Day by Night

by Tanith Lee

Genres: Alien Contact; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

This repackaged edition of a classic sci-fi tale from a master storyteller explores a planet of great contrasts, one side in perpetual light, the other in darkness.

Vel Thaidis is a figment of Vitra's imagination. In a city with no sunlight, Vitra crafts dreams to entertain the masses. She enjoys a decadent life with the nobility while the lower class work and rot.

Vitra's dreams are a mirror image of her life. Vel has a brother like her, knows a man like the one Vitra desires. Even the machines that take care of them, that no one remembers how to fix, are the same. Except in Vitra's dreams, no one can fix the machines when they slowly die, while they never break down in reality. Vitra will never fear being stuck in the dark with no machines to create light.

Until she is. Vitra's dreams and reality are merging. She feels pushed into a corner, with no solution but the one her dreams have given her. In the end, Vitra may not have as much free will as she believes—and her dreams may be more real than she knows.

Release date: August 3, 2021

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 384

Sample

CHAPTER ONE
Part One
Half a staed below the palace of Hirz, the formal gardens gradually smoothed themselves into the curve of the lake shore. Here, where jade-green undulations of liquid broke on the pale gold sand, stood a golden young woman and her three attendant robots.
Apart from the Hirz Palace, no other building was visible above or along the arms of the shore. This portion of the Yunea, for twenty staeds along the Ring in either direction, was the property of Hirz. Hest, lay the holding of the Domms, to hespa, the decadent estate of the Thars.
It was the fifth hour, as two or three singing clocks within the palace had just announced. It was also Jate, the waking time. Nevertheless, customs had changed. Only the girl and her three robots occupied the scene, and before them the lake spread its empty, sun-flecked sheet under the wide green sky. Then the Voice Robot spoke.
“Vel Thaidis, your brother is coming.”
Vel Thaidis did not bother to glance either way, since her sight could not match the optics of the robot. Instead, she looked at the robot itself in the form of Courteous Address.
“You are certain that it’s Velday?”
“I will check the patterns. Yes, they are his. There are also companions.”
“Who?” Vel Thaidis said, and the inner polarizing lids of her eyes flickered as if with tension.
“There are altogether five extra persons of both genders. Shall I name all of them?”
“No. Is Ceedres Yune Thar among them?”
“Yes, Vel Thaidis. He is riding with your brother.”
Vel Thaidis turned and looked at the lake, adopting the Distant Address.
“Advise me. I wish to avoid Ceedres Yune Thar.”
“You should return to the palace and shut yourself into your own apartments immediately.”
“Bad counsel, Voice,” Vel Thaidis said sharply. “Velday will give Ceedres free rein in the palace. Ceedres will batten on our hospitality, as always. If I’m there, perhaps I can keep some control of the situation. I can’t avoid him after all.”
“Hespa, the sand cloud your brother’s vehicle is creating is now apparent to the human eye,” said the Voice Robot.
Vel Thaidis, angrily, turned once more and gazed to her left, hespaward, through the dark lenses of her polarized inner lids. The three robots also turned. They were of a blond matte plastum, creamily shining in the unchanging sunlight. In shape they resembled women, with delicate doll-like features, blond spun hair and colored mineral eyes, to enhance their aesthetic value. The voice of the Voice Robot was rather high, but pleasant and not unnatural. Yunea science had long perfected such matters.
The young woman herself, Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz, had been formed in one of the Yunea Matrixes, a formation both genetic and human. Burnt gold of skin like all her race, she had the curvaceous graceful figure which the women of her line inherited, and the beautiful face that reappeared, in either sex of the Hirz, at regular intervals. Her hair had been bleached and tinted a faint milky green, then arranged in folds and coils over her head and down her back. Her long draped garment was smoke-white, and bracelets of apricot metal ringed her slim metallic wrists.
The sand-cloud neared like a running plume along the fifth-hour hespan shore. Now she saw the open car, the green parasol wobbling above like a long-stalked flower growing out of it, and the two madly racing lion-dogs of plated bronze thundering before. And now she saw Velday, her brother, a figment of the same Hirz beauty, grinning as he twitched the reins, and the wind of the race parted his gilt-color hair. And finally she saw Ceedres Yune Thar standing beside Velday, also handsome, also gilt-haired, the driver-box held casually in his hand. He grinned too, a grin exactly like Velday’s grin, for much of Ceedres’ fascination for others lay in masterful tricks of imitation. And as he grinned, he skimmed the speedometer of the box up and up the scale. Now the lion-dogs leapt in an ecstasy of propulsion, and sparks showered from their open mouths. One instant the chariot was a staed away, next instant the fore-whip of flying sand stung across Vel Thaidis’ bare arms and her throat. Then the chariot was stationary, the bronze beasts petrified in a crouching posture, the reins slack in Velday’s hands, and the driver-box idle in the hands of Ceedres.
“How lovely you are,” Ceedres said directly to Vel Thaidis, without preliminary, the compliment-as-insult method he was so good at.
She stared at him, and immediately he copied her stare, staring back with all her own intensity reproduced.
“Oh, come now,” said Velday. “You’re not going to fight already. My sister and my friend should like each other.”
“She mistrusts me, I fear,” said Ceedres softly. His polarized eyes went on and on, staring at her. “How can you be so cruel to me, Vaidi, when I—”
“Don’t call me that,” she said to him. It was a trap he had set her, of course, to force her into speech with him. Even so, she would not allow him to use the diminutive of her name: Vaidi, the abbreviation due to family, intimate or husband.
“I’m sorry, Vel Thaidis,” Ceedres said. The sun glinted on his fair hair like a mesh, more polished than the hair of her brother. Polished as Ceedres’ manner, now. “Truly sorry. I beg your pardon. And yours, Vay,” he added, deliberately showing her that Velday permitted him the diminutive.
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Cee,” said Velday, entering wholeheartedly into the game.
She forgave her brother. Ceedres had enchanted him since childhood: Ceedres could enchant almost anyone. Only she, it seemed to her, could fathom the roots of what Ceedres was. But she was accustomed to this triangular situation, which had also existed between the three of them since childhood. And though, at some deep level, it profoundly disturbed her, the disturbance was familiar as a garment. Sometimes, too, she admitted to herself that she enjoyed it, the quarreling, the flare of her instinct, warning her. As a child she had been jealous at losing her brother to Ceedres, and Velday had striven to soothe her jealousy, and still did, and these blandishments she relished. She guiltily relished the egotistic awareness that she alone was proof against Ceedres, had analyzed and duly despised him as a parasite. She was not self-blind, but she was young.
“Well,” Velday said, leaning on the side of the vehicle, “we kept J’ara in the Slumopolis. The food is always so filthy—great wads of papery stuff and synthetic meats. But the drink, of course, is rare. Only Hirz vintage will do after that marvelous glue they serve at the J’ara Mansions. Cee will be joining us for breakfast, my sister, and about three more—when they catch up. Do you allow it?”
A second, broader plume of sand was just blooming on the hespan horizon.
Vel Thaidis had not kept J’ara (Jate-in-Maram or stay-awake), but Maram itself, the time of sleep. Now the palace would be filled by whatever sleep-starved aristocrats Velday had collected during his J’ara, half-intoxicated, furiously hungry, argumentative and flippant.
Vel Thaidis felt a little involuntary shrinking, a little surge of mournful excitement. Crowds drew her and repelled. As Ceedres did. As an adolescent, she had hidden herself from gatherings of all types. But her father and mother were dead. Velday and she remained the solitary figureheads of Hirz.
She smiled at Velday, to disarm her words: “When have you ever asked me?” she said. “You do as you want.”
She was a year his senior. Theoretically, the palace was beneath her jurisdiction.
She stepped aside on to the sand-excluding stone path that led from the shore to the palace. The three robots moved after her.
“We’ll follow at our own pace,” Velday called.
Ceedres said to him, loud enough for her to hear, “Just give her the space to poison a cup or two for me.”
With a flash of exhilarated rage, she looked over her shoulder at him and said, “The only way to poison you, Ceedres, would be to make you swallow your tongue.”