The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five Read online

  The Collected Stories of

  Robert Silverberg

  Volume Five

  The Palace at Midnight

  1980-82

  Robert Silverberg

  Subterranean Press 2013

  The Palace at Midnight Copyright © 2010 by Agberg, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Cover art Copyright © 2013 by Thomas Maronski. All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design Copyright © 2010 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-607-6

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Gianni,” “At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party,” “Needle in a Timestack,” and “Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake,” first appeared in Playboy.

  “A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa,” “How They Pass the Time in Pelpel,” and “Not Our Brother” first appeared in Twilight Zone.

  “Our Lady of the Sauropods,” “The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve,” “The Palace at Midnight” and “Amanda and the Alien” first appeared in Omni.

  “The Regulars” first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  “The Pope of the Chimps” first appeared in Perpetual Light.

  “The Trouble With Sempoanga” first appeared in Beyond.

  “Jennifer’s Lover” first appeared in Penthouse.

  “Dancers in the Time-Flux” first appeared in Heroic Visions.

  “The Changeling” first appeared in Amazing Stories.

  “The Man Who Floated in Time” first appeared in Speculations.

  “Waiting for the Earthquake” and “Basileus” first appeared in The Best of Omni.

  “Homefaring” was first published as a limited-edition volume by Phantasia Press.

  “Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory” first appeared in Universe.

  “Thesme and the Ghayrog” first appeared in Majipoor Chronicles.

  Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, by Agberg, Ltd.

  Introductions Copyright © Agberg, Ltd., 2010

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Our Lady of the Sauropods

  Waiting for the Earthquake

  The Regulars

  The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve

  A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa

  How They Pass the Time in Pelpel

  The Palace at Midnight

  The Man Who Floated in Time

  Gianni

  The Pope of the Chimps

  Thesme and the Ghayrog

  At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party

  The Trouble with Sempoanga

  Jennifer’s Lover

  Not Our Brother

  Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory

  Dancers in the Time-Flux

  Needle in a Timestack

  Amanda and the Alien

  Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake

  The Changeling

  Basileus

  Homefaring

  For Robert Sheckley

  Ben Bova

  Alice Saunders

  Harlan Ellison

  Alice K. Turner

  George Scithers

  Kathy Green

  Judith Sims

  Alan Ryan

  T.E.D. Klein

  Marta Randall

  Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  Don Myrus

  Introduction

  Since the beginning of my writing career, more than fifty years ago, I’ve always written both novels and short stories. My first professional sale was a short story and the second was a novel, or perhaps it was the other way around. (It was a long time ago.) The rhythm of my writing life was established right at the beginning: a few short stories, then a novel, then some more short stories, and then another book. I never thought twice, or even once, about whether I was primarily a short-story writer or a novelist. I was a writer, period. I’ve always written at whatever length seemed appropriate to the story at hand; and, because I have always been a writer by trade rather than one who follows the ebb and flow of inspiration, I’ve also written according to the needs of the marketplace. When it was novel-writing time, I wrote novels. When editors wanted short stories from me, I wrote short stories.

  It isn’t that way with all writers. Some are distinctly novelists, and some are not. Ray Bradbury has written a couple of novels, but he’s basically a short-story writer. The same is true of Harlan Ellison. On the other hand, John le Carre and John Fowles may have written short stories at some time in their lives, but I haven’t seen them. (Fowles wrote a a few novellas, at least.) Robert A. Heinlein did few, if any, short stories after the first dozen years of his career. Hemingway’s lifetime output of short stories was enough to fill just one good-sized volume, and he too wrote most of them in his first dozen years. And so on: I could make long lists of writers who are basically one thing or the other, but not both. In science fiction and fantasy such names as Frank Herbert, E.E. Smith, Jack Vance, Stephen Donaldson, and Andre Norton come quickly to mind as writers mainly of novels; outside it, those of Graham Greene, William Golding, John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer. As for other short-story writers whose ventures into longer lengths are just as uncommon, we have Theodore Sturgeon, Clark Ashton Smith, William Tenn, and Damon Knight, and in the mainstream world, Edgar Allan Poe, John Collier, William Trevor, and Mavis Gallant.

  Certainly temperament has something to do with this. Some writers feel impossibly cramped within the rigid confines of the short story; they need hundreds of thousands of words to move around in. Others see the novel as a vast and interminable journey that they would rather not undertake, and prefer the quick, incisive thrust of the short story. But then there are those who are masters of both forms and choose in the second half of their careers to work in only one, usually the novel, like Hemingway or Heinlein. Surely the author of “The Snows of Kiliminjaro” and “Capital of the World” still knew how to write short stories after 1940, and the author of “Requiem” and “The Green Hills of Earth” did not mysteriously lose his ability at the short lengths around 1949; but For Whom the Bell Tolls and Stranger in a Strange Land were matters of higher priority and the short stories ceased. It’s harder to cite writers who gave up novels after an early start to concentrate only on the short story: Truman Capote and Paul Bowles, perhaps.

  In today’s American science-fiction field, where hundreds of novels are published every year and only a handful of short-story markets exist, very few of the well-established writers bother much about short fiction, and even the newcomers tend to move on as quickly as they can to immense trilogies. Writing short stories doesn’t make much sense financially. If you write them today you have to want to write them for their own sake. The pay is almost incidental: you do them for love.

  Or, in my case, because you really can’t stop yourself.

  At the beginning of my career, in the 1950s, only the most famous science-fiction writers—the Heinleins, the Asimovs—could get novels published, and most of us, if we earned our livings primarily from writing, concentrated on writing short stories and novelettes for the magazines. That meant coming up with two or three worthwhile story ideas a week—an insane way to live and an almost impossible thing to succeed at; but those of us who chose to live that way and who did actually succeed at it (about five of us) didn’t realize it couldn’t be done, and so we just went ahead and did it. You had t
o be very stubborn, very resilient, and very prolific in order to survive.

  It helped also if you were young, young enough to stay up all night if necessary to knock out a story to meet some editor’s sudden request for help. I was the youngest writer in the business in those days, not much past twenty, full of the sort of vitality and drive that was already beginning to diminish among the old guys in their thirties who were my rivals for those few places on the contents pages of the magazines, guys like Fred Pohl, Ted Sturgeon, Phil Dick, Bob Sheckley. So I earned a decent living and always paid the rent on time, and eventually things got a lot easier for us all. But I never had the luxury of being able to think of myself as a “novelist” or a “short-story writer” or any other kind of specialist. I wrote what seemed to make the most sense, economically speaking, to write at the moment.

  Today, of course, everything is different. I haven’t had to worry about paying next month’s rent for a long time, and if I were still an active novelist—it’s been a few years now since I last felt like writing one, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do another—I’d sell my books at prices that would have been beyond all belief when I was starting out. My annual income can’t begin to match the earnings of the writers at the top of the best-seller lists, but it’s lofty enough to seem startling to someone like me who remembers writing stories at a cent a word as fast as he could type. My financial situation is secure, as such things go for writers. And yet I continue to do one or two short stories a year, and even the occasional novella of 25,000 words or so. Why? Certainly not for the money.

  But sometimes, even for the professional, more than just the money is involved.

  This discussion so far has concentrated almost entirely on the production side of writing. I haven’t said a word about art; I might just as well have been talking about manufacturing bookcases, or raising potatoes, or some other useful and straightforward activity in which the muses aren’t generally considered to be involved. I’ve made it more than clear that writing is my business; that I am in the profession of producing verbal objects which I place on sale to the highest bidder. I chose from the outset to make writing my sole source of income, and so I have always worked hard, produced my verbal objects at a steady pace, and taken care to be paid, and well, for my labor.

  But writing fiction is different from manufacturing bookcases or raising potatoes. The muses are involved, however much the writer wants to think of himself as nothing more than a hard-nosed businessman. And a lifetime devoted exclusively to maximizing one’s income per word seems to me like a pretty stultifying affair. Money’s a useful thing and you won’t hear me saying a word against it. But a writer who’s totally money-oriented—who writes the same thing over and over, for example, or who writes things he despises, or who writes with only a fraction of his skill because he thinks his readers are simple-minded, or who writes about things that don’t interest him because that’s where the money is—is a writer who over the years will dry out from within, whose spirit will corrode and decay, who will sooner or later find himself embittered and hollow, trapped in an anger he can barely understand.

  I’ve done my share of writing purely for money, when circumstances made that necessary. And I’m not one to write purely for the love of the art—sonnet sequences, let’s say, that I stash away in the secret recesses of my desk, have never been part of my creative agenda. I write for publication and pay, not for private pleasure. But I try to guard myself against the death of the soul that comes from making money the be-all and end-all of my days.

  Novels are more profitable to write than short stories, and, for me at least, they were easier to do, page for page. Nevertheless, although novel-writing was my main line of work for most of my career and my chief source of income (and a considerable source of pride and pleasure, when things went the right way) I always continued to do short stories, however much sweat and pain they might cost me, because of the challenge they represented. Though you will see again and again that this story or that one in this book was written at the request or suggestion of some editor, rather than out of dire internal compulsion, the dire internal compulsion was there none the less: the compulsion to test myself against the rigorous demands of the shorter forms. It’s an exhausting kind of mental exercise that gets harder all the time. Short-story writing, as I have said many times, is hard on the nerves: you have no room to make any real mistakes, by which I mean that every word has to count, every line of dialogue has to serve three or four simultaneous purposes, every scene has to sweep the story inexorably along toward the culminating moment of insight that is the classic short-story payoff. In a novel you can go off course for whole chapters at a time and no one will mind; you may even find yourself being praised for the wonderful breadth of your concept. But a short story with so much as half an irrelevant page is a sad, lame thing, and even the casual and uncritical reader is aware that something is wrong with it.

  I did in fact stop writing short stories once, in 1973—the prelude to a total withdrawal from writing, the first and only one of my life, that was to last the next five years. As I noted in the previous volume of this series, my life had taken a troubled turn then and I had grown weary, disheartened, generally sick of everything—especially writing. Putting even more words on paper, concocting still more stories of imaginary and remote times and places, had begun to seem pointless to me. So I gave it up. I thought I was quitting it forever. As things turned out, “forever” lasted until the autumn of 1978, when I began to write the novel Lord Valentine’s Castle, and by January of 1980 I had begun writing short stories again too. The stories collected in this book were written between 1980 and 1982. I’ve continued to write short stories ever since. I have two new ones awaiting publication as I write this.

  Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I’ve discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there’s more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my—what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn’t not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I’m glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too.

  Robert Silverberg

  Our Lady of the Sauropods

  As I pointed out in the introduction to this volume, I abandoned short-story writing in 1973 after doing “Schwartz Between the Galaxies” and felt only relief, no regret, at giving it up. Short stories were just too much trouble to do. You needed a stunning idea, for one thing—the ideal science-fiction short story, I think, should amaze and delight—and you had to develop it with cunning and craft, working at the edge of your nervous system every moment, polishing and repolishing to hide all those extraneous knees and elbows. Doing a good short story at that level of quality meant a week or two of strenuous work, for which the immediate cash reward in the 1970s was likely to be about $250, and then maybe $100 every year or two thereafter if you had written something good enough to be reprinted in anthologies. Though cash return is not the most important factor in a writer’s life (if it were, we’d all be writing the most debased popular commodity possible), it is a consideration, especially when a good short story takes fifty or a hundred working hours, as mine were tending to take by 1973. At $2.50 an hour I often felt I’d prefer some other kind of work.

  But then came a magazine called Omni.

  It was printed on slick, shiny paper and its publishers understood a great deal about the techniques of promotion, and it started its life with a circulation about six times as great as any science fiction magazine had ever managed to achieve, along with dozens of pag
es of expensive advertising. It could, therefore, afford to pay a great deal of money for its material.

  After some comings and goings in the editorial chair the job of fiction editor for Omni went to my old friend Ben Bova, who began to hint broadly that it would be a nice idea if I wrote a short story for him. He mentioned a sum of money. It was approximately as much as I had been paid for each of my novels prior to the year 1968. Though cash return, as I’ve just said, is not the most important factor in a writer’s life, the amount of money Ben mentioned was at least capable of causing me to rethink my antipathy to short-story writing.

  By the time I was through rethinking, however, Bova had moved upstairs to become Omni’s executive editor. The new fiction editor was another old friend of mine, the veteran science-fiction writer Robert Sheckley, who also thought I ought to be writing stories for Omni. All through 1979 he and Bova sang their siren song to me, and in the first month of the new year I gave in. I phoned Sheckley and somewhat timidly told him I was willing to risk my nervous system on one more short story after all. “He’s going to do it,” I heard Sheckley call across the office to Bova. It was as though they had just talked Lawrence Olivier into doing one more Hamlet. So much fuss over one short story!

  But for me it was a big thing indeed: at that moment short-story writing seemed to me more difficult than writing novels, more difficult than learning Sanskrit, more difficult than winning the Olympic broad-jump. I had promised Bob and Ben that I would write a story, though; and I sat down to try. Though in an earlier phase of my career I had thought nothing of turning out three or four short stories a week, it took me about five working days to get the opening page of this one written satisfactorily, and I assure you that that week was no fun at all. But then, magically, the barriers dissolved, the words began to flow, and in a couple of days toward the end of January, 1980, the rest of the story emerged. “Our Lady of the Sauropods,” I called it, and when Omni published it in the September, 1980 issue, the cover announced, “Robert Silverberg Returns!” I imagined the puzzled readers, who surely were unaware that it was seven years since I had deigned to write short stories, turning to each other and saying, “Why, wherever has he been?”