Meridian by meridian, the Yellow moon Sores' Ease plunged softly and silently into its long-delayed final night. Only the influence of the singing fairy-flute Obocord had spared it and its star-system from the entropic demise that had long since claimed the rest of its galaxy, and indeed most of its semnic plane; now that Obocord had accepted the duty of departing from it to the distant planet Doviba, to succor her sister fairy against the wrath of an ancient and magic-fearing empire, the ravages of the eons swiftly set in. No sooner had the Great Urn Mountains ceased to echo with Obocord's last, wistful "…to where the grass is Greener still…" than their sun began to dwindle into its long-awaited neutrostellarity, and the cold of the void to settle over those portions of their world untouched by its rays.

The Urn range itself was where light and warmth lingered longest; the day had just been breaking over its summits when Obocord sang herself away to Doviba, and, all the day long (and long it was, for it was high summer in those latitudes, and Sores' Ease was a leisurely rotator), the fading sunlight continued to nurture the region in an echo of its accustomed style. For the pool that was the source of the great river Gend lay in a hidden place high in the Urn plateau – and Obocord loved the Gend, which had brought her great sorrow and greater joy, and wished it to remain flowing as long as it might.

But that, of course, mightn't be forever, or even very long in the grand scheme of things. Soon enough, the hour came when the dying sun – scarcely brighter, by this time, than a hot coal that had somehow strayed into the sky – dipped wearily below the westward peaks; with its departure, the end of all things came swiftly for the ancient mountain pool. A blanket of ice stole over the water with the speed of a living thing, while the actual living things of the region, knowing that their time was come, prepared themselves with quiet dignity for their imminent demise. The plants folded their leaves; the beasts scurried away to their nests and burrows; the fenkasthuzaloin (a kingdom of queer vegetable-creatures endemic to Sores' Ease) retracted their spiny chemoreceptors into their cement-like boles; and a great and deathly hush fell over the mountains that, so few hours before, had been among the liveliest in the Yellow Galaxies.

And, at the edge of the Gend's headwaters, amid the tight-woven branches of an old thranqua tree, a creature like a large bark-beetle, who had been born a quintillion parsecs and one semnic plane away, fulfilled the pledge he had made to Obocord and bore witness to her realm's passing, well knowing that it would mean his own as well.


It struck Narsin Ul, as he huddled among the fleecy thranqua leaves in a purely instinctive search for warmth, that there was a good deal of irony in his situation. He was, after all, a child of tropical Netrubmesk – of all the inhabited mesk trees on the planet Yituba, perhaps the most indelibly associated with golden sunshine and lush tropical greenery – and yet the quest of his life, when it had come, had both begun and ended in ice.

For it was the icy meteors rained down by the Realms of Infinity upon Doviba that had placed that enchanted world in mortal peril, causing the Dovi of the Leaf to seek anxiously for even the faintest rumor of some magic that had achieved mastery over water. When the Duke of the Orange Court Pavilion had named Obocord as the only one known to him, and had hinted that only a heroic quest by the Dovi's most devoted mortal servant could move her to leave Sores' Ease, Narsin – whose heart had been given to the beautiful fairy queen of Doviba from his earliest larva-hood – had immediately agreed to take on the task himself. He had traveled through homo-space to the ruins of the village of Kerblimt (the only point on Sores' Ease for which coordinates could still be found), circumnavigated nearly the full length of the Gend, and at last found Obocord near the edge of the Rellarill marsh, singing an ancient plaint to the Immortal One atop a shattered stump of fenkasthuzal. (The sound of her voice, as he had approached her through the reeds, was perhaps the only thing he had ever perceived that rivaled his first sight of the Dovi in its beauty. The sight of her, though, had been an anticlimax; like many arthropodal wights, he had never been able to see great beauty in the shapeless softness of vertebrate life, and the queerly erect form that Obocord wore was no exception.)

When he had told her of his lady's need, she had consented to come to Doviba's aid – but she had laid a condition. "Sores' Ease," she said, "has been as good to me as ever piece of Nature was to poor, abode-less magic. In the hour when I was weakest, mute and twisted from my struggle with a howl of hellish hunger, it provided me an avenue of challenge and refreshment, and a final destination that resolved my heart's perversion and restored me to my virtue. I could not deserve to prosper in the feat to which you bid me if I let so great a benefactor perish uncompanioned."

She had glanced at Narsin meaningfully, and Narsin had understood that he was being called upon to give his life for his lady – to remain with Obocord's realm even as it lost the power of supporting life, that her adopted world, if it had to die, might at least not die alone. For a moment, he had quailed; then, recovering his fortitude, he had accepted Obocord's terms, and she had smiled and bidden him join her in the Great Urn Mountains at sunrise the next morning. And so, now, here he was, alone in an alien tree on a dying world, the warmth of life slowly ebbing from his body as one of cosmic history's greatest waterways turned to ice before his eyes.

It was hardly the sort of end one would have envisioned for the plump little grub who had once dwelt beneath the bark of Netrubmesk, thrilling to tales of the magic planet of Doviba and its wonderful fairy queen. Yet it was, he reflected, a good end, for all that. Obocord had been right, as good fairies generally were: it would have been unfitting for a world so well-loved – and so worthy of love, he thought, gazing about at the strange beauty of the crag-ringed valley – to simply pass unheeded into endless night. And then, too, somewhere in the vast blackness above him, his own first love was even then being delivered from the malevolence of her enemies by a means that his life had been spent to procure; how many, among the trillions of mortal wights throughout the universe, could claim to have turned their inevitable demises to such good account? Not enough, surely.

With a little sigh of contentment, he leaned his head against the tip of the nearest leaf, and waited placidly for the end.


But what came was not the end, but something quite different and wholly unexpected. For a moment, Narsin supposed it to be mere delirium, or perhaps the approach of the Harvester of Souls – but then he realized that that was nonsense; delirium couldn't create a sound so different from any in his memory, and the Harvester's footsteps, if it had any, certainly wouldn't echo so loudly. Bewildered, he poked his head out from his bed of leaves, and his vision confirmed his hearing: there was, indeed, some living creature wending its way toward him across the frozen river.

Like Obocord's assumed form, it bore a perfectly vertical body on a single pair of legs, without tail or forward-slung torso to distribute its weight; like Obocord's form, it was wrapped from neck almost to feet in an elaborate hanging of woven cloth, obscuring all its features save an exposed pair of five-fingered hands; like Obocord's, its head was smooth-skinned, roughly spherical, and crowned with a mane of long, flowing hair. But it was fully twice Obocord's size – four feet tall, if it was an inch – and its hair, so far from being plumb-line straight and as black as midnight, fell in pale-yellow curls about its shoulders. (Its skin, too, had an odd pinkish tinge to it – but, in that case, one couldn't well have expected it to be the same color as Obocord's, since this creature presumably wasn't made of varnished wood.)

Its lips were very faintly puckered in the center, and from them came the queer whistling sound that Narsin had heard. It was a peculiar way of making music, but the melody thus formed was a pleasant one, and Narsin heard it gladly for a minute or so; then, as the creature (or the wight, rather; it could scarcely be a mere brute) approached nearer, the whistled tune gave way to a faint but resolute voice singing in an alien language – perhaps the same in which Obocord had sung, since, as with her songs, Narsin understood the meaning of the words without puzzlement or effort.

If I had a day that I could give you,
I'd give to you a day just like today…

Which seemed, in context, a rather grotesquely inappropriate sentiment – but, as the figure drew nearer still, Narsin began to think that perhaps it wasn't, after all. There was something about this wight – some unquenchable source of gladness, some memory of a great boon received long before – that caused it to bring with it its own small but sufficient daylight, to cast before itself a ray of revitalizing warmth that countered the entropic chill of the great night and made the ground shrubs poke their leaf-tips back up in wonder. Narsin himself, as its influence touched him, felt the deathly stupor recede that had just begun to steal over his mind, and he lifted his antennae and tasted the frosty air about him with the vivid wonder of a newly pupated child.

If I had a song that I could sing for you,
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way.

With these last words, the wight arrived at Narsin's tree, and it – she, Narsin thought, though he couldn't have said why – raised one hand and ran her fingertips along the ridged back of his carapace. "Hello," she said.

"Who are you?" Narsin murmured.

It was, perhaps, a lapse on his part; "a bold knight-errant of the true, sidereal Elfland" (as Obocord had playfully described him the day before) ought rather to have returned her greeting before demanding that she identify herself. But his brain was still a trifle groggy from the cold, and the wight, who seemed to understand this, betrayed no offense. "My name is Margot," she said. "And you?"

Narsin gave his name. "Of Netrubmesk," he added.

"Where's that?"

Narsin lifted a forelimb and gestured to the northwestern portion of the sky. "That way," he said. "About half a radian above the horizon, and an exaparsec onward."

Margot nodded, understanding. "My home was on the other side," she said. "A long-ago place, called Ohio. Or Venus, maybe," she added thoughtfully. "Or a writer's mind in Los Angeles, or a bookshelf in Carefree, Arizona. But Ohio was where I was made to have home be."

Narsin had no reply to this, and it was Margot, after another moment or two, who resumed the conversation. "Are you a friend of Obocord's?" she said.

Narsin studied this question, and found it too difficult for him. He wished well to Obocord, certainly, and he believed she wished well to him, but whether he could claim her friendship… "I don't know," he said. "What do you call a friend?"

At this, a light suddenly burned in Margot's eyes, and Narsin knew that this was a question that meant much to her. "A friend?" she said. "When you're alone in the dark, cut off by mere spite from the one thing in the world that your heart could die of not having – and then when someone travels through hundreds of years and millions of miles to come and console you, even though, to her, you're not even real. That's a friend, Mr. Ul."

Her lips tightened, and she turned her head to the western cleft where the sun had last appeared. "Two hours," she whispered. "Only two hours in seven years… and there I was, forgotten behind a locked closet door. An artfully constructed dramatic situation: a single crack in Venus's clouds, a single girl who remembered sunlight – and the terrible, devastating power of envy. Oh, it was a good story, I'm sure, and it's a good thing that it was told… but Mr. Bradbury didn't have to live it."

"Maybe he did," said Narsin, who was beginning to understand. "I'm no storyteller myself, to be sure, but those who are tell me that some of them do."

He couldn't tell whether Margot even heard him. "And then she was there," she said. "Just there, in the closet with me. A tiny little Indian girl in a flowing gown, made of wood but alive and moving: it should have seemed like delirium, but it couldn't, because she was so obviously more real than anything else in that world, including me. She wiped my eyes with her hair, and whispered in a funny little sing-song that I mustn't dare lose hope, because there were blessings locks couldn't frustrate – and then she started to sing. You've heard her sing?"

Narsin bobbed his antennae in affirmation.

"Then you know," said Margot. "When she sings, the world dances; things that weren't possible before become the most natural things that could be. A dark, empty broom closet on Venus can change itself into a summer pond in the Little Scioto Valley, with birdsong and dragonflies and sunbeams glowing green through the cottonwood leaves…" Her voice trailed off into a breathless little gasp of remembered delight, and she hugged her arms tight about her torso and started humming the tune again, causing the aureole of light and warmth about her to creep a few inches further outward.

"She was just practising, really," she said after a moment. "When she left her carver's workshop, she didn't really know how deep her virtue went, and I think she was afraid to start answering the cries of real hearts until she had had some experience being what she was. So she wandered around Arizona until she met a boy who had a whole library of classic science-fiction stories; they became friends, and she used his love for those imaginary worlds and people to make them real enough for her to enter into, and to spread her wings by performing magical kindnesses for the characters in them." She smiled. "Characters like me."

"It was very good of her," said Narsin. "But – forgive me – perhaps I don't understand. Are you a real wight, then, or no? If so, why do you call yourself a storyteller's invention? And if not, how are you now here?"

Margot took a deep breath. "I don't know whether I'm a person, exactly," she said. "What the Arctarians say is that I, and they, and all the rest of us that Obocord came to, are echoes of her magic. Once she and Alzapoof made us real, we couldn't ever quite become unreal again – but neither could we just become part of the real world, the way that Alzapoof's imaginary friend Moss and a few others did, because we were too much part of the imaginary worlds that so many people had read about and imagined. So instead of ares or aren'ts, we became might-bes – dreams escaped from the pages of long-lost books, which people in the right time and place could step into. Ghosts, maybe," she mused. "Are ghosts people? I don't know.

"But as to how I'm here," she went on, "I think, before I can tell you that, you'll have to answer the question I asked before. Are you a friend of Obocord's?"

Narsin turned his head and gazed meditatively out at the landscape of Sores' Ease, which would soon be uninhabitable by even the toughest of lichens, and in which he, whose toughness was very far from lichenous, had deliberately lingered as a kindness to its fairy mistress. "By the definition you have given," he said slowly, "yes, I suppose I am."

"Good," said Margot, with a smile. "We thought you were, when one of the Arctarians felt your mind after Obocord left. So I came up to find you and bring you to our little country beneath the Gend, since we all agreed that we couldn't leave a friend of Obocord's to freeze to death if we could help it."

"Is there a country of fictive ghosts beneath the Gend?" said Narsin. "Such wonders this moon is full of. Did Obocord know of it?"

"I think so," said Margot. "She must have sensed us now and then, when her magic made us especially real. Of course, she was always too busy then to come to us, and we were too shy to go to her – she was so much more real, you know – but I think she must have at least known that we were there."

"Curious," said Narsin. "If she knew of a path by which I might be kept from death, I should have thought she would have said so. Why should she give the impression that the price of her boon was my life, if it wasn't so?"

Margot's mouth twitched regretfully. "It is so, Mr. Ul," she said. "Visiting our country won't keep you from dying along with Sores' Ease; we can't take you to any other real world, and it's only a matter of time before the cold destroys us, too. Remember, we're just echoes of magic; once the power that Obocord put in us is used up, we can't get any more on our own.

"But will you come, anyway?" she went on. "It's a lovely place, and you'll have plenty of time to see and explore. And, besides –" here her cheeks turned faintly pink "– it's been such a long time since we've had a visitor, and it would be so nice…"

Narsin raised a forelimb. "No need for protestation, Margot," he said. "The demise of Sores' Ease is, I think, complete; no duty, and certainly no sentiment, detains me here. I will be happy to accompany you to your land of embodied dreams."


Margot smiled, and held out her hand. Narsin crawled into her palm, and she cupped her other hand protectively over him; then she turned eastward, and stepped back out onto the river. Of course, Narsin couldn't see anything through the pinkish flesh of her hands, but he could hear the renewed tap of her footsteps upon the ice – which, it occurred to him, was rather strange. Why should her feet be so hard, when her hands were so soft? Or did her people, in addition to draping themselves with cloth, also adorn the soles of their feet with enamel? It wouldn't be the strangest alien custom he had ever heard of…

But what was this, now? All of a sudden, the sound of Margot's footsteps had ceased, replaced by a faint roaring sound like that of a heavy wind far off – and the subtle motion sensors in his chitin could no longer detect any slight shudder of her feet's impact against the ground. Yet they were still moving, he knew – or, no, now they weren't any longer. And her hands were opening, and the scene revealed was no grave-black nightscape of rime-coated fenkasthuzaloin, but a glorious panorama of towering structures made of pure light – and a creature like a shikkayan gel-sphere was gliding toward them, its fluid body throbbing with the latent energy of some unimaginably potent mind.

"Greetings, friend of Obocord," came its thoughts into Narsin's brain. "I am Jarann, chief scientist of Arctar. On behalf of all who dwell in this zone of extra-natural potentiality, I welcome you to Subgendia."


Disclaimer: Story elements taken from Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" and Edmond Hamilton's "Devolution"; song lyrics taken from the New Christy Minstrels' "Green, Green" and John Denver's "Sunshine on My Shoulders". Further disclaimers as narrative events warrant.