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  Majipoor Chronicles

  ( Majipoor - 2 )

  Robert Silverberg

  ‘There's a room in there where millions of people of Majipoor have left memory-readings. You pick up a capsule, put it in a special slot and suddenly... you find yourself living in Lord Confalume's time, or Lord Siminave's, or out there fighting the Metamorph Wars…’

  The archives of the House of Records of the planet Majipoor have been rediscovered by the boy Hissune in the time after the restoration of the Coronal Lord Valentine.

  In tales of life, love, conflict and discovery, the complex and colourful world of Majipoor is explored from different perspectives, ranging across its long history and immense terrain.

  Majipoor Chronicles

  by Robert Silverberg

  For Kirby who may not have been driven all the way to despair by this one, but who certainly got as far as the outlying suburbs.

  Prologue

  In the fourth year of the restoration of the Coronal Lord Valentine a great mischief has come over the soul of the boy Hissune, a clerk in the House of Records of the Labyrinth of Majipoor. For the past six months it has been Hissune's task to prepare an inventory of the archives of the tax-collectors — an interminable list of documents that no one is ever going to need to consult — and it looks as though the job will keep him occupied for the next year or two or three. To no purpose, so far as Hissune can understand, since who could possibly care about the reports of provincial tax-collectors who lived in the reign of Lord Dekkeret or Lord Calintane or even the ancient Lord Stiamot? These documents had been allowed to fall into disarray, no doubt for good reason, and now some malevolent destiny has chosen Hissune to put them to rights, and so far as he can see it is useless work, except that he will have a fine geography lesson, a vivid experience of the hugeness of Majipoor. So many provinces! So many cities! The three giant continents are divided and subdivided and further divided into thousands of municipal units, each with its millions of people, and as he toils, Hissune's mind overflows with names, the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, the great urban districts of Zimroel, the mysterious desert settlements of Suvrael, a torrent of metropolises, a lunatic tribute to the fourteen thousand years of Majipoor's unceasing fertility: Pidruid, Narabal, Ni-moya, Alaisor, Stoien, Piliplok, Pendiwane, Amblemorn, Minimool, Tolaghai, Kangheez, Natu Gorvinu — so much, so much, so much! A million names of places! But when one is fourteen years old one can tolerate only a certain amount of geography, and then one begins to grow restless.

  Restlessness invades Hissune now. The mischievousness that is never far from the surface in him wells up and overflows.

  Close by the dusty little office in the House of Records where Hissune sifts and classifies his mounds of tax reports is a far more interesting place, the Register of Souls, which is closed to all but authorized personnel, and there are said to be not many authorized personnel. Hissune knows a good deal about that place. He knows a good deal about every part of the Labyrinth, even the forbidden places, especially the forbidden places — for has he not, since the age of eight, earned his living in the streets of the great underground capital by guiding bewildered tourists through the maze, using his wits to pick up a crown here and a crown there? "House of Records," he would tell the tourists. "There's a room in there where millions of people of Majipoor have left memory-readings. You pick up a capsule and put it in a special slot, and suddenly it's as if you were the person who made the reading, and you find yourself living in Lord Confalume's time, or Lord Siminave's, or out there fighting the Metamorph Wars with Lord Stiamot — but of course hardly anyone is allowed to consult the memory-reading room." Of course. But how hard would it be, Hissune wonders, to insinuate himself into that room on the pretext of needing data for his research into the tax archives? And then to live in a million other minds at a million other times, in all the greatest and most glorious eras of Majipoor's history — yes!

  Yes, it would certainly make this job more tolerable if he could divert himself with an occasional peek into the Register of Souls.

  From that realization it is but a short journey to the actual attempting of it. He equips himself with the appropriate passes — he knows where all the document-stampers are kept in the House of Records — and makes his way through the brightly lit curving corridors late one afternoon, dry-throated, apprehensive, tingling with excitement.

  It has been a long time since he has known any excitement. Living by his wits in the streets was exciting, but he no longer does that; they have civilized him, they have housebroken him, they have given him a job. A job! They! And who are they? The Coronal himself, that's who! Hissune has not overcome his amazement over that. During the time when Lord Valentine was wandering in exile, displaced from his body and his throne by the usurper Barjazid, the Coronal had come to the Labyrinth, and Hissune had guided him, recognizing him somehow for what he truly was; and that had been the beginning of Hissune's downfall. For the next thing Hissune knew, Lord Valentine was on his way from the Labyrinth to Castle Mount to regain his crown, and then the usurper was overthrown, and then at the time of the second coronation Hissune found himself summoned, the Divine only knew why, to attend the ceremonies at Lord Valentine's Castle. What a time that was! Never before had he so much as been out of the Labyrinth to see the light of day, and now he was journeying in an official floater, up the valley of the Glayge past cities he had known only in dreams, and there was Castle Mount's thirty-mile-high bulk rising like another planet in the sky, and at last he was at the Castle, a grimy ten-year-old boy standing next to the Coronal and trading jokes with him — yes, that had been splendid, but Hissune was caught by surprise by what followed. The Coronal believed that Hissune had promise. The Coronal wished him to be trained for a government post. The Coronal admired the boy's energy and wit and enterprise. Fine. Hissune would become a protege of the Coronal. Fine. Fine. Back to the Labyrinth, then — and into the House of Records! Not so fine. Hissune has always detested the bureaucrats, those mask-faced idiots who pushed papers about in the bowels of the Labyrinth, and now, by special favor of Lord Valentine, he has become such a person himself. Well, he supposes he has to do something by way of earning a living besides take tourists around — but he never imagined it would be this! Report of the Collector of Revenue for the Eleventh District of the Province of Chorg, Prefecture of Bibiroon, 11th Pont. Kinniken Cor. Lord Ossier — oh, no, no, not a lifetime of that! A month, six months, a year of doing his nice little job in the nice little House of Records, Hissune hopes, and then Lord Valentine might send for him and install him in the Castle as an aide-de-camp, and then at last life would have some value! But the Coronal seems to have forgotten him, as one might expect. He has an entire world of twenty or thirty billion people to govern, and what does one little boy of the Labyrinth matter? Hissune suspects that his life has already passed its most glorious peak, in his brief time on Castle Mount, and now by some miserable irony he has been metamorphosed into a clerk of the Pontificate, doomed to shuffle documents forever — But there is the Register of Souls to explore. Even though he may never leave the Labyrinth again, he might — if no one caught him — roam the minds of millions of folk long dead, explorers, pioneers, warriors, even Coronals and Pontifexes. That's some consolation, is it not?

  He enters a small antechamber and presents his pass to the dull-eyed Hjort on duty.

  Hissune is ready with a flow of explanations: special assignment from the Coronal, important historical research, need to correlate demographic details, necessary corroboration of data profile — oh, he's good at such talk, and it lies coiled waiting back of his tongue. But the Hjort says only, "You know how to use the equipment?"

  "It's been a while. Perha
ps you should show me again."

  The ugly warty-faced fellow, many-chinned and flabby, gets slowly to his feet and leads Hissune to a sealed enclosure, which he opens by some deft maneuver of a thumb-lock. The Hjort indicates a screen and a row of buttons. "Your control console. Send for the capsules you want. They plug in here. Sign for everything. Remember to turn out the lights when you're done."

  That's all there is to it. Some security system! Some guardian!

  Hissune finds himself alone with the memory-readings of everyone who has ever lived on Majipoor.

  Almost everyone, at any rate. Doubtless billions of people have lived and died without bothering to make capsules of their lives. But one is allowed every ten years, beginning at the age of twenty, to contribute to these vaults, and Hissune knows that although the capsules are minute, the merest flecks of data, there are miles and miles of them in the storage levels of the Labyrinth. He puts his hands to the controls. His fingers tremble.

  Where to begin?

  He wants to know everything. He wants to trek across the forests of Zimroel with the first explorers, he wants to drive back the Metamorphs, to sail the Great Sea, to slaughter sea-dragons off the Rodamaunt Archipelago, to — to — to — he shakes with the frenzy of yearning. Where to begin? He studies the keys before him. He can specify a date, a place, a specific person's identity — but with fourteen thousand years to choose from — no, more like eight or nine thousand, for the records, he knows, go back only to Lord Stiamot's time or a little before — how can he decide on a starting point? For ten minutes he is paralyzed with indecision.

  Then he punches at random. Something early, he thinks. The continent of Zimroel; the time of the Coronal Lord Barhold, who had lived even before Stiamot; and the person — why, anyone! Anyone!

  A small gleaming capsule appears in the slot.

  Quivering in amazement and delight, Hissune plugs it into the playback outlet and dons the helmet. There are crackling sounds in his ears. Vague blurred streaks of blue and green and scarlet cross his eyes behind his closed lids. Is it working? Yes! Yes! He feels the presence of another mind! Someone dead nine thousand years, and that person's mind — her mind, she was a woman, a young woman — flows into Hissune's, until he cannot be sure whether he is Hissune of the Labyrinth or this other, this Thesme of Narabal—

  With a little sobbing sound of joy he releases himself entirely from the self he has lived with for the fourteen years of his life and lets the soul of the other take possession of him.

  ONE

  Thesme and the Ghayrog

  1

  For six months now Thesme had lived alone in a hut that she had built with her own hands, in the dense tropical jungle half a dozen miles or so east of Narabal, in a place where the sea breezes did not reach and the heavy humid air clung to everything like a furry shroud. She had never lived by herself before, and at first she wondered how good she was going to be at it; but she had never built a hut before either, and she had done well enough at that, cutting down slender sijaneel saplings, trimming away the golden bark, pushing their slippery sharpened ends into the soft moist ground, lashing them together with vines, finally tying on five enormous blue vramma leaves to make a roof. It was no masterpiece of architecture, but it kept out the rain, and she had no need to worry about cold. Within a month her sijaneel timbers, trimmed though they were, had all taken root and were sprouting leathery new leaves along their upper ends, just below the roof; and the vines that held them were still alive too, sending down fleshy red tendrils that searched for and found the rich fertile soil. So now the house was a living thing, daily becoming more snug and secure as the vines tightened and the sijaneels put on girth, and Thesme loved it. In Narabal nothing stayed dead for long; the air was too warm, the sunlight too bright, the rainfall too copious, and everything quickly transformed itself into something else with the riotous buoyant ease of the tropics.

  Solitude was turning out to be easy too. She had needed very much to get away from Narabal, where her life had somehow gone awry: too much confusion, too much inner noise, friends who became strangers, lovers who turned into foes. She was twenty-five years old and needed to stop, to take a long look at everything, to change the rhythm of her days before it shook her to pieces. The jungle was the ideal place for that. She rose early, bathed in a pond that she shared with a sluggish old gromwark and a school of tiny crystalline chichibors, plucked her breakfast from a thokka vine, hiked, read, sang, wrote poems, checked her traps for captured animals, climbed trees and sunbathed in a hammock of vines high overhead, dozed, swam, talked to herself, and went to sleep when the sun went down. In the beginning she thought there would not be enough to do, that she would soon grow bored, but that did not seem to be the case; her days were full and there were always a few projects to save for tomorrow.

  At first she expected that she would go into Narabal once a week or so, to buy staple goods, to pick up new books and cubes, to attend an occasional concert or a play, even to visit her family or those of her friends that she still felt like seeing. For a while she actually did go to town fairly often. But it was a sweaty, sticky trek that took half a day, nearly, and as she grew accustomed to her reclusive life she found Narabal ever more jangling, ever more unsettling, with few rewards to compensate for the drawbacks. People there stared at her. She knew they thought she was eccentric, even crazy, always a wild girl and now a peculiar one, living out there by herself and swinging through the treetops. So her visits became more widely spaced. She went only when it was unavoidable. On the day she found the injured Ghayrog she had not been to Narabal for at least five weeks.

  She had been roving that morning through a swampy region a few miles northeast of her hut, gathering the sweet yellow fungi known as calimbots. Her sack was almost full and she was thinking of turning back when she spied something strange a few hundred yards away: a creature of some sort with gleaming, metallic-looking gray skin and thick tubular limbs, sprawled awkwardly on the ground below a great sijaneel tree. It reminded her of a predatory reptile her father and brother once had killed in Narabal Channel, a sleek, elongated, slow-moving thing with curved claws and a vast toothy mouth. But as she drew closer she saw that this life-form was vaguely human in construction, with a massive rounded head, long arms, powerful legs. She thought it might be dead, but it stirred faintly when she approached and said, "I am damaged. I have been stupid and now I am paying for it."

  "Can you move your arms and legs?" Thesme asked.

  "The arms, yes. One leg is broken, and possibly my back. Will you help me?"

  She crouched and studied it closely. It did look reptilian, yes, with shining scales and a smooth, hard body. Its eyes were green and chilly and did not blink at all; its hair was a weird mass of thick black coils that moved of their own accord in a slow writhing; its tongue was a serpent-tongue, bright scarlet, forked, flickering constantly back and forth between the narrow fleshless lips.

  "What are you?" she asked.

  "A Ghayrog. Do you know of my kind?"

  "Of course," she said, though she knew very little, really. All sorts of non-human species had been settling on Majipoor in the past hundred years, a whole menagerie of aliens invited here by the Coronal Lord Melikand because there were not enough humans to fill the planet's immensities. Thesme had heard that there were four-armed ones and two-headed ones and tiny ones with tentacles and these scaly snake-tongued snake-haired ones, but none of the alien beings had yet come as far as Narabal, a town on the edge of nowhere, as distant from civilization as one could get. So this was a Ghayrog, then? A strange creature, she thought, almost human in the shape of its body and yet not at all human in any of its details, a monstrosity, really, a nightmare-being, though not especially frightening. She pitied the poor Ghayrog, in fact — a wanderer, doubly lost, far from its home world and far from anything that mattered on Majipoor. And badly hurt, too. What was she going to do with it? Wish it well and abandon it to its fate? Hardly. Go all the way into Narabal a
nd organize a rescue mission? That would take at least two days, assuming anyone cared to help. Bring it back to her hut and nurse it to good health? That seemed the most likely thing to do, but what would happen to her solitude, then, her privacy, and how did one take care of a Ghayrog, anyway, and did she really want the responsibility? And the risk, for that matter: this was an alien being and she had no idea what to expect from it.

  It said, "I am Vismaan."

  Was that its name, its title, or merely a description of its condition? She did not ask. She said, "I am called Thesme. I live in the jungle an hour's walk from here. How can I help you?"

  "Let me brace myself on you while I try to get up. Do you think you are strong enough?"

  "Probably."

  "You are female, am I right?"

  She was wearing only sandals. She smiled and touched her hand lightly to her breasts and loins and said, "Female, yes."

  "So I thought. I am male and perhaps too heavy for you."

  Male? Between his legs he was as smooth and sexless as a machine. She supposed that Ghayrogs carried their sex somewhere else. And if they were reptiles, her breasts would indicate nothing to him about her sex. Strange, all the same, that he should need to ask.

  She knelt beside him, wondering how he was going to rise and walk with a broken back. He put his arm over her shoulders. The touch of his skin against hers startled her: it felt cool, dry, rigid, smooth, as though he wore armor. Yet it was not an unpleasant texture, only odd. A strong odor came from him, swampy and bitter with an undertaste of honey. That she had not noticed it before was hard to understand, for it was pervasive and insistent; she decided she must have been distracted by the unexpectedness of coming upon him. There was no ignoring the odor now that she was aware of it, and at first she found it intensely disagreeable, though within moments it ceased to bother her.