Copyright © 1999 by Lenna A. Mahoney
This appendix is, in a certain sense, a tale of four dopples; or, more accurately, of three dopples and an original, me. The tale grew from a quasi-historical legend of the Offset Planet's Dreamwarld, which Sabre/"Elaine" entered though she shouldn't have been able to.
Legends do not behave in the Dreamwarld as they do in the wakeworlds. Every dreamer who hears a legend participates in it, merely by listening to it and shaping it in their own minds. By so joining in, they change the legend to some extent and change history as well. Therefore the Offsettian strategists couldn't tolerate it when "Elaine" entered the Dreamwarld. She learned its tales, she gave them outré new offworld interpretations, she skewed the strategists' plans, and they found and expelled her. Which eventually led to complications.
Theofe rescued "Elaine" by landing her GW in the Temple arena, an act that explicitly demonstrated her doppLink ability to scry her way though the Offsettian camouflage and misdirection. (Most offplaneters couldn't have found the Temple through the diversionary spells.) Then Theofe let the Temple priests know that there were two more "Elaine" dopplekin in Gregaria, and that unless "Elaine" were released, all three of the dopplekin would come to the Offset World and thoroughly confuse the Dreamwarld, using the outerdreaming skills that they presumably shared with "Elaine". Ixy handled the actual negotiations with the shamans, letting them test his memories of the other dopples for truthproof. Theofe had to stay safe in the GW as the ultimate weapon.
That was one aspect of the doppLink. Some other features can be seen in this appendix. "Elaine" lived a Dreamwarld legend in the Dreamwarld sense of living. "Lainley" acquired an idea of the story from "Elaine" via doppLink (neither knowing it, at the time) and rewrote it as fiction, "The March on the City That is Mountain." Many of the place and person names in "Lainley's" version came from Theofe's acquaintances, though Theofe received no doppLink backflush from "Elaine" or "Lainley". In the same period of time, I remembered a related image from a dream and composed a song from it.
THE LEGEND
(From "Elaine", loosely summarized)
In the Dreamwarld, when the sky is daylight all of the worldscape, land, sea, trees, and buildings, everything you can touch, is dark under night. The nighttime sky is mated with a sunlit surrounding worldscape, and dawn is exchanged with sunset. This twistlight was a compromise between the sun-loving patterners and the sun-loathing vampires. Many of the "points" scored in the Dreamwarld rivalry relate to attempts to undo, or on the other side to preserve, the twistlight. The March on the City That is Mountain was one such.
Jinairnee had been a queen, a beautiful young queen, not human. After she had been driven from her throne by a rebellion of the poor, she looked into her scrying mirror and saw herself black and shrivelled and old. And so she decided to make her revenge on the waterfront men who had so bent and stagnated her life that she had no better future than the mirror's.
She put on her best red gown and went to the lowest of the barges and offered herself as a live-in, to their leering and furtive delight, knowing herself that she had not long to live. She went alone to the room they gave her; there, there was a weak white flutter of butterfly wings and a dissolution with filthy stench. Jinairnee had chosen to leave her life and form in such a way as to fittingly punish the bargemen with the intolerable and permanent stink, and to die in a way suited to her life.
The butterfly flew up through a brick stairwell, out past a tiled fountain, and into a small house covered with white flowers, where it found rebirth in the human woman Cer Caray (whose name means The Misplaced). She still lived near the docks where her merchant father traded, and she visited them at the wrong time. Rusweyne was there, because it was much easier for him to travel and transport down to the underland (whatever name he gave it) through sea than through land.
Cer Caray remembered nothing about her abduction; it must have been easy for Rusweyne because she had the scent of a suicide. While she slept in the underland prison her god carried her spirit through the slave-filled halls, and then guards took her to Rus with other prisoners. The corridors were now emptied. At the last she passed two doors with posters that named the rooms within as the "Gambling Rooms for those with Money", and the "Gambling Rooms for those without Money". In the latter chamber slaves of the underland gambled with their lives for their masters' entertainment and perhaps their own. Cer Caray knew that was not her destiny but accepted the fear of it for that time.
Rusweyne began to sentence his catch, and Cer Caray spoke up as if she were still a merchant's daughter, not a slave. She suggested he might make considerable money if he translated and marketed the slave songs in the upper world. She must have impressed him (with the idea, or the insanity of offering it, or the knowledge of slave behavior that she couldn't have gotten waking). He ordered that she be taken to storage, but the other slaves to the Gambling Rooms. Cer Caray first reawoke in a laboratory where she and her class were listening to Rus as he taught a little of his magic.
Every sorcerer expects his apprentices to attempt his life by magic. Some of that class did. Cer Caray's ambitions were partly different. She wanted only to escape from the underland, where there is nothing but night. Cer gave Rusweyne more trouble than the rest of the class combined simply because her goals were different and her means correspondingly varied.
She tried escape without any spells at all, and was captured by nomads of the underland. She tried inducing Rusweyne to attack the upperland, inventing a tube-similarity constriction spell to squeeze closed the upperlanders' armor, cannon barrels, and water and air piping. She tried to invert the entire underland with herself as the untouched center, a spell that would cast her out on the surface of the upperland (at the price of cataclysm).
Then Rusweyne bargained with Cer Caray: she was to further one plot of his by playing the part of an upperland noble for five true days and nights, and on the sixth he would free her to her home. She agreed.
In her first day at court, arrived as a foreign princess, she saved the king from well-armed insurgents by casting her constriction spell on them. The king offered her a choice of husband from all the single men then present at court. To avoid leaning to one faction over another, to be able to survive at court for the six days, and out of simple liking, she chose the jester Starstro Verhoray.
On the second day, after absurdly prolonging the suspense, Verhoray refused the marriage as only a jester could safely do. Now Cer's presence at court was assured (if briefly) by her somewhat bawdy notoriety.
On the third day a nobleman, Cavneverdaveez, persuaded her by ambiguities to a night assignation. That night, also, there was a ball which he could not choose but attend. There were two conclusions Cer Caray might draw from Cav's hints: that he knew of Rusweyne's plot and meant to seek her out in connexion with it, with that more important to him than pleasing the king; or that he had not meant to come to the rendezvous but to betray her. Neither pleased her and she chose to risk the meeting.
While Cer passed in another's cloak through the true-night streets some passersby insulted her. She unwisely returned the insult and they challenged her to a duel to the death. Had she challenged first, her rank would have forced them to refuse; now her rank forced her to accept. She had responded as a slave, not a princess.
Cer Caray won, her god fighting beside her with slow but deadly deep-gouging weapons. She did not reach the rendezvous, and she did not learn whether Cavneverdaveez had set the duellists on her. But she took the duellists' girl hostage Diere back to the palace with her to have a companion of her own level, one indebted to her for life. "You think I want to slit your throat for your friends' sake. I want your throat for talking, not bleeding. I want your company for two days, only."
On the fourth day Cavneverdaveez had vanished, with nothing but a butterfly swarm of rumors to explain it. One story no better attested than the rest said that he had questioned the king one time too many before the ball, and had fled till the waning of the royal displeasure.
On the fifth day, when Cer Caray took Diere to court to entertain her before releasing her, Diere's god spoke through her mouth to denounce Cer as a cannibal. The evidence was found, the duellists' carved bodies in the duellists' alley. Cer fought and fled, and Starstro Verhoray hid her in the secret passages known only to the guilds of jesters and stage tricksters, used only in their performances.
At dawn of the sixth day, Verhoray took Cer Caray from hiding to the Lucharell. It was a place where precious things were kept; a sanctuary, where he who entered was safe as long as he was within, and safe if he was allowed to leave again; a shrine where one asked of its guardian oracle three questions. Should they be questions one whole-heartedly wanted answered, one might leave with the answers, with great treasure, and with life and lasting safety. Those who failed the test were not seen again.
Just outside the Lucharell colonnade, Cav's guardschildren attacked Verhoray and Cer. There were blasts. Cer Caray looked back and saw Verhoray's head and a fallen column covered with red flowers where his neck should have been. She ran into the Lucharell, dragging two guards with her. One man, dressed like a servant with no face, stepped from behind a counter.
"Where is the Answerer?"
"Do you have a deposit of value?"
"These children. Their lives."
She responded as a princess, not a seeker.
"But clearly they are of no value to
you. You must give us something of value to you."
She answered with her brooch. The glass gem was derisory but it had been a gift from Rusweyne. Then she looked back once more and saw that Verhoray's head was made of thick paper. His ventriloquist's dummy had been his twin, as to the face.
"Is Verhoray alive?"
"Is Verhoray safe?"
"How can I make Rusweyne free me?"
Cer Caray found herself standing next to Rusweyne's pavilion in the midst of Rusweyne's army in the middle world, the twistworld. Which of her questions had betrayed her?
Rusweyne recognized Cer Caray, had no use for her here, and would not send her home because she had not played her part in their contract. Cavneverdaveez knew her too. For that time and place he was Rusweyne's ally general. Cav took her into his entourage as a messenger; her outland origin let her run with her god's feet. Her loyalty turned to Rusweyne. She saw him with a seeker's eyes, not a lackey's.
The soldiery of Rus and his allies stretched over half the twistworld. At its edges the army was composed of animals, animals under orders, not men. As they approached the pole and center of the middle world, The City That Was Mountain, Kadukstannchk, the constellations in the twistnight sky took clear substantial shape so that they could see exactly as well as they could be seen. There were other marvels too, harder to remember for their strangeness.
When Rusweyne had besieged The City That Was Mountain for seven years and seven months and seven days, his army was stronger than ever. Cav could not bear this. He sent Cer Caray with a message to the lord of a certain promontory. But in that region she found only fisher folk, who lived on vast rafts in the sea and visited the shore only on holy days. They knew nothing about Cavneverdaveez. They took Cer to the only person who dwelt on the promontory, a statue of a man with no face except a patch of rainbow moire like oil on water. A sea goddess had turned a sculptor into that statue, after he prayed her to pose for him and then carved her as he saw her. Cer Caray gave the statue Cav's message: "Never be so innocent as to create a false face for what's stronger than you." And the statue spoke the same message back to her.
Cer Caray returned as rapidly as she might to the camp outside The City. As she ran she prayed for Cavneverdaveez and Rusweyne, because she could not be there to stand between them. She ran as a warrior, not a messenger, and her god so answered her prayers. When Cer neared the battlefield, where Rus and Cav and the other former allies were fighting all against all, her god brought her one step into the air for each step she ran forward. Soon she was on the top of The City's outer wall, with all the army stopped and watching. She looked into The City and saw where the twistlight was knotted, but it did not concern her because the twistland was only the middle land, not her own land.
The City That Was Mountain had no human guards except those which the outer wall made for itself. Cer Caray opened the gates of The City, and the army came in.
All through The City there were fountains of red brick and gold. Great black and white sharks leaped out of air above the arcs of water, killed fighters in swathes, and disappeared again. The water ran near every point in The City, large streams flowing to small flowing to minute, like the bloodstream of The City, and wherever the water ran the sharks sprang.
Cavneverdaveez tried to find the source of the water, to stop its flow that the sharks drew upon for life, and Cer Caray followed him. Rusweyne would not help them, he only sought the knot in the twistlight. Rus's guard hunted Cer and Cav and trapped them in a plaza scattered full of stone cubes of many sizes. Cavneverdaveez fought with his god beside him, and Cer Caray could not reach him and found herself further from him the harder she tried. In despair she picked up a cube to hurl it at the killers around Cav. All the water of The City burst forth from the hole beneath the cube she had lifted.
The waters washed throughout The City That Was Mountain. The City eroded to sand, and the sand and the army and Rusweyne, caught in the midst of his untwining spell, were carried into the underland through the pit scoured by the waters. Cavneverdaveez and Cer Caray were saved by their own spells. Cav went on to other battles and intrigues. Cer stayed to live on the promontory of the statue, and she is said to have restored him to life as a human, one very like Starstro Verhoray.
RUSWEYNE'S EPITAPH
(by an unremembered Dreamwarld poet; loosely translated by "Elaine")
I fight the lifelong battle that I chose.
The effort that I spend is only lost,
But what is good I cannot leave to foes;
And, keeping it, I cannot think of cost.
Theofe: Lainley's novel started with a machine they'd constructed in the remote
middle of the desert. Built it with bevatron (? hard to translate from the Latin)
tubes. Its basic structure, manufactured elsewhere, shipped in. Details added later,
tiny components in ordered regular patterns. One tube the size of a man's head.
Another, a vacant shell big enough for a man to step into. A digital meter, calibrated in
"studs" (translation?). These show a combined measure of time, power, degree of
reality. The controls, a "map" of cross-connections in light-blue, lavender conduits like
neon. The device creates a magical analog of the Sun, any star, depending on the
components. Then it causes the star-analog to dream, such that one can step into the dream in
the man-sized tube. The dream may reveal the star's past, present, future, something else.
Merrick, Banster, Black, Ashvy built most of
the sundreaming machine. (Their unLatin names provide that certain SF atmosphere for the Roma
Novan readers.) They start the thing up. They watch the neons, the counter. They
hear a disturbance outside. Merrick and Banster shut off the machine, go out. Black
stays behind. Morlan tries to force him at gunpoint to install the main bevatron, start the
machine. Morlan intends to use it for history change. Black carries the tube over
toward the receptacle, then hurls it down on the floor. It explodes in terrible heat, its
destruction kills Black. Morlan escapes almost unharmed.
The disturbance started with Aurens (!), a
desert man, with his tribe. They've come, challenged Merrick to a fight to the death, mostly
a distraction for Morlan's sake, partly hostility to the machine. Of course Merrick
wins. He spares Aurens. They return at the sound of the explosion. Ashvy had come
in just before it happened. She saw Black throw the tube down, then got half-shielded by a
partition, half knocked out, saw Morlan escape.
Ashvy, the rest of the team walking back
across the desert toward their messenger from home. Later, after burying Black, they talk
about the loss to his mother, apparently a greedy possessive old bitch. Merrick compares her
to the Earth, clinging to her children with atmosphere, gravity. But the sundreaming machine
gives humans their way out.
Morlan approaches Ashvy. He speaks of
himself as a man who seeks to regain his honor. They meet in a secret closet among the pipes,
ducts below the laboratory. He intrigues her by his closedness. Also by his belief that
one must stand outside the world, work there, to earn re-admittance to it. Almost at once he
persuades her to let him enter the sun's dream. The machine's guards absolutely trust her
team. The weekend has come, no one else around. She sets the components for his past to
let him go through. (He doesn't care about coming back.) Then she decides to go
too. She seeks something to admire, hasn't found it in her land, "as grained and warped as
wood, and near as weak". Also she has some peculiar half-personal relationship with Morlan,
starting back in New York. In a sense he "converted" her.
Next comes the sun's dream, a March on the
City that is Mountain, which holds the world in twilight, commanding tributes, threatening
perpetual night. The story must remind the Roma Novans of Alexander's march. The
charismatic king, the orator (Morlan) behind him who poisons the well, the king's loyal generals
(Ashvy one of them).
Telmartin has become powerful in the city
Muir, an Athens-like democracy. Now he goes out with his large army of loyalists to destroy
the City, stop its demand for tributes. His actual plan, to control the City, then the rest
of his world. One lord, one justice. His ambition seldom shows.
Ashvy finds herself a slave, under armed
guard, partly remembering her origin outside the sundream. Part of the tribute of slaves to
the City from Muir. Telmartin's army, equipped by a pledge from Muir's magnates, comes to
stop the tribute, send it back. She escapes, finds leather semi-armor, chops off her hair,
besmirches herself, joins the army as a newling. The men instruct her (she calls herself
Asv). At the first battle she gets a wound during a grand fight near the catapults. (In
the fight she gives a disarmed enemy another chance). The medics discover her secret.
Telmartin commends her. (Only he knows she had come from the tribute slaves.) The
soldiers treat her as a good-luck sign. She swears an oath of fealty to Telmartin.
When she heals, Telmartin begins to teach
military strategy to her, some other women. A myth says only a woman can take the City.
He gives Ashvy command of a smallish group of mounted archers. Some illwisher sends her a
curse-medallion. She pays him for it, always wears it as jewelry. At the next battle,
in a brilliant maneuver she captures a crucial mount of land, she gets much acclaim. By now
she loves Telmartin, more precisely adores him.
Temporarily, the army holds a position where
it can halt securely. Telmartin receives a secret warning message from Muir. The
council has plans to recall him. On the advice of an orator, Morlan, who has spoken against
Telmartin as a power-seeker. Telmartin sends Ashvy, as Asv, back to Muir with a small unit of
soldiers. Ostensibly to report their precariously successful position. Chiefly to bring
Morlan up to the front, Telmartin says, "for he cannot be caught between two storms". Ashvy
recognizes Morlan's name, remembers vaguely that he also came from that other world. The
memory makes her more sure of his wrong-headedness.
They go to Muir, which Ashvy remembers only
as if she'd heard about it. It means nothing to her. Her womanhood goes unseen when she
makes her report. She wears the traditional warrior's garb for such political work, a mask
and hampering robe. Morlan recognizes, doesn't betray her. He questions her in council,
makes no headway.
Morlan goes with the guard without argument,
leaving one great speech for the city to remember him by. Sometimes he rides up near Ashvy,
chiefly alone to the side. Tel would suspect any people Morlan spent too much time
with. On the last night before reaching the main body of Telmartin's army, Morlan invites
Ashvy to dinner. She comes, dressed as "what I am, a soldier." He tells her everything
he finds suspicious about Telmartin.
The sending away of Tel's best female general
Ashvy. Too honest to keep around during negotiations with the City? The requisitioning
of Morlan himself. To put him out of the way? Tel's oligarch friends gaining power in
Muir. Tel's pause, though an attack on the City would seem most fit, though the council can't
actually recall him now. His use of all his funds, not a proportion of them. Finally,
Tel's use of mercenaries, not patriots.
Of course all this has some explanation that
Ashvy can accept, certainly not Morlan's. Ashvy has her oath to remember, her
adoration. Morlan ends by telling her every great general has a certain sort of flaw.
The simplicity, innocence of someone who acts rather than observing. He gives examples,
leaves it open... is he speaking of her? Telmartin?
Telmartin sends Ashvy to take a small
scouting party through the City, which seems dead, empty as the desert around it. He says the
lack of tribute probably finished the City off. Morlan reminds her he'd warned her of this,
getting rid of her, the tool who might know too much. She and her group total 13, the number
of victims in a tribute.
They go. Something takes her men one by
one, sometimes as by magic, sometimes by very human means. None of them definitely killed,
though. It captures Ashvy last. She escapes at the very heart of the City, a sorcerer
machine filled with parasitical men, women. The City breeds these from tribute as game pieces
for its own schizoid mind.
Ashvy attacks the City's denizens randomly,
evading its sense of strategy. When she lures them outside the walls, the City begins to turn
its soldiers against each other, Telmartin's army, it hardly seems to care...
Ashvy escapes, returns to Telmartin's
army. She suffers a pitiful conflict between her certainty of betrayal by Telmartin, the
worship she has placed in him. In the camp she finds Telmartin, Morlan in conflict equally
violent. She comes down into the middle, her appearance stops the battlers. Even the
mercenaries let her pass. At the center of the clamor, Telmartin, Morlan. They freeze
too, neither having expected her. Right then the sunlight begins to change for the first time
in decades. The City's eerie fighters begin to attack the army, which responds in disorder.
Telmartin accuses Morlan of treason,
subversion of Muir, to the audience of soldiers. Morlan replies, "You are not Muir."
Tel orders Ashvy to execute Morlan. It rasps on her inner conflict. By oath she must
obey. She thinks of killing him, cannot. She cannot kill Morlan, who has proved
himself. She cannot kill herself, she rebels against such evasion. Finally Ashvy
thrusts her javelin, her only weapon, into the ground too firmly for easy removal. She tells
Telmartin "I will not aid you," steps back to Morlan. Tel knifes Morlan. Ashvy, seeing
how her wrong gift of devotion led to this, falls to her knees at Morlan's side to find him
dying. He calls her down to take his last wish, smiles, stabs her cleanly to take her with
him.
Telmartin has revealed himself, so found his
doom among the soldiers loyal to Muir.
Ashvy and Morlan find themselves back in
their own world, now an old, old, strange, stranded world, the stars changed, the mountains
lower. When Ashvy turns the machine off, it dissolves with age. (Till then the sun
preserved it.) Such, the length of one dream of the sun. Such, the price they pay for
having given up reality. They can't know the outcome of either of the worlds they've lived
in. Still they've gained virtue, "which is a disposition". They move out into the dim
world with the will to let no more of it slip away.
Undine
(Ruby
Arsenic)
1.
The foam slides on the seashore;
It gazes without eyes
On the men fishing and sailing,
On the pair strolling the tides.
The lovers hope no one can hear them;
On the waves a listener glides.
2.
A man sits carving driftwood
In shapes of his surmise,
While the waves wander before him
And the foam peaks and subsides.
Every day he comes to carve there,
Out among the sea's raw designs.
3.
The foam lingers around him,
To see what he contrives,
And to lie near to his breathing,
And to curve close to his side.
And when he leaves daily at nightfall,
Where he sat the sand still is dry.
R.
Then, one night, the storm of centuries is
aroused.
The sea and keening wind cut at the shore.
And a tree is bent and torn to be like a
girl;
She lies, a hand held out, as to implore.
She lies near where the sand is dry once
more.
4.
The man comes and he finds her,
Coarse wood shaped as his bride.
He begins carving and painting,
Makes her fair, kindly, and wise.
Until the foam beats all around him,
Till he flees in desperate fright.
5.
A shrine stands with the statue.
There the folk pray, when inclined
To request sea-luck and mercy
On this shore weirdly deprived.
For the sea-foam never is seen here,
And the smell is tears, never brine.
Copyright © 1999 by Lenna A. Mahoney
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