A Song For Lya – Transcribed

Hello and welcome to the Martinworld book club style read through. Like each book club story on this blog, the reading and commenting is done at your own pace. Have fun and enjoy! List of other transcribed works located at the bottom of page.

I have started a book club re-read for the older works of George R.R. Martin for purposes such as research, scholarship, and teaching. I own all copies of material that is used for this book club. If you have not yet a story listed, please check with your local bookstore for your own reading material to purchase. (Indie Bookstore Finder) The full list of GRRM stories outside of the A Song of Ice and Fire series that I have read can be found on this page here.

“All fiction, if it’s successful, is going to appeal to the emotions…

These are some complicated ideas we’re touching on now. I hate to make sweeping statements about fiction in general. Every writer does his own thing. But my own view of the world… I don’t think I’m a misanthrope, or gloomy. I think love and friendship are very important parts of what make life worth living. There is room for happiness. But that having been said, there are some basic truths… Any happy ending where everything is resolved, and everything is jolly, maybe rings false because of what is coming for us.

Another thing that is maybe not so big a part of Ice and Fire, but certainly a huge part of my early work, is the existential loneliness that we all suffer. While we interact with other human beings, we can never really know them. I think these things, that we feel on some deep instinctual level, make us feel the resonances in fiction. Historically, tragedy has always had more respect than comedy…What does that tell us?” — GRRM

The story you are about to read, A Song for Lya, is the story that won the author his first Hugo Award in 1974. Yay! This came during a time in the mid to late 1970’s where George R.R. Martin was producing some of his best Sci-Fi work including This Tower of Ashes, Bitterblooms, …And Seven Times Never Kill Man, and my personal favorite, Meathouse Man.

This is a story of doomed telepathic lovers. Each of the couple have a specific psi-talent that seems to be alluring to those who require their services. I ended up noting this story a tad heavily in a few parts, and as a result, the tale grew in the telling. You may have to bookmark this page to get through it all in two sittings. I do anticipate many notes to be added in comments because there is no way I could add every ASOIAF detail that exists.

Here is a little something from GRRM himself that gives insight to this story:

• “A Song for Lya” is the oldest of the six stories in this section. It was written in 1973, during my days in VISTA, when I was living on Margate Terrace in Chicago’s Uptown, sharing a third-floor walk-up with some of my college chess cronies, and working at the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. I was also in the midst of the first serious romance of my life; it was not the first time I had ever been in love, but it was certainly the first time my feelings had been reciprocated. That relationship gave “Lya” its emotional core; without it, I would have been the proverbial blind man describing a sunset. “A Song for Lya” was also my longest story to date, my first novella. When I finished it, I knew that I had finally surpassed “With Morning Comes Mistfall” and “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” written two years earlier. This was the best thing I’d ever done.

---

A Song for Lya, by George R.R. Martin

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And Love itself have rest.

–Byron

The cities of the Shkeen are old, older far than man’s, and the great rust-red metropolis that rose from their sacred hill country had proved to be the oldest of them all. The Shkeen city had no name. It needed none. Though they built cities and towns by the hundreds and the thousands, the hill city had no rivals. It was the largest in size and population, and it was alone in the sacred hills. It was their Rome, Mecca, Jerusalem; all in one. It was the city, and all Shkeen came to it at last, in the final days before Union.

That city had been ancient in the days before Rome fell, had been huge and sprawling when Babylon was still a dream. But there was no feel of age to it. The human eye saw only miles and miles of low, red-brick domes; small hummocks of dried mud that covered the rolling hills like a rash. Inside they were dim and nearly airless. The rooms were small and the furniture crude.

Yet it was not a grim city. Day after day it squatted in those scrubby hills, broiling under a hot sun that sat in the sky like a weary orange melon; but the city teemed with life: smells of cooking, the sounds of laughter and talk and children running, the bustle and sweat of brickmen repairing the domes, the bells of the Joined ringing in the streets. The Shkeen were a lusty and exuberant people, almost childlike.

Certainly there was nothing about them that told of great age or ancient wisdom. This is a young race, said the signs, this is a culture in its infancy.

But that infancy had lasted more than fourteen thousand years.

The human city was the real infant, less than ten Earth years old. It was built on the edge of the hills, between the Shkeen metropolis and the dusty brown plains where the spaceport had gone up. In human terms, it was a beautiful city: open and airy, full of graceful archways and glistening fountains and wide boulevards lined by trees. The buildings were wrought of metal and colored plastic and native woods, and most of them were low in deference to Shkeen architecture. Most of them… the Administration Tower was the exception, a polished blue steel needle that split a crystal sky.

You could see it for miles in all directions. Lyanna spied it even before we landed, and we admired it from the air. The gaunt skyscrapers of Old Earth and Baldur were taller, and the fantastic webbed cities of Arachne were far more beautiful—but that slim blue Tower was still imposing enough as it rose unrivaled to its lonely dominance above the sacred hills.

• Like most names Martin comes up with, Lya (Lyanna) is most likely derived from one of two space ‘sources’ in real life. I tend to think it (maybe!) could be the first link as it describes a Lya as the daily value of the solar hydrogen atom emission. We know Jon is the Sun’s son.
• The tower, also called the needle, is the running theme GRRM has established of towers, trees, libraries all equalling history and knowledge.

The spaceport was in the shadow of the Tower, easy walking distance. But they met us anyway. A low-slung scarlet aircar sat purring at the base of the ramp as we disembarked, with a driver lounging against the stick. Dino Valcarenghi stood next to it, leaning on the door and talking to an aide.

• I just want to point out how important this detail is not only to this story, but to ASOIAF as well. The Others emerge from the shadows between the trees/towers in the prologue to A Game of Thrones. This is the ‘darkling plain”, or a type of door opening as detailed in the (transcribed) GRRM story Only Kids are Afraid of the Dark. Wormholes, if you will.
  • He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the haunted forest had no more terrors for him.
    Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise.
  • “Can’t you feel it?” Gared asked. “Listen to the darkness.”
  • He turned his head, glimpsed a white shadow in the darkness.
  • A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood.

Valcarenghi was the planetary administrator, the boy wonder of the sector. Young, of course, but I’d known that. Short, and good-looking, in a dark, intense way, with black hair that curled thickly against his head and an easy, genial smile.

He flashed us that smile then, when we stepped off the ramp, and reached to shake hands. “Hi,” he began, “I’m glad to see you.” There was no nonsense with formal introductions. He knew who we were, and we knew who he was, and Valcarenghi wasn’t the kind of man who put much stock in ritual.

Lyanna took his hand lightly in hers, and gave him her vampire look: big, dark eyes opened wide and staring, thin mouth lifted in a tiny faint smile. She’s a small girl, almost waiflike, with short brown hair and a child’s figure. She can look very fragile, very helpless. When she wants to. But she rattles people with that look. If they know Lya’s a telepath, they figure she’s poking around amid their innermost secrets.

• Vampires are used in various ways across Martin’s works. Fevre Dream is his vampire novel, but then there are also enslaved vampires called Githyanki soul-sucks who are telepaths and send visions (among other things). Spoiler past this point: What we will know about Lya is that she transforms and becomes part of the soul sucks of this story. She learns to reach out from the darkling plain by story end.
• Vampire-Lilith-Succubus is also a Daenerys characteristic that Martin worked in to her characterization as touched on here, and discussed more here.
• The “woman in a child’s body” is also something reused and ramped up with Bakkalon- Daenerys, the undercurrent to all of this in Martinworld is the red fires.

Actually she’s playing with them. When Lyanna is really reading, her whole body goes stiff and you can almost see her tremble. And those big, soul-sucking eyes get narrow and hard and opaque.

But not many people know that, so they squirm under her vampire eyes and look the other way and hurry to release her hand. Not Valcarenghi, though. He just smiled and stared back, then moved on to me.

I was reading when I took his hand—my standard operating procedure. Also a bad habit, I guess, since it’s put some promising friendships into an early grave. My talent isn’t equal to Lya’s. But it’s not as demanding, either. I reach emotions. Valcarenghi’s geniality came through strong and genuine. With nothing behind it, or at least nothing that was close enough to the surface for me to catch.

• Robb prefers touch to reach/read the emotions from people. Lya can use touch or not, but she reads information. She is a fire person consuming information.
• Just want to note the idea of ‘reaching to read’ here. This is often used in Martinworld to signify a mental connection, a psi-link bond. Is this the reason GRRM named the viriley arboreous region of Westeros the Reach? Greenseer connections. This mental connection as a ‘reach’ is also heavily used and expanded upon in …For A Single Yesterday.

We also shook hands with the aide, a middle-aged blond stork named Nelson Gourlay. Then Valcarenghi ushered everybody into the aircar and we took off. “I imagine you’re tired,” he said after we were airborne, “so we’ll save the tour of the city and head straight for the Tower. Nelse will show you your quarters, then you can join us for a drink, and we’ll talk over the problem. You’ve read the materials I sent?”

• It is interesting to me that Gourlay is called a stork, as in somethng that delivers?
• As of now, Gourlay is rather reminiscent of Lyle from Armageddon Rag as well as Devan Seaworth in ASOIAF.

“Yes,” I said. Lya nodded. “Interesting background, but I’m not sure why we’re here.”

“We’ll get to that soon enough,” Valcarenghi replied. “I ought to be letting you enjoy the scenery.” He gestured toward the window, smiled, and fell silent.

So Lya and I enjoyed the scenery, or as much as we could enjoy during the five-minute flight from spaceport to tower. The aircar was whisking down the main street at treetop level, stirring up a breeze that whipped the thin branches as we went by. It was cool and dark in the interior of the car, but outside the Shkeen sun was riding toward noon, and you could see the heat waves shimmering from the pavement. The population must have been inside huddled around their air-conditioners, because we saw very little traffic.

• Already a few details that are similar to the Red Waste/Dothraki sea/Lhazar in ASOIAF.

We got out near the main entrance to the Tower and walked through a huge, sparkling-clean lobby. Valcarenghi left us then to talk to some underlings. Gourlay led us into one of the tubes and we shot up fifty floors. Then we waltzed past a secretary into another, private tube, and climbed some more.

Our rooms were lovely, carpeted in cool green, and paneled with wood. There was a complete library there, mostly Earth classics bound in synthaleather, with a few novels from Baldur, our home world. Somebody had been researching our tastes. One of the walls of the bedroom was tinted glass, giving a panoramic view of the city far below us, with a control that could darken it for sleeping.

• Again, we have a tower/tree building that they had to climb, and then we are introduced to the green and wood color scheme and libraries.
• This story was written in 1974, almost two decades before A Song of Ice and Fire, yet we also have the idea that a wall of glass/mirror/ice is used to gave at the other side. This gazing through glass idea is all over Martinworld works.

Gourlay showed it to us dutifully, like a dour bellhop. I read him briefly though, and found no resentment. He was nervous, but only slightly. There was honest affection there for someone. Us? Valcarenghi?

Lya sat down on one of the twin beds. “Is someone bringing our luggage?” she asked. Gourlay nodded. “You’ll be well taken care of,” he said. “Anything you want, ask.”

“Don’t worry, we will,” I said. I dropped to the second bed, and gestured Gourlay to a chair. “How long you been here?”

“Six years,” he said, taking the chair gratefully and sprawling out all over it. “I’m one of the veterans. I’ve worked under four administrators now. Dino, and Stuart before him, and Gustaffson before him. I was even under Rockwood a few months.”

Lya perked up, crossing her legs under her and leaning forward. “That was all Rockwood lasted, wasn’t it?”

“Right,” Gourlay said. “He didn’t like the planet, took a quick demotion to assistant administrator someplace else. I didn’t care much, to tell the truth. He was the nervous type, always giving orders to prove who was boss.”

“And Valcarenghi?” I asked.

Gourlay made a smile look like a yawn. “Dino? Dino’s OK, the best of the lot. He’s good, knows he’s good. He’s only been here two months, but he’s gotten a lot done, and he’s made a lot of friends. He treats the staff like people, calls everybody by his first name, all that stuff. People like that.”

I was reading, and I read sincerity. It was Valcarenghi that Gourlay was affectionate toward, then. He believed what he was saying.

• A Dance with Dragons – Melisandre I

  “Yes, my lady.” The boy poured her a cup of water from the stone jug by the window and brought it to her.

  “Thank you.” Melisandre took a sip, swallowed, and gave the boy a smile. That made him blush. The boy was half in love with her, she knew. He fears me, he wants me, and he worships me.

  All the same, Devan was not pleased to be here. The lad had taken great pride in serving as a king’s squire, and it had wounded him when Stannis commanded him to remain at Castle Black.

I had more questions, but I didn’t get to ask them. Gourlay got up suddenly. “I really shouldn’t stay,” he said. “You want to rest, right? Come up to the top in about two hours and we’ll go over things with you. You know where the tube is?”

We nodded, and Gourlay left. I turned to Lyanna. “What do you think?”

She lay back on the bed and considered the ceiling. “I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t reading. I wonder why they’ve had so many administrators. And why they wanted us.”

• This is reading to me somewhat like the Night’s Watch and their 998+ Lord Commander’s, and that fact that it seems the Other’s from the prologue are looking for Jon (or just a NW commander) specifically.

“We’re Talented,” I said, smiling. With the capital, yes. Lyanna and I have been tested and registered as psi Talents, and we have the licenses to prove it.

“Uh-huh,” she said, turning on her side and smiling back at me. Not her vampire half-smile this time.

Her sexy little girl smile.

“Valcarenghi wants us to get some rest,” I said. “It’s probably not a bad idea.” Lya bounced out of bed. “OK,” she said, “but these twins have got to go.” “We could push them together.”

She smiled again. We pushed them together. And we did get some sleep. Eventually.

Our luggage was outside the door when we woke. We changed into fresh clothes, old casual stuff, counting on Valcarenghi’s notorious lack of pomp. The tube took us to the top of the Tower.

***

The office of the planetary administrator was hardly an office. There was no desk, none of the usual trappings. Just a bar and lush blue carpets that swallowed us ankle high, and six or seven scattered chairs. Plus lots of space and sunlight, with Shkea laid out at our feet beyond the tinted glass. All four walls this time.

• Now we are up above the “treelines” up in the Eyrie.

Valcarenghi and Gourlay were waiting for us, and Valcarenghi did the bartending chores personally. I didn’t recognize the beverage, but it was cool and spicy and aromatic, with a real sting to it. I sipped it gratefully. For some reason I felt I needed a lift.

• Two things come to mind- 1: That Sweetrobin could have poisoning via Lysa’s milk of the mommy; 2: spices and aromas are part of all acts of fire-magic.

• A Feast for Crows – The Soiled Knight

  A short man stood in an arched doorway grilling chunks of snake over a brazier, turning them with wooden tongs as they crisped. The pungent smell of his sauces brought tears to the knight’s eyes. The best snake sauce had a drop of venom in it, he had heard, along with mustard seeds and dragon peppers. Myrcella had taken to Dornish food as quick as she had to her Dornish prince, and from time to time Ser Arys would try a dish or two to please her. The food seared his mouth and made him gasp for wine, and burned even worse coming out than it did going in. His little princess loved it, though.

“Shkeen wine,” Valcarenghi said, smiling, in answer to an unasked question. “They’ve got a name for it, but I can’t pronounce it yet. But give me time. I’ve only been here two months, and the language is rough.”

“You’re learning Shkeen?” Lya asked, surprised. I knew why. Shkeen is rough on human tongues, but the natives learned Terran with stunning ease. Most people accepted that happily, and just forgot about the difficulties of cracking the alien language.

• Terran is the “earth” language: “I’m not an “American First” (and maybe because I read science fiction) I’m a “Terran First”. I’m a human being first. And I have this sympathy for other human beings no matter what side of the giant ice wall they happen to be born on.”– George R.R. Martin

“It gives me an insight into the way they think,” Valcarenghi said. “At least that’s the theory.” He smiled.

• A Feast for Crows – Cersei IX

  “She?”

  “The maegi.” The words came tumbling out of her. She could still hear Melara Hetherspoon insisting that if they never spoke about the prophecies, they would not come true. She was not so silent in the well, though. She screamed and shouted. “Tyrion is the valonqar,” she said. “Do you use that word in Myr? It’s High Valyrian, it means little brother.” She had asked Septa Saranella about the word, after Melara drowned.

I read him again, although it was more difficult. Physical contact makes things sharper. Again, I got a simple emotion, close to the surface—pride this time. With pleasure mixed in. I chalked that up to the wine. Nothing beneath.

“However you pronounce the drink, I like it,” I said.

“The Shkeen produce a wide variety of liquors and foodstuffs,” Gourlay put in. “We’ve cleared many for export already, and we’re checking others. Market should be good.”

“You’ll have a chance to sample more of the local produce this evening,” Valcarenghi said. “I’ve set up a tour of the city, with a stop or two in Shkeentown. For a settlement of our size, our night life is fairly interesting. I’ll be your guide.”

“Sounds good,” I said. Lya was smiling too. A tour was unusually considerate. Most Normals feel uneasy around Talents, so they rush us in to do whatever they want done, then rush us out again as quickly as possible. They certainly don’t socialize with us.

“Now—the problem,” Valcarenghi said, lowering his drink and leaning forward in the chair. “You read about the Cult of the Union?”

• Quaithe and possibly Marwyn could be members of the Cult of Starry Wisdom.

“A Shkeen religion,” Lya said.

“The Shkeen religion,” corrected Valcarenghi. “Every one of them is a believer. This is a planet without heretics.”

“We read the materials you sent on it,” Lya said. “Along with everything else.” “What do you think?”

I shrugged. “Grim. Primitive. But no more than any number of others I’ve read about. The Shkeen aren’t very advanced, after all. There were religions on Old Earth that included human sacrifice.”

• An opposing religion/belief system akin to the First Men. But note, this also places the greeshka in opposite beleif/worship to the trees.

Valcarenghi shook his head, and looked toward Gourlay.

“No, you don’t understand,” Gourlay started, putting his drink down on the carpet. “I’ve been studying their religion for six years. It’s like no other in history. Nothing on Old Earth like it, no sir. Nor in any other race we’ve encountered.

“And Union, well, it’s wrong to compare it to human sacrifice, just wrong. The Old Earth religions sacrificed one or two unwilling victims to appease their gods. Killed a handful to get mercy for the millions. And the handful generally protested. The Shkeen don’t work it that way. The Greeshka takes everyone. And they go willingly. Like lemmings they march off to the caves to be eaten alive by those parasites. Every Shkeen is Joined at forty, and goes to Final Union before he’s fifty.”

I was confused. “All right,” I said. “I see the distinction, I guess. But so what? Is this the problem? I imagine that Union is rough on the Shkeen, but that’s their business. Their religion is no worse than the ritual cannibalism of the Hrangans, is it?”

Valcarenghi finished his drink and got up, heading for the bar. As he poured himself a refill, he said, almost casually, “As far as I know, Hrangan cannibalism has claimed no human converts.”

• Hrangan’s as defined in the Thousand Worlds Universe- Humanity’s great enemy during the Double War, the Hrangans were perhaps the most alien sentients ever encountered. Their social system was structured on the basis of a number of biological castes, most of whom seemed to belong to different species, so different were they. Of the Hrangan millions, only the so-called Minds were truly intelligent, and mankind never communicated successfully even with them. The Hrangans were bitterly xenophobic; prior to the Double War, they had enslaved a dozen less-advanced races, and there is evidence that they had exterminated others entirely. The war effectively destroyed the Hrangans, except on Old Hranga itself and a handful of their oldest colonies.

Lya looked startled. I felt startled. I sat up and stared. “What?”

Valcarenghi headed back to his seat, glass in hand. “Human converts have been joining the Cult of the Union. Dozens of them are already Joined. None of them have achieved full Union yet, but that’s only a question of time.” He sat down, and looked at Gourlay. So did we.

The gangling blond aide picked up the narrative. “The first convert was about seven years ago. Nearly a year before I got here, two and a half after Shkea was discovered and the settlement built. Guy named Magly. Psi-psych, worked closely with the Shkeen. He was it for two years. Then another in ’08, more than next year. And the rate’s been climbing every since. There was one big one. Phil Gustaffson.”

Lya blinked. “The planetary administrator?”

“The same,” said Gourlay. “We’ve had a lot of administrators. Gustaffson came in after Rockwood couldn’t stand it. He was a big, gruff old guy. Everybody loved him. He’d lost his wife and kids on his last assignment, but you’d never have known it. He was always hearty, full of fun. Well, he got interested in the Shkeen religion, started talking to them. Talked to Magly and some of the other converts too. Even went to see a Greeshka. That shook him up real bad for a while. But finally he got over it, went back to his researches. I worked with him, but I never guessed what he had in mind. A little over a year ago, he converted. He’s Joined now. Nobody’s ever been accepted that fast. I hear talk in Shkeentown that he may even be admitted to Final Union, rushed right in. Well, Phil was administrator here longer than anybody else. People liked him, and when he went over, a lot of his friends followed. The rate’s way up now.”

“Not quite one percent, and rising,” Valcarenghi said. “That seems low, but remember what it means. One percent of the people in my settlement are choosing a religion that includes a very unpleasant form of suicide.”

• Targaryen “fire madness’ like Aerys burning and torturing people (and then getting turned on by it), and Aerion Brightlfame drinking wildfire, Cersei becoming entranced by the wildfire flames, religious zealotry of the red priests of R’hllor, etc…

Lya looked from him to Gourlay and back again. “Why hasn’t this been reported?”

“It should have been,” Valcarenghi said. “But Stuart succeeded Gustaffson, and he was scared stiff of a scandal. There’s no law against humans adopting an alien religion, so Stuart defined it as a nonproblem. He reported the conversion rate routinely, and nobody higher up ever bothered to make the correlation and remember just what all these people were converting to.”

I finished my drink, set it down. “Go on,” I said to Valcarenghi.

“I define the situation as a problem,” he said. “I don’t care how few people are involved, the idea that human beings would allow the Greeshka to consume them alarms me. I’ve had a team of psychs on it since I took over, but they’re getting nowhere. I needed Talent. I want you two to find out why these people are converting. Then I’ll be able to deal with the situation.”

• A Dance with Dragons – Jon III

  The heat from the fire pit was palpable even at a distance; for the wildlings, it had to be blistering. He saw men cringing as they neared the flames, heard children cry. A few turned for the forest. He watched a young woman stumble away with a child on either hand. Every few steps she looked back to make certain no one was coming after them, and when she neared the trees she broke into a run. One greybeard took the weirwood branch they handed him and used it as a weapon, laying about with it until the queen’s men converged on him with spears. The others had to step around his body, until Ser Corliss had it thrown in the fire. More of the free folk chose the woods after that—one in ten, perhaps.

  But most came on. Behind them was only cold and death. Ahead was hope. They came on, clutching their scraps of wood until the time came to feed them to the flames. R’hllor was a jealous deity, ever hungry. So the new god devoured the corpse of the old, and cast gigantic shadows of Stannis and Melisandre upon the Wall, black against the ruddy red reflections on the ice.

The problem was strange, but the assignment seemed straightforward enough. I read Valcarenghi to be sure. His emotions were a bit more complex this time, but not much.

Confidence above all: he was sure we could handle the problem. There was honest concern there, but no fear, and not even a hint of deception. Again, I couldn’t Catch anything below the surface. Valcarenghi kept his hidden turmoil well hidden, if he had any.

I glanced at Lyanna. She was sitting awkwardly in her chair, and her fingers were wrapped very tightly around her wine glass. Reading. Then she loosened up and looked my way and nodded.

“All right,” I said. “I think we can do it.”

Valcarenghi smiled. “That I never doubted,” he said. “It was only a question of whether you would. But enough of business for tonight. I’ve promised you a night on the town, and I always try to deliver on my promises. I’ll meet you downstairs in the lobby in a half-hour.”

***

Lya and I changed into something more formal back in our room. I picked a dark blue tunic, with white slacks and a matching mesh scarf. Not the height of fashion, but I was hoping that Shkea would be several months behind the times. Lya slipped into a silky white skintight with a tracery of thin blue lines that flowed over her in sensuous patterns in response to her body heat. The lines were definitely lecherous, accentuating her thin figure with a singleminded determination. A blue raincape completed the outfit.

• The white with blue tracery/veining color scheme is an oft used symbol that there is a poisoning going on, the Eyrie also follows this example.

“Valcarenghi’s funny,” she said as she fastened it.

“Oh?” I was struggling with the sealseam on my tunic, which refused to seal. “You catch something when you read him?”

“No,” she said. She finished attaching the cape and admired herself in the mirror. Then she spun toward me, the cape swirling behind her. “That’s it. He was thinking what he was saying. Oh, variations in the wording, of course, but nothing important. His mind was on what we were discussing, and behind that there was only a wall.” She smiled. “Didn’t get a single one of his deep dark secrets.”

I finally conquered the sealseam. “Tsk,” I said. “Well, you get another chance tonight.”

• Could sealseam be analogous to seal-skin, as in a skinchanger which is a connection to the old gods and trees. House Farwynd is rumored to be aqueous skinchangers.

That got me a grimace. “The hell I do. I don’t read people on off-time. It isn’t fair. Besides, it’s such a strain. I wish I could catch thoughts as easily as you do feelings.”

“The price of Talent,” I said. “You’re more Talented, your price is higher.” I rummaged in our luggage for a raincape, but I didn’t find anything that went well, so I decided not to wear one. Capes were out, anyway. “I didn’t get much on Valcarenghi either. You could have told as much by watching his face. He must be a very disciplined mind. But I’ll forgive him. He serves good wine.”

• To me, Valcarenghi seems to be developing into some sort of middleman vessel that has not truly figured out his role in this job- a slave that brings in food for the flames. Just like This Tower of Ashes, and even Melisandre with Shireen.

• A Dance with Dragons – Melisandre I

  She made it sound a simple thing, and easy. They need never know how difficult it had been, or how much it had cost her. That was a lesson Melisandre had learned long before Asshai; the more effortless the sorcery appears, the more men fear the sorcerer. When the flames had licked at Rattleshirt, the ruby at her throat had grown so hot that she had feared her own flesh might start to smoke and blacken. Thankfully Lord Snow had delivered her from that agony with his arrows. Whilst Stannis had seethed at the defiance, she had shuddered with relief.

  • The red priestess shuddered. Blood trickled down her thigh, black and smoking. The fire was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, filling her, searing her, transforming her. Shimmers of heat traced patterns on her skin, insistent as a lover’s hand. Strange voices called to her from days long past. “Melony,” she heard a woman cry. A man’s voice called, “Lot Seven.” She was weeping, and her tears were flame. And still she drank it in.

Lya nodded. “Right! That stuff did me good. Got rid of the headache I woke up with.”

“The altitude,” I suggested. We headed for the door.

The lobby was deserted, but Valcarenghi didn’t keep us waiting long. This time he drove his own aircar, a battered black job that had evidently been with him for a while. Gourlay wasn’t the sociable type, but Valcarenghi had a woman with him, a stunning auburn-haired vision named Laurie Blackburn. She was even younger than Valcarenghi—mid-twenties, by the look of her.

It was sunset when we took off. The whole far horizon was a gorgeous tapestry in red and orange, and a cool breeze was blowing in from the plains. Valcarenghi left the coolers off and opened the car windows, and we watched the city darken into twilight as we drove.

Dinner was at a plush restaurant with Baldurian decor—to make us feel comfortable, I guessed. The food, however, was very cosmopolitan. The spices, the herbs, the style of cooking were all Baldur. The meats and vegetables were native. It made for an interesting combination. Valcarenghi ordered for all four of us, and we wound up sampling about a dozen different dishes. My favorite was a tiny Shkeen bird that they cooked in sourtang sauce. There wasn’t very much of it, but what there was tasted great. We also polished off three bottles of wine during the meal: more of the Shkeen stuff we’d sampled that afternoon, a flask of chilled Veltaar from Baldur, and some real Old Earth Burgundy.

The talk warmed up quickly; Valcarenghi was a born storyteller and an equally good listener. Eventually, of course, the conversation got around to Shkea and the Shkeen. Laurie led it there. She’d been on Shkea for about six months, working toward an advanced degree in extee anthropology. She was trying to discover why the Shkeen civilization had remained frozen for so many millennia.

• Laurie Blackburn and her archetype that includes this type of college educated, heavily knowledgeable in histories (even challenging history as known) female is just as GRRM consistently writes these protagonist co-horts, and all are associated with the ‘tree’ types; Val in ASOIAF, Gwen Delvano in Dying of the Light, Melantha Jhirl in Nightlfyers, Janis Ryther in … And Seven Times Never Kill Man, etc.

“They’re older than we are, you know,” she told us. “They had cities before men were using tools. It should have been space-traveling Shkeen that stumbled on primitive men, not the other way around.”

“Aren’t there theories on that already?” I asked.

“Yes, but none of them is universally accepted,” she said. “Cullen cites a lack of heavy metals, for example. A factor, but is it the whole answer? Von Hamrin claims the Shkeen didn’t get enough competition. No big carnivores on the planet, so there was nothing to breed aggressiveness into the race. But he’s come under a lot of fire. Shkea isn’t all that idyllic; if it were, the Shkeen never would have reached their present level. Besides, what’s the Greeshka if not a carnivore? It eats them, doesn’t it?”

“What do you think?” Lya asked.

“I think it had something to do with the religion, but I haven’t worked it all out yet. Dino’s helping me talk to people and the Shkeen are open enough, but research isn’t easy.” She stopped suddenly and looked at Lya hard. “For me, anyway. I imagine it’d be easier for you.”

• Blood mages of Valyria
• Great Empire of the Dawn

We’d heard that before. Normals often figure that Talents have unfair advantages, which is perfectly understandable. We do. But Laurie wasn’t resentful. She delivered her statement in a wistful, speculative tone, instead of etching it in verbal acid.

Valcarenghi leaned over and put an arm around her. “Hey,” he said. “Enough shop talk. Robb and Lya shouldn’t be worrying about the Shkeen until tomorrow.”

• We know Melisandre was using magic/potions to seemingly convince Jon that Ghost liked her naturally, but it was all illusions…

• A Dance with Dragons – Jon VI

  I am not a wolf, he thought. “And how would I do that?”

  “I can show you.” Melisandre draped one slender arm over Ghost, and the direwolf licked her face. “The Lord of Light in his wisdom made us male and female, two parts of a greater whole. In our joining there is power. Power to make life. Power to make light. Power to cast shadows.”

  “Shadows.” The world seemed darker when he said it.

Laurie looked at him, and smiled tentatively. “OK,” she said lightly. “I get carried away. Sorry.”

“That’s OK,” I told her. “It’s an interesting subject. Give us a day and we’ll probably be getting enthusiastic too.”

Lya nodded agreement, and added that Laurie would be the first to know if our work turned up anything that would support her theory. I was hardly listening. I know it’s not polite to read Normals when you’re out with them socially, but there are times I can’t resist. Valcarenghi had his arm around Laurie and had pulled her toward him gently. I was curious.

So I took a quick, guilty reading. He was very high—slightly drunk, I guess, and feeling very confident and protective. The master of the situation. But Laurie was a jumble—uncertainty, repressed anger, a vague fading hint of fright. And love, confused but very strong. I doubted that it was for me or Lya. She loved Valcarenghi.

I reached under the table, searching for Lya’s hand, and found her knee. I squeezed it gently and she looked at me and smiled. She wasn’t reading, which was good. It bothered me that Laurie loved Valcarenghi, though I didn’t know why, and I was just as glad that Lya didn’t see my discontent.

We finished off the last of the wine in short order, and Valcarenghi took care of the whole bill. Then he rose. “Onward!” he announced. “The night is fresh, and we’ve got visits to make.”

So we made visits. No holoshows or anything that drab, although the city had its share of theaters. A casino was next on the list. Gambling was legal on Shkea, of course, and Valcarenghi would have legalized it if it weren’t. He supplied the chips and I lost some for him, as did Laurie. Lya was barred from playing; her Talent was too strong. Valcarenghi won big; he was a superb mindspin player, and pretty good at the traditional games too.

Then came a bar. More drinks, plus local entertainment which was better than I would have expected.

It was pitch black when we got out, and I assumed that the expedition was nearing its end.

Valcarenghi surprised us. When we got back to the car, he reached under the controls, pulled out a box of sober-ups, and passed them around.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re driving. Why do I need this? I just barely got up here.”

“I’m about to take you to a genuine Shkeen cultural event, Robb,” he said. “I don’t want you making rude comments or throwing up on the natives. Take your pill.”

I took my pill, and the buzz in my head began to fade. Valcarenghi already had the car airborne. I leaned back and put my arm around Lya, and she rested her head on my shoulder. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Shkeentown,” he replied, never looking back, “to their Great Hall. There’s a Gathering tonight, and I figured you’d be interested.”

“It will be in Shkeen, of course,” Laurie said, “but Dino can translate for you. I know a little of the language too, and I’ll fill in whatever he misses.”

Lya looked excited. We’d read about Gatherings, of course, but we hardly expected to go see one on our first day of Shkea. The Gatherings were a species of religious rite; a mass confessional of sorts for pilgrims who were about to be admitted to the ranks of the Joined. Pilgrims swelled the hill city daily, but Gatherings were conducted only three or four times a year when the numbers of those-about-to-be-Joined climbed high enough.

• In many other Martinworld stories, including ASOIAF, gatherings are events that are akin to orgies, a place where the genetic pool is expanded and free love/sex happens (opposite of oppressive incest).

The aircar streaked almost soundlessly through the brightly lit settlement, passing huge fountains that danced with a dozen colors and pretty ornamental arches that flowed like liquid fire. A few other cars were airborne, and here and there we flew above pedestrians strolling the city’s broad malls. But most people were inside, and light and music flooded from many of the homes we passed.

Then, abruptly, the character of the city began to change. The level ground began to roll and heave, hills rose before us and then behind us, and the lights vanished. Below, the malls gave way to unlit roads of crushed stone and dust, and the domes of glass and metal done in fashionable mock-Shkeen yielded to their older brick brothers. The Shkeen city was quieter than its human counterpart; most of the houses were darkly silent.

Then, ahead of us, a hummock appeared that was larger than the others—almost a hill in itself, with a big arched door and a series of slitlike windows. And light leaked from this one, and noise, and there were Shkeen outside.

• Mother of Mountains, the heart of worship.

I suddenly realized that, although I’d been on Shkea for nearly a day, this was the first sight I’d caught of the Shkeen. Not that I could see them all that clearly from an aircar at night. But I did see them. They were smaller than men—the tallest was around five feet—with big eyes and long arms. That was all I could tell from above.

Valcarenghi put the car down alongside the Great Hall, and we piled out. Shkeen were trickling through the arch from several directions, but most of them were already inside. We joined the trickle, and nobody even looked twice at us, except for one character who hailed Valcarenghi in a thin, squeaky voice and called him Dino. He had friends even here.

The interior was one huge room, with a great crude platform built in the center and an immense crowd of Shkeen circling it. The only light was from torches that were stuck in grooves along the walls, and on high poles surrounding the platform. Someone was speaking, and every one of those great, bulging eyes was turned his way. We four were the only humans in the Hall.

• A Dance with Dragons – The Blind Girl

  She set out as the Titan roared the sunset, counting her way down the steps from the temple door, then tapping to the bridge that took her over the canal to the Isle of the Gods. She could tell that the fog was thick from the clammy way her clothes clung to her and the damp feeling of the air on her bare hands. The mists of Braavos did queer things to sounds as well, she had found. Half the city will be half-blind tonight.

  As she made her way past the temples, she could hear the acolytes of the Cult of Starry Wisdom atop their scrying tower, singing to the evening stars. A wisp of scented smoke hung in the air, drawing her down the winding path to where the red priests had fired the great iron braziers outside the house of the Lord of Light. Soon she could even feel the heat in the air, as red R’hllor’s worshipers lifted their voices in prayer. “For the night is dark and full of terrors,” they prayed.

  Not for me. Her nights were bathed in moonlight and filled with the songs of her pack, with the taste of red meat torn off the bone, with the warm familiar smells of her grey cousins. Only during the days was she alone and blind.

The speaker, outlined brightly by the torches, was a fat, middle-aged Shkeen who moved his arms slowly, almost hypnotically, as he talked. His speech was a series of whistles, wheezes, and grunts, so I didn’t listen very closely. He was much too far away to read. I was reduced to studying his appearance, and that of other Shkeen near me. All of them were hairless, as far as I could see, with softish-looking orange skin that was creased by a thousand tiny wrinkles. They wore simple shifts of crude, multicolored cloth, and I had difficulty telling male from female.

Valcarenghi leaned over toward me and whispered, careful to keep his voice low. “The speaker is a fanner,” he said. “He’s telling the crowd how far he’s come, and some of the hardships of his life.”

I looked around. Valcarenghi’s whisper was the only sound in the place. Everyone else was dead quiet, eyes riveted on the platform, scarcely breathing. “He’s saying that he has four brothers,” Valcarenghi told me. “Two have gone on to Final Union, one is among the Joined. The other is younger than himself, and now owns the farm.” He frowned. “The speaker will never see his farm again,” he said, more loudly, “but he’s happy about it.”

“Bad crops?” asked Lya, smiling irreverently. She’d been listening to the same whisper. I gave her a stern look.

The Shkeen went on. Valcarenghi stumbled after him. “Now he’s telling his crimes, all the things he’s done that he’s ashamed of, his blackest soul-secrets. He’s had a sharp tongue at times, he’s vain, once he actually struck his younger brother. Now he speaks of his wife, and the other women he has known. He has betrayed her many times, copulating with others. As a boy, he mated with animals for he feared females. In recent years he has grown incapable, and his brother has serviced his wife.”

On and on and on it went, in incredible detail, detail that was both startling and frightening. No intimacy went untold, no secret was left undisturbed. I stood and listened to Valcarenghi’s whispers, shocked at first, finally growing bored with the squalor of it all. I began to get restless. I wondered briefly if I knew any human half so well as I now knew this great fat Shkeen. Then I wondered whether Lyanna, with her Talent, knew anyone half so well. It was almost as if the speaker wanted all of us to live through his life right here and now.

His speech lasted for what seemed hours, but finally it began to wind up. “He speaks now of Union,” Valcarenghi whispered. “He will be Joined, he is joyful about it, he has craved it for so long. His misery is at an end, his aloneness will cease, soon he shall walk the streets of the sacred city and peal his joy with the bells. And then Final Union, in the years to come. He will be with his brothers in the afterlife.”

“No, Dino.” This whisper was Laurie. “Quit wrapping human phrases around what he says. He will be his brothers, he says. The phrase also implies they will be him.”

• Laurie, the educated-history female knows what is going on, truth in translations.

Valcarenghi smiled. “OK, Laurie. If you say so…”

• Valcarenghi tries multiple times through out this scene to silence and mock Laurie. Not a god thing to do in Martinworld. There is a real struggle between tree knowledge and what fire wants you to think. Even fiery Cersei tries to silence Eddard Stark’s words by ‘consuming’ them as she rips up Robert Baratheon’s dying words and imprisons Eddard.

Suddenly the fat farmer was gone from the platform. The crowd rustled, and another figure took his place: much shorter, wrinkled excessively, one eye a great gaping hole. He began to speak, haltingly at first, then with greater skill.

• These Shkea speakers are analogous to the red priests such as Moqorro, Benerro, Melisandre, but not so much Thoros who is sneakily more closely associated with tree magics. Tyrions time in Volantis during his A Dance with Dragons travels shows these same interactions almost to the letter. Fiery god worship.
  • Haldon nodded. “Benerro has sent forth the word from Volantis. Her coming is the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. From smoke and salt was she born to make the world anew. She is Azor Ahai returned … and her triumph over darkness will bring a summer that will never end … death itself will bend its knee, and all those who die fighting in her cause shall be reborn …”
  • “High Priest of the red temple in Volantis. Flame of Truth, Light of Wisdom, First Servant of the Lord of Light, Slave of R’hllor.”

  • “What rantings?” the dwarf asked, toying with his rabble.

    The Volantene waved a hand. “In Volantis, thousands of slaves and freedmen crowd the temple plaza every night to hear Benerro shriek of bleeding stars and a sword of fire that will cleanse the world. He has been preaching that Volantis will surely burn if the triarchs take up arms against the silver queen.”

  • Benerro. The priest stood atop a red stone pillar, joined by a slender stone bridge to a lofty terrace where the lesser priests and acolytes stood. The acolytes were clad in robes of pale yellow and bright orange, priests and priestesses in red.

“This one is a brickman, he has worked many domes, he lives in the sacred city. His eye was lost many years ago, when he fell from a dome and a sharp stick poked into him. The pain was very great, but he returned to work within a year, he did not beg for premature Union, he was very brave, he is proud of his courage. He has a wife, but they never had offspring, he is sad of that, he cannot talk to his wife easily, they are apart even when together and she weeps at night, he is sad of that too, but he has never hurt her and…”

It went on for hours again. My restlessness stirred again, but I cracked down on it—this was too important. I let myself get lost in Valcarenghi’s narration, and the story of the one-eyed Shkeen. Before long, I was riveted as closely to the tale as the aliens around me. It was hot and stuffy and all but airless in the dome, and my tunic was getting sooty and soaked by sweat, some of it from the creatures who pressed around me. But I hardly noticed.

The second speaker ended as had the first, with a long praise of the joy of being Joined and the coming of Final Union. Toward the end, I hardly even needed Valcarenghi’s translation—I could hear the happiness in the voice of the Shkeen, and see it in his trembling figure. Or maybe I was reading, unconsciously. But I can’t read at that distance—unless the target is emoting very hard.

A third speaker ascended the platform, and spoke in a voice louder than the others. Valcarenghi kept pace. “A woman this time,” he said. “She has carried eight children for her man, she has four sisters and three brothers, she has farmed all her life, she. . .”

Suddenly her speech seemed to peak, and she ended a long sequence with several sharp, high whistles. Then she fell silent. The crowd, as one, began to respond with whistles of their own. An eerie, echoing music filled the Great Hall, and the Shkeen around us all began to sway and whistle. The woman looked out at the scene from a bent and broken position.

Valcarenghi started to translate, but he stumbled over something. Laurie cut in before he could backtrack. “She has now told them of great tragedy,” she whispered. “They whistle to show their grief, their oneness with her pain.”

“Sympathy, yes,” said Valcarenghi, taking over again. “When she was young, her brother grew ill, and seemed to be dying. Her parents told her to take him to the sacred hills, for they could not leave the younger children. But she shattered a wheel on her cart through careless driving, and her brother died upon the plains. He perished without Union. She blames herself.”

The Shkeen had begun again. Laurie began to translate, leaning close to us and using a soft whisper. “Her brother died, she is saying again. She faulted him, denied him Union, now he is sundered and alone and gone without… without…”

“Afterlife,” said Valcarenghi. “Without afterlife.”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely right,” Laurie said. “That concept is…”

• The concept is akin to Danaerys using the souls of her loved ones to imbue her dragon eggs with a type of second-life as she wakes the dead eggs with fire and blood ritual.
• All of the underlined int he recent passages are re-purposed into Danaerys’s arc in A Game of Thrones, right down to the details about Viserys, the sacred hills is the Mother of Mountains, the cart is the Darry/Cart King detail, and Dany allowed Drogo to kill Viserys with her complacency, one of the three that the fire god/dess Dany has taken.

• A Clash of Kings – Daenerys I

  The Dothraki looked at her hatchlings uneasily. The largest of her three was shiny black, his scales slashed with streaks of vivid scarlet to match his wings and horns. “Khaleesi,” Aggo murmured, “there sits Balerion, come again.”

  “It may be as you say, blood of my blood,” Dany replied gravely, “but he shall have a new name for this new life. I would name them all for those the gods have taken. The green one shall be Rhaegal, for my valiant brother who died on the green banks of the Trident. The cream-and-gold I call Viserion. Viserys was cruel and weak and frightened, yet he was my brother still. His dragon will do what he could not.”

  “And the black beast?” asked Ser Jorah Mormont.”The black,” she said, “is Drogon.”

Valcarenghi waved her silent. “Listen,” he said. He continued to translate.

• The Greeshka is a jealous, hungry god that uses emotions and illusions to get what it wants, to consume for personal gain. Those that go for final Joining are given a final death: from Nightflyers-

The xenotech grunted and turned back to her work. “Why fake being human, then?”

“Because,” said Lommie Thorne, “most legal systems give AIs no rights. A ship can’t own itself, even on Avalon. The Nightflyer is probably afraid of being seized and disconnected.” She whistled. “Death, Alys; the end of self-awareness and conscious thought.”

We listened to her story, told in Valcarenghi’s increasingly hoarse whisper. She spoke longest of all, and her story was the grimmest of the three. When she finished, she too was replaced. But Valcarenghi put a hand on my shoulder and beckoned toward the exit.

The cool night air hit like ice water, and I suddenly realized that I was drenched with sweat. Valcarenghi walked quickly toward the car. Behind us, the speaking was still in progress, and the Shkeen showed no signs of tiring.

“Gatherings go on for days, sometimes weeks,” Laurie told us as we climbed inside the aircar. “The Shkeen listen in shifts, more or less—they try terribly to hear every word, but exhaustion gets to them sooner or later and they retire for brief rests, then return for more. It is a great honor to last through an entire Gathering without sleep.”

Valcarenghi shot us aloft. “I’m going to try that someday,” he said. “I’ve never attended for more than a couple of hours, but I think I could make it if I fortified myself with drugs. We’ll get more understanding between human and Shkeen if we participate more fully in their rituals.”

“Oh,” I said. “Maybe Gustaffson felt the same way.”

Valcarenghi laughed lightly. “Yes, well, I don’t intend to participate that fully.”

The trip home was a tired silence. I’d lost track of time but my body insisted that it was almost dawn. Lya, curled up under my arm, looked drained and empty and only half-awake. I felt the same way.

We left the aircar in front of the Tower, and took the tubes up. I was past thinking. Sleep came very, very quickly.

I dreamed that night. A good dream, I think, but it faded with the coming of the light, leaving me empty and feeling cheated. I lay there, after waking, with my arm around Lya and my eyes on the ceiling, trying to recall what the dream had been about. But nothing came.

Instead, I found myself thinking about the Gathering, running it through again in my head. Finally I disentangled myself and climbed out of bed. We’d darkened the glass, so the room was still pitch black. But I found the controls easily enough, and let through a trickle of late morning light.

Lya mumbled some sort of sleepy protest and rolled over, but made no effort to get up. I left her alone in the bedroom and went out to our library, looking for a book on the Shkeen—something with a little more detail than the material we’d been sent. No luck. The library was meant for recreation, not research.

I found a viewscreen and punched up to Valcarenghi’s office. Gourlay answered. “Hello,” he said. “Dino figured you’d be calling. He’s not here right now. He’s out arbitrating a trade contract. What do you need?”

“Books,” I said, my voice still a little sleepy. “Something on the Shkeen.”

“That I can’t do,” Gourlay said. “Are none, really. Lots of papers and studies and monographs, but no full-fledged books. I’m going to write one, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. Dino figured I could be your resource, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“Got any questions?”

I searched for a question, found none. “Not really,” I said, shrugging. “I just wanted general background, maybe some more information on Gatherings.”

“I can talk to you about that later,” Gourlay said. “Dino figured you’d want to get to work today. We can bring people to the Tower, if you’d like, or you can get out to them.”

“We’ll go out,” I said quickly. Bringing subjects in for interviews fouls up everything. They get all anxious, and that covers up any emotions I might want to read, and they think on different things, too, so Lyanna has trouble.

“Fine,” said Gourlay. “Dino put an aircar at your disposal. Pick it up down in the lobby. Also, they’ll have some keys for you, so you can come straight up here to the office without bothering with the secretaries and all.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Talk to you later.” I flicked off the view-screen and walked back to the bedroom. Lya was sitting up, the covers around her waist. I sat down next to her and kissed her. She smiled,

but didn’t respond. “Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Headache,” she replied. “I thought sober-ups were supposed to get rid of hangovers.”

“That’s the theory. Mine worked pretty well.” I went to the closet and began looking for something to wear. “We should have headache pills around here someplace. I’m sure Dino wouldn’t forget anything that obvious.”

“Umpf. Yes. Throw me some clothes.”

I grabbed one of her coveralls and tossed it across the room. Lya stood up and slipped into it while I dressed, then went off to the washroom.

“Better,” she said. “You’re right, he didn’t forget medicines.”

“He’s the thorough sort.”

She smiled. “I guess. Laurie knows the language better, though. I read her. Dino made a couple of mistakes in that translation last night.”

I’d guessed at something like that. No discredit to Valcarenghi; he was working on a four-month handicap, from what they’d said. I nodded. “Read anything else?”

“No. I tried to get those speakers, but the distance was too much.” She came up and took my hand. “Where are we going today?”

“Shkeentown,” I said. “Let’s try to find some of these Joined. I didn’t notice any at the Gathering.” “No. Those things are for Shkeen about-to-be-Joined.”

“So I hear. Let’s go.”

We went. We stopped at the fourth level for a late breakfast in the Tower cafeteria, then got our aircar pointed out to us by a man in the lobby. A sporty green four-seater, very common, very inconspicuous.

I didn’t take the aircar all the way into the Shkeen city, figuring we’d get more of the feel of the place if we went through on foot. So I dropped down just beyond the first range of hills, and we walked.

***

The human city had seemed almost empty, but Shkeentown lived. The crushed-rock streets were full of aliens, hustling back and forth busily, carrying loads of bricks and baskets of fruit and clothing. There were children everywhere, most of them naked: fat balls of orange energy that ran around us in circles, whistling and grunting and grinning, tugging at us every once in a while. The kids looked different from the adults. They had a few patches of reddish hair, for one thing, and their skins were still smooth and unwrinkled. They were the only ones who really paid any attention to us. The adult Shkeen just went about their business, and gave us an occasional friendly smile. Humans were obviously not all that uncommon in the streets of Shkeentown.

Most of the traffic was on foot, but small wooden carts were also common. The Shkeen draft animal looked like a big green dog that was about to be sick. They were strapped to the carts in pairs, and they whined constantly as they pulled. So, naturally, men called them whiners. In addition to whining, they also defecated constantly. That, with odors from the food peddled in baskets and the Shkeen themselves, gave the city a definite pungency.

• A Dance with Dragons – Tyrion VI

  A different guard motioned them through the gate, waving a torch at them impatiently. Haldon Halfmaester led the way into Selhorys proper, with Tyrion waddling warily at his heels.

  A great square opened up before them. Even at this hour, it was crowded and noisy and ablaze with light. Lanterns swung from iron chains above the doors of inns and pleasure houses, but within the gates, they were made of colored glass, not parchment. To their right a nightfire burned outside a temple of red stone. A priest in scarlet robes stood on the temple balcony, haranguing the small crowd that had gathered around the flames. Elsewhere, travelers sat playing cyvasse in front of an inn, drunken soldiers wandered in and out of what was obviously a brothel, a woman beat a mule outside a stable. A two-wheeled cart went rumbling past them, pulled by a white dwarf elephant. This is another world, thought Tyrion, but not so different from the world I know.

• A Dance with Dragons – Tyrion VII

  Farther on, they fell in behind a smaller elephant, white as old bone and pulling an ornate cart. “Is an oxcart an oxcart without an ox?” Tyrion asked his captor. When that sally got no response, he lapsed back into silence, contemplating the rolling rump of the white dwarf elephant ahead of them.

  Volantis was overrun with white dwarf elephants. As they drew closer to the Black Wall and the crowded districts near the Long Bridge, they saw a dozen of them. Big grey elephants were not uncommon either—huge beasts with castles on their backs. And in the half-light of evening the dung carts had come out, attended by half-naked slaves whose task it was to shovel up the steaming piles left by elephants both great and small. Swarms of flies followed the carts, so the dung slaves had flies tattooed upon their cheeks, to mark them for what they were. There’s a trade for my sweet sister, Tyrion mused. She’d look so pretty with a little shovel and flies tattooed on those sweet pink cheeks.

There was noise too, a constant clamor. Kids whistling, Shkeen talking loudly with grunts and whimpers and squeaks, whiners whining and their carts rattling over the rocks. Lya and I walked through it all silently, hand in hand, watching and listening and smelling and… reading.

I was wide open when I entered Shkeentown, letting everything wash over me as I walked, unfocused but receptive. I was the center of a small bubble of emotion—feelings rushed up at me as Shkeen approached, faded as they walked away, circled around and around with the dancing children. I swam in a sea of impressions. And it startled me.

It startled me because it was all so familiar. I’d read aliens before. Sometimes it was difficult, sometimes it was easy, but it was never pleasant. The Hrangans have sour minds, rank with hate and bitterness, and I feel unclean when I come out. The Fyndii feel emotions so palely that I can scarcely read them at all. The Damoosh are… different. I read them strongly, but I can’t find names for the feelings I read.

But the Shkeen—it was like walking down a street on Baldur. No wait—more like one of the Lost Colonies, when a human settlement has fallen back into barbarism and forgotten its origins. Human emotions rage there, primal and strong and real, but less sophisticated than on Old Earth or Baldur. The Shkeen were like that: primitive, maybe, but very understandable. I read joy and sorrow, envy, anger, whimsy, bitterness, yearning, pain. The same heady mixture that engulfs me everywhere, when I open myself to it.

Lya was reading, too. I felt her hand tense in mine. After a while, it softened again. I turned to her, and she saw the question in my eyes.

“They’re people,” she said. “They’re like us.”

I nodded. “Parallel evolution, maybe. Shkea might be an older Earth, with a few minor differences.

But you’re right. They’re more human than any other race we’ve encountered in space.” I considered that. “Does that answer Dino’s question? If they’re like us, it follows that their religion would be more  appealing than a really alien one.”

“No, Robb,” Lya said. “I don’t think so. Just the reverse. If they’re like us, it doesn’t make sense that they’d go off so willingly to die. See?”

She was right, of course. There was nothing suicidal in the emotions I’d read, nothing unstable, nothing really abnormal. Yet every one of the Shkeen went off to Final Union in the end.

“We should focus on somebody,” I said. “This blend of thought isn’t getting us anywhere.” I looked around to find a subject, but just then I heard the bells begin.

They were off to the left somewhere, nearly lost in the city’s gentle roar. I tugged Lya by the hand, and we ran down the street to find them, turning left at the first gap in the orderly row of domes.

The bells were still ahead, and we kept running, cutting through what must have been somebody’s yard, and climbing over a low bush fence that bristled with sweethorns. Beyond that was another yard, a dung pit, more domes, and finally a street. It was there we found the bell-ringers.

• Ringing a head like a bell in ASOIAF signifies something gone wrong, usually something that leads/follows death: A Storm of Swords – Jon XI

  “It’s too heavy,” the Oldtown boy complained.

  “It’s as heavy as it needs to be to stop a sword,” Jon said. “Now get it up.” He stepped forward, slashing. Satin jerked the shield up in time to catch the sword on its rim, and swung his own blade at Jon’s ribs. “Good,” Jon said, when he felt the impact on his own shield. “That was good. But you need to put your body into it. Get your weight behind the steel and you’ll do more damage than with arm strength alone. Come, try it again, drive at me, but keep the shield up or I’ll ring your head like a bell . . .”

• A Clash of Kings – Daenerys V

  She was breaking her fast on a bowl of cold shrimp-and-persimmon soup when Irri brought her a Qartheen gown, an airy confection of ivory samite patterned with seed pearls. “Take it away,” Dany said. “The docks are no place for lady’s finery.”

  If the Milk Men thought her such a savage, she would dress the part for them. When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest, and a curved dagger hung from her medallion belt. Jhiqui had braided her hair Dothraki fashion, and fastened a silver bell to the end of the braid. “I have won no victories,” she tried telling her handmaid when the bell tinkled softly.

  Jhiqui disagreed. “You burned the maegi in their house of dust and sent their souls to hell.”

There were four of them, all Joined, wearing long gowns of bright red fabric that trailed in the dust, with great bronze bells in either hand. They rang the bells constantly, their long arms swinging back and forth, the sharp, clanging notes filling the street. All four were elderly, as Shkeen go—hairless and pinched up with a million tiny wrinkles. But they smiled very widely, and the younger Shkeen that passed smiled at them.

On their heads rode the Greeshka.

I’d expected to find the sight hideous. I didn’t. It was faintly disquieting, but only because I knew what it meant. The parasites were bright blobs of crimson goo, ranging in size from a pulsing wart on the back of one Shkeen skull to a great sheet of dripping, moving red that covered the head and shoulders of the smallest like a living cowl. The Greeshka lived by sharing the nutrients in the Shkeen bloodstream, I knew.

• ‘Blood of my blood” – Daenerys Targagryen to the Dothraki.
• Slaves of Essos are identified as wearing collars and having tattoos. Melisandre’s collar is her ruby necklace (small greeshka) as is the one she makes Mance Rayder wear (that drives him crazy). Red priests of R’hllor are considered slaves to their religion/god as are the Steel Angels of another GRRM story (also wearing red collars). Notice in the Melisandre quote below that it is noted that while Mance is under ruby-fire glamour, that he put away his suit of bones… he became “goo” like the greeshka. Mance also has dark shadows move across his face, somewhat like ‘magic’ tattoos.

  • A Dance with Dragons – Tyrion VI

    “Do I have to be reborn in this same body?” asked Tyrion. The crowd was growing thicker. He could feel them pressing in around them. “Who is Benerro?”

    Haldon raised an eyebrow. “High Priest of the red temple in Volantis. Flame of Truth, Light of Wisdom, First Servant of the Lord of Light, Slave of R’hllor.”

  • A Dance with Dragons – Melisandre I

    The wildling wore a sleeveless jerkin of boiled leather dotted with bronze studs beneath a worn cloak mottled in shades of green and brown. No bones. He was cloaked in shadows too, in wisps of ragged grey mist, half-seen, sliding across his face and form with every step he took. Ugly things. As ugly as his bones. A widow’s peak, close-set dark eyes, pinched cheeks, a mustache wriggling like a worm above a mouthful of broken brown teeth.

    Melisandre felt the warmth in the hollow of her throat as her ruby stirred at the closeness of its slave. “You have put aside your suit of bones,” she observed.

    “The clacking was like to drive me mad.”

  • …And Seven Times Never Kill Man- And before the trader could reply, the Steel Angels came out of the forest.
    There were five of them at first, widely spaced; then shortly five more. All afoot, in uniforms whose mottled dark greens blended with the leaves, so that only the glitter of the mesh-steel belts and matching battle helmets stood out. One of them, a gaunt pale woman, wore a high red collar; all of them had hand-lasers drawn.
• Sharing nutrients via the bloodstream is much like Daenerys and her “knowing” fire and blood magic via genetic memory and this experience she has in the House of the Undying Ones where each taste is something drawn from a collective memory.

  • A Storm of Swords – Jon XI

    He shut the door and pulled the bell cord. The winch began to turn. They rose. The day was bright and the Wall was weeping, long fingers of water trickling down its face and glinting in the sun. In the close confines of the iron cage, he was acutely aware of the red woman’s presence. She even smells red. The scent reminded him of Mikken’s forge, of the way iron smelled when red-hot; the scent was smoke and blood. Kissed by fire, he thought, remembering Ygritte. The wind got in amongst Melisandre’s long red robes and sent them flapping against Jon’s legs as he stood beside her. “You are not cold, my lady?” he asked her.

    She laughed. “Never.” The ruby at her throat seemed to pulse, in time with the beating of her heart. “The Lord’s fire lives within me, Jon Snow. Feel.” She put her hand on his cheek, and held it there while he felt how warm she was. “That is how life should feel,” she told him. “Only death is cold.”

  • A Game of Thrones – Daenerys VI

    “No. He cannot have my son.” She would not weep, she decided. She would not shiver with fear. The Usurper has woken the dragon now, she told herself … and her eyes went to the dragon’s eggs resting in their nest of dark velvet. The shifting lamplight limned their stony scales, and shimmering motes of jade and scarlet and gold swam in the air around them, like courtiers around a king.

    Was it madness that seized her then, born of fear? Or some strange wisdom buried in her blood? Dany could not have said. She heard her own voice saying, “Ser Jorah, light the brazier.”

    “Khaleesi?” The knight looked at her strangely. “It is so hot. Are you certain?”

  • A Clash of Kings – Daenerys IV

    “One flute will serve only to unstop your ears and dissolve the caul from off your eyes, so that you may hear and see the truths that will be laid before you.”

    Dany raised the glass to her lips. The first sip tasted like ink and spoiled meat, foul, but when she swallowed it seemed to come to life within her. She could feel tendrils spreading through her chest, like fingers of fire coiling around her heart, and on her tongue was a taste like honey and anise and cream, like mother’s milk and Drogo’s seed, like red meat and hot blood and molten gold. It was all the tastes she had ever known, and none of them . . . and then the glass was empty.

    “Now you may enter,” said the warlock. Dany put the glass back on the servitor’s tray, and went inside.

And also by slowly—oh so slowly—consuming its host.

• Many times, in many ways, readers are shown in ASOIAF that fire consumes humans, and trees which is a metaphor for living humans.

• A Storm of Swords – Davos V

  “Your Grace,” said Davos, “the cost . . .”

  “I know the cost! Last night, gazing into that hearth, I saw things in the flames as well. I saw a king, a crown of fire on his brows, burning . . . burning, Davos. His own crown consumed his flesh and turned him into ash. Do you think I need Melisandre to tell me what that means? Or you?” The king moved, so his shadow fell upon King’s Landing. “If Joffrey should die . . . what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?”

  “Everything,” said Davos, softly.

• A Clash of Kings – Tyrion XIV

  Ser Mandon shouted, “The Mud Gate!” And they were off again. “King’s Landing!” his men cried raggedly, and “Halfman! Halfman!” He wondered who had taught them that. Through the steel and padding of his helm, he heard anguished screams, the hungry crackle of flame, the shuddering of warhorns, and the brazen blast of trumpets. Fire was everywhere. Gods be good, no wonder the Hound was frightened. It’s the flames he fears . . .

• A Storm of Swords – Jon XII

  …When Jon closed his eyes he saw the heart tree, with its pale limbs, red leaves, and solemn face. The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell, Lord Eddard always said . . . but to save the castle Jon would have to tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red woman’s hungry fire god. I have no right, he thought. Winterfell belongs to the old gods.

• A Dance with Dragons – Jon III

  But most came on. Behind them was only cold and death. Ahead was hope. They came on, clutching their scraps of wood until the time came to feed them to the flames. R’hllor was a jealous deity, ever hungry. So the new god devoured the corpse of the old, and cast gigantic shadows of Stannis and Melisandre upon the Wall, black against the ruddy red reflections on the ice.

• A Dance with Dragons – Victarion I

  Besides, Moqorro assured him that the three ships were not lost. Each night, the sorcerer priest would kindle a fire on the forecastle of the Iron Victory and stalk around the flames, chanting prayers. The firelight made his black skin shine like polished onyx, and sometimes Victarion could swear that the flames tattooed on his face were dancing too, twisting and bending, melting into one another, their colors changing with every turn of the priest’s head.

Lya and I stopped a few yards from them, and watched them ring. Her face was solemn, and I think mine was. All of the others were smiling, and the songs that the bells sang were songs of joy. I squeezed Lyanna’s hand tightly. “Read,” I whispered.

We read.

Me: I read bells. Not the sound of bells, no, no, but the feel of bells, the emotion of bells, the bright clanging joy, the hooting-shouting-ringing loudness, the song of the Joined, the togetherness and the sharing of it all. I read what the Joined felt as they pealed their bells, their happiness and anticipation, their ecstasy in telling others of their clamorous contentment. And I read love, coming from them in great hot waves, passionate possessive love of a man and woman together, not the weak watery affection of the human who “loves” his brothers. This was real and fervent and it burned almost as it washed over me and surrounded me. They loved themselves, and they loved all Shkeen, and they loved the Greeshka, and they loved each other, and they loved us. They loved us. They loved me, as hotly and wildly as Lya  loved me. And with love I read belonging, and sharing. They four were all apart, all distinct, but they thought as one almost, and they belonged to the Greeshka, and they were all together and linked although each was still himself and none could read the others as I read them.

• In ASOIAF, as in this story, the sound of bells signifies death. Daenerys and the Dothraki hair bells, the death toll bells in King’s Landing, even the “shame” bells that are inflicted upon Cersei which ultimately bring about a fiery-er evolution in her outlook. The Battle of the Bells even haunts Jon Connington almost two decades later. That is ultimatley what happens here but the zealotry and mind-bedning are makign things unclear.

And Lyanna? I reeled back from them, and shut myself off, and looked at Lya. She was white-faced, but smiling. “They’re beautiful,” she said, her voice very small and soft and wondering. Drenched in love, I still remembered how much I loved her, and how I was part of her and her of me.

“What—what did you read?” I asked, my voice fighting the continued clangor of the bells.

• As Laurie Blackburn is fighting the words of Valcarenghi.

She shook her head, as if to clear it. “They love us,” she said. “You must know that, but oh, I felt it, they do love us. And it’s so deep. Below that love there’s more love, and below that more, and on and on forever. Their minds are so deep, so open. I don’t think I’ve ever read a human that deeply. Everything is right at the surface, right there, their whole lives and all their dreams and feelings and memories and oh—I just took it in, swept it up with a reading, a glance. With men, with humans, it’s so much work. I have to dig, I have to fight, and even then I don’t get down very far. You know, Robb, you know. Oh, Robb!” And she came to me and pressed tight against me, and I held her in my arms. The torrent of feeling that had washed over me must have been a tidal wave for her. Her Talent was broader and deeper than mine, and now she was shaken. I read her as she clutched me, and I read love, great love, and wonder and happiness, but also fear, nervous fear swirling through it all.

Around us, the ringing suddenly stopped. The bells, one by one, ceased to swing, and the four Joined stood in silence for a brief second. One of the other Shkeen nearby came up to them with a huge, cloth-covered basket. The smallest of the Joined threw back the cloth, and the aroma of hot meatrolls rose in the street. Each of the Joined took several from the basket, and before long they were all crunching away happily, and the owner of the rolls was grinning at them. Another Shkeen, a small nude girl, ran up and offered them a flask of water, and they passed it around without comment.

• I highly recommend reading this essay about Craster and his Black Sausages  written by SweetSunRay. Craster is making offerings to different gods, and they seem to be darkling-flame related as well.
• The Unsullied have no pillar or stones, and the only vice an Unsullied has is food.
• Varys was made a eunuch and his member was given to the flames.

• A Game of Thrones – Daenerys VI

  But the Western Market smelled of home.

  As Irri and Jhiqui helped her from her litter, she sniffed, and recognized the sharp odors of garlic and pepper, scents that reminded Dany of days long gone in the alleys of Tyrosh and Myr and brought a fond smile to her face. Under that she smelled the heady sweet perfumes of Lys. She saw slaves carrying bolts of intricate Myrish lace and fine wools in a dozen rich colors. Caravan guards wandered among the aisles in copper helmets and knee-length tunics of quilted yellow cotton, empty scabbards swinging from their woven leather belts. Behind one stall an armorer displayed steel breastplates worked with gold and silver in ornate patterns, and helms hammered in the shapes of fanciful beasts. Next to him was a pretty young woman selling Lannisport goldwork, rings and brooches and torcs and exquisitely wrought medallions suitable for belting. A huge eunuch guarded her stall, mute and hairless, dressed in sweat-stained velvets and scowling at anyone who came close. Across the aisle, a fat cloth trader from Yi Ti was haggling with a Pentoshi over the price of some green dye, the monkey tail on his hat swaying back and forth as he shook his head.

  “When I was a little girl, I loved to play in the bazaar,” Dany told Ser Jorah as they wandered down the shady aisle between the stalls. “It was so alive there, all the people shouting and laughing, so many wonderful things to look at … though we seldom had enough coin to buy anything … well, except for a sausage now and again, or honeyfingers … do they have honeyfingers in the Seven Kingdoms, the kind they bake in Tyrosh?”

“What’s going on?” I asked Lya. Then, even before she told me, I remembered. Something from the literature that Valcarenghi had sent. The Joined did no work. Forty Earth-years they lived and toiled, but from First Joining to Final Union there was only joy and music, and they wandered the streets and rang their bells and talked and sang, and other Shkeen gave them food and drink. It was an honor to feed a Joined, and the Shkeen who had given up his meatrolls was radiating pride and pleasure.

“Lya,” I whispered, “can you read them now?”

She nodded against my chest and pulled away and stared at the Joined, her eyes going hard and then softening again. She looked back at me. “It’s different,” she said, curious.

“How?”

She squinted in puzzlement. “I don’t know. I mean, they still love us, and all. But now their thoughts are, well, sort of more human. There are levels, you know, and digging isn’t easy, and there are hidden things, things they hide even from themselves. It’s not all open like it was. They’re thinking about the food now and how good it tastes. It’s all very vivid. I could taste the rolls myself. But it’s not the same.”

I had an inspiration. “How many minds are there?”

“Four,” she said. “Linked somehow, I think. But not really.” She stopped, confused, and shook her head. “I mean, they sort of feel each other’s emotions, like you do, I guess. But not thoughts, not the detail. I can read them, but they don’t read each other. Each one is distinct. They were closer before, when they were ringing, but they were always individuals.”

I was slightly disappointed. “Four minds then, not one?”

“Umpf, yes. Four.”

“And the Greeshka?” My other bright idea. If the Greeshka had minds of their own…

“Nothing,” Lya said. “Like reading a plant, or a piece of clothing. Not even yes-I-live.”

That was disturbing. Even lower animals had some vague consciousness of life—the feeling Talents called yes-I-live—usually only a dim spark that it took a major Talent to see. But Lya was a major Talent.

“Let’s talk to them,” I said. She nodded, and we walked up to where the Joined were munching their meatrolls. “Hello,” I said awkwardly, wondering how to address them. “Can you speak Terran?”

Three of them looked at me without comprehension. But the fourth one, the little one whose Greeshka was a rippling red cape, bobbed his head up and down. “Yesh,” he said, in a piping-thin voice.

I suddenly forgot what I was going to ask, but Lyanna came to my rescue. “Do you know of human Joined?” she said.

He grinned. “All Joined are one,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, yes, but do you know any who look like us? Tall, you know, with hair and skin that’s pink or brown or something?” I came to another awkward halt, wondering just how much Terran the old Shkeen knew, and eyeing his Greeshka a little apprehensively.

His head bobbled from side to side. “Joined are all different, but all are one, all are shame. Shome look ash you. Would you Join?”

• Note about the word ‘ash’ here. This is not a typo, but supposed to be an accent of sorts, but the irony here is that the humans look as ‘ash’, ya know, burned.

“No, thanks,” I said. “Where can I find a human Joined?”

He bobbled his head some more. “Joined shing and ring and walk the shacred city.”

Lya had been reading. “He doesn’t know,” she told me. “The Joined just wander and play their bells. There’s no pattern to it, nobody keeps track. It’s all random. Some travel in groups, some alone, and new groups form every time two bunches meet.”

• Q: Why did Melisandre seek out Stannis? Did she see him in her flames and decided to seek him out on her own, or is she on a mission on behalf of the red priests? It doesn’t seem at any point as if the latter is the case, when you compare to Moqorro who has been sent out by the priesthood.

  GRRM: You’re right. Melisandre has gone to Stannis entirely on her own, and has her own agenda. source

“We’ll have to search,” I said.

“Eat,” the Shkeen told us. He reached into the basket on the ground and his hands came out with two steaming meatrolls. He pressed one into my hand, one in Lya’s.

I looked at it dubiously. “Thank you,” I told him. I pulled at Lya with my free hand and we walked off together. The Joined grinned at us as we left, and started ringing once more before we were halfway down the street.

The meatroll was still in my hand, its crust burning my fingers. “Should I eat this?” I asked Lya.

She took a bite out of hers. “Why not? We had them last night in the restaurant, right? And I’m sure Valcarenghi would’ve warned us if the native food was poisonous.”

That made sense, so I lifted the roll to my mouth and took a bite as I walked. It was hot, and also hot, and it wasn’t a bit like the meatrolls we’d sampled the previous night. Those had been golden, flaky things, seasoned gently with orangespice from Baldur. The Shkeen version was crunchy, and the meat inside dripped grease and burned my mouth. But it was good, and I was hungry, and the roll didn’t last long.

“Get anything else when you read the small guy?” I asked Lya around a mouthful of hot roll.

She swallowed, and nodded. “Yes, I did. He was happy, even more than the rest. He’s older. He’s near Final Union, and he’s very thrilled about it.” She spoke with her old easy manner; the after effects of reading the Joined seemed to have faded.

“Why?” I was musing out loud. “He’s going to die. Why is he so happy about it?” Lya shrugged. “He wasn’t thinking in any great analytical detail, I’m afraid.”

I licked my fingers to get rid of the last of the grease. We were at a crossroads, with Shkeen bustling by us in all directions, and now we could hear more bells on the wind. “More Joined,” I said. “Want to look them up?”

“What would we find out? That we don’t already know? We need a human Joined.”

“Maybe one of this batch will be human.”

I got Lya’s withering look, “Ha. What are the odds?”

“All right,” I conceded. It was now late afternoon. “Maybe we’d better head back. Get an earlier start tomorrow. Besides, Dino is probably expecting us for dinner.”

***

Dinner, this time, was served in Valcarenghi’s office, after a little additional furniture had been dragged in. His quarters, it turned out, were on the level below, but he preferred to entertain upstairs where his guests could enjoy the spectacular Tower view.

There were five of us, all told: me and Lya, Valcarenghi and Laurie, plus Gourlay. Laurie did the cooking, supervised by master chef Valcarenghi. We had beefsteaks, bred on Shkea from Old Earth stock, plus a fascinating blend of vegetables that included mushrooms from Old Earth, ground-pips from Baldur, and Shkeen sweethorns. Dino liked to experiment and the dish was one of his inventions.

Lya and I gave a full report on the day’s adventures, interrupted only by Valcarenghi’s sharp, perceptive questioning. After dinner, we got rid of tables and dishes and sat around drinking Veltaar and talking. This time Lya and I asked the questions, with Gourlay supplying the biggest chunk of the  answers. Valcarenghi listened from a cushion on the floor, one arm around Laurie, the other holding his wine glass. We were not the first Talents to visit Shkea, he told us. Nor the first to claim the Shkeen were manlike.

“Suppose that means something,” he said. “But I don’t know. They’re not men, you know. No, sir. They’re much more social, for one thing. Great little city builders from way back, always in towns, always surrounding themselves with others. And they’re more communal than man, too. Cooperate in all sorts of things, and they’re big on sharing. Trade, for instance—they see that as mutual sharing.”

Valcarenghi laughed. “You can say that again. I just spent the whole day trying to work out a trade contract with a group of farmers who hadn’t dealt with us before. It’s not easy, believe me. They give us as much of their stuff as we ask for, if they don’t need it themselves and no one else has asked for it earlier. But then they want to get whatever they ask for in the future. They expect it, in fact. So every time we deal we’ve got a choice; hand them a blank check, or go through an incredible round of talks that ends with them convinced that we’re totally selfish.”

Lya wasn’t satisfied. “What about sex?” she demanded. “From the stuff you were translating last night, I got the impression they’re monogamous.”

“They’re confused about sex relationships,” Gourlay said. “It’s very strange. Sex is sharing, you see, and it’s good to share with everyone. But the sharing has to be real and meaningful. That creates problems.”

Laurie sat up, attentive. “I’ve studied the point,” she said quickly. “Shkeen morality insists they love everybody. But they can’t do it, they’re too human, too possessive. They wind up in monogamous relationships, because a really deep sex-sharing with one person is better than a million shallow physical things, in their culture. The ideal Shkeen would sex-share with everyone, with each of the unions being just as deep, but they can’t achieve that ideal.”

I frowned. “Wasn’t somebody guilty last night over betraying his wife?”

Laurie nodded eagerly. “Yes, but the guilt was because his other relationships caused his sharing with his wife to diminish. That was the betrayal. If he’d been able to manage it without hurting his older relationship, the sex would have been meaningless. And, if all of the relationships have been real love-sharing, it would have been a plus. His wife would have been proud of him. It’s quite an achievement for a Shkeen to be in a multiple union that works.”

“And one of the greatest Shkeen crimes is to leave another alone,” Gourlay said. “Emotionally alone. Without sharing.”

I mulled over that, while Gourlay went on. The Shkeen had little crime, he told us. Especially no violent crime. No murders, no beatings, no prisons, no wars in their long, empty history.

“They’re a race without murderers,” Valcarenghi said. “Which may explain something. On Old Earth, the same cultures that had the highest suicide rates often had the lowest murder rates, too. And the Shkeen suicide rate is one hundred percent.”

“They kill animals,” I said.

“Not part of the Union,” Gourlay replied. “The Union embraces all that thinks, and its creatures may not be killed. They do not kill Shkeen, or humans, or Greeshka.”

• A Storm of Swords – Davos VI

  Stannis ground his teeth again. “I never asked for this crown. Gold is cold and heavy on the head, but so long as I am the king, I have a duty . . . If I must sacrifice one child to the flames to save a million from the dark . . . Sacrifice . . . is never easy, Davos. Or it is no true sacrifice. Tell him, my lady.”

  Melisandre said, “Azor Ahai tempered Lightbringer with the heart’s blood of his own beloved wife. If a man with a thousand cows gives one to god, that is nothing. But a man who offers the only cow he owns . . .”

  “She talks of cows,” Davos told the king. “I am speaking of a boy, your daughter’s friend, your brother’s son.”

“A king’s son, with the power of kingsblood in his veins.” Melisandre’s ruby glowed like a red star at her throat. “Do you think you’ve saved this boy, Onion Knight? When the long night falls, Edric Storm shall die with the rest, wherever he is hidden. Your own sons as well. Darkness and cold will cover the earth. You meddle in matters you do not understand.”

Lya looked at me, then at Gourlay. “The Greeshka don’t think,” she said. “I tried to read them this morning and got nothing but the minds of the Shkeen they rode. Not even a yes-I-live.”

“We’ve known that, but the point’s always puzzled me,” Valcarenghi said, climbing to his feet. He went to the bar for more wine, brought out a bottle, and filled our glasses. “A truly mindless parasite, but an intelligent race like the Shkeen are enslaved by it. Why?”

The new wine was good and chilled, a cold trail down my throat. I drank it, and nodded, remembering the flood of euphoria that had swept over us earlier that day. “Drugs,” I said, speculatively. “The Greeshka must produce an organic pleasure drug. The Shkeen submit to it willingly and die happy. The joy is real, believe me. We felt it.”

• A similar concept that GRRM used in This Tower of Ashes.

Lyanna looked doubtful, though, and Gourlay shook his head adamantly. “No, Robb. Not so. We’ve experimented on the Greeshka, and…”

He must have noticed my raised eyebrows. He stopped.

“How did the Shkeen feel about that?” I asked.

“Didn’t tell them. They wouldn’t have liked it, not at all. Greeshka’s just an animal, but it’s their God. Don’t fool around with God, you know. We refrained for a long time, but when Gustaffson went over, old Stuart had to know. His orders. We didn’t get anywhere, though. No extracts that might be a drug, no secretions, nothing. In fact, the Shkeen are the only native life that submits so easily. We caught a whiner, you see, and strapped it down, and let a Greeshka link up. Then, couple hours later, we yanked the straps. Damn whiner was furious, screeching and yelping, attacking the thing on its head. Nearly clawed its own skull to ribbons before it got it off.”

“Maybe only the Shkeen are susceptible?” I said. A feeble rescue attempt.

“Not quite,” said Valcarenghi, with a small, thin smile. “There’s us.”

***

Lya was strangely silent in the tube, almost withdrawn. I assumed she was thinking about the conversation. But the door to our suite had barely slid shut behind us when she turned toward me and wrapped her arms around me.

I reached up and stroked her soft brown hair, slightly startled by the hug. “Hey,” I muttered, “what’s wrong?”

She gave me her vampire look, big-eyed and fragile. “Make love to me, Robb,” she said with a soft sudden urgency. “Please. Make love to me now.”

I smiled, but it was a puzzled smile, not my usual lecherous bedroom grin. Lya generally comes on impish and wicked when she’s horny, but now she was all troubled and vulnerable. I didn’t quite get it.

But it wasn’t a time for questions, and I didn’t ask any. I just pulled her to me wordlessly and kissed her hard, and we walked together to the bedroom.

And we made love, really made love, more than poor Normals can do. We joined our bodies as one, and I felt Lya stiffen as her mind reached out to mine. And as we moved together I was opening myself to her, drowning myself in the flood of love and need and fear that was pouring from her.

• A Dance with Dragons – The Wayward Bride

  Asha had known other lovers; some shared her bed for half a year, some for half a night. Qarl pleased her more than all the rest together…

  A shy smile, strong arms, clever fingers, and two sure swords. What more could any woman want? She would have married Qarl, and gladly, but she was Lord Balon’s daughter and he was common-born, the grandson of a thrall. Too lowborn for me to wed, but not too low for me to suck his cock. Drunk, smiling, she crawled beneath the furs and took him in her mouth. Qarl stirred in his sleep, and after a moment he began to stiffen. By the time she had him hard again, he was awake and she was wet. Asha draped the furs across her bare shoulders and mounted him, drawing him so deep inside her that she could not tell who had the cock and who the cunt. This time the two of them reached their peak together.

Then, quickly as it had begun, it ended. Her pleasure washed over me in a raw red wave. And I joined her on the crest, and Lya clutched me tightly, her eyes shrunk up small as she drank it all in.

Afterward, we lay there in the darkness and let the stars of Shkea pour their radiance through the window. Lya huddled against me, her head on my chest, while I stroked her. “That was good,” I said in a drowsy-dreamy voice, smiling in the star-filled darkness.

“Yes,” she replied. Her voice was soft and small, so small I barely heard it. “I love you, Robb,” she whispered.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And I love you.”

She pulled loose of my arm and rolled over, propping her head on a hand to stare at me and smile. “You do,” she said. “I read it. I know it. And you know how much I love you, too, don’t you?”

I nodded, smiling. “Sure.”

“We’re lucky, you know. The Normals have only words. Poor little Normals. How can they tell, with just words? How can they know? They’re always apart from each other, trying to reach each other and failing. Even when they make love, even when they come, they’re always apart. They must be very  lonely.”

There was something… disturbing… in that. I looked at Lya, into her bright happy eyes, and thought about it. “Maybe,” I said, finally. “But it’s not that bad for them. They don’t know any other way. And they try, they love too. They bridge the gap sometimes.”

“Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.” Lya quoted, her voice sad and tender. “We’re luckier, aren’t we? We have so much more.”

“We’re luckier,” I echoed. And I reached out to read her too. Her mind was a haze of satisfaction, with a gentle scent of wistful, lonely longing. But there was something else, way down, almost gone now, but still faintly detectable.

I sat up slowly. “Hey,” I said. “You’re worried about something. And before, when we came in, you were scared. What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know, really,” she said. She sounded puzzled and she was puzzled; I read it there. “I was scared, but I don’t know why. The Joined, I think. I kept thinking about how much they loved me. They didn’t even know me, but they loved me so much, and they understood—it was almost like what we have. It—I don’t know. It bothered me. I mean, I didn’t think I could ever be loved that way, except by you. And they were so close, so together. I felt kind of lonely, just holding hands and talking. I wanted to be close to you that way. After the way they were all sharing and everything, being alone just seemed empty. And frightening. You know?”

“I know,” I said, touching her lightly again, with hand and mind. “I understand. We do understand each other. We’re together almost as they are, as Normals can’t ever be.”

Lya nodded, and smiled, and hugged me. We went to sleep in each other’s arms.

***

Dreams again. But again, at dawn, the memory stole away from me. It was all very annoying. The dream had been pleasant, comfortable. I wanted it back, and I couldn’t even remember what it was. Our bedroom, washed by harsh daylight, seemed drab compared to the splendors of my lost vision.

Lya woke after me, with another headache. This time she had the pills on hand, by the bedstand. She grimaced and took one.

“It must be the Shkeen wine,” I told her. “Something about it takes a dim view of your metabolism.”

She pulled on a fresh coverall and scowled at me. “Ha. We were drinking Veltaar last night, remember? My father gave me my first glass of Veltaar when I was nine. It never gave me headaches before.”

“A first!” I said, smiling.

“It’s not funny,” she said. “It hurts.”

• As Lya is slowly consumed by the red, fiery Greeshka, so is Valerie from Fevre Dream. Valerie is a vampire trying to survive by escaping the dark bloodmaster Damon Julian. As Valerie is slowly consumed by the sun, she exclaims:“It hurts!” she screamed, lifting hands red as lobster claws above her head in an attempt to block out the sun.

I quit kidding, and tried to read her. She was right. It did hurt. Her whole forehead throbbed with pain. I withdrew quickly before I caught it too.

“All right,” I said. “I’m sorry. The pills will take care of it, though. Meanwhile, we’ve got work to do.”

Lya nodded. She’d never let anything interfere with work yet.

The second day was a day of manhunt. We got off to a much earlier start, had a quick breakfast with Gourlay, then picked up our aircar outside the Tower. This time we didn’t drop down when we hit Shkeentown. We wanted a human Joined, which meant we had to cover a lot of ground. The city was  the biggest I’d ever seen, in area at any rate, and the thousand-odd human cultists were lost among millions of Shkeen. And, of those humans, only about half were actually Joined yet.

So we kept the aircar low, and buzzed up and down the dome-dotted hills like a floating rollercoaster, causing quite a stir in the streets below us. The Shkeen had seen aircars before, of course, but it still had some novelty value, particularly to the kids, who tried to run after us whenever we flashed by. We also panicked a whiner, causing him to upset the cart full of fruit he was dragging. I felt guilty about that, so I kept the car higher afterwards.

We spotted Joined all over the city, singing, eating, walking—and ringing those bells, those eternal bronze bells. But for the first three hours, all we found were Shkeen Joined. Lya and I took turns driving and watching. After the excitement of the previous day, the search was tedious and tiring.

Finally, however, we found something: a large group of Joined, ten of them, clustered around a bread cart behind one of the steeper hills. Two were taller than the rest.

We landed on the other side of the hill and walked around to meet them, leaving our aircar surrounded by a crowd of Shkeen children. The Joined were still eating when we arrived. Eight of them were Shkeen of various sizes and hues, Greeshka pulsing atop their skulls. The other two were human.

They wore the same long red gowns as the Shkeen, and they carried the same bells. One of them was a big man, with loose skin that hung in flaps, as if he’d lost a lot of weight recently. His hair was white and curly, his face marked by a broad smile and laugh wrinkles around his eyes. The other was a thin, dark weasel of a man with a big hooked nose.

Both of them had Greeshka sucking at their skulls. The parasite riding the weasel was barely a pimple, but the older man had a lordly specimen that dripped down beyond his shoulders and into the back of the gown.

Somehow, this time, it did look hideous.

Lyanna and I walked up to them, trying hard to smile, not reading—at least at first. They smiled at us as we approached. Then they waved.

“Hello,” the weasel said cheerily when we got there. “I’ve never seen you. Are you new on Shkea?”

That took me slightly by surprise. I’d been expecting some sort of garbled mystic greeting, or maybe no greeting at all. I was assuming that somehow the human converts would have abandoned their humanity to become mock-Shkeen. I was wrong.

“More or less,” I replied. And I read the weasel. He was genuinely pleased to see us, and just bubbled with contentment and good cheer. “We’ve been hired to talk to people like you.” I’d decided to be honest about it.

The weasel stretched his grin farther than I thought it would go. “I am Joined, and happy,” he said. “I’ll be glad to talk to you. My name is Lester Kamenz. What do you want to know, brother?”

Lya, next to me, was going tense. I decided I’d let her read in depth while I asked questions. “When did you convert to the Cult?”

“Cult?” Kamenz said.

“The Union.”

He nodded, and I was struck by the grotesque similarity of his bobbing head and that of the elderly Shkeen we’d seen yesterday. “I have always been in the Union. You are in the Union. All that thinks is in the Union.”

“Some of us weren’t told,” I said. “How about you? When did you realize you were in the Union?”

“A year ago, Old Earth time. I was admitted to the ranks of the Joined only a few weeks ago. The First Joining is a joyful time. I am joyful. Now I will walk the streets and ring my bells until the Final Union.”

“What did you do before?”

“Before?” A short vague look. “I ran machines once. I ran computers, in the Tower. But my life was empty, brother. I did not know I was in the Union, and I was alone. I had only machines, cold machines. Now I am Joined. Now I am”—again he searched—”not alone.”

I reached into him, and found the happiness still there, with love. But now there was an ache too, a vague recollection of past pain, the stink of unwelcome memories. Did these fade? Maybe the gift the Greeshka gave its victims was oblivion, sweet mindless rest and end of struggle. Maybe.

I decided to try something. “That thing on your head,” I said, sharply. “It’s a parasite. It’s drinking your blood right now, feeding on it. As it grows, it will take more and more of the things you need to live. Finally it will start to eat your tissue. Understand? It will eat you. I don’t know how painful it will be, but however it feels, at the end you’ll be dead. Unless you come back to the Tower now, and have the surgeons remove it. Or maybe you could remove it yourself. Why don’t you try? Just reach up and pull it off. Go ahead.”

• This consuming is very different than what we see happening to Bloodraven in the cave with Bran right now (A Dance with Dragons as of this writing). Bloodraven’s life was extended as he searched for the ‘right’ greenseer to take over the helm as the next Three-eyed Crow to serve the many. This consuming the Greeshka do takes the life of beings prematurely, and for self-serving purposes. Fire is a jealous god, every hungry.

I’d expected—what? Rage? Horror? Disgust? I got none of these. Kamenz just stuffed bread in his mouth and smiled at me, and all I read was his love and joy and a little pity.

“The Greeshka does not kill,” he said finally. “The Greeshka gives joy and happy Union. Only those who have no Greeshka die. They are… alone. Oh, forever alone.” Something in his mind trembled with sudden fear, but it faded quickly.

I glanced at Lya. She was stiff and hard-eyed, still reading. I looked back and began to phrase another question. But suddenly the Joined began to ring. One of the Shkeen started it off, swinging his bell up and down to produce a single sharp clang. Then his other hand swung, then the first again, then the second, then another Joined began to ring, then still another, and then they were all swinging and clanging and the noise of their bells was smashing against my ears as the joy and the love and the feel of the bells assaulted my mind once again.

I lingered to savor it. The love there was breathtaking, awesome, almost frightening in its heat and intensity, and there was so much sharing to frolic in and wonder at, such a soothing-calming-exhilarating tapestry of good feelings. Something happened to the Joined when they rang, something touched them and lifted them and gave them a glow, something strange and glorious that mere Normals could not hear in their harsh clanging music. I was no Normal, though. I could hear it.

I withdrew reluctantly, slowly. Kamenz and the other human were both ringing vigorously now, with broad smiles and glowing twinkling eyes that transfigured their faces. Lyanna was still tense, still reading. Her mouth was slightly open, and she trembled where she stood.

I put an arm around her and waited, listening to the music, patient. Lya continued to read. Finally, after minutes, I shook her gently. She turned and studied me with hard, distant eyes. Then blinked. And her eyes widened and she came back, shaking her head and frowning.

Puzzled, I looked into her head. Strange and stranger. It was a swirling fog of emotion, a dense moving blend of more feelings than I’d care to put a name to. No sooner had I entered than I was lost, lost and uneasy. Somewhere in the fog there was a bottomless abyss lurking to engulf me. At least it felt that way.

“Lya,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head again, and looked at the Joined with a look that was equal parts fear and longing. I repeated my question.

“I—I don’t know,” she said. “Robb, let’s not talk now. Let’s go. I want time to think.”

“OK,” I said. What was going on here? I took her hand and we walked slowly around the hill to the slope where we’d left the car. Shkeen kids were climbing all over it. I chased them, laughing. Lya just stood there, her eyes gone all faraway on me. I wanted to read her again, but somehow I felt it would be an invasion of privacy.

Airborne, we streaked back toward the Tower, riding higher and faster this time. I drove, while Lya sat beside me and stared out into the distance.

“Did you get anything useful?” I asked her, trying to get her mind back on the assignment.

“Yes. No. Maybe.” Her voice sounded distracted, as if only part of her was talking to me. “I read their lives, both of them. Kamenz was a computer programmer, as he said. But he wasn’t very good. An ugly little man with an ugly little personality, no friends, no sex, no nothing. Lived by himself, avoided the Shkeen, didn’t like them at all. Didn’t even like people, really. But Gustaffson got through to him, somehow. He ignored Kamenz’ coldness, his bitter little cuts, his cruel jokes. He didn’t retaliate, you know? After a while, Kamenz came to like Gustaffson, to admire him. They were never really friends in any normal sense, but still Gustaffson was the nearest thing to a friend that Kamenz had.”

She stopped suddenly. “So he went over with Gustaffson?” I prompted, glancing at her quickly. Her eyes still wandered.

“No, not at first. He was still afraid, still scared of the Shkeen and terrified of the Greeshka. But later, with Gustaffson gone, he began to realize how empty his life was. He worked all day with people who despised him and machines that didn’t care, then sat alone at night reading and watching holoshows. Not life, really. He hardly touched the people around him. Finally he went to find Gustaffson, and wound up converted. Now…”

“Now… ?”

She hesitated. “He’s happy, Robb,” she said. “He really is. For the first time in his life, he’s happy. He’d never known love before. Now it fills him.”

“You got a lot,” I said.

“Yes.” Still the distracted voice, the lost eyes. “He was open, sort of. There were levels, but digging wasn’t as hard as it usually is—as if his barriers were weakening, coming down almost…”

“How about the other guy?”

She stroked the instrument panel, staring only at her hand. “Him? That was Gustaffson…”

And that, suddenly, seemed to wake her, to restore her to the Lya I knew and loved. She shook her head and looked at me, and the aimless voice became an animated torrent of words. “Robb, listen, that was Gustaffson, he’s been Joined over a year now, and he’s going on to Final Union within a week. The Greeshka has accepted him, and he wants it, you know? He really does, and—and—oh Robb, he’s dying!”

“Within a week, according to what you just said.”

“No. I mean yes, but that’s not what I mean. Final Union isn’t death, to him. He believes it, all of it, the whole religion. The Greeshka is his god, and he’s going to join it. But before, and now, he was dying. He’s got the Slow Plague, Robb. A terminal case. It’s been eating at him from inside for fifteen years now. He got it back on Nightmare, in the swamps, when his family died. That’s no world for people, but he was there, the administrator over a research base, a short-term thing. They lived on Thor; it was only a visit, but the ship crashed. Gustaffson got all wild and tried to reach them before the end, but he grabbed a faulty pair of skinthins, and the spores got through. And they were all dead when he got there. He had an awful lot of pain, Robb. From the Slow Plague, but more from the loss. He really loved them, and it was never the same after. They gave him Shkea as a reward, kind of, to take his mind off the crash, but he still thought of it all the time. I could see the picture, Robb. It was vivid. He couldn’t forget it. The kids were inside the ship, safe behind the walls, but the life system failed and choked them to death. But his wife—oh, Robb—she took some skinthins and tried to go for help, and outside those things, those big wrigglers they have on Nightmare—?”

I swallowed hard, feeling a little sick. “The eater-worms,” I said, dully. I’d read about them, and seen holos. I could imagine the picture that Lya’d seen in Gustaffson’s memory, and it wasn’t at all pretty. I was glad I didn’t have her Talent.

“They were still—still—when Gustaffson got there. You know. He killed them all with a screech gun.”

I shook my head, “I didn’t think things like that really went on.”

“No,” Lya said. “Neither did Gustaffson. They’d been so—so happy before that, before the thing on Nightmare. He loved her, and they were really close, and his career had been almost charmed. He didn’t have to go to Nightmare, you know. He took it because it was a challenge, because nobody else could handle it. That gnaws at him, too. And he remembers all the time. He—they—” Her voice faltered. “They thought they were lucky,” she said, before falling into silence.

There was nothing to say to that. I just kept quiet and drove, thinking, feeling a blurred, watered-down version of what Gustaffson’s pain must have been like. After a while, Lya began to speak again.

“It was all there, Robb,” she said, her voice softer and slower and more thoughtful once again. “But he was at peace. He still remembered it all, and the way it had hurt, but it didn’t bother him as it had.

Only now he was sorry they weren’t with him. He was sorry that they died without Final Union. Almost like the Shkeen woman, remember? The one at the Gathering? With her brother?”

“I remember,” I said.

“Like that. And his mind was open, too. More than Kamenz, much more. When he rang, the levels all vanished, and everything was right at the surface, all the love and pain and everything. His whole life, Robb. I shared his whole life with him, in an instant. And all his thoughts, too… he’s seen the caves of Union… he went down once, before he converted. I…”

More silence, settling over us and darkening the car. We were close to the end of Shkeentown. The Tower slashed the sky ahead of us, shining in the sun. And the lower domes and archways of the glittering human city were coming into view.

“Robb,” Lya said. “Land here. I have to think a while, you know? Go back without me. I want to walk among the Shkeen a little.”

I glanced at her, frowning. “Walk? It’s a long way back to the Tower, Lya.”

“I’ll be all right. Please. Just let me think a bit.”

I read her. The thought fog had returned, denser than ever, laced through with the colors of fear. “Are you sure?” I said. “You’re scared, Lyanna. Why? What’s wrong? The eater-worms are a long way off.”

She just looked at me, troubled. “Please, Robb,” she repeated.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I landed.

***

And I, too, thought, as I guided the aircar home. Of what Lyanna had said, and read—of Kamenz and Gustaffson. I kept my mind on the problem we’d been assigned to crack. I tried to keep it off Lya, and whatever was bothering her. That would solve itself, I thought.

Back at the Tower, I wasted no time. I went straight up to Valcarenghi’s office. He was there, alone, dictating into a machine. He shut it off when I entered.

“Hi, Robb,” he began. “Where’s Lya?”

“Out walking. She wanted to think. I’ve been thinking, too. And I believe I’ve got your answer.” He raised his eyebrows, waiting.

I sat down. “We found Gustaffson this afternoon, and Lya read him. I think it’s clear why he went over. He was a broken man, inside, however much he smiled. The Greeshka gave him an end to his pain. And there was another convert with him, a Lester Kamenz. He’d been miserable, too, a pathetic lonely man with nothing to live for. Why shouldn’t he convert? Check out the other converts, and I bet you’ll find a pattern. The most lost and vulnerable, the failures, the isolated—those will be the ones that turned to Union.”

• ASOIAF readers will be able to recognize this pattern of Gustaffson and his personal trials taking an everlasting toll on him. This is akin to Septon Meribald from the A Fest For Crows, Brienne V chapter. I have pasted what is known as the “broken Man” speech below after this story for comparison. This is the real world equivalent to war veterans taking their own lives (joining a death cult) because they can no longer function in the normal day to day processes.
• A somewhat sad idea to this broken man is that in both this Lya story and ASOIAF, the broken men are still looking for that one last ruby, which is fire, or royalty, or someone with a major Talent.
• The corporate/institutional life followed by personal loss is what I frequently point out across Martinworld as being the “dragons” of ice and fire- extremes that represent crushing governmental rule and/or corporations. As an old hippie might call it, “the man“.

Valcarenghi nodded. “OK, I’ll buy that,” he said. “But our psychs guessed that long ago, Robb. Only it’s no answer, not really. Sure, the converts on the whole have been a messed-up crew, I won’t dispute that. But why turn to the Cult of the Union? The psychs can’t answer that. Take Gustaffson now. He was a strong man, believe me. I never knew him personally, but I knew his career. He took some rough assignments, generally for the hell of it, and beat them. He could have had the cushy jobs, but he wasn’t interested. I’ve heard about the incident on Nightmare. It’s famous, in a warped sort of way. But Phil Gustaffson wasn’t the sort of man to be beaten, even by something like that. He snapped out of it very quickly, from what Nelse tells me. He came to Shkea and really set the place in order, cleaning up the mess that Rockwood had left. He pushed through the first real trade contract we ever got, and he made the Shkeen understand what it meant, which isn’t easy.

“So here he is, this competent, talented man, who’s made a career of beating tough jobs and handling men. He’s gone through a personal nightmare, but it hasn’t destroyed him. He’s as tough as ever. And suddenly he turns to the Cult of the Union, signs up for a grotesque suicide. Why? For an end to his pain, you say? An interesting theory, but there are other ways to end pain. Gustaffson had years between Nightmare and the Greeshka. He never ran away from pain then. He didn’t turn to drink, or drugs, or any of the usual outs. He didn’t head back to Old Earth to have a psi-psych clean up his memories—and believe me, he could’ve gotten it paid for, if he’d wanted it. The colonial office would have done anything for him, after Nightmare. He went on, swallowed his pain, rebuilt. Until suddenly he converts.

“His pain made him more vulnerable, yes, no doubt of it. But something else brought him over—something that Union offered, something he couldn’t get from wine or memory wipe. The same’s true of Kamenz, and the others. They had other outs, other ways to vote no on life. They passed them up. But they chose Union. You see what I’m getting at?”

I did, of course. My answer was no answer at all, and I realized it. But Valcarenghi was wrong too, in parts.

“Yes,” I said. “I guess we’ve still got some reading to do.” I smiled wanly. “One thing, though.

Gustaffson hadn’t really beaten his pain, not ever. Lya was very clear on that. It was inside him all the time, tormenting him. He just never let it come out.”

“That’s victory, isn’t it?” Valcarenghi said. “If you bury your hurts so deep that no one can tell you have them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But… anyway, there was more. Gustaffson has the Slow Plague. He’s dying. He’s been dying for years.”

• In what seems to be GRRM”s opinion, no, it is not victory to play dead: A Feast for Crows – Jaime I

  I have smelled my own hand rotting, when Vargo Hoat made me wear it for a pendant. “A man can bear most anything, if he must,” Jaime told his son. I have smelled a man roasting, as King Aerys cooked him in his own armor. “The world is full of horrors, Tommen. You can fight them, or laugh at them, or look without seeing . . . go away inside.”

  Tommen considered that. “I . . . I used to go away inside sometimes,” he confessed, “when Joffy . . .”

  “Joffrey.” Cersei stood over them, the wind whipping her skirts around her legs. “Your brother’s name was Joffrey. He would never have shamed me so.”

Valcarenghi’s expression flickered briefly. “That I didn’t know, but it just bolsters my point. I’ve read that some eighty percent of Slow Plague victims opt for euthanasia, if they happen to be on a planet where it’s legal. Gustaffson was a planetary administrator. He could have made it legal. If he passed up suicide for all those years, why choose it now?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Lyanna hadn’t given me one, if she had one. I didn’t know where we could find one, either unless…

“The caves,” I said suddenly. “The caves of Union. We’ve got to witness a Final Union. There must be something about it, something that accounts for the conversions. Give us a chance to find out what it is.”

• It is a real world tradition for churches to have red doors. Theories vary for the reason why, but all seem to signal some sort of reformation… or re-formation. This seems to be the reason George has the physical description of the Greeshka the way he does, red and enthralling. I fear we may have Daenerys finally find her house with the red door and it might be a second life inside Drogon as I discussed on this page here… maybe. Discuss below 🙂

• A Game of Thrones – Daenerys I

  “We will have it all back someday, sweet sister,” he would promise her. Sometimes his hands shook when he talked about it. “The jewels and the silks, Dragonstone and King’s Landing, the Iron Throne and the Seven Kingdoms, all they have taken from us, we will have it back.” Viserys lived for that day. All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.

• A Game of Thrones – Daenerys IX

  “… wake the dragon …”

  The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

  “… the dragon …”

Valcarenghi smiled. “All right,” he said. “I can arrange it. I expected it would come to that. It’s not pleasant, though, I’ll warn you. I’ve gone down myself, so I know what I’m talking about.”

• A Storm of Swords – Davos II

  Davos shook his head. “I will be fine. Tell me, Salla, I must know. No one but Melisandre?”

  The Lyseni gave him a long doubtful look, and continued reluctantly. “The guards keep all others away, even his queen and his little daughter. Servants bring meals that no one eats.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Queer talking I have heard, of hungry fires within the mountain, and how Stannis and the red woman go down together to watch the flames. There are shafts, they say, and secret stairs down into the mountain’s heart, into hot places where only she may walk unburned. It is enough and more to give an old man such terrors that sometimes he can scarcely find the strength to eat.”

  Melisandre. Davos shivered. “The red woman did this to him,” he said. “She sent the fire to consume us, to punish Stannis for setting her aside, to teach him that he could not hope to win without her sorceries.”

“That’s OK,” I told him. “If you think reading Gustaffson was any fun, you should have seen Lya when she was through. She’s out now trying to walk it off.” That, I’d decided, must have been what was bothering her. “Final Union won’t be any worse than those memories of Nightmare, I’m sure.”

“Fine, then. I’ll set it up for tomorrow. I’m going with you, of course. I don’t want to take any chances on anything happening to you.”

I nodded. Valcarenghi rose. “Good enough,” he said. “Meanwhile, let’s think about more interesting things. You have any plans for dinner?”

We wound up eating at a mock-Shkeen restaurant run by humans, in the company of Gourlay and Laurie Blackburn. The talk was mostly social noises—sports, politics, art, old jokes, that sort of thing. I don’t think there was a mention of the Shkeen or the Greeshka all evening.

Afterwards, when I got back to our suite, I found Lyanna waiting for me. She was in bed, reading one of the handsome volumes from our library, a book of Old Earth poetry. She looked up when I entered.

“Hi,” I said. “How was your walk?”

“Long.” A smile creased her pale, small face, then faded. “But I had time to think. About this afternoon, and yesterday, and about the Joined. And us.”

“Us?”

“Robb, do you love me?” The question was delivered almost matter-of-factly, in a voice full of question. As if she didn’t know. As if she really didn’t know.

I sat down on the bed and took her hand and tried to smile. “Sure,” I said. “You know that, Lya.”

“I did. I do. You love me, Robb, really you do. As much as a human can love. But…” She stopped. She shook her head and closed her book and sighed. “But we’re still apart, Robb. We’re still apart.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This afternoon. I was so confused afterwards, and scared. I wasn’t sure why, but I’ve thought about it. When I was reading, Robb—I was in there, with the Joined, sharing them and their love. I really was. And I didn’t want to come out. I didn’t want to leave them, Robb. When I did, I felt so isolated, so cut off.”

“That’s your fault,” I said. “I tried to talk to you. You were too busy thinking.”

“Talking? What good is talking? It’s communication, I guess, but is it really? I used to think so, before they trained my Talent. After that, reading seemed to be the real communication, the real way to reach somebody else, somebody like you. But now I don’t know. The Joined—when they ring—they’re so together, Robb. All linked. Like us when we make love, almost. And they love each other, too. And they love us, so intensely. I felt—I don’t know. But Gustaffson loves me as much as you do. No. He loves me more.”

Her face was white as she said that, her eyes wide, lost, lonely. And me, I felt a sudden chill, like a cold wind blowing through my soul. I didn’t say anything. I only looked at her, and wet my lips. And bled.

She saw the hurt in my eyes, I guess. Or read it. Her hand pulled at mine, caressed it. “Oh, Robb. Please. I don’t mean to hurt you. It’s not you. It’s all of us. What do we have, compared to them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lya.” Half of me suddenly wanted to cry. The other half wanted to shout. I stifled both halves, and kept my voice steady. But inside I wasn’t steady, I wasn’t steady at all.

“Do you love me, Robb?” Again. Wondering.

“Yes!” Fiercely. A challenge.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“You know what it means,” I said. “Dammit, Lya, think! Remember all we’ve had, all we’ve shared together. That’s love, Lya. It is. We’re the lucky ones, remember? You said that yourself. The Normals have only a touch and a voice, then back to their darkness. They can barely find each other. They’re alone. Always. Groping. Trying, over and over, to climb out of their isolation booths, and failing, over and over. But not us, we found the way, we know each other as much as any human beings ever can. There’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you, or share with you. I’ve said that before, and you know it’s true, you can read it in me. That’s love, dammit. Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, in a voice so sadly baffled. Soundlessly, without even a sob, she began to cry. And while the tears ran in lonely paths down her cheeks, she talked. “Maybe that’s love. I always thought it was. But now I don’t know. If what we have is love, what was it I felt this afternoon, what was it I touched and shared in? Oh, Robb, I love you too. You know that. I try to share with you. I want to share what I read, what it was like. But I can’t. We’re cut off. I can’t make you understand. I’m here and you’re there and we can touch and make love and talk, but we’re still apart. You see? You see? I’m alone. And this afternoon, I wasn’t.”

“You’re not alone, dammit,” I said suddenly. “I’m here.” I clutched her hand tightly. “Feel? Hear? You’re not alone!”

She shook her head, and the tears flowed on. “You don’t understand, see? And there’s no way I can make you. You said we know each other as much as any human beings ever can. You’re right. But how much can human beings know each other? Aren’t all of them cut off, really? Each alone in a big, dark, empty universe? We only trick ourselves when we think that someone else is there. In the end, in the cold lonely end, it’s only us, by ourselves, in the blackness. Are you there, Robb? How do I know? Will you die with me, Robb? Will we be together then? Are we together now? You say we’re luckier than the Normals. I’ve said it too. They have only a touch and voice, right? How many times have I quoted that? But what do we have? A touch and two voices, maybe. It’s not enough anymore. I’m scared. Suddenly I’m scared.”

She began to sob. Instinctively I reached out to her, wrapped her in my arms, stroked her. We lay back together, and she wept against my chest. I read her, briefly, and I read her pain, her sudden loneliness, her hunger, all aswirl in a darkening mind-storm of fear. And, though I touched her and caressed her and whispered—over and over—that it would be all right, that I was here, that she wasn’t alone, I knew that it would not be enough. Suddenly there was a gulf between us, a great dark yawning tiling that grew and grew, and I didn’t know how to bridge it. And Lya, my Lya, was crying, and she needed me. And I needed her, but I couldn’t get to her.

Then I realized that I was crying too.

• A Dance with Dragons – Bran III

  Meera began to cry.

  Bran hated being crippled then. “Don’t cry,” he said. He wanted to put his arms around her, hold her tight the way his mother used to hold him back at Winterfell when he’d hurt himself. She was right there, only a few feet from him, but so far out of reach it might have been a hundred leagues. To touch her he would need to pull himself along the ground with his hands, dragging his legs behind him. The floor was rough and uneven, and it would be slow going, full of scrapes and bumps. I could put on Hodor’s skin, he thought. Hodor could hold her and pat her on the back. The thought made Bran feel strange, but he was still thinking it when Meera bolted from the fire, back out into the darkness of the tunnels. He heard her steps recede until there was nothing but the voices of the singers.

We held each other, in silent tears, for what must have been an hour. But finally the tears ran out. Lya clutched her body to me so tightly I could hardly breathe, and I held her just as tightly.

“Robb,” she whispered. “You said—you said we really know each other. All those times you’ve said it. And you say, sometimes, that I’m right for you, that I’m perfect.”

I nodded, wanting to believe. “Yes. You are.”

“No,” she said, choking out the word, forcing it into the air, fighting herself to say it. “It’s not so. I read you, yes. I can hear the words rattling around in your head as you fit a sentence together before saying it. And I listen to you scold yourself when you’ve done something stupid. And I see memories, some memories, and live through them with you. But it’s all on the surface, Robb, all on the top. Below it, there’s more, more of you. Drifting half-thoughts I don’t quite catch. Feelings I can’t put a name to.

Passions you suppress, and memories even you don’t know you have. Sometimes I can get to that level. Sometimes. If I really fight, if I drain myself to exhaustion. But when I get there, I know—I know—that there’s another level below that. And more and more, on and on, down and down. I can’t reach them, Robb, though they’re part of you. I don’t know you. I can’t know you. You don’t even know yourself, see? And me, do you know me? No. Even less. You know what I tell you, and I tell you the truth, but maybe not all. And you read my feelings, my surface feelings—the pain of a stubbed toe, a quick flash of annoyance, the pleasure I get when you’re in me. Does that mean you know me? What of my levels, and levels? What about the things I don’t even know myself? Do you know them? How, Robb, how?”

She shook her head again, with that funny little gesture she had whenever she was confused. “And you say I’m perfect, and that you love me. I’m so right for you. But am I? Robb, I read your thoughts. I know when you want me to be sexy, so I’m sexy. I see what turns you on, so I do it. I know when you want me to be serious, and when you want me to joke. I know what kind of jokes to tell, too. Never the cutting kind, you don’t like that, to hurt or see people hurt. You laugh with people not at them, and I laugh with you, and love you for your tastes. I know when you want me to talk, and when to keep quiet.  I know when you want me to be your proud tigress, your tawny telepath, and when you want a little girl to shelter in your arms. And I am those things, Robb, because you want me to be, because I love you, because I can feel joy in your mind at every right thing that I do. I never set out to do it that way, but it happened. I didn’t mind, I don’t mind. Most of the time it wasn’t even conscious. You do the same thing, too. I read it in you. You can’t read as I do, so sometimes you guess wrong—you come on witty when I want silent understanding, or you act the strong man when I need a boy to mother. But you get it right sometimes, too. And you try, you always try.

“But is it really you? Is it really me? What if I wasn’t perfect, you see, if I was just myself, with all my faults and the things you don’t like out in the open? Would you love me then? I don’t know. But Gustaffson would, and Kamenz. I know that, Robb. I saw it. I know them. Their levels… vanished. I KNOW them, and if I went back I could share with them, more than with you. And they know me, the real me, all of me, I think. And they love me. You see? You see?”

• A Game of Thrones – Daenerys X

  Only death can pay for life.

  And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts. She heard the screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you SEE? With a belch of flame and smoke that reached thirty feet into the sky, the pyre collapsed and came down around her. Unafraid, Dany stepped forward into the firestorm, calling to her children.

  The third crack was as loud and sharp as the breaking of the world.

Did I see? I don’t know. I was confused. Would I love Lya if she was “herself”? But what was “herself”? How was it different from the Lya I knew? I thought I loved Lya and would always love Lya—but what if the real Lya wasn’t like my Lya? What did I love? The strange abstract concept of a human being, or the flesh and voice and personality that I thought of as Lya? I didn’t know. I didn’t know who Lya was, or who I was, or what the hell it all meant. And I was scared. Maybe I couldn’t feel what she had felt that afternoon. But I knew what she was feeling then. I was alone, and I needed someone.

“Lya,” I called. “Lya, let’s try. We don’t have to give up. We can reach each other. There’s a way, our way. We’ve done it before. Come, Lya, come with me, come to me.”

As I spoke, I undressed her, and she responded and her hands joined mine. When we were nude, I began to stroke her, slowly, and she me. Our minds reached out to each other. Reached and probed as never before. I could feel her, inside my head, digging. Deeper and deeper. Down. And I opened myself to her, I surrendered, all the petty little secrets I had kept even from her, or tried to, now I yielded up to her everything I could remember, my triumphs and shames, the good moments and the pain, the times I’d hurt someone, the times I’d been hurt, the long crying sessions by myself, the fears I wouldn’t admit, the prejudices I fought, the vanities I battled when the time struck, the silly boyish sins. All. Everything. I buried nothing. I hid nothing. I gave myself to her, to Lya, to my Lya. She had to know me.

And so, too, she yielded. Her mind was a forest through which I roamed, hunting down wisps of emotion, the fear and the need and the love at the top, the fainter things beneath, the half-formed whims and passions still deeper into the woods. I don’t have Lya’s Talent, I read only feelings, never thoughts. But I read thoughts then, for the first and only time, thoughts she threw at me because I’d never seen them before. I couldn’t reach much, but some I got.

• Darkling forest, darkling mind, darkling plain.
• This comes from the poem Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.

And as her mind opened to mine, so did her body. I entered her, and we moved together, bodies one, minds entwined, as close as human beings can join. I felt pleasure washing over me in great glorious waves, my pleasure, her pleasure, both together building on each other, and I rode the crest for an eternity as it approached a far distant shore. And finally as it smashed into that beach, we came together, and for a second—for a tiny, fleeting second—I could not tell which orgasm was mine, and which was hers.

But then it passed. We lay, bodies locked together, on the bed. In the starlight. But it was not a bed. It was the beach, the flat black beach, and there were no stars above. A thought touched me, a vagrant thought that was not mine. Lya’s thought. We were on a plain, she was thinking, and I saw that she was right. The waters that had carried us here were gone, receded. There was only a vast flat blackness stretching away in all directions, with dim ominous shapes moving on either horizon. We are here as on a darkling plain, Lya thought. And suddenly I knew what those shapes were, and what poem she had been reading.

We slept.

***

I woke, alone.

The room was dark. Lya lay on the other side of the bed, curled up, still asleep. It was late, near dawn I thought. But I wasn’t sure. I was restless.

I got up and dressed in silence. I needed to walk somewhere, to think, to work things out. Where, though?

There was a key in my pocket. I touched it when I pulled on my tunic, and remembered. Valcarenghi’s office. It would be locked and deserted at this time of night. And the view might help me think.

I left, found the tubes, and shot up, up, up to the apex of the Tower, the top of man’s steel challenge to the Shkeen. The office was unlit, the furniture dark shapes in the shadows. There was only the starlight. Shkea is closer to the galactic center than Old Earth, or Baldur. The stars are a fiery canopy across the night sky. Some of them are very close, and they burn like red and blue-white fires in the awesome blackness above. In Valcarenghi’s office, all the walls are glass. I went to one, and looked out. I wasn’t thinking. Just feeling. And I felt cold and lost and little.

Then there was a soft voice behind me saying hello. I barely heard it.

I turned away from the window, but other stars leaped at me from the far walls. Laurie Blackburn sat in one of the low chairs, concealed by the darkness.

“Hello,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I thought no one would be here.”

She smiled. A radiant smile in a radiant face, but there was no humor in it. Her hair fell in sweeping auburn waves past her shoulders, and she was dressed in something long and gauzy. I could see her gentle curves through its folds, and she made no effort to hide herself.

“I come up here a lot,” she said. “At night, usually. When Dino’s asleep. It’s a good place to think.”

“Yes,” I said, smiling. “My thoughts, too.”

“The stars are pretty, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“I think so. I—” Hesitation. Then she rose and came to me. “Do you love Lya?” she said.

A hammer of a question. Timed terribly. But I handled it well, I think. My mind was still on my talk with Lya. “Yes,” I said. “Very much. Why?”

• A Game of Thrones – Eddard I

  “Only once,” Robert said bitterly.

  They had come together at the ford of the Trident while the battle crashed around them, Robert with his warhammer and his great antlered helm, the Targaryen prince armored all in black. On his breastplate was the three-headed dragon of his House, wrought all in rubies that flashed like fire in the sunlight. The waters of the Trident ran red around the hooves of their destriers as they circled and clashed, again and again, until at last a crushing blow from Robert’s hammer stove in the dragon and the chest beneath it. When Ned had finally come on the scene, Rhaegar lay dead in the stream, while men of both armies scrabbled in the swirling waters for rubies knocked free of his armor.

She was standing close to me, looking at my face, and past me, out to the stars. “I don’t know. I wonder about love, sometimes. I love Dino, you know. He came here two months ago, so we haven’t known each other long. But I love him already. I’ve never known anybody like him. He’s kind, and considerate, and he does everything well. I’ve never seen him fail at anything he tried. Yet he doesn’t seem driven, like some men. He wins so easily. He believes in himself a lot, and that’s attractive. He’s given me anything I could ask for, everything.”

I read her, caught her love and worry and guessed. “Except himself,” I said.

She looked at me, startled. Then she smiled. “I forgot. You’re a Talent. Of course you know. You’re right. I don’t know what I worry about, but I do worry. Dino is so perfect, you know. I’ve told him—well, everything. All about me and my life. And he listens and understands. He’s always receptive, he’s there when I need him. But—”

“It’s all one way,” I said. It was a statement. I knew.

• This is the difference between the trees that ‘consume’ to add to the library in order to share knowledge back to with the people, and the fire that consumes for personal, selfish gain. The ‘consuming’ is not the same in mechanics nor intent.

• A Dance with Dragons – Melisandre I

  Melisandre paid the naked steel no mind. If the wildling had meant her harm, she would have seen it in her flames. Danger to her own person was the first thing she had learned to see, back when she was still half a child, a slave girl bound for life to the great red temple. It was still the first thing she looked for whenever she gazed into a fire. “It is their eyes that should concern you, not their knives,” she warned him.

She nodded. “It’s not that he keeps secrets. He doesn’t. He’ll answer any question I ask. But the answers mean nothing. I ask him what he fears, and he says nothing, and makes me believe it. He’s very rational, very calm. He never gets angry, he never has. I asked him. He doesn’t hate people, he thinks hate is bad. He’s never felt pain, either, or he says he hasn’t. Emotional pain, I mean. Yet he understands me when I talk about my life. Once he said his biggest fault was laziness. But he’s not lazy at all, I know that. Is he really that perfect? He tells me he’s always sure of himself, because he knows he’s good, but he smiles when he says it, so I can’t even accuse him of being vain. He says he believes in God, but he never talks about it. If you try to talk seriously, he’ll listen patiently, or joke with you, or lead the conversation away. He says he loves me, but—”

• A Dance with Dragons – Melisandre I

  She made it sound a simple thing, and easy. They need never know how difficult it had been, or how much it had cost her. That was a lesson Melisandre had learned long before Asshai; the more effortless the sorcery appears, the more men fear the sorcerer. When the flames had licked at Rattleshirt, the ruby at her throat had grown so hot that she had feared her own flesh might start to smoke and blacken. Thankfully Lord Snow had delivered her from that agony with his arrows. Whilst Stannis had seethed at the defiance, she had shuddered with relief.

I nodded. I knew what was coming.

It came. She looked at me, eyes begging. “You’re a Talent,” she said. “You’ve read him, haven’t you? You know him? Tell me. Please tell me.”

I was reading her. I could see how much she needed to know, how much she worried and feared, how much she loved. I couldn’t lie to her. Yet it was hard to give her the answer I had to.

“I’ve read him,” I said. Slowly. Carefully. Measuring out my words like precious fluids. “And you, you too. I saw your love, on that first night, when we ate together.”

“And Dino?”

My words caught in my throat. “He’s—funny, Lya said once. I can read his surface emotions easily enough. Below that, nothing. He’s very self-contained, walled off. Almost as if his only emotions are the ones he—allows himself to feel. I’ve felt his confidence, his pleasure. I’ve felt worry too, but never real fear. He’s very affectionate toward you, very protective. He enjoys feeling protective.”

“Is that all?” So hopeful. It hurt.

“I’m afraid it is. He’s walled off, Laurie. He needs himself, only himself. If there’s love in him, it’s behind that wall, hidden. I can’t read it. He thinks a lot of you, Laurie. But love—well, it’s different. It’s stronger and more unreasoning and it comes in crashing floods. And Dino’s not like that, at least not out where I can read.”

“Closed,” she said. “He’s closed to me. I opened myself to him, totally. But he didn’t. I was always afraid—even when he was with me, I felt sometimes that he wasn’t there at all—”

• Note the juxteposition between who is closed and who is open in the two main relationships. This is most definitely a common theme in other Martinworld stories, Meathouse Man for one, but also within George himself (as he has noted before).

She sighed. I read her despair, her welling loneliness. I didn’t know what to do. “Cry if you like,” I told her, inanely. “Sometimes it helps. I know. I’ve cried enough in my time.”

She didn’t cry. She looked up, and laughed lightly. “No,” she said. “I can’t. Dino taught me never to cry. He said tears never solve anything.”

A sad philosophy. Tears don’t solve anything, maybe, but they’re part of being human. I wanted to tell her so, but instead I just smiled at her.

She smiled back, and cocked her head. “You cry,” she said suddenly, in a voice strangely delighted. “That’s funny. That’s more of an admission than I ever heard from Dino, in a way. Thank you, Robb. Thank you.”

And Laurie stood on her toes and looked up, expectant. And I could read what she expected. So I took her and kissed her, and she pressed her body hard against mine. And all the while I thought of Lya, telling myself that she wouldn’t mind, that she’d be proud of me, that she’d understand.

Afterwards, I stayed up in the office alone to watch the dawn come up. I was drained, but somehow content. The light that crept over the horizon was chasing the shadows before it, and suddenly all the fears that had seemed so threatening in the night were silly, unreasoning. We’d bridged it, I thought—Lya and I. Whatever it was, we’d handled it, and today we’d handle the Greeshka with the same ease, together.

When I got back to our room, Lya was gone.

***

“We found the aircar in the middle of Shkeentown,” Valcarenghi was saying. He was cool, precise, reassuring. His voice told me, without words, that there was nothing to worry about. “I’ve got men out looking for her. But Shkeentown’s a big place. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

“No,” I said, dully. “Not really. Maybe to see some more Joined. She seemed—well, almost obsessed by them. I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ve got a good police force. We’ll find her, I’m certain of that. But it may take a while. Did you two have a fight?”

“Yes. No. Sort of, but it wasn’t a real fight. It was strange.”

“I see,” he said. But he didn’t. “Laurie tells me you came up here last night, alone.”

“Yes. I needed to think.”

“All right,” said Valcarenghi. “So let’s say Lya woke up, decided she wanted to think too. You came up here. She took a ride. Maybe she just wants a day off to wander around Shkeentown. She did something like that yesterday, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“So she’s doing it again. No problem. She’ll probably be back well before dinner.” He smiled.

“Why did she go without telling me, then? Or leaving a note, or something?”

“I don’t know. It’s not important.”

Wasn’t it, though? Wasn’t it? I sat in the chair, head in my hands and a scowl on my face, and I was sweating. Suddenly I was very much afraid, of what I didn’t know. I should never have left her alone, I was telling myself. While I was up here with Laurie, Lyanna woke alone in a darkened room, and—and—and what? And left.

“Meanwhile, though,” Valcarenghi said, “we’ve got work to do. The trip to the caves is all set.”

I looked up, disbelieving. “The caves? I can’t go there, not now, not alone.”

He gave a sigh of exasperation, exaggerated for effect. “Oh, come now, Robb. It’s not the end of the world. Lya will be all right. She seemed to be a perfectly sensible girl, and I’m sure she can take care of herself. Right?”

I nodded.

“Meanwhile, we’ll cover the caves. I still want to get to the bottom of this.”

“It won’t do any good,” I protested. “Not without Lya. She’s the major Talent. I—I just read emotions. I can’t get down deep, as she can. I won’t solve anything for you.”

He shrugged. “Maybe not. But the trip is on, and we’ve got nothing to lose. We can always make a second run after Lya comes back. Besides, this should do you good, get your mind off this other business. There’s nothing you can do for Lya now. I’ve got every available man out searching for her, and if they don’t find her you certainly won’t. So there’s no sense dwelling on it. Just get back into action,  keep busy.” He turned, headed for the tube. “Come. There’s an aircar waiting for us. Nelse will go too.”

• At this point I want to say that Dino Valcarenghi and Nelson Gourlay are coming off as a Selyse (minorly as Devan) and Melisandre; As actual snarks and grumkins, these two want to burn Shireen (<–it is not on record anywhere that GRRM himself ever said *Stannis* will burn Shireen, just that Shireen burns).

Reluctantly, I stood. I was in no mood to consider the problems of the Shkeen, but Valcarenghi’s arguments made a certain amount of sense. Besides which, he’d hired Lyanna and me, and we still had obligations to him. I could try anyway, I thought.

On the ride out, Valcarenghi sat in the front with the driver, a hulking police sergeant with a face chiseled out of granite. He’d selected a police car this time so we could keep posted on the search for Lya. Gourlay and I were in the back seat together. Gourlay had covered our laps with a big map, and he was telling me about the caves of Final Union.

“Theory is the caves are the original home of the Greeshka,” he said. “Probably true, makes sense. Greeshka are a lot bigger there. You’ll see. The caves are all through the hills, away from our part of Shkeentown, where the country gets wilder. A regular little honeycomb. Greeshka in every one, too. Or so I’ve heard. Been in a few myself, Greeshka in all of them. So I believe what they say about the rest. The city, the sacred city, well, it was probably built because of the caves. Shkeen come here from all over the continent, you know, for Final Union. Here, this is the cave region.” He took out a pen, and made a big circle in red near the center of the map. It was meaningless to me. The map was getting me down. I hadn’t realized that the Shkeen city was so huge. How the hell could they find anyone who didn’t want to be found?

• This cannot fully apply to the Children of the Forest, those that sing the song of earth, as their numbers have dwindled and they are not all cave dwellers by nature. This Greeshka is the antithesis to the trees/Cotf. Sometimes GRRM uses caves as safe havens, used for centuries/millennia, sometimes the caves are for the more nefarious purposes. The CotF lived in clans just about everywhere including caves (though not exclusively), just as other GRRM humanoids like the Jaenshi, Greel, the Grouns, those in The Stone City were not origionally cave dwellers. The CotF were forced underground by ‘fire’, and even still, they live for a very long time. This is the opposite of the Joined with the Greeshka which chose a death cult to come to Final Union (death) with a blob of consuming plasma-fire. We are back to mechanics and intent again… one of these things is not like the other.
• A fandom favorite thread made by Wizz-the-Smith on the Westeros.org forum has pulled together many excellent examples of just such hollow hills, magic castles, and greenseers. I highly recommend giving his ideas a read here.
• Fire lives within the hearts of mountains such as the Mountain, R’hllor and the fiery heart, Melisandre and Stannis on Dragonstone (as quoted above), and the Mother of Mountains. Mountains are volcanoes with fire (fiery hearts), which all goes back in Martinworld to stories like Cyrain of Ash and Lilith and the Steel Angels of Bakkalon. In the story Sandkings, even the fiery-buggy sandkings live in underground ‘hives’, each with a cave opening and tunnels.
• The red circle on the map is very much like King’s Landing, as made clear by the details like the red walls and the Red Keep, the connecting hills and streets (and tunnels to brothels). Link to map here. Readers also know that (as of ADWD) fire is stored under the hills and building, scattered throughout the city.

Valcarenghi looked back from the front seat. “The cave we’re going to is a big one, as these places go. I’ve been there before. There’s no formality about Final Union, you understand. The Shkeen just pick a cave, and walk in, and lie down on top of the Greeshka. They’ll use whatever entrance is most convenient. Some of them are no bigger than sewer pipes, but if you went in far enough, theory says you’d run into a Greeshka, setting back in the dark and pulsing away. The biggest caves are lighted with torches, like the Great Hall, but that’s just a frill. It doesn’t play any real part in the Union.”

“I take it we’re going to one of them?” I said.

Valcarenghi nodded. “Right. I figured you’d want to see what a mature Greeshka is like. It’s not pretty, but it’s educational. So we need lighting.”

Gourlay resumed his narrative then, but I tuned him out. I felt I knew quite enough about the Shkeen and the Greeshka, and I was still worried about Lyanna. After a while he wound down, and the rest of the trip was in silence. We covered more ground than we ever had before. Even the Tower—our shining steel landmark—had been swallowed by the hills behind us.

The terrain got rougher, rockier, and more overgrown, and the hills rose higher and wilder. But the domes went on and on and on, and there were Shkeen everywhere. Lya could be down there. I thought, lost among those teeming millions. Looking for what? Thinking what?

Finally we landed, in a wooded valley between two massive, rock-studded hills. Even here there were Shkeen, the red-brick domes rising from the undergrowth among the stubby trees. I had no trouble spotting the cave. It was halfway up one of the slopes, a dark yawn in the rock face, with a dusty road winding up to it.

• This is near exactly like the terrain and fiery entrance sequence that Simon Kress experiences in the story Sandkings. The Sandking ‘bugs’ who worship Simon Kress make faces out of the sand material, and eventually the maws grow large enough to literally (not metaphorically!) consume humans. Also a trait GRRM gave the ship Fevre Dream after it is transformed into the Ozymandias.

We set down in the valley and climbed that road. Gourlay ate up the distance with long, gawky strides, while Valcarenghi moved with an easy, untiring grace, and the policeman plodded on stolidly. I was the straggler. I dragged myself up, and I was half-winded by the time we got to the cave mouth.

If I’d expected cave paintings, or an altar, or some kind of nature temple, I was sadly disappointed. It was an ordinary cave, with damp stone walls and low ceilings and cold, wet air. Cooler than most of Shkea, and less dusty, but that was about it. There was one long, winding passage through the rock, wide enough for the four of us to walk abreast yet low enough so Gourlay had to stoop. Torches were set along the walls at regular intervals, but only every fourth one or so was lit. They burned with an oily smoke that seemed to cling to the top of the cave and drift down into the depths before us. I wondered what was sucking it in.

After about ten minutes of walking, most of it down a barely perceptible incline, the passage led us out into a high, brightly lit room, with a vaulting stone roof that was stained sooty by torch smoke. In the room, the Greeshka.

• This is very much like the scene in the story In the House of the Worm when Annalyn discovers the underground chambers of the Meatbringer character.

Its color was a dull brownish red, like old blood, not the bright near-translucent crimson of the small creatures that clung to the skulls of the Joined. There were spots of black, too, like burns or soot stains on the vasty body. I could barely see the far side of the cave; the Greeshka was too huge, it towered above us so that there was only a thin crack between it and the roof. But it sloped down abruptly halfway across the chamber, like an immense jellied hill, and ended a good twenty feet from where we stood.

Between us and the great bulk of the Greeshka was a forest of hanging, dangling red strands, a living cobweb of Greeshka tissue that came almost to our faces.

• A Storm of Swords – Samwell II

  “The m-maesters think not,” Sam stammered. “The maesters say it comes from the fires of the earth. They call it obsidian.”

• A Storm of Swords – Samwell V

  “Dragonglass.” The red woman’s laugh was music. “Frozen fire, in the tongue of old Valyria. Small wonder it is anathema to these cold children of the Other.”

  “On Dragonstone, where I had my seat, there is much of this obsidian to be seen in the old tunnels beneath the mountain,” the king told Sam. “Chunks of it, boulders, ledges. The great part of it was black, as I recall, but there was some green as well, some red, even purple. I have sent word to Ser Rolland my castellan to begin mining it…”

And it pulsed. As one organism. Even the strands kept time, widening and then contracting again, moving to a silent beat that was one with the great Greeshka behind them.

• A Storm of Swords – Davos III

  [Melisandre] It is death we choose, or life. Darkness, or light.” She clasped the bars of his cell with her slender white hands. The great ruby at her throat seemed to pulse with its own radiance. “So tell me, Ser Davos Seaworth, and tell me truly—does your heart burn with the shining light of R’hllor? Or is it black and cold and full of worms?” She reached through the bars and laid three fingers upon his breast, as if to feel the truth of him through flesh and wool and leather.

• A Dance with Dragons – Jon XIII

  That was just a softer way of saying let them die.

  The chamber was crowded. Princess Shireen stood beside her mother’s seat, with Patchface cross-legged at her feet. Behind the queen loomed Ser Axell Florent. Melisandre of Asshai stood closer to the fire, the ruby at her throat pulsing with every breath she took. The red woman too had her attendants—the squire Devan Seaworth and two of the guardsmen the king had left her.

My stomach churned, but my companions seemed unmoved. They’d seen this before. “Come,” Valcarenghi said, switching on a flashlight he’d brought to augment the torchlight. The light, twisting around the pulsing web, gave the illusion of some weird haunted forest. Valcarenghi stepped into that forest. Lightly. Swinging the light and brushing aside the Greeshka.

• A Dance with Dragons – The Sacrifice

  “Lord of Light, accept this sacrifice,” a hundred voices echoed. Ser Corliss lit the first pyre with the torch, then thrust it into the wood at the base of the second. A few wisps of smoke began to rise. The captives began to cough. The first flames appeared, shy as maidens, darting and dancing from log to leg. In moments both the stakes were engulfed in fire.

  “He was dead,” the weeping boy screamed, as the flames licked up his legs. “We found him dead … please … we was hungry …” The fires reached his balls. As the hair around his cock began to burn, his pleading dissolved into one long wordless shriek.

  Asha Greyjoy could taste the bile in the back of her throat. On the Iron Islands, she had seen priests of her own people slit the throats of thralls and give their bodies to the sea to honor the Drowned God. Brutal as that was, this was worse.

• A Dance with Dragons – Jon III

  “The queen’s men are saying that the King-Beyond-the-Wall died craven. That he cried for mercy and denied he was a king.”

  “He did. Lightbringer was brighter than I’d ever seen it. As bright as the sun.” Jon raised his cup. “To Stannis Baratheon and his magic sword.” The wine was bitter in his mouth.

Gourlay followed him, but I recoiled. Valcarenghi looked back and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The Greeshka takes hours to attach itself, and it’s easily removed. It won’t grab you if you stumble against it.”

I screwed up my courage, reached out, and touched one of the living strands. It was soft and wet, and there was a slimy feel to it. But that was all. It broke easily enough. I walked through it, reaching before me and bending and breaking the web to clear my path. The policeman walked silently behind me.

• Walking in to the flames.

Then we stood on the far side of the web, at the foot of the great Greeshka. Valcarenghi studied it for a second, then pointed with his flashlight. “Look,” he said. “Final Union.”

I looked. His beam had thrown a pool of light around one of the dark spots, a blemish on the reddish hulk. I looked closer. There was a head in the blemish. Centered in the dark spot, with just the face showing, and even that covered by a thin reddish film. But the features were unmistakable. An elderly Shkeen, wrinkled and big-eyed, his eyes closed now. But smiling. Smiling.

• Visions in the flames, which by the way, could be available to anyone who gives it practice, the issue is the interpretation and what you chose to to with the information. Mechanics and intent.

I moved closer. A little lower and to the right, a few fingertips hung out of the mass. But that was all. Most of the body was already gone, sunken into the Greeshka, dissolved or dissolving. The old Shkeen was dead, and the parasite was digesting his corpse.

• As opposed to the trees that give/extend life:

“Every one of the dark spots is a recent Union,” Valcarenghi was saying, moving his light around like a pointer. “The spots fade in time, of course. The Greeshka is growing steadily. In another hundred years it will fill this chamber, and start up the passageway.”

• Shadowbabies? The icy equivalent White Walkers who emerge from the darkness between the trees?

• A Storm of Swords – Davos III

  “No.” Perhaps he should have lied, and told her what she wanted to hear, but Davos was too accustomed to speaking truth. “You are the mother of darkness. I saw that under Storm’s End, when you gave birth before my eyes.”

  “Is the brave Ser Onions so frightened of a passing shadow? Take heart, then. Shadows only live when given birth by light, and the king’s fires burn so low I dare not draw off any more to make another son. It might well kill him.” Melisandre moved closer. “With another man, though . . . a man whose flames still burn hot and high . . . if you truly wish to serve your king’s cause, come to my chamber one night. I could give you pleasure such as you have never known, and with your life-fire I could make . . .”

  “. . . a horror.” Davos retreated from her. “I want no part of you, my lady. Or your god. May the Seven protect me.”

Then there was a rustle of movement behind us. I looked back. Someone else was coming through the web.

• As an opposite parallel, we have Bran entering Bloodraven’s cave and having his hands entangled in a spiderweb in ADWD- Bran II, just as the wall ‘baptized’ Bran as he passed under and it dropped a salty tear on his forehead. This leads to Bran being enlightened, something he can give back to humanity, as opposed to the consuming nature of a fiery entity. A Song of Ice and Fire has the literary room to expand on this ‘cup of ice-cup of fire‘ personal choice idea, it is in the name as a matter of fact.
• One is a ‘god’ replacing another god, one is a god demanding sacrifice.

She reached us soon, and smiled. A Shkeen woman, old, naked, breasts hanging past her waist.

Joined, of course. Her Greeshka covered most of her head and hung lower than her breasts. It was still bright and translucent from its time in the sun. You could see through it, to where it was eating the skin off her back.

“A candidate for Final Union,” Gourlay said.

“This is a popular cave,” Valcarenghi added in a low, sardonic voice.

The woman did not speak to us, nor we to her. Smiling, she walked past us. And lay down on the Greeshka.

The little Greeshka, the one that rode her back, seemed almost to dissolve on contact, melting away into the great cave creature, so the Shkeen woman and the great Greeshka were joined as one. After that, nothing. She just closed her eyes, and lay peacefully, seemingly asleep.

• Patchface: “Under the sea the old fish eat the young fish,” the fool muttered at Davos. He bobbed his head, and his bells clanged and chimed and sang. “I know, I know, oh oh oh.”

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Union,” said Valcarenghi. “It’ll be an hour before you’d notice anything, but the Greeshka is closing over her even now, swallowing her. A response to her body heat, I’m told. In a day she’ll be buried in it. In two, like him—” The flash found the half-dissolved face above us.

“Can you read her?” Gourlay suggested. “Maybe that’d tell us something.”

“All right,” I said, repelled but curious. I opened myself. And the mindstorm hit.

But it’s wrong to call it a mindstorm. It was immense and awesome and intense, searing and blinding and choking. But it was peaceful too, and gentle with a gentleness that was more violent than human hate. It shrieked soft shrieks and siren calls and pulled at me seductively, and it washed over me in crimson waves of passion, and drew me to it. It filled me and emptied me all at once. And I heard the bells somewhere, clanging a harsh bronze song, a song of love and surrender and togetherness, of joining and union and never being alone.

Storm, mindstorm, yes, it was that. But it was to an ordinary mindstorm as a supernova is to a hurricane, and its violence was the violence of love. It loved me, that mindstorm, and it wanted me, and its bells called to me, and sang its love, and I reached to it and touched, wanting to be with it, wanting to link, wanting never to be alone again. And suddenly I was on the crest of a great wave once again, a wave of fire that washed across the stars forever, and this time I knew the wave would never end, this time I would not be alone afterwards upon my darkling plain.

But with that phrase I thought of Lya.

And suddenly I was struggling, fighting it, battling back against the sea of sucking love. I ran, ran, ran, RAN … and closed my minddoor and hammered shut the latch and let the storm flail and howl against it while I held it with all my strength, resisting. Yet the door began to buckle and crack.

I screamed. The door smashed open, and the storm whipped in and clutched at me, whirled me out and around and around. I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe.

Then nothing.

• Much like Bran in his third A Game of Thrones chapter known in the fandom as his ‘coma dream’ sequence.

  • A Game of Thrones – Bran III

    Now, Bran, the crow urged. Choose. Fly or die.

    Death reached for him, screaming.

    Bran spread his arms and flew.

  • The crow opened its beak and cawed at him, a shrill scream of fear, and the grey mists shuddered and swirled around him and ripped away like a veil, and he saw that the crow was really a woman, a serving woman with long black hair, and he knew her from somewhere, from Winterfell, yes, that was it, he remembered her now, and then he realized that he was in Winterfell, in a bed high in some chilly tower room, and the black-haired woman dropped a basin of water to shatter on the floor and ran down the steps, shouting, “He’s awake, he’s awake, he’s awake.”

***

I woke up back in my room, with a headache that was trying to tear my skull apart. Gourlay was sitting oh a chair reading one of our books. He looked up when I groaned.

Lya’s headache pills were still on the bedstand. I took one hastily, then struggled to sit up in bed. “You all right?” Gourlay asked.

“Headache,” I said, rubbing my forehead. It throbbed, as if it was about to burst. Worse than the time I’d peered into Lya’s pain. “What happened?”

He stood up. “You scared the hell out of us. After you began to read, all of a sudden you started trembling. Then you walked right into the goddamn Greeshka. And you screamed. Dino and the sergeant had to drag you out. You were stepping right in the thing, and it was up to your knees. Twitching, too. Weird. Dino hit you, knocked you out.”

• Could Sweetrobin, who is a secondary Bran character, be experiencing something similar?
• This could be another example of how GRRM took one character from a previous story and expanded them into two (or three) in ASOIAF. One received a certain set of themes, while the other received an inversion.

He shook his head, started for the door. “Where are you going?” I said.

“To sleep,” he said. “You’ve been out for eight hours or so. Dino asked me to watch you till you came to. OK, you came to. Now get some rest, and I will too. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“I want to talk about it now.”

“It’s late,” he said, as he closed the bedroom door. I listened to his footsteps on the way out. And I’m sure I heard the outer door lock. Somebody was clearly afraid of Talents who steal away into the night. I wasn’t going anywhere.

• This is Jon in his AGOT chapter at Castle Black when he was locked in his cell after trying to attack Alliser Thorne for his taunts. This is when the wights, Othor and Jafer Flowers, attack Lord Mormont and kill Jaremy Ryyker (respectively). Not everything from one Martin story to the next is an exact 1:1 comparison, but we do have many of the same plot points/elements within the same ice or fire ‘side’, the ingredients are all there, just re-purposed for the specific story.

• A Game of Thrones – Jon VII

  They took his knife and his sword and told him he was not to leave his cell until the high officers met to decide what was to be done with him. And then they placed a guard outside his door to make certain he obeyed. His friends were not allowed to see him, but the Old Bear did relent and permit him Ghost, so he was not utterly alone.

  “My father is no traitor,” he told the direwolf when the rest had gone. Ghost looked at him in silence. Jon slumped against the wall, hands around his knees, and stared at the candle on the table beside his narrow bed. The flame flickered and swayed, the shadows moved around him, the room seemed to grow darker and colder. I will not sleep tonight, Jon thought.

  Yet he must have dozed. When he woke, his legs were stiff and cramped and the candle had long since burned out. Ghost stood on his hind legs, scrabbling at the door. Jon was startled to see how tall he’d grown. “Ghost, what is it?” he called softly. The direwolf turned his head and looked down at him, baring his fangs in a silent snarl. Has he gone mad? Jon wondered. “It’s me, Ghost,” he murmured, trying not to sound afraid. Yet he was trembling, violently. When had it gotten so cold?

I got up and went out for a drink. There was Veltaar chilling. I put away a couple of glasses quick, and ate a light snack. The headache began to fade. Then I went back to the bedroom, turned off the light and cleared the glass, so the stars would all shine through. Then back to sleep.

***

But I didn’t sleep, not right away. Too much had happened. I had to think about it. The headache first, the incredible headache that ripped at my skull. Like Lya’s. But Lya hadn’t been through what I had. Or had she? Lya was a major Talent, much more sensitive than I was, with a greater range. Could that mindstorm have reached this far, over miles and miles? Late at night, when humans and Shkeen were sleeping and their thoughts dim? Maybe. And maybe my half-remembered dreams were pale reflections of whatever she had felt the same nights. But my dreams had been pleasant. It was waking that bothered me, waking and not remembering.

But again, had I had this headache when I slept? Or when I woke?

What the hell had happened? What was that thing, that reached me there in the cave, and pulled me to it? The Greeshka? It had to be. I hadn’t even time to focus on the Shkeen woman, it had to be the Greeshka. But Lyanna had said that Greeshka had no minds, not even a yes-I-live…

• A battle on the astral plain. I do suspect that this will be between Bran and Daenerys when the time comes, literally or figuratively. Tree-man against the fire-woman.

It all swirled around me, questions on questions on questions, and I had no answers. I began to think of Lya then, to wonder where she was and why she’d left me. Was this what she had been going through? Why hadn’t I understood? I missed her then. I needed her beside me, and she wasn’t there. I was alone, and very aware of it.

I slept.

Long darkness then, but finally a dream, and finally I remembered. I was back on the plain again, the infinite darkling plain with its starless sky and black shapes in the distance, the plain Lya had spoken of so often. It was from one of her favorite poems. I was alone, forever alone, and I knew it. That was the nature of things. I was the only reality in the universe, and I was cold and hungry and frightened, and the shapes were moving toward me, inhuman and inexorable. And there was no one to call to, no one to turn to, no one to hear my cries. There never had been anyone. There never would be anyone.

Then Lya came to me.

She floated down from the starless sky, pale and thin and fragile, and stood beside me on the plain. She brushed her hair back with her hand, and looked at me with glowing wide eyes, and smiled. And I knew it was no dream. She was with me, somehow. We talked.

• A Dance with Dragons – Daenerys X

  She dreamed. All her cares fell away from her, and all her pains as well, and she seemed to float upward into the sky. She was flying once again, spinning, laughing, dancing, as the stars wheeled around her and whispered secrets in her ear. “To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

  “Quaithe?” Dany called. “Where are you, Quaithe?”

  Then she saw. Her mask is made of starlight.

• Cult of Starry Wisdom

Hi, Robb.

Lya? Hi, Lya. Where are you? You left me.

I’m sorry. I had to. You understand, Robb. You have to. I didn’t want to be here anymore, ever, in this place, this awful place. I would have been, Robb. Men are always here, but for brief moments.

A touch and a voice?

Yes, Robb. Then darkness again, and a silence. And the darkling plain.

You’re mixing two poems, Lya. But it’s OK. You know them better than I do. But aren’t you leaving out something? The earlier part. “Ah love, let us be true…”

Oh, Robb.

Where are you?

I’m—everywhere. But mostly in a cave. I was ready, Robb. I was already more open than the rest. I could skip the Gathering, and the Joining. My Talent made me used to sharing. It took me.

• So here we have confirmation that the mother Greeshka wants Lya for her talents, something in her blood that makes her highly valuable. This is just like the split idea that Bran actually is more talented than readers realize, and also gives backbone to the idea that in the prologue of AGOT, the Others are looking for Jon specifically.

Final Union? Yes.

Oh, Lya.

Robb. Please. Join us, join me. It’s happiness, you know? Forever and forever, and belonging and sharing and being together. I’m in love, Robb, I’m in love with a billion billion people, and I know all of them better than I ever knew you, and they know me, all of me, and they love me. And it will last forever. Me. Us. The Union. I’m still me, but I’m them too, you see? And they’re me. The Joined, the reading, opened me, and the Union called to me every night, because it loved me, you see? Oh, Robb, join us, join us. I love you.

The Union. The Greeshka, you mean. I love you, Lya. Please come back. It can’t have absorbed you already. Tell me where you are. I’ll come to you.

Yes, come to me. Come anywhere, Robb. The Greeshka is all one, the caves all connect under the hills, the little Greeshka are all part of the Union. Come to me and join me. Love me as you said you did. Join me. You’re so far away, I can hardly reach you, even with the Union. Come and be one with us.

No. I will not be eaten. Please, Lya, tell me where you are.

Poor Robb. Don’t worry, love. The body isn’t important. The Greeshka needs it for nourishment, and we need the Greeshka. But, oh Robb, the Union isn’t just the Greeshka, you see? The Greeshka isn’t important, it doesn’t even have a mind, it’s just the link, the medium, the Union is the Shkeen. A million billion billion Shkeen, all the Shkeen that have lived and Joined in fourteen thousand years, all together and loving and belonging, immortal. It’s beautiful, Robb, it’s more than we had, much more, and we were the lucky ones, remember? We were! But this is better.

• The creature supposedly without a yes-I-live sentience wants the major talent that has all of the information.

• A Game of Thrones – Daenerys X

  She had sensed the truth of it long ago, Dany thought as she took a step closer to the conflagration, but the brazier had not been hot enough. The flames writhed before her like the women who had danced at her wedding, whirling and singing and spinning their yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them, her skin flushed and glowing. This is a wedding, too, she thought. Mirri Maz Duur had fallen silent. The godswife thought her a child, but children grow, and children learn.

  Another step, and Dany could feel the heat of the sand on the soles of her feet, even through her sandals. Sweat ran down her thighs and between her breasts and in rivulets over her cheeks, where tears had once run. Ser Jorah was shouting behind her, but he did not matter anymore, only the fire mattered. The flames were so beautiful, the loveliest things she had ever seen, each one a sorcerer robed in yellow and orange and scarlet, swirling long smoky cloaks. She saw crimson firelions and great yellow serpents and unicorns made of pale blue flame; she saw fish and foxes and monsters, wolves and bright birds and flowering trees, each more beautiful than the last. She saw a horse, a great grey stallion limned in smoke, its flowing mane a nimbus of blue flame. Yes, my love, my sun-and-stars, yes, mount now, ride now.

Lya. My Lya. I loved you. This isn’t for you, this isn’t for humans. Come back to me.

This isn’t for humans? Oh, it IS! It’s what humans have always been looking for, searching for, crying for on lonely nights. It’s love, Robb, real love, and human love is only a pale imitation. You see?

• Meathouse man

Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the crudest is the one called love.

No.

Come, Robb. Join. Or you’ll be alone forever, alone on the plain, with only a voice and a touch to keep you going. And in the end when your body dies, you won’t even have that. Just an eternity of empty blackness. The plain, Robb, forever and ever. And I won’t be able to reach you, not ever. But it doesn’t have to be…

No.

Oh, Robb. I’m fading. Please come.

No. Lya, don’t go. I love you, Lya. Don’t leave me.

I love you, Robb. I did. I really did. . .

And then she was gone. I was alone on the plain again. A wind was blowing from somewhere, and it whipped her fading words away from me, out into the cold vastness of infinity.

***

In the cheerless morning, the outer door was unlocked. I ascended the tower and found Valcarenghi alone in his office. “Do you believe in God?” I asked him.

He looked up, smiled. “Sure.” Said lightly. I was reading him. It was a subject he’d never thought about.

“I don’t,” I said. “Neither did Lya. Most Talents are atheists, you know. There was an experiment tried back on Old Earth fifty years ago. It was organized by a major Talent named Linnel, who was also devoutly religious. He thought that by using drugs, and linking together the minds of the world’s most potent Talents, he could reach something he called the Universal Yes-I-Live. Also known as God. The experiment was a dismal failure, but something happened. Linnel went mad, and the others came away with only a vision of a vast, dark, uncaring nothingness, a void without reason or form or meaning. Other Talents have felt the same way, and Normals too. Centuries ago there was a poet named Arnold, who wrote of a darkling plain. The poem’s in one of the old languages, but it’s worth reading. It shows—fear, I think. Something basic in man, some dread of being alone in the cosmos. Maybe it’s just fear of death, maybe it’s more. I don’t know. But it’s primal. All men are forever alone, but they don’t want to be. They’re always searching, trying to make contact, trying to reach others across the void. Some people never succeed, some break through occasionally. Lya and I were lucky. But it’s never permanent. In the end you’re alone again, back on the darkling plain. You see, Dino? Do you see?”

• A Game of Thrones – Daenerys X

  Only death can pay for life.

  And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts. She heard the screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you SEE? With a belch of flame and smoke that reached thirty feet into the sky, the pyre collapsed and came down around her. Unafraid, Dany stepped forward into the firestorm, calling to her children.

  The third crack was as loud and sharp as the breaking of the world.

He smiled an amused little smile. Not derisive—that wasn’t his style—just surprised and disbelieving. “No,” he said.

“Look again, then. Always people are reaching for something, for someone, searching. Talk, Talent, love, sex, it’s all part of the same thing, the same search. And gods, too. Man invents gods because he’s afraid of being alone, scared of an empty universe, scared of the darkling plain. That’s why your men are converting, Dino, that’s why people are going over. They’ve found God, or as much of a God as they’re ever likely to find. The Union is a mass-mind, an immortal mass-mind, many in one, all love. The Shkeen don’t die, dammit. No wonder they don’t have the concept of an afterlife. They know there’s a God. Maybe it didn’t create the universe, but it’s love, pure love, and they say that God is love, don’t they? Or maybe what we call love is a tiny piece of God. I don’t care, whatever it is, the Union is it. The end of the search for the Shkeen, and for Man too. We’re alike after all, we’re so alike it hurts.”

• This is the small, but fundamental, difference between the trees and fire in ASOIAF.

  Trees= Universal mind/ Collective consciousness which is roughly defined as the unifying standards of a society and aspect of universal consciousness. Think the world tree of Yggdrasil. For many of us our standards include things like individuality, property rights, and a baseline shared morality. These standards, being the primary reasons for our participation in society, act as a glue in the collective decisions that shape our society. Information is gathered that is shared back with the people. We at times subvert certain desires to protect the ideals of the collective consciousness. This is something that serves the masses, common folk (altruistic).

  Fire= Egregore/Mass-Mind/Hivemind/Group think is a bit different. Group think is roughly defined as acting to preserve the whole, the one being. The difference being that for group think the primary goal is to maintain the cohesiveness of the unit not the integrity. When the collective acts to protect the collective and not the standards of the collective you end up with group think. This is often lead by a zealot or (cult) religious figure (self-serving). Egregore is an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (“dragons” across Martinworld).

Valcarenghi gave his exaggerated sigh. “Robb, you’re overwrought. You sound like one of the Joined.”

“Maybe that’s just what I should be. Lya is. She’s part of the Union now.”

He blinked. “How do you know that?”

“She came to me last night in a dream.”

“Oh. A dream.”

“It was true, dammit. It’s all true.”

Valcarenghi stood, and smiled. “I believe you,” he said. “That is, I believe that the Greeshka uses a psi-lure, a love lure if you will, to draw in its prey, something so powerful that it convinces men—even you—that it’s God. Dangerous, of course. I’ll have to think about this before taking action. We could guard the caves to keep humans out, but there are too many caves. And sealing off the Greeshka wouldn’t help our relations with the Shkeen. But now it’s my problem. You’ve done your job.”

I waited until he was through. “You’re wrong, Dino. This is real, no trick, no illusion. I felt it, and Lya too. The Greeshka hasn’t even a yes-I-live, let alone a psi-lure strong enough to bring in Shkeen and men.”

“You expect me to believe that God is an animal who lives in the caves of Shkea?”

“Yes.”

“Robb, that’s absurd, and you know it. You think the Shkeen have found the answer to the mysteries of creation. But look at them. The oldest civilized race in known space, but they’ve been stuck in the Bronze Age for fourteen thousand years. We came to them. Where are their spaceships? Where are their towers?”

“Where are our bells?” I said. “And our joy? They’re happy, Dino. Are we? Maybe they’ve found what we’re still looking for. Why the hell is man so driven, anyway? Why is he out to conquer the galaxy, the universe, whatever? Looking for God, maybe…? Maybe. He can’t find him anywhere, though, so on he goes, on and on, always looking. But always back to the same darkling plain in the end.”

“Compare the accomplishments. I’ll take humanity’s record.”

“Is it worth it?”

“I think so.” He went to the window, and looked out. “We’ve got the only Tower on their world,” he said, smiling, as he looked down through the clouds.

“They’ve got the only God in our universe,” I told him. But he only smiled.

“All right, Robb,” he said, when he finally turned from the window. “I’ll keep all this in mind. And we’ll find Lyanna for you.”

My voice softened. “Lya is lost,” I said. “I know that now. I will be too, if I wait. I’m leaving tonight. I’ll book passage on the first ship out to Baldur.”

He nodded. “If you like. I’ll have your money ready.” He grinned. “And we’ll send Lya after you, when we find her. I imagine she’ll be a little miffed, but that’s your worry.”

I didn’t answer. Instead I shrugged, and headed for the tube. I was almost there when he stopped me.

“Wait,” he said. “How about dinner tonight? You’ve done a good job for us. We’re having a farewell party anyway, Laurie and me. She’s leaving too.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

His turn to shrug. “What for? Laurie’s a beautiful person, and I’ll miss her. But it’s no tragedy. There are other beautiful people. I think she was getting restless with Shkea, anyway.”

I’d almost forgotten my Talent, in my heat and the pain of my loss. I remembered it now. I read him. There was no sorrow, no pain, just a vague disappointment. And below that, his wall. Always the wall, keeping him apart, this man who was a first-name friend to everyone and an intimate to none. And on it, it was almost of if there were a sign that read, THIS FAR YOU GO, AND NO FARTHER.

“Come up,” he said. “It should be fun.” I nodded.

***

I asked myself, when my ship lifted off, why I was leaving.

Maybe to return home. We have a house on Baldur, away from the cities, on one of the undeveloped continents with only wilderness for a neighbor. It stands on a cliff, above a high waterfall that tumbles endlessly down into a shaded green pool. Lya and I swam there often, in the sunlit days between assignments. And afterwards we’d lie down nude in the shade of the orangespice trees, and make love on a carpet of silver moss. Maybe I’m returning to that. But it won’t be the same without Lya, lost Lya…

Lya whom I could still have. Whom I could have now. It would be easy, so easy. A slow stroll into a darkened cave, a short sleep. Then Lya with me for eternity, in me, sharing me, being me, and I her. Loving and knowing more of each other than men can ever do. Union and joy, and no darkness again, ever. God. If I believed that, what I told Valcarenghi, then why did I tell Lya no?

• Robb chose life over death, and in life he died a little, but he still lived.

Maybe because I’m not sure. Maybe I still hope, for something still greater and more loving than the Union, for the God they told me of so long ago. Maybe I’m taking a risk, because part of me still believes. But if I’m wrong… then the darkness, and the plain…

But maybe it’s something else, something I saw in Valcarenghi, something that made me doubt what I had said.

For man is more than Shkeen, somehow; there are men like Dino and Gourlay as well as Lya and Gustaffson, men who fear love and Union as much as they crave it. A dichotomy, then. Man has two primal urges, and the Shkeen only one? If so, perhaps there is a human answer, to reach and join and not be alone, and yet to still be men.

• Green is the neutral, chose life, chose the trees= Greenseeing means Enlightenment.

I do not envy Valcarenghi. He cries behind his wall, I think, and no one knows, not even he. And no one will ever know, and in the end he’ll always be alone in smiling pain. No, I do not envy Dino.

• Greyjoy.

Yet there is something of him in me, Lya, as well as much of you. And that is why I ran, though I loved you.

Laurie Blackburn was on the ship with me. I ate with her after liftoff, and we spent the evening talking over wine. Not a happy conversation, maybe, but a human one. Both of us needed someone, and we reached out.

Afterwards, I took her back to my cabin, and made love to her as fiercely as I could. Then, the darkness softened, we held each other and talked away the night.

“A Song for Lya” copyright © 1974 by the Condé Nast Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 2002 by George R. R. Martin. From Analog, June 1974.

Skip the speech to bottom of page instead.

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Broken Man Speech

A Feast for Crows- Brienne V

“Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. “Is a broken man an outlaw?”

“More or less,” Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. “More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

“Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.

“They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

“If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize.

They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world …

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them … but he should pity them as well.”

When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, “How old were you when they marched you off to war?”

“Why, no older than your boy,” Meribald replied. “Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. Willam said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape.”

“The War of the Ninepenny Kings?” asked Hyle Hunt.

“So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war, though. That it was.”

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What to read next?

1. For A Single Yesterday– A short story about learning from the past to rebuild the future.
2. This Tower of Ashes– A story of how lost love, mother’s milk, and spiders don’t mix all too well.
3. A Peripheral Affair (1973)– When a Terran scout ship on a routine patrol through the Periphery suddenly disappears, a battle-hungry admiral prepares to renew the border war.
4. The Stone City– a have-not surviving while stranded on a corporate planet. Practically a GRRM autobiography in itself.
5. Slide Show– a story of putting the stars before the children.
6. Only Kids are Afraid of the Dark– rubies, fire, blood sacrifice, and Saagael- oh my!
7. A Night at the Tarn House– a magical game of life and death played at an inn at a crossroads.
8. Men of Greywater Station– Is it the trees, the fungus, or is the real danger humans?
9. The Computer Cried Charge!– what are we fighting for and is it worth it?
10. The Needle Men– the fiery hand wields itself again, only, why are we looking for men?
11. Black and White and Red All Over– a partial take on a partial story.
12. Fire & Blood excerpt; Alysanne in the north– not a full story, but transcribed and noted section of the book Fire & Blood, volume 1.

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If you want to browse my own thoughts and speculations on the ASOIAF world using GRRM’s own work history, use the drop-down menu above for the most content, or click on the page that just shows recent posts -> Recent Posts Page.

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Thank you for reading the jambles and jumbles of the Fattest Leech of Ice and Fire, by Gumbo!

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