Madrak turns and says, “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here. What is this silly business?”
“Suicide show,” says Madrak. “A man named Dolmin. They’ve forgotten what death is like.”
“So soon, so soon,” sighs the other. “Then let us give them their money’s worth-full circle!”
“Vramin, I know you can do it, but considering the shape he’s in-“
The small man in the straw hat approaches and regards them with his small, dark eyes.
“Sir,” he says to Madrak, “any other ceremonial things you’d care to do before the interment?”
“I-“
“Of course not,” says Vramin. “One only buries the dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“That man is not dead-only smoldering.”
“You’re wrong, mister. This is an honest show.”
“Nevertheless, I say he lives and will walk again for your amusement.”
“You must be some kind of ‘chotic.”
“Only an humble thaumaturge,” Vramin replies, stepping into the circle.
Madrak follows him. Vramin then raises his cane and weaves it through a cryptic gesture. It glows with green light, which then leaps forward and falls upon the box.
“Dolmin, come forth!” says Vramin.
The audience presses forward. Vramin and Madrak move to the wall of the tent. The small man would follow them, but is distracted by a knocking from within the coffin.
“Brother, we'd best leave,” says Vramin, and slices through the fabric with the tip of his cane.
The lid of the coffin is slowly raised as they step through the wall and into the world without.
Beyond them a sound occurs. It is compounded of screaming and cries of “Fake!” and “We want our money back!” and “Look at him!”
“ ‘What fools these mortals be,’ ” says the green man, who is one of the few persons living able to put quotation marks around it and know why.
He is coming, riding down the sky on the back of a great beast of burnished metal. It has eight legs and its hooves are diamonds. Its body is as long as two horses. Its neck is as long as its body, and its head is that of a Chinese demon dog out of gold. Beams of blue light come forth from its nostrils and its tail is three antennae. It moves across the blackness that lies between the stars, and its mechanical legs move slowly. Each step that it takes, however, crossing from nothing to nothing, carries it twice the distance of the previous step. Each stride also takes the same amount of time as the prior one. Suns flash by, fall behind, wink out. It runs through solid matter, passes through infernos, pierces nebulae, faster and faster moving through the starfall blizzard in the forest of the night. Given a sufficient warm-up run, it is said that it could circumnavigate the universe in a single stride. What would happen if it kept running after that, no one knows.
Its rider was once a man. He is the one who is called the Steel General. That is not a suit of armor that he is wearing; it is his body. He has turned off most of his humanity for the duration of the trip, and he stares now straight ahead past the scales like bronze oak leaves on the side of his mount’s neck. He holds four reins, each as thick as a strand of silk, on the fingertips of his left hand. He wears a ring of tanned human flesh on his little finger, because it would be senseless and noisy for him to wear metal jewelry. The flesh was once his; at least, it helped to surround him at one time long ago.
Wherever his goes, he carries a collapsible five-string banjo with him in a compartment near to where his heart used to be. When he plays it he becomes a kind of negative Orpheus and men follow him to Hell.
He is also one of the very few masters of temporal fugue in the entire universe. It is said that no man can lay hands upon him unless he permits it.
His mount was once a horse.
Regard the world of Blis, with its color and its laughter and its breezes. Regard the world of Blis as Megra of Kalgan.
Megra is a nurse in Kalgan Obstetrical Center 73, and she knows that the world is babies. Blis has something like ten billion people breathing at one another, with more occurring constantly and very few departing. The impaired are repaired. There is no infant mortality. Screams of the newborn and the laughter of their makers are the two most often heard sounds on Blis.
Megra of Kalgan regards Bliss through cobalt-colored eyes amidst long blonde lashes. The fine strands of her pale hair tickle her naked shoulders, and two stiffened spears of it cross to form an X in the center of her brow. Her nose is small, her mouth is a tiny blue flower, and she has very little chin to speak of. She wears a silver breast strap, a golden belt and a short silver skirt. She is barely five feet in height, and she has been touched with the odor of flowers she has never seen. She wears a golden pendant which grows warm upon her breast whenever men place aphrodisiacs before her.
Megra waited ninety-three days before she could gain entrance to the Fair. The waiting list was long, because of the fact that the fairground that is all colors and odors and movements is one of the very few such open places remaining upon Blis. There are only fourteen cities on Blis, but they cover the four continents from sea to creamy sea, burrow far beneath the land and tower into the sky. Portions of them also extend beneath the seas. Actually, all of them interlock with several others, making for continental layers of civilization; but since there are fourteen separate city governments with clear territorial jurisdictions, there are said to be fourteen cities on Blis. Megra’s city is Kalgan, where she tends life that is screaming and new, and occasionally life that is screaming and old, in all colors, all shapes. Since a gene pattern can be constructed to satisfy the parents’ specific wishes and substituted surgically for the nucleus of a fertilized cell, she is liable to see anything born and often does. Being old-fashioned, all that Megra’s own parents had wanted was a cobalt-eyed doll with the strength of a dozen or so men, so that the kid could take care of herself in life.
However, after having taken care of herself successfully for eighteen years, Megra decided that the time had come to contribute to the general breathing. It takes two to strive for infinity, and Megra decided upon the colors and the romance of the open places, of the fairground, for her striving. Life is her occupation and her religion, and she is anxious to serve it further. A month’s vacation lies before her.
All she has to do now is find the other one…
The Thing That Cries In The Night raises its voice within its barless prison. It howls, coughs and barks, gibbers, wails. It is contained within a silver cocoon of fluctuating energies, suspended from an invisible web of forces and hung within a place which has never known daylight.
The Prince Who Was A Thousand tickles it with laser beams, bathes it with gamma rays and feeds it a varying range of ultrasonics and subsonics.
Then it is silent, and for a bare moment the Prince raises his head from the equipment he has brought, and his green eyes widen and the corners of his thin lips twitch upwards after a smile they never reach.
It begins to scream again.
He gnashes his milk-white teeth and throws back his dark cowl.
His hair is a halo of fallow gold in the twilight of the Place Without Doors. He stares upward at the almost-seen form that writhes within the light. As often he has cursed it, his lips move mechanically around the words they always form when he fails.
For ten centuries he has tried to kill it, and still it lives.
He crosses his arms upon his breast, bows his head and vanishes.