Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

“It wouldn’t matter if I had you.”

She shook her head. “It would matter. And our two races are as far apart as the stars. We would have nothing to share between us.”

Remembering what Rhul had told me I flared up and said some angry things. She let me say them and then she smiled. “It is none of that, JonRoss.” She turned to look out over the city. “This is my place and no other. When it is gone I must be gone too.”

Quite suddenly I hated Shandakor.

I didn’t sleep much after that. Every time Duani left me I was afraid she might never come back. Rhul would tell me nothing and I didn’t dare to question him too much. The hours rushed by like seconds and Duani was happy and I was not. My shackles had magnetic locks. I couldn’t break them and I couldn’t cut the chains.

One evening Duani came to me with something in her face and in the way she moved that told me the truth long before I could make her put it into words. She clung to me, not wanting to talk, but at last she said, “Today there was a casting of lots and the first hundred have gone to the Place of Sleep.”

“It is the beginning, then.”

She nodded. “Every day there will be another hundred until all are gone.”

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I thrust her away and stood up. “You know where the ‘keys’ are. Get these chains off me!”

She shook her head. “Let us not quarrel now, JonRoss. Come. I want to walk in the city.”

We had quarreled more than once, and fiercely. She would not leave Shandakor and I couldn’t take her out by force as long as I was chained. And I was not to be released until everyone but Rhul had entered the Place of Sleep and the last page of that long history had been written.

I walked with her among the dancers and the slaves and the bright-cloaked princes. There were no temples in Shandakor. If they worshipped anything it was beauty and to that their whole city was a shrine. Duani’s eyes were rapt and there was a remoteness on her now.

I held her hand and looked at the towers of turquoise and cinnabar, the pavings of rose quartz and marble, the walls of pink and white and deep red coral, and to me they were hideous. The ghostly crowds, the mockery of life, the phantom splendors of the past were hideous, a drug, a snare. “The faculty of reason!” I thought and saw no reason in any of it.

I looked up to where the great globe turned and turned against the sky, keeping these mockeries alive. “Have you ever seen the city as it is—with-out the Shadows?”

“No. I think only Rhul, who is the oldest, remembers it that way. I think it must have been very lonely. Even then there were less than three thousand of us left.”

It must indeed have been lonely. They must have wanted the Shadows as much to people the empty streets as to fend off the enemies who believed in magic.

I kept looking at the globe. We walked for a long time. And then I said, “I must go back to the tower.”

She smiled at me very tenderly. “Soon you will be free of the tower—and of these.” She touched the chains. “No, don’t be sad, JonRoss. You will remember me and Shandakor as one remembers a dream.”

She held up her face, that was so lovely and so unlike the meaty faces of human women, and her eyes were full of somber lights. I kissed her and then I caught her up in my arms and carried her back to the tower.

In that room, where the great shaft turned, I told her, “I have to tend the things below. Go up onto the platform, Duani, where you can see all Shan-dakor. I’ll be with you soon.”

I don’t know whether she had some hint of what was in my mind or whether it was only the imminence of parting that made her look at me as she did. I thought she was going to speak but she did not, climbing the ladder obediently. I watched her slender golden body vanish upward. Then I went into the chamber below.

There was a heavy metal bar there that was part of a manual control for regulating the rate of turn. I took it off its pin. Then I closed the simple switches on the power plant. I tore out all the leads and smashed the connections with the ban I did what damage I could to the cogs and the offset shaft. I worked very fast. Then I went up into the main chamber again. The great shaft was still turning but slowly, ever more slowly.

There was a cry from above me and I saw Duani. I sprang up the ladder, thrusting her back onto the platform. The globe moved heavily of its own momentum. Soon it would stop but the white fires still flickered in the crystal rods. I climbed up onto the railing, clinging to a strut. The chains on my wrists and ankles made it hard but I could reach. Duani tried to pull me down. I think she was screaming. I hung on and smashed the crystal rods with the bar, as many as I could.

There was no more motion, no more light. I got down on the platform again and dropped the bar. Duani had forgotten me. She was looking at the city.

The lights of many colors that had burned there were burning still but they were old and dim, cold embers without radiance. The towers of jade and turquoise rose up against the little moons and they were broken and cracked with time and there was no glory in them. They were desolate and very sad. The night lay clotted around their feet.

The streets, the plazas and the market-squares were empty, their marble paving blank and bare. The soldiers had gone from the walls of Shandakor, with their banners and their bright mail, and there was no longer any movement anywhere within the gates.

Duani let out one small voiceless cry. And as though in answer to it, suddenly from the darkness of the valley and the slopes beyond there rose a thin fierce howling as of wolves.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why?” She turned to me. Her face was pitiful. I caught her to me.

“I couldn’t let you die! Not for dreams and visions, nothing. Look, Duani. Look at Shandakor.” I wanted to force her to understand.

“Shandakor is broken and ugly and forlorn. It is a dead city—but you’re alive. There are many cities but only one life for you.”

Still she looked at me and it was hard to meet her eyes. She said, “We knew all that, JonRoss.”

“Duani, you’re a child, you’ve only a child’s way of thought. Forget the past and think of tomorrow. We can get through the barbarians. Conn did. And after that ...”

“And after that you would still be human—and I would not.”

From below us in the dim and empty streets there came a sound of lamentation. I tried to hold her but she slipped out from between my hands. “And I am glad that you are human,” she whispered. “You will never understand what you have done.”

And she was gone before I could stop her, down into the tower.

I went after her. Down the endless winding stairs with my chains clattering between my feet, out into the streets, the dark and broken and deserted streets of Shandakor. I called her name and her golden body went before me, fleet and slender, distant and more distant. The chains dragged upon my feet and the night took her away from me.

I stopped. The whelming silence rushed smoothly over me and I was bitterly afraid of this dark dead Shandakor that I did not know. I called again to Duani and then I began to search for her in the shattered shadowed streets. I know now how long it must have been before I found her.

For when I found her, she was with the others. The last people of Shandakor, the men and the women, the women first, were walking silently in a long line toward a low flat-roofed building that I knew without telling was the Place of Sleep.

They were going to die and there was no pride in their faces now. There was a sickness in them, a sickness and a hurt in their eyes as they moved heavily forward, not looking, not wanting to look at the sordid ancient streets that I had stripped of glory .