infrequently at first, then more and more, with increasing volume and anger. After a time the quiet male voice was virtually silent, while Gwen and Garse screamed at one another. Then it said something, a sharp command. And Dirk heard a noise, a fleshy thud. A blow. Someone hitting someone, it could be nothing else.

Finally Vikary giving orders, followed by silence. The light went off inside the room.

Dirk stood quietly, holding Vikary's manuscript and wondering what to do. There did not seem to be anything he could do, except talk to Gwen the next morning and find out who had hit her, and why. It had to be Janacek, he thought.

Ignoring the tubes, he decided to walk downstairs to Ruark's rooms.

Once in bed, Dirk found he was immensely tired and badly shaken by the events of the day. So much all at once, he could hardly cope with it. The Kavalar hunters and their mockmen, the strange bitter life Gwen lived with Vikary and Janacek, the sudden dizzy possibility of her return. Unable to sleep, he thought about it all for a long time. Ruark was already asleep; there was no one to talk to. Finally Dirk picked up the thick manuscript Gwen had given him and began to leaf through the first few pages. There was nothing like a good chunk of scholarly writing to put a man to sleep, he reflected.

Four hours and a half-dozen cups of coffee later, he put down the manuscript, yawned, and rubbed his eyes. Then he shut off the light and stared at the darkness.

Jaan Vikary's thesis-Myth and History: Origins of Holdfast Society As Based on an Interpretation of the Demonsong Cycle of Jamis-Lion Taal-was a worse indictment of his people than anything that Arkin Ruark could possibly say, Dirk thought. He had laid it all out, with sources and documentation from the computer banks on Avalon, with lengthy quotations from the poetry of Jamis- Lion Taal and even lengthier dissertations on what Jamis Taal had meant. All of the things that he and Gwen had told Dirk that morning were there, in detail. Vikary supplied theories on theories, attempted to explain everything. He even explained the mockmen, more or less. He argued that during the Time of Fire and Demons some survivors from the cities had reached the mining camps and sought shelter. Once taken in, however, they proved dangerous. Some were victims of radiation sickness; they died slowly and horribly, and possibly passed the poison on to those who nursed them. Others, seemingly healthy, lived and became part of the proto-holdfast, until they married and produced children. Then the taint of radiation showed up. It was all conjecture on Vikary's part, with not even a line or two from Jamis-Lion to support it, yet it seemed a glib and plausible rationalization of the mockman myth.

Vikary also wrote at length of the event the Kavalars called the Sorrowing Plague-and what he carefully called 'the shift to contemporary Kavalar sexual-familial patterns.'

According to his hypothesis, the Hrangans had returned to High Kavalaan approximately a century after their first raid. The cities they had bombed were still slag; there was no sign of new building on the part of the humans. Yet the three slaveraces they had dropped to seed the planet were nowhere in evidence: decimated, extinct. Undoubtedly the Hrangan Mind commanding concluded that some of the humans still lived. To effect a final wiping up, the Hrangans dropped plague bombs. That was Vikary's theory.

Jamis-Lion's poems had no mention of Hrangans, but many mentions of sickness. All the surviving Kavalar accounts agreed on that. There was a Sorrowing Plague, a long period when one horrible epidemic after another swept through the holdfasts. Each turn of the season brought a new and more dreadful disease-the ultimate demon-enemy, one the Kavalars could not fight or kill.

Ninety men died out of every hundred. Ninety men, and ninety-nine women.

One of the many plagues, it seemed, was female-selective. The medical specialists Vikary had consulted on Avalon had told him that, based on the meager evidence he gave them-a few ancient poems and songs-it seemed likely that the female sex hormones acted as a catalyst for the disease. Jamis-Lion Taal had written that young maids were spared the bloody wasting because of their innocence, while the rutting eyn-kethi were struck down horribly and died in shuddering convulsions. Vikary interpreted this to mean that prepubescent girls were left untouched, while sexually mature women were devastated. An entire generation was wiped out. Worse, the disease lingered; no sooner did girl children reach puberty than the plague struck. Jamis-Lion made this a truth of vast religious significance.

Some women escaped-the naturally immune. Very few at first. More later; because they lived, producing