“Why do you call this place the Canyon of the Dead?” she asked him.
“Because they are all about us here, the dead,” he replied.
“I feel nothing.”
“I know.”
They crossed through the Valley of the Bones, where millions of the dead from many races and worlds lay stacked all about them, and she did not see these things. She had come to the graveyard of all the world, but she did not realize this thing. She had encountered its tender, its keeper, and she did know what he was, he who staggered beside her like a man drunken.
John Auden took her to his home–not really the place where he lived, but it would be now–and there he activated ancient circuits within the building within the mountains, and in response light leaped forth from the walls, light he had never needed before but now required.
The door slid shut behind them and the temperature built up to a normal warmth. Fresh air circulated and he took it into his lungs and expelled it, glorying in the forgotten sensation. His heart beat within his breast, a red warm thing that reminded him of the pain and of the pleasure. For the first time in ages, he prepared a meal and fetched a bottle of wine from one of the deep, sealed lockers. How many others could have borne what he had borne?
None, perhaps.
She dined with him, toying with the food, sampling a bit of everything, eating very little. He, on the other hand, glutted himself fantastically, and they drank of the wine and were happy.
“This place is so strange,” she said. “Where do you sleep?”
“I used to sleep in there,” he told her, indicating a room he had almost forgotten; and they entered and he showed it to her, and she beckoned him toward the bed and the pleasures of her body.
That night he loved her, many times, with a desperation that burnt away the alcohol and pushed all of his life forward with something like a hunger, but more.
The following day, when the dying sun had splashed the Valley of the Bones with its pale, moonlike light, he awakened and she drew his head to her breast, not having slept herself, and she asked him, “What is the thing that moves you, John Auden? You are not like one of the men who live and who die, but you take life almost like one of the Faioli, squeezing from it everything that you can and pacing it at a tempo that bespeaks a sense of time no man should know. What are you?”
“I am one who knows,” he said. “I am one who knows that the days of a man are numbered and one who covets their dispositions as he feels them draw to a close.”
“You are strange,” said Sythia. “Have I pleased you?”
“More than anything else I have ever known,” he said.
And she sighed, and he found her lips once again.
They breakfasted, and that day they walked in the Valley of the Bones. He could not distinguish distances nor grasp perspectives properly, and she could not see anything that had been living and now was dead. So, of course, as they sat there on a shelf of stone, his arm around her shoulders, he pointed out to her the rocket which had just come down from out of the sky, and she squinted after his gesture. He indicated the robots, which had begun unloading the remains of the dead of many world from the hold of the ship, and she cocked her head to one side and stared ahead, but she did not really see what he was talking about.
Even when one of the robots lumbered up to him and held out the board containing the receipt and the stylus, and as he signed the receipt for the bodies received, she did not see or understand what it was that was occurring.
In the days that followed, his life took upon it a dreamlike quality, filled with the pleasure of Sythia and shot through with certain inevitable streaks of pain. Often, she saw him wince, and she asked him concerning his expressions.