But they were men, like those of the ancient city, and bore bows. They pierced him with arrows and his blood stained the snow and the rocks and ran in great smears down the sky. No! he thought, refusing to die. He looked up at the bird which was always there, and saw among the rocks the violet-eyed serpent, which coiled with head uplifted, watching him. It shaped itself. He made up his mind and did the same. He was a man again, on two feet. The bird screamed in the sky, and he gave it a cold look, and healed himself of his wounds. He glanced again at the serpent, but a whole host of polychrome serpents had taken its place, and the rocks had acquired a pair of eyes, amethyst-rimmed.
They were lively with interest. "What is your name?" the voice asked. He shaped his totem again. It hung about his neck. He drew a great breath, suffused with power, and named them his name. He extended the ground at his feet, and made it golden grass, stretched it wide and pushed back the mountain peaks, until his own mountains stood there again. He made the sky blue overhead, and the sun, young and yellow. He stretched wide his arms, embracing the world, and looked again toward the rocks. A naked boy stood there, among the serpents, which hissed and threatened. The boy looked frightened, a frowning, sullen fear, with will to fight. He approved that, respected it.
"Elio," he said, for he knew that name among the others. He ignored the frown and made game in the land, and more and better birds to fly in the heavens, made the great river, and fish to swim in it, made it all as it had been, and himself as he had been, and lifted his hand and looked about him, showing it all to the boy who was a king.
"No!" the bird cried; and the serpents, far away now, wove into a man of metal which started at the horizon and clicked toward them.
"They will kill you," the boy said. "They will kill me too if I stand here. Let me out of your dream. Let me go. I should not have stepped so far apart from them."
"Do you want to leave?" he asked the boy, who, naked, looked about at the blue sky and the bright young sun and all the grasslands, and shook his head, his eyes shining violet to the depths.
"It is young," he said. "What else is it?" He shut his eyes a moment, and dreamed Ta'in, whose vast slit eyes and scaly nose took shape for him, head and great amber-scaled body. . . huge, fierce Ta'in, who had carried himfrom boyhood. The dragon rubbed against him and nosed the boy, lifted a wide slit-eyed gaze at the edge of the land, which with every step of the metal creature, turned to metal and cities, and over that creeping change, a ship hovered, bristling with offworlders' weapons. "We must run," the boy said.
He paid no heed, swung up to Ta'in's back, faced the metal edge which was growing wider and nearer, and reckoned well that this was the last time, that if he lost Ta'in again, Ta'in was truly lost, and so was he. He had his weapons again, drew bow and fired at the advancing edge, fired shaft after shaft, and saw the machines and the guns bearing down on him as they had before. He was not alone. Another dragon whipped up beside him, with a young rider in the saddle. The boy drew bow and fired, shouted for joy to see the metal edge retreat ever so slightly. And then there was another dragon, and another rider, on the boy's left.
"Mahin!" the boy cried, naming him. Three bows launched arrows now, and yet for all they took back, the metal edge still struggled forward.
And stopped its advance, for another and another dragon appeared, a hissing thunder. He saw them, shrieked a war cry, ordered attack, and the riders were still joining them, while dragon bodies surged forward, and Ta'in's power rippled between his knees. The arrows became a storm. The metal edge retreated, and the ship, last of all, began to shiver in a sky gone blue, plummeted down, grew feathers, shed them and died.
He looked about him, at the bright familiar land, at the keen-eyed warriors who had joined him, men and women, at the brave boy who was his once-lost son. Pride welled up in him.
"Your dream," his son said, love burning in his eyes, "is best of all."
"Let me in," Ginar said. He had walked far to the iron gates, and his bulk made walking difficult. Two days and Belat had not returned. It was a desperate act, to cross the bridge unbidden, to venture the catacombs. . . all but deserted now, but he had seen the movement from the hill by the port, the drift of peasants going where they would not have dared to go, the gradual desertion of the fringes of the city, the long silence. . . and Ginar, who was an addict of the dream, could no longer bear the question. "Let me in," he begged of the Keeper, who did not looklike the legendary Keepers, but more like one of the peasants. He hoped for the tape at least, to have that, to savor the dream for which he had been longing with feverish desire. The Keeper let him in. He walked, panting, the long road through the field of ruin, where peasants sat with placid eyes. Walked, with long, painful pauses, to the inner gates, and found them open; climbed, which took him very long, the Way of the Thousand Steps, sweating and panting; but he was driven by his addiction, and not by any rational impulse. Belat had promised him—promised him the most unique of all dreams. He had imagined this, savored this, desired it with a desire that consumed all sense. . . to have this one greatest dream. . . to experience such a death, and live—
At long last he reached the doors, which stood ajar, where peasants sat along the corridors. . . he stumbled among their bodies, pushed and forced his way in gathering shadow, for the lamps were dimmed. He entered the lotus hall at last, where peasants sat among the lords of dream, where a boy sat on a flower throne.
And a weariness came on his limbs so that they could no longer move for it was night and the dream was strong. He sank down, no longer conscious of his bulk, forgetful of such desires, and the pleasures he had come to find.
He sat down in the council ring among the tents, and smiled, while the dragons stamped and shuffled outside the camp, and the wind whispered in the grass beyond, and the three moons were young.
1981
HIGHLINER
( New York City )
The city soared, a single spire aimed at the clouds, concave-curved from sprawling base to needle heights. It had gone through many phases in its long history. Wars had come and gone. Hammered into ruin, it rebuilt on that ruin, stubbornly rising as if up were the only direction it knew. How it had begun to build after that fashion no one remembered, only that it grew, and in the sun's old age, when the days of Earth turned strange, it grew into its last madness, becoming a windowed mountain, a tower, a latter-day Babel aimed at the sullen heavens. Its expanse at the base was enormous, and it crumbled continually under its own weight, but its growth outpaced that ruin, growing broader and broader below and more and more solid at its base and core, with walls crazily angled to absorb the stresses.
Climate had changed many times over the course of its life. Ice came now and froze on its crest, and even in summers, evening mists iced on the windward side, crumbling it more; but still it grew, constantly webbed with scaffolding at one point or the other, even at the extreme heights; and the smaller towers of its suburbs followed its example, so that on its peripheries, bases touching and joining its base, strange concave cones lifted against the sky, a circle of spires around the greater and impossible spire of the City itself, on all sides but the sea. At night the City and its smaller companions gleamed with lighted windows, a spectacle the occupants of the outlying city-mountains could see from their uppermost windows, looking out with awe on the greatest and tallest structure man had ever built on Earth. . . or ever would. And from the much higher windows of the City itself, the occupants might look out on a perspective to take the senses away, towering over all the world. Even with windows tinted and shielded against the dying sun's radiations, the reflections off the surface of the land and the windows of other buildings flared and glared with disturbing brightness; and by night the cities rose like jeweled spires of the crown of the world, towering mounds which one day might be absorbed as their bases had already been.