Dying of the Light by George R.R. Martin Page A

so much to ask, so many things to decide. Yet he had done none of it. Soon, though, he promised himself as he flew. Soon.
    The aircar purred very softly, almost inaudibly, beneath his gentle touch. The ground grew dark below, and the kilometers raced by. Life, Gwen told him, would be found ahead, west, due west, toward the sunset.
             
    The city of the evening was a single silver building with its feet in the rolling hills far beneath them and its head in the clouds two kilometers up. It was a city of light, its flanks metallic and windowless and shimmering with white-hot brilliance. Coruscating, flashing, the light climbed the vaulting shaft in waves, beginning at the far bottom where the city was anchored deep into the primal rock, then climbing and climbing and growing steadily brighter as the city rose and narrowed like the vast needle it was. Faster and higher the wave of light would ascend, up all that incredible climb, until it reached that cloud-crusted silver spire in a burst of blinding glory. And by then, three later waves had already begun to follow it up.
    “Challenge,” Gwen named the city as they approached. Its name and its intent. It was built by the urbanites of ai-Emerel, whose home cities are black steel towers set amid rolling plains. Each Emereli city was a nation-state, all in a single tower, and most Emereli never left the building they were born in (although those that did, Gwen said, often became the greatest wanderers in all of space). Challenge was all those Emereli towers in one, silver-white instead of black, twice as haughty and three times as tall—ai-Emerel’s archaeological philosophy embodied in metal and plastic—fusion-powered, automatic, computerized, and self-repairing. The Emereli boasted that it was immortal, a final proof that the glories of Fringe technology (or Emereli technology, at any rate) gleamed no less bright than that of Newholme or Avalon or even Old Earth itself.
    There were dark horizontal slashes in the body of the city—airlot landing decks, each ten levels from the last. Dirk homed in on one, and when he reached it the black slit blazed into light for his approach. The opening was easily ten meters high; he had no trouble setting them down in the vast airlot on the hundredth level.
    As they climbed out, a deep bass voice spoke to them from nowhere. “Welcome,” it said. “I am the Voice of Challenge. May I entertain you?”
    Dirk glanced back over his shoulder, and Gwen laughed at him. “The city brain,” she explained. “A supercomputer. I told you this city still lived.”
    “May I entertain you?” the Voice repeated. It came from the walls.
    “Maybe,” Dirk said tentatively. “I think we’re probably hungry. Can you feed us?”
    The Voice did not answer, but a wall panel rolled back several meters away and a silent cushioned vehicle moved out and stopped before them. They got in and the vehicle moved off through another obliging wall.
    They rolled on soft balloon tires through a succession of spotless white corridors, past countless rows of numbered doors, while music played soothingly around them. Dirk remarked briefly that the white lights were a harsh contrast to the dim evening sky of Worlorn, and instantly the corridors became a soft, muted blue.
    The fat-tired car let them off at a restaurant, and a robowaiter who sounded much like the Voice offered them menus and wine lists. Both selections were extensive, not limited to cuisine from ai-Emerel or even to the outworlds, but including famous dishes and vintage wines from all the scattered worlds of the manrealm, including a few that Dirk had never heard of. Each dish had its world of origin printed in small type beneath it on the menu. They mulled the selection for a long time. Finally Dirk chose sand dragon broiled in butter, from Jamison’s World, and Gwen ordered bluespawn-in-cheese, from Old Poseidon.
    The wine they picked was clear and white. The robot brought it frozen in