In the Deadlands (25 page)

In general, the population of the nation is more birth conscious than ever before, and one of the side effects has been a reduced tolerance for social and sexual deviants. Homosexuals have been driven out of several cities, and there is reason to believe that this trend will continue for some time....

2050.05.06/TIMEFAX

...FOUND BEATEN TO DEATH IN AN ALLEY. THE MAN WAS LATER IDENTIFIED AS PAUL-JOHN MURDOCK, A VAGRANT. POLICE SUSPECT THE BEATING DEATH IS JUST ONE MORE IN A SERIES OF “ANTI-FAGGOT” INCIDENTS THAT HAVE RACKED URBANA IN RECENT, MONTHS.

2053.05.10/TIMEFAX

...THE PRESIDENT ANNOUNCED TODAY A NEW STAMP COMMEMORATING THE WORK OF DR. DANA LEDGERTON, CONSTRUCTOR OF THE FERTILITY VIRUS. THE STAMP WILL GO ON SALE IN FOUR DAYS, TIMED TO COINCIDE WITH THE SIXTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH....

AFTERWORD:

I overestimated the number of people who would be living on this planet by the middle of this century. At least I hope I did.

If I had written a longer version of this story, it would have been about the demographic upheavals between affected and unaffected racial and cultural groups. It would have been about China and India taking over the world economy….

This Crystal Castle

For the first two years of my college career, I was an art major. I got just good enough to recognize that I would never be as good as I wanted to be.

In one class, we would study a different artist's style every week—Seurat, Rouault, Picasso, Henry Miller. On Monday we would look at the specific elements that characterized the style—then on Wednesday and Friday, we would draw or paint our own piece, using those same elements of that style.

The intention was not to have us imitate any particular way of creating, but to understand it as a way of assaulting the canvas. (Well, in my case, it was an assault.) It wasn't about mastering any specific style—it was about having a foundation on which to develop our own.

The cumulative effect of that semester was profound.

Later, as I started exercising my writing muscles, I found myself doing the same thing again, but this time at the keyboard instead of the easel. I looked at the stories of my favorite authors and studied how they handled mood and setting, language and description. What feelings did they evoke and how? Why did their words work so well?

In the SF genre, several authors had established themselves as masters of style—they wrote with distinctly recognizable voices. Theodore Sturgeon was a master of the liquid paragraph; Jack Vance could sketch a marvelous landscape in handful of sentences; and Samuel R. Delaney took the reader sailing through luminance in a glorious flight of language.

As I had done in class, I would put myself into (what I perceived) the mode of the creator in my own attempt to evoke a similar mood. Where Seurat had worked with tiny points of color, I worked with little bits of language. I tried on the Heinlein hat, of course—but I also tried on the Sturgeon hat, the Delaney hat, the Ellison hat, and others.

Each time, I learned something new—until one day, I discovered my own hat. It had been on top of my head the whole time.

This story wasn't written to evoke the flavor of any specific author, but when it was finished I did recognize a smidge of this and a dollop of that.

It is night, and the plants are scratching at the walls of the castle, a horrible sibilant sound. And the vampires are out. I can hear them cawing their insatiable craving. During the day they sleep somewhere in the dark valley below; at night, the scent of fresh blood draws them up the mountain and they circle ceaselessly about the castle. With the first pink and yellow rays of the sun they will shrink back down into their unholy valley; but for now, they circle and moan.

The plants too are moaning. By day they take in oxygen, storing it in great flaccid sacs. In the cold night the sacs leak; the air seeps out in long meaningless groans, echoing the hunger of the vampires.

I stand before the great bronze doors of the castle and listen to the incessant scrabbling of the plants. Sometimes I want to throw back those heavy doors and open myself to the night and the creatures that inhabit it. I could if I wanted to. I could; I know I could. I think the servants might even let me.

Or maybe they wouldn't. Someday I'll find out.

At last morning comes bright through the castle windows, and I rush eagerly down the stairs leading from my chambers and burst out into the world. The morning is a blue and white color. Always there is a breeze. If there is any warmth from the sun, the wind will wash it away. The
star is a hole in the sky, a yellow-white glare; bright and cold, it cannot banish the chill of this great looming mountain.

Today the flowers are red and yellow and they sparkle with little crystal droplets. Lovely they are, but lethal to touch. By noon they will have begun to wilt, and by afternoon they will be dead. By the time the sun nears the west there will be nothing left but shriveled wisps of meaningless ash.

I stay on the walks of glass; they sparkle too, but not with the dampness. Lovely they are too, but not lethal. Here and there are delicate black designs, like trapped insects imbedded in the crystal layers of the walk; the light is broken into sparkling shards. Beautiful.

Somewhere in the castle the servants are busying themselves with tasks of iron and crystal. I do not seek them, nor will they bother me. Here, high on the mountain, I am alone. I can see for miles. Down into a valley, deep carpeted with trees of tall green and gold. At the bottom is a river, winding through the canyon—narrow looking from here, but actually wide to cross.

Then, up the other side of the rift, almost a solid straight wall of living green, at last giving way to the rocky tops across. And beyond are other mountains, sometimes shrouded in clouds, but more often with purpling peaks crisp against the sky.

The distance must be miles. There are no castles on the other peaks. I am alone, the lord of this land, the lonely lord of this land. This beautiful and empty land.

Like a grim dragon perched upon its towering aerie, the castle looms behind me. It looks over its world and broods, this great crystal and stone monster, glittering and glimmering in the light with sparks of white and gold and shimmery green.

Parapets and arching towers, lofty terraces and balconies—all perch delicately atop those forbidding walls. Too high, too high, all too high. The walls below remain unbroken. Not a window, not a chink in their crystal surfaces. Every night I can hear the plants scrabbling and scratching as they strain for purchase. But the walls are good walls. They separate things—the plants from me and me from the world.

The castle is carved out of the mountain itself. Great stones have been cut from the heart and raised to form walls around the summit. It is as if the whole of the mountain is only the base of the spire and the castle its pinnacle. It must be beautiful from a distance.

My table is set, as always, in the garden—the garden that blooms at night and dies in the day. The service is crystal, as is everything in my world, even down to the utensils. The same type of crystal that walls the castle.

The bread is fresh. As always. The meat is red and spicy beneath its crystal cover, and a goblet glitters with promises of icy sweet and tartness.

When I finish, a servant comes, gleaming like bronze, golden in the sunlight. Without blemish and without expression. They are all like that; I cannot tell one from another. They provide for my needs, all of them.

He does not look at me, he never does, but goes about his tasks with a familiar efficiency. He handles the emptied dishes with no sign of either obeisance or distaste, no emotion at all; and placing them on his tray, he goes. His footfall leaves the crystal walk ringing like bells.

It is the same every morning.

I wander about the grounds, but a complete circuit takes less than ten minutes.

There are places where balconies pause like afterthoughts, overlooking the steep sides of the mountain—places where a piece of wall and floor and perhaps a crystal bench have been put so as to keep the castle from having an unfinished look. I could throw myself off from one of these places.

But they would stop me. They always do.

Every day it is the same.

I note how the flowers are already losing their glimmer. The luster of life is fading and their creepers are shriveling off the edge of the walk. In the darkness of night those same creepers will return to scrape and scratch at my unyielding surfaces.

Finally, even though they are watching me, they know and I know it is inevitable. I follow the walk down to where it touches the edge of the creeping forest. And I stare hungrily into that aching and uneasy mass of green and black. Deep shimmering buds cluster up and down the tall trunks. I imagine I can see past them—past their sluggish tendrils, far past—down to where the tall trees give way to the lesser ones, the twisted ones, where convoluted vines twist and wind among the dark grasping limbs at the bottom.

I find myself longing for the sight of just one living thing. Anything. An animal, any animal; a small one would do—just a squirrel or even a bird. An insect perhaps. Something alive. I mean
really
alive, not the half-alive, leechlike creatures that infest the forest. I mean something really alive. Anything.

I can stand it no longer; I turn away and back toward the castle looming dark above me. It is haloed by its own shimmering outline. The crystal walls glitter with the light of the yellow
sun, which from here is hidden behind that great bulk. The sky is aching and empty blue behind it.

Just one living thing, I ask. Just one living thing.

I am possessed by frenzy. I run screaming through the castle in madness.

But the chairs are too heavy to throw, the draperies too strong to tear, the windows too thick to shatter. And of objects that might be used as weapons, there are none. The servants saw to that a long time ago.

I run screaming through the castle; hoarse cries echo blankly off impassive faces. “How can you let me go on like this?!! This is madness! I must escape! I must be free of this! I must!”

I scrape at the glittering walls until my nails are bloody and useless. I hammer and claw at them, all the time sobbing, sobbing, and collapsing in a heap. When I am through, the servants tend my wounds. Every day it is the same.

Except—

—once. He was young. Innocent. The freshness of spring was still on his cheeks. His eyes were closed, his skin was pale, and his hair was plastered wetly on his forehead.

The servants ran their silent hands across his frame. Minimal injuries. He had suffered no broken bones in the crash; only the shock, nothing more. Somewhere out in the night, pieces of a steel needle still smoldered across a gashed hillside.

At my direction, they carried him upstairs. There is only one bedchamber in the castle. Mine. The builders of this magnificent palace hadn't expected that one day I would be entertaining a guest.

The youth was placed in the huge bed in the chamber at the top of the stairs.

I fell asleep in a chair watching him.

Morning, and he was awake. His pale eyes were wide with curiosity. How long had he been lying there staring at me? I nodded to him, slowly.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“You don't know,” I said.

He looked at me curiously. “No. Who are you?”

I smiled. I crossed to the window and threw it open. Daylight, somehow gold and warm, streamed through it. My actions were slow and deliberate; his eyes were on me as I moved, and for the first time I realized how truly friendly the morning could be.

I stretched, and it was a pleasure just to breathe. Although the ache of sleeping in the chair had settled in my bones, a few moments in the morning sun promised to bake it out.

“You didn't answer my question,” he said.

I grunted in reply. Noncommittal. Looking at him, I asked, “Are you feeling all right?”

He nodded and tried to move. A sudden grimace crossed his face. “Uh, maybe I guess not. I'm still a little sore.”

“That should heal quickly enough. The servants found little to be concerned about when we brought you in last night.” I studied him thoughtfully. He could have been twenty or twenty-five. Youth is resilient.

“Am I in the castle?”

I nodded.

He smiled. “I thought so.”

“Why?”

“Where else could I be? Except for the jungle, this world is empty. The only thing on it is the castle. From the sky it's a glittering jewel. The sun sparkles off it in a hundred different colors.”

He looked at me curiously, a long time; his eyes were bright. (Am I male or female, I wonder? It has been so long since I have...too long, too long.) “Who
are
you?” he asked again. “What's the reason for all this…this...?”

A shake of the head. He cannot know. Not yet, not yet. He must not know. The first person I have seen since...since...the first person I have seen in far too long; I cannot lose him. I will not lose him.

I threw open the door of the chamber. The servants, all of them, were standing there helplessly. There was confusion in their milling. They were, for the first time in my experience, confronted with a situation they could not understand. Suddenly there were two persons in a castle built only for one.

Yesterday, yesterday when the ship came screaming across the sky, they had responded to their primary patterning, responded to the ingrained command that a man must not be allowed to come to injury, to suffer pain, or to die. But today, that man is alive and in the castle. In the castle designed only for one, there are
two!
And there is nothing in their conditioning to help them cope with such a fact. There should be only one, but there are two!

I delight in their confusion. Two! There are two! It is ecstasy! Bitter ecstasy. There are two!

Their confusion hints at something I had long suspected but never known how to prove. Were I to stop and consider it, it might prove disturbing; but in the dazzling excitement of the morning, I paid no attention.