Songs of the Dying Earth

A quick inspection revealed it to be everything he’d hoped for. Tome after tome in many languages; charts and maps; plans of cities long fallen to ruin. In the longer halls, exhibit after exhibit of the history of the progress of the animal and vegetal kingdoms, and of Mankind. There were machines designed for flying through the air; others seemingly made for travel beneath the seas. There were men of metal shaped like humans whose purpose he could not fathom. He had time before darkness to discover that the northenmost tower was an observatory with a fine giant spying-glass.

He found a hall of portraits of former Curators of the Museum. Just before he had parted company with Rogol Domedonfors and T’silla months ago, she had handed him a folded and sealed paper.

“What’s this?” he had asked.

“There will come a time when you will need it. Open it then,” she said. All these months, it had been a comforting weight in his pocket.

He travelled up the hall of portraits, pausing at the one of the original Rogol Domedonfors from long ages past. He came up the hall as if transgressing time itself, noting changes in the styles of costuming in the portraits, from the high winged collars to the off-the-shoulder straps. The last full portrait outside the Curator’s door was of Rogol Domedonfors Jr. Tybalt noted the faint resemblance of the features shared by he and the original — the wayward cowlick, the frown-line on one side of the mouth, the long neck. Almost impossible that the same features would skip so many generations, only to show up later in the namesake.

Last outside the door was an empty frame with four pins stuck at its center.

Tybalt reached in his pocket, took out the folded and sealed paper, broke its waxen seal, and unfolded it.

It was a drawing of himself, done in brown pencil, wearing his frogskin cap. The legend below said: “Tybalt the Scientist. “Frogskin Cap” The last Curator of the Museum of Man.” It was an excellent likeness, though the words uneased him. When had T’silla had time between the game of the bells and the ball, and early the next rainy morning when they parted, to do such a good drawing

He pinned the drawing within the frame — it fit perfectly. It made him feel at home, as if he had a place there.

He noticed too, that as the night had darkened, the walls of the room it had begun to glow with the faintest of blue lights, which intensified as the outside grew blacker. He looked from the office-room and the whole Museum glowed likewise

He found a writing instrument and pages of foolscap, cleared a space on the desk, and began to write on the topmost sheet:

THE TRUE. AUTHENTIC HISTORY

OF OUR SUN

By Tybalt, “Frogskin Cap”

Curator of the Museum of Man

He had worked through most of the night. The walls were fading as a red glow tainted eastwards.

Tybalt stretched himself. He had barely begun outlining the main sequence of the birth, growth, senescence, and death of stars. Enough for now; there were books to consult; there was food to find. He was famished, having finished some parched corn he’d gotten at the last farmhouse before coming to the woods that led to the Museum of Man, late the afternoon before. Surely there was food somewhere hereabouts.

He went outside the green porcelain Museum and turned to face the East.

The darkened Sun rose lumpy as a cracked egg. Straggly whiskers of fire stood out from the chins of the Sun, growing and shortening as he watched.

A curl of fire swept up out of the top of the sphere, and the surface became pocked and darkened, as if it had a disease.

The Sun was having one of its bad days.

Afterword:

I remember sitting in a green and white lawn chair under a magnolia tree (at the only house I ever lived in that had one) in the summer of 1962, reading Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.

I would read on those unairconditioned summer mornings til it got too hot, then walk two miles to the municipal swimming pool and swim all afternoon, return home, eat something, then go to my seven-day-a-week, 5-hours-a-night job at a service station, being somewhere between a Johannes Factotum and a grease monkey.

The edition I read was the one I have now, “The Lancer Science Fiction Library Limited Edition” second printing of the book from 1962, and the first generally available. (My friend Jake Sanders was a Jack Vance collector, having many of the original appearances of Vance’s works in Thrilling Wonder and Startling Stories: he had a first printing (by Hillman, publisher of Airboy Comics!) of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.

I had remembered the Lancer edition as having rounded corners (a trick of memory; Avon paperbacks had rounded corners in the early 1960s, not Lancer.)

Bibliographic anomalies aside, Lancer had done the world a favor by bringing an ignored classic back into print 12 years after its first printing.