The Hollow Lands

1. In Which Jherek Carnelian Continues to be in Love

"You have begun another fashion I fear, my dear." The Iron Orchid slid the sable sheets down her smooth skin and pushed them from the bed with her slender feet.

"I am so proud of you. What mother would not be? You are a talented and tasty son!"

Jherek sighed from where he lay on the far side of the bed, his face all but hidden in the huge downy pile of pillows. He was pale. He was pensive.

"Thank you, brightest of blossoms, most revered of metals."

His voice was small.

"But you still pine," she said sympathetically, "for your Mrs. Underwood."

"Indeed."

"Few could sustain such a passion so well. The world still awaits, eagerly, expectantly, the outcome. Will you go to her? Will she come to you?"

"She said that she would come to me," Jherek Carnelian murmured. "Or so I understood. You know how difficult it is sometimes to make sense of a time traveller's conversation, and I must say that it was particularly confusing in 1896." He smiled. "It was wonderful, however. I wish you could have seen it, Iron Orchid. The Coffee Stalls, the Gin Palaces, the Prisons and all the other monuments. And so many people! One might doubt a sufficiency of air to give life to them!"

"Yes, dear." Her response was not as lively as it might have been, for she had heard all this more than once. "But your recreation is there, for all of us to enjoy. And others now follow where you led."

Realizing that he was in danger of boring her, he sat up in his pillows, stretching his fingers out before him and contemplating the shimmering power rings which adorned them. Pursing his perfect lips he made an adjustment to the ring on the index finger of his right hand. A window appeared on the far side of the room and through the window sunshine came leaping, warm and bright.

"What a beautiful morning!" exclaimed the Iron Orchid, complimenting him. "How do you plan to spend it?"

He shrugged. "I had not considered the problem. Have you a suggestion?"

"Well, Jherek, since you are the one who has set the fashion for nostalgia, I thought you might like to come with me to one of the old rotted cities."

"You are most certainly in a nostalgic mood, Queen of imaginative mothers." He kissed her softly upon the lids of her ebony eyes. "We are last there together when I was a child — you are thinking of Shanalorm, of course?"

"Shanalorm, or whatever it's called. You were conceived there, too, as I remember." She yawned. "The rotted cities are the only permanency in this world of ours."

"Some would say they were the world." Jherek smiled. "But they do not have the charm of the Dawn Age metropoli, ancient as they are."

"I find them romantic," she said reminiscently. She threw jet arms around him, kissing him upon the lips with her mouth of midnight blue, her dress (living purple poppies) undulating and sighing. "What shall you wear, to go adventuring? Are you still in a mood for those arrowed suits?"

"I think not." (Privately, he was disappointed that she still favoured blacks and dark blues, for it indicated that she had not completely forgotten her relationship with doom-embracing Werther de Goethe.) He considered the problem for a moment and then, with a twist of a power ring, produced flowing robes of white spider-fur. His intention was to create a contrast, and it pleased her. "Perfect," she purred. "Come, let's board your carriage and be off."

They left his ranch (which was purposely preserved much as it had been when he had tried to prepare a home for his lost love, Mrs. Amelia Underwood, before she had been projected back to her own 19th century) and crossed the well-tended lawns, where his deer and his buffalo no longer roamed, through the rockeries, rose bowers and Japanese gardens which reminded him so poignantly of Mrs. Underwood, to his landau of milky jade. The landau was upholstered inside with the skins of apricot-coloured vynyls (beasts now long extinct) and trimmed with green gold.

The Iron Orchid settled herself in the carriage and Jherek seated himself opposite, tapping a rail as a signal for the carriage to ascend. Someone (not himself) had produced a lovely, round yellow sun and gorgeous blue clouds, while below them rolled gentle grassy hills, woods of pine and clover-trees, rivers of amber and silver, rich and restful to the eye. There was miles and miles of it. They headed in a roughly southerly direction, towards Shanalorm.

They crossed a viscous white and foamy sea from which pink creatures, not unlike gigantic earthworms, poked either their heads or their tails (or both), and they speculated on its creator.

"Unfortunately, it is probably Werther," said the Iron Orchid. "How he strives against an ordinary aesthetic! Is this another example of his Nature, do you think? It certainly seems primitive."

They were glad to have the white sea behind them. Now they floated over high salt crags which glittered in the light of a reddish orb which was probably the real sun. There was a silence in this landscape which thrilled them both and they did not speak until it was passed.

"Nearly there," said the Iron Orchid, peering over the side of the landau (actually she had absolutely no clear idea where they were and had no need to know, for Jherek had given the carriage clear instructions). Jherek smiled, delighting in his mother's enthusiasms. She always enjoyed their outings together.

Caught by a gust of air, his spider-fur draperies lifted around him, all but obscuring his view. He patted them down so that their whiteness spread across the seat and at that moment, for a reason he could not define, he thought of Mrs. Underwood and his brow clouded. It had been much longer than he had expected. He was sure that she would have returned by now if she could. He knew that soon he must visit the ill-tempered old scientist, Brannart Morphail, and beg him for the use of another time machine. Morphail had claimed that Mrs. Underwood, subject as anyone else to the Morphail Effect, would soon be ejected from 1896 and might wind up in any period of time covered by the past million years, but Jherek was sure that she would return to this Age. After all, they were in love. She had admitted, at long last, that she loved him. Jherek wondered if Brannart, determined to prove his theory flawless, were actually blocking Mrs. Underwood's attempts to get to him. He knew that the suspicion was unfair, but it was already obvious that both My Lady Charlotina and Lord Jagged of Canaria were playing complicated games involving his and Mrs. Underwood's fates. He had taken this in good part so far, but he was beginning to wonder if the joke were not beginning to pall.

The Iron Orchid had noticed his change of mood. She leaned across and stroked his forehead. "Melancholy, again, my love?"

"Forgive me, finest of flowers." With an effort he cleared his face of lines. He smiled. He was glad when, at that moment, he noticed violet light pulsing on the horizon. "Shanalorm looms. See!"

As she turned, her face was a black mirror reflecting the delicate radiation. "Ah, at last!"

They entered a landscape that none chose to change; not merely because it was so fine, but also because it might have been unwise to tamper with the sources of their power. Cities like Shanalorm had been built over the course of many centuries and they were very old. It had been said that they were capable of converting the energy of the entire cosmos, that the universe could be created afresh by means of their mysterious engines, but no one had ever dared to test this pronouncement. Though few had bothered to do so in the past couple of millennia (it was currently considered vulgar) it was certainly possible to make any number of new stars or planets. The cities would last as long as Time itself (which was not that long, if Yusharisp, the little alien who had gone into space with Lord Mongrove, was to be believed).

Beneath its canopy of violet light, which did not seem to penetrate to the city itself, Shanalorm lay dreaming. Some of its bizarre buildings had melted and remained in a semi-liquid state, their outlines still discernible; other buildings were festering — machine mould and energy-moss undulated across their shells, bright yellow-green, bile-blue and reddish-brown, groaning and whispering as it sought fresh seepages from the power-reservoirs; peculiar little animals, indigenous to the cities, scuttled in and out of openings which might have been doors and windows, through shadows of pale blue, scarlet and mauve, cast by nothing visible; they swam through pools of glittering gold and turquoise, feasting off half-metallic plants which in turn were nurtured by queer radiations and cryptically structured crystals. And all the while Shanalorm sang to itself, a thousand interweaving songs, hypnotic harmonies. Once, it was said, the whole city had been sentient, the most intelligent being in the universe, but now it was senile and even its memories were fragmented. Images flickered here and there among the rotting jewel-metal of the buildings; scenes of Shanalorm's glories, of its inhabitants, of its history. It had had many names before it was called Shanalorm.

"Isn't it pretty, Jherek!" cried the Iron Orchid. "Where shall we have our picnic?"

Jherek stroked part of the landau's rail and the carriage began to spiral very slowly down until it was floating between the towers, skimming just above the roofs of blocks and domes and globes which shone with a thousand indefinable shades. "There?" He indicated a pool of ruby-coloured liquid overhung with old trees, their long, rusted branches touching the surface. A soft, red-gold moss crept down to the bank and tiny, tinkling insects made sparkling trails of amber and amethyst through the air.

"Oh, yes! It's perfect!"

As he landed the carriage and she stepped daintily out, she raised a finger to her lips, staring around at the scene with an expression of faint recognition.

"Is this…? Could it be…? Jherek, you know, I believe this is where you were conceived , my egg. Your father and I were walking" — she pointed at a complex of low buildings on the opposite shore, just visible through a drifting, yellow mist — "over there! When the conversation turned, as it will in such places, to the customs of the ancients. I think we were discussing the Dead Sciences. As it happened, he had been studying some old text on biological restructuring, and we wondered if it was still possible to create a child according to Dawn Age practices." She laughed. "The mistakes we made at first! But eventually we got the hang of it and here you are — a creature of quality, the product of skilled craftsmanship. Possibly that is why I cherish you so deeply, with such pride."

Jherek took her hand of gleaming jet. He kissed the tips of her fingers. Gently, he stroked her back. He could say nothing, but his hands were gentle, his expression tender. He knew her well enough to know that she was strangely excited.

They lay down together on the comfortable moss, listening to the music of the city, watching the insects dancing in the predominantly violet light.

"It is the peace, I believe, that I treasure most," murmured the Iron Orchid, moving her head luxuriously against his shoulder, "the antique peace. Have we lost something, do you think, that our forefathers possessed, some quality of experience? Werther believes that we have."

Jherek smiled. "It is my understanding, most glorious of blooms, that individuals are given to individual experiences. We can make of the past anything we choose."

"And of the future?" said she dreamily, inconsequently.

"If Yusharisp's warnings are to be taken seriously, then the future fades; there is scarcely any left."

But he had lost her attention. She got up and walked to the edge of the pool. Below the surface warm colours writhed and, entranced for the moment, she stared at them. "I should regret…" she began, then paused, shaking her dusky hair. "Ah, the smells , Jherek. Are they not sublime?"

He raised himself to his feet and went to join her, a billowing cloud of white as he moved. He took a deep breath of the chemical atmosphere and his body glowed. He looked across the pool at the outline of the city, wondering how it had changed since it had been populated by humankind, when people had lived their lives among its engines and its mills, before it had become self-sufficient, no longer needing tending. Did it ever suffer loneliness, he thought, or miss what must have seemed to it, at last, the clumsy, affectionate attentions of the engineers who had brought it to life? Had Shanalorm's inhabitants drifted away from the city, or had the city rejected them? He put an arm around his mother's shoulders, but he realized that it was himself shivering, touched for a moment by an inexplicable chill.

"They are sublime," he said.

"Not dissimilar, I suppose, to the one you visited — to London?"

"It is a city," he agreed, "and they do not alter much in their essentials." And he felt another pang, so he laughed and said: "What shall be the colours of our meal today?"

"Ice white and berry-blue," she said. "Those little snails with their azure shells — where are they from? And plums! What else? Aspirin in jelly?"

"Not today. I find it a trifle insipid. Shall we have a snow-fish of some sort?"

"Absolutely!" Removing her gown, she flicked it out over the moss and it became a silvery cloth. Together they arranged the food, seating themselves on opposite sides of the cloth.

But when it was ready Jherek did not feel hungry. To please his mother, he sampled some fish, a sip or two of mineral water, a morsel of heroin, and was glad when she herself became bored with the meal and suggested that they disseminate it. No matter how much he tried to give his whole heart to his mother's enthusiasm, he found that he still could not purge himself of a vague feeling of unease. He knew that he would like to be elsewhere but knew, too, that there was nowhere in the world he could go and be rid of his sense of dissatisfaction. He noticed that she was smiling.

"Jherek! You sag, my dear! You mope! Perhaps the time has come to forget your role — to give it up in favour of one which can be better realized?"

"I cannot forget Mrs. Underwood."

"I admire your resolution. I have told you so already. I merely remind you, from my own knowledge of the classics, that passion, like a perfect rose, must finally fade. Perhaps it is time to begin fading a little?"

"Never."

She shrugged. "It is your drama and you must be faithful to it, of course. I would be the first to question the wisdom of veering from the original conception. Your taste, your tone, your touch — they are exquisite. I shall argue no further."

"It appears to go beyond taste," said Jherek, picking at a piece of bark and making it thrum gently against the bole of the tree. "It is difficult to explain."

"What truly important work of art is not?"

He nodded. "You are right, Iron Orchid. That is all it is."

"It will soon resolve itself, fruit of my seed." She linked her arm in his. "Come, let us walk for a while through these tranquil streets. You might find inspiration here."

He allowed her to lead him across the pool while she, still in a mood of fond reminiscence, talked of his father's love of this particular city and the profound knowledge he had had of its history.

"And you never knew who my father was?"

"No. Wasn't it delicious? He remained in disguise throughout. We were in love for weeks!"

"No clues?"

"Oh, well…" She laughed lightly. "It would have spoiled it to have pursued the secret too fiercely, you know."

Beneath their feet some buried transformer sighed and made the ground tremble.