Isle Of The Dead   ::   Zelazny Roger

Better to be swept away in the pursuit of something halfway noble than to vegetate until someone finally figured a way to kill me in bed.

... And this, too, was a phase.

I began to chant a litany in a language older than mankind. It was the first time in many years that I had done so, for it was the first time in many years that I had felt fit to.

The light in the cabin seemed to grow dim, though I was sure it burnt as brightly as ever. The little dials on the console before me receded, became sparks, became the glowing eyes of animals peering at me from out a dark wood. My voice now sounded like the voice of another, coming by some acoustical trick from a point far before me. Within myself, I followed it forward.

Then other voices joined in. Soon my own ceased, but the others continued, faint, high-pitched, fading and swelling as though borne by some unfelt wind; they touched lightly at my ears, not really beckoning. I couldn't make out any words, but they were singing. The eyes were all around me, neither advancing nor receding, and in the distance there was a very pale glow, as of sunset on a day filled with milk-clouds. I realized then that I was asleep and dreaming, and that I could awaken if I wished. I didn't, though. I moved on into the west.

At length, beneath a dream-pale sky, I came to the edge of a cliff and could go no farther. There was water, water that I could not cross over, pale and sparkling, wraiths of mist folding and unfolding, slowly, above it; and out, far out from where I stood, one arm half-extended, crag piled upon terrace upon cold terrace, rocky buttresses all about, fog-dimmed pinnacles indicating a sky that I could not see, the whole stark as a sandblasted iceberg of ebony, I beheld the source of the singing, and a chillness clutched at my neck and perhaps the hair rose upon it.

I saw the shades of the dead, drifting like the mists or standing, half-hid, by the dark rocks of that place. And I knew that they were the dead, for among them I saw Nick the dwarf, gesturing obscenely, and I saw the telepath Mike Shandon, who had almost toppled an empire, _my_ empire, the man I had slain with my own hands, and there was my old enemy Dango the Knife, and Courtcour Bodgis, the man with the computer mind, and Lady Karle of Algol, whom I had loved and hated.

Then I called upon that which I hoped I could still call upon.

There came a rumble of thunder and the sky grew as bright and blue as a pool of azure mercury. I saw her standing there for a moment, out across those waters in that dark place, Kathy, all in white, and our eyes met and her mouth opened and I heard my name spoken but nothing more, for the next clap of thunder brought with it total darkness and laid it upon that isle and the one who had stood upon the cliff, one arm half-extended. Me, I guess.

* * *



When I awoke, I had a rough idea of what it had meant. A rough idea only. And I couldn't understand it worth a damn, though I tried to analyze it.

I had once created Boecklin's Isle of the Dead to satisfy the whim of a board of unseen clients, strains of Rachmaninoff dancing like phantom sugar plums through my head. It had been a rough piece of work. Especially, since I am a creature who thinks in a mostly pictorial format. Whenever I think of death, which is often, there are two pictures that take turns filling my mind. One is the Valley of Shadows, a big, dark valley beginning between two massive prows of gray stone, with a greensward that starts out twilit and just gets darker and darker as you stare farther and farther into it, until finally you are staring into the blackness of interstellar space itself, _sans_ stars, comets, meteors, anything; and the other is that mad painting by Boecklin, _The isle of the Dead_, of the place I had just viewed in the land of dream. Of the two places, the Isle of the Dead is far more sinister. The Valley seems to hold a certain promise of peace. This, however, may be because I never designed and built a Valley of Shadows, sweating over every nuance and overtone of that emotion-wringing landscape. But in the midst of an otherwise Eden, I had raised up an Isle of the Dead one time, and it had burnt itself into my consciousness to such an extent that not only could I never wholly forget it, but I had become a part of it as surely as it was a part of me. Now, this part of myself had just addressed me in the only way that it could, in response to a sort of prayer. It was warning me, I felt, and it was also giving me a clue, a clue that might make sense as time went on. Symbols, by their very nature, conceal as well as indicate, damn them!

Kathy _had_ seen me, within the fabric of my vision, which meant that there might be a chance ...

I turned on the screen and regarded the spirals of light, moving in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions about a point directly before me. These were the stars, visible only in this fashion, there, on the underside of space. As I hung there and the universe moved about me, I felt the decades' layers of fat that padded my soul's midsection catch fire and begin to burn. The man I had worked so hard at becoming died then, I hope, and I felt that Shimbo of Darktree Tower, Shrugger of Thunders, still lived.

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realized he might yet forge himself another, can be.

After a time, the whirlpool in the sky sucked me down to sleep's dark center, dreamless and cool, soft and still, like the Valley of Shadows perhaps.

* * *



It was as two weeks' time before Lawrence Conner brought his _Model T_ to berth on Aldebaran V, which is called Driscoll, after its discoverer. It was as two weeks inside the _Model T_, though no time at all passed during phase. Don't ask me why, please. I don't have time to write a book. But had Lawrence Conner decided to turn around and head back for Homefree, he could have enjoyed another two weeks of calisthenics, introspection and reading and quite possibly have made it back on the afternoon of the same day Francis Sandow had departed, doubtless pleasing the wildlife no end. He didn't, though. Instead, he helped Sandow nail down a piece of the briar business, which he didn't really want, just to keep up appearances while he examined the puzzle-pieces he'd found. Maybe they were pieces from several different puzzles, all mixed together. There was no way of telling.

I wore a light tropical suit and sunglasses, for the yellow sky had in it only a few orange-colored clouds and the sun beat waves of heat about me, and they broke upon the pastel pavements where they splashed and rose in a warm, reality-distorting spray.