Elysia Read Free Page B

totally inhuman inhabitants, might easily have settled on several. Oh, yes, for there were wonderful, beautiful islands galore out there in the infinite seas of space. But while they'd rested in these planets and found peace in them, it had never, lasted. Always de Marigny would wake with a cry one morning, sit up and cast about, discover that yesterday's wonders and last night's marvels had turned drab on him and lost their flavour, and his eyes would grow dull while the bright dream he had dreamed receded. And then they would go to the time-clock, and at his command its panel would open and spill out that familiar, pulsing purplish glow, and it would be time to move on.
    And of course he knew that it would be exactly the same here on Bore . But at least there were friends here, completely human friends; which was why, after these last three years of futile search, he had returned. Earth ... ? That thought had never seriously occurred to him. The
    Earth was beautiful but diseased, polluted by men, the one planet of all the worlds de Marigny knew whose inhabitants were systematically raping and ruining her. Indeed; even. Earth's dreamlands were beginning to suffer!
    And that was a thought, an idea, which had occurred more than once: why not give up all Elysian aspirations and dwell instead in the lands of Earth's dreams? Fine, but there are perils even in the dreamlands. And the very least of them lay in waking up! For de Marigny knew that there are certain dreams from which men never wake ...
    The dreamlands, strange dimension formed by the subconscious longings of men. A real place or world, as de Marigny now knew.
    Gazing down from a rock-hewn bartizan at the rim of the plateau, now he smiled — however wryly as his mind went back again to the adventures he had known in Earth's dreamlands with Titus Crow and Tiania of Elysia. For peering from on high like this was not unlike (and yet, in another sense, totally unlike) the vertiginous view from cloud-floating Serannian's wharves of pink-veined marble, where that fabulous city was built in the sky and looked out over an ethereal sea of glowing cirrus and cirrocumulus:
    And remembering that wonderful aerial city, de Marigny's mind could not help but conjure, too, Kuranes: 'Lord of Ooth-Nargei, Celephais, and the Sky around Serannian.' Kuranes, yes! — and Randolph Carter, perhaps Earth's greatest dreamer, a king himself now in Ilek-Vad — and who better for the job, since he himself had probably dreamed Ilek-Vad in the first place?
    Other lands and cities sprang to mind: Ulthar, where no man may kill a cat, and the Isle of Oriab across the Southern Sea, with its principal port Bahama. Aye, incredible places all, and their peoples fabulous as the dreams that Made them; but not all dreams are pleasant, and the dreamlands had their share of nightmares, too.
    Now de Marigny thought of Dylath-Leen in the Bad Days and shuddered, and he tasted something bitter in his mouth as he recalled names and places such as Zura of the Charnel Gardens, the Vale of Pnoth, Kadath in the Cold Waste and Leng's forbidden plateau and hideous hinterland. Especially Leng, where squat, horned beast-men cavorted about balefires to the whine of demon flutes and the bone-dry rattle of crazed crotala
    No, the dreamlands were no fit habitation for such as Moreen and de Marigny — who in any case had never considered himself an expert dreamer — not yet for a while, anyway. Perhaps one day on his deathbed he'd dream himself a white-walled villa there in timeless Celephais, but until then ...
    … The dimension of dream, glimpsed briefly in the eye of memory, slipped away and de Marigny was back .on Borea, on the roof of the plateau. Chill Borea, where for ten days now he and Moreen had been feted like prodigals until, as always, the pleasures had begun to pall; even the great pleasure of human companionship, the company of men such as Silberhutte, Kota'na, Jimmy Franklin and Charlie Tacomah.
    And suddenly