#t'sais

T'sais and T'sain meet each other and Turjan of Miir still ponders the secrets of the Universe

“’Earth,’ mused Pandelume. ‘A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red.’”

“T’sais” is the story of a flawed woman whose brain has reversed beauty and ugliness, who adventures to Earth to discover the true meaning of beauty in the hope of curing her imperfection. She finds Earth is a grim place, escaping from multiple dangers before running into Etarr, a mysterious man who has a defect of his own.

The story “T’sais” is grotesque and unusually gruesome for Vance, in which we find a flawed woman encountering a myriad of terrible dangers in a quest to understand the difference between evil and good, filth and purity. As we discover at the end of the story, T’sais is able correct her flaw by following a morally just path. So even though  T’sais has a flaw which makes her repugnant to all things good, she acts in a morally good manner anyway, leading us to conclude that the polarities of good and evil are merely constructs, beneath which lies the true measure of morality, which is intent.

The most beautiful (and in “T’sais” the most normal) characters—Javanne and Liane—are by far the most wicked. This must be especially distressing for T’sais, who is busy trying to discern what beauty means. She struggles through Earth, parsing out evil and good by reasoning and basic education from Pandelume, seen in this encounter with Liane:

“T’sais was disturbed. The woman was dead. Was not killing wicked? So Pandelume has said. If the woman were good, as the bearded man had said, then Liane was evil.”

A couple points on this quote: first, T’sais is determining what evil means by considering its opposite. It leads to the correct conclusion (Liane must be evil), but it also sheds perspective on our simplistic consideration of good and evil. T’sais, a woman with essentially no education or cultural understanding, can grasp the simple good and evil binary: things that are not good are therefore evil, and vice versa. I point this out because Vance constantly presses his characters into the realm of moral ambiguity, repeatedly pressing us to consider the spectrum of good and evil as much more complicated than we often think.

The second interesting point is that T’sais is parsing out what is good by examining intent and action. Liane and Javanne represent the archetypical charmer-seductress—people who can cajole or seduce their way into acts otherwise evil because of their beauty. When T’sais confronts Liane about the woman’s death, he sweet-talks her: “’You are lovely, my dear, and I—I am the perfect man.” T’sais, not understanding good, evil, nor beauty, judges by action alone and is unaffected by his charm.

The demon orgy scene is one of the more bizarre scenes in The Dying Earth, written to exemplify the extent of depravity capable of humankind. While watching this ritual, Etarr points out a demon whose face looks similar to his. T’sais responds by saying

“that which underlies my brain—my blood, my body, my heart—that which is me loves you, the you underneath the mask […] I hate you with all the hate that I give to the world; I love you with a feeling nothing else arouses.”

This is a contradictory, emotional dialogue which reveals the inner working of T’sais’ defect. It also reinforces the complicated relationship of good and evil, love and hate, collapsing opposites Vance continues to muddle together, obsessed with the many-faced, multifaceted nature of morality. 

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Jack Vance