Night of Light

“She’s dead.”

There was a delay of about fifteen minutes. Tand phoned the hospital, and soon the long red oil-burning steam-driven ambulance rolled up. The driver jumped off the high seat over the front of the vehicle, which was built much like a landau, and said, “You’re lucky. This will be our last call. We’re taking the Sleep in the next hour.”

Tand had gone through the girl’s pockets and produced her papers of identification. Carmody noticed that he’d done so with a suspiciously policemanlike efficiency. Tand gave them to the ambulance men and told them that it would be best probably to wait until after the Sleep before notifying her parents.

Afterwards, as they walked down the street, Carmody said, “Who takes care of the fire department, the police work, the hospitals, the supplying of food?”

“Our fires don’t amount to anything because of the construction of our buildings. Stocking food for seven days is no real problem; so few are up and out. As for the police, well, there is no law during this time. No human law, anyway.”

“What about a cop who takes the Chance?”

“I said that the law is suspended then.”

By then they’d walked out of the business district into the residential. Here the buildings did not stand shoulder to shoulder but were set in the middle of large yards. Plenty of breathing space. But the sense of massiveness, of overpoweringness, of eternity frozen in stone still hovered in the air, as these houses were every one at least three stories high and built of massive blocks and had heavy burglar-proof iron doors and windows. Even the doghouses were built to withstand a siege.

It was seeing several of these that reminded Carmody of the sudden cessation of animal life. The birds that had filled the air with their cries the day before were gone; the lyan and kin, doglike and catlike pets, which were usually seen in large numbers even on the downtown streets, were gone. And the squirrels seemed to have retreated into the holes in their trees.

Tand, in reply to Carmody’s remark about this, said, “Yes, animals instinctively sleep during the Night, have been doing it, from all evidences, since the birth of life here. Only man has lost the instinctive ability, only man has a choice or the knowledge of using drugs to put him in a state close to suspended animation. Apparently, even prehistoric man knew of the plant which gives the drug that will induce this sleep; there are cave paintings depicting the Sleep.” They stopped before the house belonging to the female whom Carmody called Mother Kri. It was here that visiting Earthmen, willy-nilly, were quartered by the Kareenan government. It was a four-storied circular house built of limestone and mortar, capped by a thick shale roof, and set in a yard at least two hundred feet square.

A long winding tree-lined walk led up to the great porch, which itself ran completely around the house. Halfway up the walk, Tand paused beside a tree.

“See anything peculiar in this?” he asked the Earthman.

As was his habit when thinking, Carmody spoke aloud, not looking at his audience but staring off to one side as if he were talking to an invisible person. “It looks like a mature tree, yet it’s rather short, about seven feet high. Something like a dwarf cotton-wood. But it has a double trunk that joins about a third of the way up. And two main branches, instead of many. Almost as if it had arms and legs. If I were to come upon it on a dark night, I might think it was a tree just getting ready to take a walk.”

“You’re close,” said Tand. “Feel the bark. Real bark, eh? It looks like it to the naked eye. But under the microscope, the cellular structure is rather peculiar. Neither like a man’s nor a tree’s. Yet like both. And why not?”

He paused, smiled enigmatically at Carmody, and said, “It is Mrs. Kri’s husband.”

Carmody replied coolly, “It is?” He laughed and said, “He’s a rather sedentary character, isn’t he?”

Tand raised his featherish eyebrows.

“Exactly. During his life as a man he preferred to sit around, to watch the birds, to read books of philosophy. Taciturn, he avoided most people. As a result he never got very far in his job, which he hated.

“Mrs. Kri had to earn money for them by starting this lodging house; she retaliated by making his life miserable with nagging him, but she could never fill him with her own enthusiasms and ambitions. Finally, partly in an endeavor to get away from her, I think, he took the Chance. And this is what happened. Most people said he failed. Well, I don’t know. He got what he really wanted, his deepest wish.”

He laughed softly. “Dante’s Joy is the planet where you get what you really want. That is why it is off-limits to most of the Federation’s people. It is dangerous to have your unconscious prayers answered in full and literal detail.”

Carmody didn’t understand anything he was being told, but he jauntily said, “Has anybody taken X rays? Does he—it—have a brain?”

“Yes, of a sort, but what woody thoughts it thinks I wouldn’t know.”

Carmody laughed again. “Vegetable and/or man, eh? Look, Tand, what are you trying to do, scare me into getting off the planet or into taking the Sleep? Well, it won’t work. Nothing frightens me, nothing at all.”

Abruptly, his laughter ended in a choking sound, and he became rigid, staring straight ahead. His strength poured from him, and his body grew hot from his belly on out. About three feet before him there was a flickering like a heat wave, then, as if the air were solidifying into a mirror, the vibrations condensed into matter. Slowly, like a balloon collapsing as air poured out of holes torn in it, the bag of skin that had appeared folded in on itself.

But not before Carmody had recognized the face.

“Mary!”

It was some time before he could bring himself to touch the thing that lay on the sidewalk. For one thing, he didn’t have the strength. Something had sucked it out of him.

Only his reluctance to display fear before somebody else moved him to pick it up.

“Real skin?” said Tand.

From someplace in the hollowness within him Carmody managed to conjure a laugh.

“Feels just like hers did, as soft, as unblemished. She had the most beautiful complexion in the world.”

He frowned. “When it began to go bad...”

His fist opened out, and the skin dropped to the ground. “Empty as she was essentially empty. Nothing in the head. No guts.”

“You’re a cool one,” said Tand. “Or shallow. Well, we shall see.”

He picked up the bag and held it in both hands so it streamed out like a flag in the breeze. Carmody saw that there was now not only the face itself, but the scalp was complete and the front of the neck and part of the shoulders were there. Moreover, many long blond hairs floated like spider webs from the scalp, and the first layer of the eyeball itself had formed beneath the eyelids.

“You are begi

“I? I’m not doing that; I don’t even know what’s going on.”

Tand touched his head and heart. “These know.” He wadded the tissue in his fist and dropped it in a trashbasket on the porch.

“Ashes to ashes,” said Carmody.

“We shall see,” replied Tand again.

By this time scattered clouds had appeared, one of which masked the sun. The light that filtered through made everything gray, ghostly. Inside the house the effect was even worse. It was a group of phantoms that greeted them as they entered the dining room. Mother Kri, a Vegan named Aps, and two Earthmen, all sitting at a round table in a great darkened room flickeringly lit with seven candles set in a candelabrum. Behind the hostess was an altar and a stone carving of the Mother Goddess holding in her arms Yess and Algul as twin babies, Yess placidly sucking upon her right nipple, Algul biting down upon the left and scratching the breast with unbaby-like claws, the Mother Boonta regarding both impartially with a beatific smile. On the table itself, dominating the candelabrum and the plates and goblets, were the symbols of Boonta: the cornucopia, the flaming sword, the wheel.