Darker Worlds Read online

  Oh, but life was now good. And if later, with familiarity, he grew bored with his transfigured wife, at least he now had hope that life might hold further remarkable discoveries.

  There were wonders in the universe, after all.

  THE MAYOR OF EPHEMERA

  -1-

  Time is meat. At first its carcass is the bright red of dawn, accented with clouds of fat, offering seemingly boundless promise. It is sliced into fractions, and consumed in increments. But gradually it is depleted, and the portions that are not used are wasted, blacken and decay and become nothing.

  Time needed no face before there was anyone to observe and chart its coming and goings. Since there has been, often Time has come boldly and undisguised, its head a gold stopwatch framing a disk of raw red meat. Yet at times Time is masked, and passes on its way unrecognized on unfathomable errands.

  The people of Ephemera had long lain oblivious to the stealthy doings of Time. Long ago, they had become dissatisfied with their imposed and primitive biological existence. The dictates of belly and genitalia. They had devised methods of experiencing life and interacting with one-another in what they considered loftier and more meaningful ways, through the use of increasingly clever technology. They had supplemented and circumvented the body. Ultimately they had superseded the body altogether.

  The citizens of Ephemera had rid themselves of their obsolete husks of transient flesh, preserving only the most vital of organs – the thinking organ – in mechanical bodies, either cosmetically designed by themselves or by others whose specialty it was. No longer imprisoned in some random conglomeration of cells they had had no choice over, the citizens expressed their innermost beings, celebrated the beauty of artifice, and all this satisfied them for quite some time.

  Eventually, however, they again became disenchanted with existence. As their mechanized environment required less and less that they work, they spent more and more time idle, relaxing…resting…sleeping. Sleeping for longer and longer periods.

  Dreaming became their main source of entertainment, of comfort, of sustenance. Dreaming transported them beyond even their synthetic bodies, and relieved them of their frustratingly and perplexingly unsatisfying interactions with each other in the waking world.

  In time, the people no longer chose to wake, and what little needed to run in Ephemera ran itself.

  -2-

  For the most part, Ephemera lay inert and silent.

  The many dreamers reposed within their homes, those sealed-up dark pockets within the walls of Ephemera’s narrow streets and narrower alleys, all of which twisted and turned back on themselves like the convolutions of a brain. Over time, with the seismic shifting of the world beneath and the vagaries of the weather beyond Ephemera’s surrounding wall, the streets had warped and grown more radically humped, the turns of the alleys sharper and more abrupt. Sometimes an alley would gradually close up and become dead-ended, while another would slowly be pried open between buildings. The buildings leaned closer toward each other, touching foreheads intimately, or slanted away from each other as if contemplating their reflections in surprised revulsion.

  As mindlessly as a sleeper’s respiration, a variety of support systems continued operating, discreetly and furtively, as if afraid to cause the awakening of a single soul. To an outsider, though there were none, many of these sustaining functions and maintenance procedures would be inscrutable.

  At a second story level, metal wires crisscrossed some streets, and from a high compartment would emerge an object shaped like a bird of folded paper that would slide along the wire, come to a halt at the center point, open its beak and sigh a short puff of steam, then continue on the wire to a compartment in the opposite wall.

  Had anyone been awake to hear it, a tiny tick-tick-ticking would have announced the scuttling approach of a centipede-like automaton with a head like that of a child’s doll, only the top of the head was cut away and showed a gaping empty space, this hollow meant to indicate that this mechanism was not the artificial body of a citizen of Ephemera but merely one of the custodians, who nevertheless themselves came in diverse forms. Such a centipede would pause near an exhaust vent in the outer wall of a building where the moist exhalations of the sleepers within had caused black mildew to form, and the automaton would scrape this off with its bladed primary forelimbs, and with its padded secondary forelimbs polish the stained area white again.

  Up from hatches in rooftops crawled mannequins with those same gaping heads and pleasantly placid faces, their bodies garbed in satin harlequin suits, elegant spider-like legs carrying them delicately. They would sweep into disposal chutes the latest film of fallen ash and dead leaves blown in from outside the enclosing wall. They did all this under the absinthe green light of the sun, which had grown diseased over the uncounted years. Against the green-tinged sky, giant bubbles of gas-filled mercury rose from skewed smokestacks dispersed throughout Ephemera, drifting away to eventually burst and rain down quicksilver upon the forest beyond, toxic metal and gas wastes disposed of in one go.

  Another type of custodian rode through the lanes on something like a tricycle, its brilliant red paint blistered and chipped, the custodian itself painted red with a pointed head like that of a beakless cardinal, and from the seat of its tricycle it would reach out to scan the many large barcodes stenciled on the walls of the buildings throughout Ephemera, to confirm that it was making every stop on its endless rounds. Another barcode scanned, and onward it would pedal again, wobbly wheels squeaking softly.

  When each was done with its own particular cycle of chores, nearly all of the various custodians would return to their respective tiny closet, or oil-scented garage, or cavernous warehouse, to stand idle until the next cycle. Sometimes, standing there in the dark, they might twitch rhythmically or even go into occasional violent bursts of vibrating motion, because they were very old. Here and there, a custodian would remain fixed in place, never to venture forth on its errands again, because there were no custodians to tend to the custodians.

  -3-

  The primary component of dreams is longing.

  Dr. Phemorus dreamed repeatedly that the top of his head – which was that of a snowy-haired puppet with oversized glass eyes and skin textured like painted papier-mâché – had been sawed off like the top of a pumpkin. From the white-fringed crater of his open head would sprout a telescoping ladder, which would slant upwards and finally lean against the top of a great, blank wall. Though he couldn’t see it from the ground, he knew that on the other side of the looming wall was a forest with leaves of red, of scarlet and crimson and carmine, of cherry and blood and ruby. A beautiful autumnal forest that he had played in as a boy, picnicked in as a lover, wandered in as a thoughtful student. Shut out, now, these many years behind the wall that closed in Ephemera.

  In his long, long, unbroken chain of dreams, if occasionally he had wandered those forest paths again, once more in his original body of flesh and blood, again holding the hand of his youthful first love, or that of his second love who would later become his bride (his departed and mourned wife), then he might have been sufficiently content to go on dreaming. Even though he, Phemorus, had stridently warned the others, warned the Mayor of Ephemera himself, that it was a mistake to allow all the citizens to submerge themselves in constant slumber, to consign themselves to insentience. To shut down their conscious minds in favor of dreams. It was not natural, he argued.

  But what is natural? was the Mayor’s reply. Anything we can devise becomes an addition to what is natural. You, who devised the very body you now occupy, talk of ‘natural’ like a frightened and senile old man from the time before immortality?

  The Mayor went on to say that all that could be achieved consciously, in the waking world, had been achieved. There was no longer a need to eat, to work, to struggle for survival. Now, proclaimed the Mayor, was the time for them all to reap the benefits of past labors, past sacrifices. Now was the time to cast off time. The dictates, the shackle of time, a
nd of reality itself.

  We may yet achieve greater things if we remain awake, Dr. Phemorus argued, things that we can’t yet foresee or conceive of. How do you know we have no more to discover and accomplish?

  But the Mayor and the others of Ephemera wouldn’t listen to him – even though he, Dr. Phemorus, had once been considered a great man, the designer and engineer of the first of the mechanical vehicles into which all the citizens of Ephemera would ultimately transfer their minds, the artificial body that he now slumbered in being one of his initial prototypes.

  Then at least allow me to remain awake, and watch over the rest of you, to safeguard you, he implored. Who knows what enemies might come along and take advantage of us in our vulnerability? I will make the rounds and scan the barcodes, and see that all the systems are running smoothly.

  But no, the Mayor forbade it. He made a decree. Every one of the citizens of Ephemera must sleep, and sleep forever.

  You will regret this, Dr. Phemorus predicted vehemently.

  How will we regret it? scoffed the Mayor. We will be asleep.

  Somehow, someday, you will.

  There will be no someday. No days, nor nights. Only dream. Beautiful, blissful dream, as dream never existed before. Sweet, endless, and utter.

  Had the Mayor been correct, that dreams would only be sweet, then things might have been different. But Phemorus had the recurring dream that the ladder rose up from his empty skull, and once leaning against the top of the wall he couldn’t climb it, because even though he had generated the ladder himself the base of it, the root of it, weighed upon him as he supported it. As if it pinned him in place like a bug in a forgotten museum display. And so he did not relive, in dream, his wandering in the red forest, holding the hand of his first lover or of his future bride.

  Therefore, after an unknown passage of time, Dr. Phemorus woke up.

  -4-

  He woke in a state of confusion. He knew he was awake; he was not under the illusion that he still dreamed. He could not at first understand, however, why he found himself standing in a warehouse in which a variety of makes of doll-faced anthropomorphic custodians stood in two rows of four, at rest. Their hollow open heads reminded him of his dreams of the extending ladder he was unable to climb. Weak, mold-colored light entered through waxy windows, showing him that the joisted ceiling was hung with cobwebs too high for the custodians to reach, if they ever even noticed them during their comings and goings to tend to other, narrowly focused matters.

  Had he been brought here? If so, by whom? Had someone else awakened before him, also discontented with their dreams? Or was it someone from some other place, beyond Ephemera, beyond the expanse of forest, having come alone or with others to intrude upon Ephemera’s coma-like silence? Phemorus even wondered, bitterly, if the Mayor and his cohorts had tricked all the others into entering into deep slumber when they themselves had planned on remaining awake all along. But to what end?

  Finally he settled on the theory that – unhappy with his dreams for some time – he had, without fully throwing off the mantle of sleep, become a restless somnambulist. Sleepwalking, for who knew how long, through the labyrinthine lanes, squeezing through the constricting alleys, that made up Ephemera. Dreaming of the ladder and the unreachable red forest beyond the wall, all the while. Dreaming he was awake, and thus going through the motions of consciousness. It was a wonder to him, then, that he hadn’t awakened standing longingly at the foot of the wall itself.

  He stepped forward creakily, trying not to totter and lose his balance after so long a time without being ambulatory – at least in the conscious sense. A peripheral movement caught his eye and he swiveled his wild-haired head to see a device that looked half like a giant white moth and half like an opened book come fluttering into the room through a black, circular opening in one wall. It flapped awkwardly through the air, indicating that its gears were slowing down after it had made its rounds, its function being to scrape away with delicate forelimbs the grime between the bricks that faced buildings. He watched it return to its station on one wall and skewer itself on a waiting screw that would wind up its mechanism again. Its wings closed like praying hands.

  Even as the cleaner moth went still, all but one of the standing custodians lifted their sagging heads and stepped into motion, as if following Phemorus’s example. He shifted aside to let them pass as the seven automatons filed toward a doorway at the far end of the warehouse room. He watched them depart, then turned his attention to the one that had remained and he moved closer to it.

  This custodian was jittering very subtly, as if shivering with cold. Its eyelids fluttered, their exaggerated lashes like little black wings. It hurt Phemorus’s pride to see that this lone specimen was an early custodian model that he himself had designed before other engineers had come in his footsteps and nudged him aside. He consoled himself that it was no doubt malfunctioning due to it being older than the others that had departed, but he still sought to determine the exact reason for the trouble.

  It didn’t take long to discover something that, while not the cause of the glitch, was nevertheless incongruous. Because the automaton’s head was leaning forward a bit, its chin almost touching its breast, he could readily see into the gap of its skull. In there, a bird – which may have got into the room through the same opening the cleaner moth used – had built a nest of twigs and tatters of cloth. But the nest was very old, the eggs within broken open, the featherless baby birds that had hatched having starved and gone gray and desiccated.

  He scooped out the nest with his hands, set it aside, but the custodian went on blinking rapidly and quivering, its control system actually being within its torso. If he was to repair it, he would need tools. It would be best to take it back to his workshop, adjacent to his living quarters.

  But if he were to expend his efforts on so trivial a matter, it could wait. First, he wanted to know if anyone else were awake like himself, and to see what state Ephemera was in as a whole.

  At one end of the spacious, dimly lighted chamber was a ladder bolted into the wall. He went to this, took hold of a rung and started to climb. He ascended to the ceiling, where a metal hatch was almost obscured by a curtain of cobwebs. He swept this aside and it stuck to his sleeve like a clinging funeral shroud. He reached up and pushed the hatch open on its squealing, rusted hinges, then clambered out onto the building’s flat rooftop.

  He had thought the greenish tint of sunlight through the warehouse’s windows might be due to the age of the glass, but now he saw that the overcast sky was indeed the green of decomposition.

  From up here Phemorus could see over the jumbled and radically slanted, drunkenly keeling rooftops of Ephemera’s dwellings and shops. He stepped to the parapet that edged the warehouse’s roof, and a moment later he gripped it for support, for he felt like swooning. He felt like returning to merciful unconsciousness, if only his dreams had been worth fleeing to. If he had still possessed a heart, it would be hammering in horror and sadness, as he stared across Ephemera and over its surrounding wall toward the great forest beyond.

  He saw, for the first time, that the trees were no longer vibrantly, vividly red. Those leaves that remained fixed to their skeletal branches had gone gray, dead on their stems. The forest floor was thickly carpeted with these gray scales, the oldest leaves to have fallen having crumbled to dust that was stirred up into brief little eddies with the breeze.

  As he gazed at the extinct forest in despair that gradually turned to anger, vibrant and vivid red anger, he saw a giant balloon of mercury float overhead, disgorged from one of the smokestacks behind him. The gas-filled giant orb glided out over the wall, out over the trees, and then finally its weight caused it to drift lower and its belly was punctured on bare claw-like branches. The bubble burst, the gas was released, and a shower of mercury fell down to the mounds of gray leaves below.

  Phemorus could not say he was surprised. He had known that this waste disposal process could not be good for the forest and
he had cautioned the Mayor and all of Ephemera about his fears, but he had been reassured that the woods would be resilient. The damage would be minimal and acceptable. And anyway, who would be awake to care?

  But the damage was not minimal. As far as the glass eye could see, there was nothing but gray forest stretching out to the horizon where it merged in a mist with the green sky.

  -5-

  With a tool he had taken from his workshop, it was an easy matter for Dr. Phemorus to pick the lock of the front door to the Mayor’s house.

  This wasn’t the first place he had gone after climbing down from atop the warehouse, though, and emerging onto the street. Still seething with rage and a sadness keen as panic, he had gone along the lane pounding on doors with his smooth, white porcelain hands, their jointed fingers balled into fists. Wake up! he had cried in his artificial voice, expelled from a miniature bellows in his upper torso. Wake up, you fools! But none of the doors had opened, and after about a dozen he had stopped.

  Was he the only one whose dreams had been lacking, whose dreams had not been narcotic enough to fog the mind, muffle it in layers of deadening cotton?

  He had then found his legs carrying him, as if his mechanical body itself willed them instead of his brain, to the great mausoleum near Ephemera’s crookedly spiraling center. It was a glossy white box with the appearance of having been carved from a single block of marble, like an edifice of organically grown bone. Its metal door had whined piteously as he pushed it open.

  He had found the aisle he sought, its length lined in rows of small dark panels set in the marble. He hadn’t needed to read the numbers stenciled below these panels to locate the right one. He had stood before the panel that represented his departed wife, reached out his white hand and depressed a button beside her stenciled number. A light had come on behind the dark panel, revealing this to be a pane of glass, and beyond it was a tiny box-like space lit by a bulb. The light had revealed a music box that he himself had created for his wife as a present to mark their first anniversary. He had felt proud to see that the minute figure of a ballerina atop the music box was still spinning, spinning, though he couldn’t hear the tinkling music behind the thick glass pane that allowed one to view her cenotaph. Seeing the ballerina still twirling, as if she too was awake, had soothed his anger somewhat and allowed him to think more clearly. He had left the mausoleum with a destination in mind.