The Fall of The Towers Read online

  THE FALL OF THE TOWERS

  by

  SAMUEL R. DELANY

  THE FALL OF THE TOWERS

  The Empire of Toromon was the last hope and refuge of mankind. Sealed off from the charred radioactive wastelands by the radiation barrier, the Empire survived to face new adversaries deadlier even than the Great Fire - the Lord of the Flames, a force of evil devoid of physical substance; the berserk computer which guided the Empire's military complex; and an alien intelligence which crossed the abyss of space in search of new worlds to conquer.

  SAMUEL R. DELANY

  Winner of three Nebula Awards, he has created a saga of stunning imaginative range and narrative power in the tradition of Frank Herbert's Dune and Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

  First published in Great Britain (in three volumes) by Sphere Books Ltd 1968

  Copyright © Samuel Delany 1965, 1968

  Published as one volume January 1971

  Reprinted May 1974

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which this is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Set in Intertype Plantin

  Printed in Great Britain by

  C. Nicholls & Company Ltd

  The Philips Park Press, Manchester

  ISBN o 7221 2899 i

  Contents:-

  Out of The Dead City PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  The Towers of Toron CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  City of a Thousand Suns CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  EPILOGUE

  Out of The Dead City

  PROLOGUE

  the green of beetle's wings ... the red of polished carbuncle ... a web of silver fire. Lightning tore his eyes apart, struck deep inside his body. He felt his bones split and clutched the stomach of his coveralls, doubling around what would be pain. But it was gone. He was falling through blue smoke, cool as blown ice.

  He put his hands out to catch

  Palms and knees scudded in something hot. Jon Koshar shook his head, looked up. Sand saddled away from him. His black hair fell over his eyes again; he shook it away and sat back on his heels.

  The sky was turquoise. The horizon was too close. The sand was more like lime. He looked down. Two shadows fanned from his body. To his left a tooth of rock also cast a double shadow.

  He staggered erect. He was too light; gravity was all wrong. The sand burned his toes. Sweat started on the back of his neck, beneath his arms. The air stung his nasal cavity. Jon squinted.

  Far down the sand was a lake; rising by, or perhaps from it was a... city? He narrowed his eyes more, staring ...

  Jerk a man from one world; fling him into another. It will take him the same time to realize where he is as to remember where he has been. Each location defines the other.

  Jon Koshar took a step forward. His left pants-leg flapped about his ankle, wet to the knee. He looked down again. Mud streaked his foot. Sometime in the past hour he had stumbled into a—mud-hole? Confused, he looked around the desert again, took another step. His hair fell forward again.

  As he brushed it back, something slipped beneath his palm. His hand closed on it. Now he looked at his fist. Caught between his calloused fingers was a green fragment of fern. Sometime very recently he had been trying to move forward, brush aside the leaves, and more leaves, and more. He twisted his face against the reflected heat, looking left and right. There was no green anywhere in the dunes. He started walking again.

  When he stopped, it was because his hand brushed something on his pants-leg. He shifted his hip and looked down, then looked at the underside of his sleeve. Joined corner to corner the green squares of ... woodlice? Puzzled, he glanced up at the treeless emptiness, then back down. Yes, woodlice had caught all over the rough cloth.

  By the time he had reached the lake, panting (he had panted before, but lungfuls of moist air, heavy with vegetation), he recognized the atmosphere's sharpness as ozone. He looked down at the water.

  His dirty face blinked up at him. His shirt was torn across his shoulder. He reached up to touch the scratch over his collar-bone, where a branch had raked him in the dark—but the desert was blindingly bright; there were no trees.

  His lips met and parted in silent struggle with the identification numerals across the front of his coveralls. That number had been part of his name for the past five years; now even that was wrong.

  But it was a reflection! Of course, he was trying to read it backward. As he raised his eyes, whispered the number correctly, the creosoted walls of the penal barracks came back to him; and the chattering links on the cutter teeth he had guided for five years, gnawing at the tetron ore; and the leaves and brush that had beat his face and shoulders as he ran through the dark--

  And he recognized the city.

  There, across the lake, it struck his eyes with a familiarity that made him step back. What had been an abstraction, now coalesced into the towers, the looped roadways of Telphar! As the head of an arrow indicates direction, or the marquee of a theatre means entertainment, so the spires of Telphar symbolized death.

  His throat dried under the next breath. His ringers clamped and slipped on wet palms. He stepped backwards while the skin over his spine crawled. His scrambling mind reached out for facts:

  I am Jon Koshar and I want to be free! That was first, above the fear, first through his five-year imprisonment in the mines that had culminated when the three of them had escaped—how many hours ago?

  But that was on earth. He had been on earth. So had the city. And the sight of it from the pitted edge of the jungles and lava fields meant death. But here he was looking at Tel-phar on an alien world, beneath a double sun. Then memory completed itself:

  Exhausted, he had seen the city from the pitted rocks. At the same time he had heard something (or had he heard it): The Lord of the Flames.

  And suddenly there had been no reason to fear further. He tried to untangle the recollection. He had entered the city, found the sending stage of the transit ribbon, the band of metal that would take him back, over the jungles, over the heads of the guards, over the sea, back to the safe, island city of Toron--

  Suddenly he frowned, then the frown broke into an expression more frantic, desperate, as he searched for the silver ribbon that should have soared from the window of the far building, from pylon to pylon, gleaming across the sand.

  The transit-ribbon

  No!

  Gone? Broken? With the new fear, he nearly screamed. There were no pylons, there was no line of metal. The city sat isolate on the alien sand. Please, don't let it be broken
! Please...

  The entire scene was suddenly wiped from his eyes. There was nothing but blue smoke, cool as blown ice; he spun in blue. Lightning seered his eyeballs, and the after-image shivered, shifted, became ... silver, red—beetles' wings.

  CHAPTER I

  And above the empty stage in the laboratory tower of the dead city of Telphar, the crystal sphere dimmed. The room was silent as it had been for sixty years. From the crystal the metal ribbon soared over the balcony, above the wet ashes and puddled roadways. The sun had just cleared the ragged horizon; the dripping metal gleamed like the back of a sleeping serpent.

  Miles on, darkness paled before morning. In the lava fields among the ferns sat row behind row of barracks, cheerless as roosting macaws. The light rain had stopped. Water dribbled the supporting pylon. The ribbon made a black band on the fading night.

  Six people approached the barracks from the jungle. They were all over seven feet tall. They carried the bodies of two ordinary sized men. Two behind the others hung back to converse.

  'What about the other one, Larta?'

  'Koshar? He won't get far.' She pushed back her fur cape from her shoulder; the new sun struck the brass circlets banding her upper arm.

  'If he does,' said the man, 'he'll be the first to get through us in twelve years.'

  'If he tries to get back to the coast and out to Toron,' Larta said. 'If we don't get him, it means he's gone inland towards the radiation barrier.' They passed under the shadow of the transit-ribbon. The circlets, and her eyes, dimmed. 'Then we won't have to worry anyway, if he goes towards Telphar, eh, Ptora?'

  The tall man's head was shaved. 'I suppose I'm not really worried about the one escaping.' Ptorn glanced at those passing into the sun. 'But the increasing number of attempts over the last year..."

  Larta shrugged. 'The orders for tetron have nearly doubled.' As she left the shadow, the sun lit three parallel scars down the side of her face, under her jaw, and down her neck.

  Ptorn slid his right hand beneath his left arm. 'I wonder what sort of leeches make their living off these miserable ...' He didn't finish but nodded ahead.

  'The hydroponics growers, the aquarium manufacturers in Toron,' Larta said. 'They're the ones who call for the ore. Then, there's the preparation for the war.'

  'They say,' mused Ptorn, 'that since the aquariums have taken over supplying fish to the Toron, the fishermen on the coast have nowhere to sell and are being starved out. And with the increased demand for tetron, the prisoners are dying like flies here at the mines. Sometimes I wonder how they supply miners.'

  'They don't.' Now Larta called ahead, 'All right. We'll leave the rest to the men who guard them.' There was the gentlest contempt in the word 'men' that italics would be too strong to convey. 'We've done our part. Drop them there, in front of the cabin.' The rain had made the yard mud. 'Maybe that'll teach the rest of them some sort of lesson.'

  Two dull splashes.

  'Maybe,' Ptorn said.

  But Larta had turned back towards the jungle, shadow from the trees brushing over her face, over the triple scar.

  Streaks of sun speared the yellow clouds and pried apart the billowing rifts. Shafts of yellow sank into the lusher forests of Toromon nearer the shore. The light dropped from the wet, green fronds, or caught in the moist cracks of boulders. Then dawn snagged on the metal ribbon mat lanced over the trees; webs of shadow from the supporting pylons fell over a lava bed among the trees.

  A formation of airships flashed through a tear in the clouds like a handful of hurled, sliver chips. The buzz from their tetron motors descended through the trees. And Lug, who was four feet three inches tall, with a forehead high as his thumb was wide, looked up from under his boney brow.

  The others around him, of the same height and rounded shoulders, grunted to one another. The word repeated most often was 'war.' Lug motioned the others; they started again, padding over the jungle floor, the palms of their feet shaping to stone and stick and root. Their semi-opposable big toes stroked absently at the textures of the ground as one might thumb the differences, running one's hands over things in the grass.

  Finally Lug leaned against a tree trunk. 'Quorl?' he said. 'Quorl!'he barked.

  Behind branches that had been cut down and replanted to form a shapeless shelter, something turned under leaves. The lean-to had no real form from the outside, but was limited like the outside of a bush. You could only really be sure it was a shelter when something moved within. A hand grasped one branch, and someone sat up inside.

  They watched, whispered, then watched again. Quorl stood, emerging and emerging from the top of the shelter. His yellow eyes were awake, even though the muscles in his face were settling themselves into place after what must have been a huge yawn. His nostrils rounded under the scents of the morning. Then he smiled.

  From their stunted heights, they blinked at his seven foot hugeness. Some only stared at the confusing wonder of his hand hanging by the thumb from his belt; others did not look above the gnarled machinery of his knee. To the neanderthals both were as expressive of marvels as his face.

  'Quorl?' Lug asked.

  'What is it, Lug?'

  'Around the bottom of the mountain by the lake, they've come. Not the ones as big as you, but taller than us. They are like the ones at the mines, the prisoners. But these aren't prisoners, Quorl. They're building.'

  Quorl nodded. 'Good. It seemed time they came. Time they built.'

  'You have seen them?'

  'No.'

  'Someone else came and told you earlier?'

  'No.' Quorl's smile was subtly humorous, more subtly regretful. 'It was time for them to come. It's simple.' For Lug it was just a smile.

  They whispered among themselves, awed by the things that the tall ones knew; and smiled back.

  'Come,' Quorl said. 'Take me to see.'

  Lug looked at the others.

  'Yes,' Quorl said, stepping from his shelter, 'Come, we will go.'

  'Why?' asked Lug. 'Do you want to talk to them?'

  Quorl stretched up, pulled down two kharba fruits, and handed one to a man, the other to a girl. He pulled down two more, and the leaves shook again. 'No,' he said. 'Let's just go to see.' He handed out the other two melons. 'Share these.'

  Lug shrugged, and they all started through the trees. They broke the fruits among them. Two apish boys began to shoot seeds at one another, fell into a scuffle, fell into laughter. Quorl looked back, but they were already catching up.

  'Why do we go?' Lug asked again. Such scuffles and laughter were so close to him he did not look, did not see. 'You know already that the men'—and there was a slight awe in the word 'men' that block letters would not quite suggest— 'are there, what they are doing. What do you want to see? Will we help them build? Does what they build have anything to do with the war.?'

  Quorl pushed his hand into Lug's hair and arched his fingers, arched them again. 'It rained this morning,' he said. Lug bent his neck as Quorl scratched his head. 'You know how the lake looks in the morning mist after the rain?'

  Lug straightened his shoulders, his muscles tensing with pleasure. 'Yes.' His lips grinned back from yellow teeth. 'Yes, I know.'

  "That's why we go to see,' Quorl said. His hand dropped to Lug's shoulder.

  Behind them the ribbon crossed the top of the hundred-foot pylon, just visible through the trees.

  As dawn slipped across the jungle, more and more of the ribbon gleamed from beneath the receding shadows till at last it soared above the sand that marked the edge of the sea.

  Fifty yards down the beach from the last supporting pylon whose base still sat on dry land, Cithon, the fisherman, emerged from his shack.

  'Tel?' he called. He was a wiry man of average height. His face was cracked from sand and wind. 'Tel?' he called once more. Now he turned back into the cottage. 'And where has the boy got off to now?'

  Grella had already seated herself at the loom, and her strong han
ds began to work the shuttle back and forth while her feet stamped the treddle.

  'Where has he gone?' Cithon demanded.

  'He went out early this morning,' Grella said quietly. She did not look at her husband. She watched the shuttle moving back and forth, back and forth between the green threads.

  'I can see he's gone out,' Cithon snapped. 'But where? The sun is up. He should be out with me on the boat. When will he be back?'

  Grella didn't answer.

  'When will he be back?' Cithon demanded.

  'I don't know.'

  Outside there was a sound, and Cithon turned abruptly and went to the side of the shack.

  The boy was leaning over the water trough, sloshing his face.

  'Tel!'

  The boy looked up quickly at his father. He was perhaps fourteen, a thin child, with a shock of black hair, yet eyes as green as the sea. Fear had widened them now.

  'Where were you?'

  'No place,' was the boy's quiet, defensive answer. 'I wasn't doing anything.'

  'Where were you?'

  'No place,' Tel mumbled again. 'Just walking and picking up sea-shells-'

  Suddenly Cithon's hand, which had been at his waist, jerked up and then down, and the studded strap that had been his belt slashed over the boy's wet shoulder, slashed again.

  The only sound was Tel's gasps.

  'Now get down to the boat.'

  Inside the shack, the shuttle paused in Grella's fist the length of a drawn breath. Then it shot once more between the threads.

  Down the beach, the transit-ribbon leapt across the water. Light shook on the surface of the sea like mica, and the ribbon above was dull by comparison.

  Dawn reached across the water till at last the early light fell on the shore of an island. High in the air, the ribbon soared above the busy piers and the early morning traffic of the wharf. Behind the piers, the towers of the city were lanced with gold, and as the sun rose, gold light ran down the building faces.