Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  Robert

  Silverberg

  Tom O’Bedlam

  Here, from the famed author of The Majipoor Trilogy, is his long-awaited major work of science-fiction and fantasy that brings him into the mainstream of the great practitioners of imaginative literature.

  It is A.D. 2103. Tom O’Bedlam, like the wandering character in the medieval ballad, “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song,” feigns madness as a sane means of survival in a high-tech, post-industrial world. Only Tom knows that his “sanity” is his way of coping with the extraordinary powers he possesses—powers that enable him to send his mind out across unimaginable gulfs of space, touring other worlds and capturing them in his unconsciousness.

  When a star probe that has been journeying to Proxima Centauri—four light years from Earth—sends back images of life, it becomes clear that this is the same shimmering green world of Tom’s imagination, the same images he has telepathically transmitted to others. Sometimes threatening, sometimes beyond belief, the distant worlds that communicate with Tom are ultimately revealed as not a threat but a salvation, and Tom O’Bedlam, “poor Tom,” as he likes to refer to himself, has become their designated instrument and representative on Earth.

  Realism and fantasy, faith and disbelief combine to make Tom O’Bedlam Robert Silverberg’s masterwork.

  Selected Titles by Robert Silverberg

  Nightwings

  Dying Inside

  The Stochastic Man

  The Book of Skulls

  Lord Valentine’s Castle

  Majipoor Chronicles

  Valentine Pontifex

  Gilgamesh the King

  Copyright © 1985 by Agberg Ltd.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Published in the United States of America by Donald I. Fine, Inc. and in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Ltd.

  Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 85-070754

  ISBN: 0-917657-31-4

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on acid free paper. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  This one’s for Don

  To consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet only one grain will grow.

  — Metrodoros the Epicurean,

  c. 300 B.C.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  * * *

  One

  From the hag and hungry goblin

  That into rags would rend ye,

  And the spirit that stands by the naked man

  In the book of moons, defend ye.

  That of your five sound senses

  You never be forsaken

  Nor wander from yourselves with Tom

  Abroad to beg your bacon.

  While I do sing, “Any food, any feeding,

  Feeding, drink, or clothing?

  Come, dame or maid,

  Be not afraid

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  —Tom O’Bedlam’s Song

  THIS time something had told Tom to try going westward. West was a good direction, he figured. You head for the sunset, maybe you can walk right off the edge into the stars.

  Late on a July afternoon he came struggling up the slope of a steep dry wash and paused in a parched field to catch his breath and look around. This was about a hundred, hundred-fifty miles east of Sacramento, on the thirsty side of the mountains, in the third year of the new century. They said this was the century in which all the miseries were supposed finally to end. Maybe they really would, Tom thought. But you couldn’t count on it.

  Just up ahead he saw seven or eight men in ragged clothes, gathered around an old ground-effect van with jagged red-and-yellow lightning bolts painted on its rusting flanks. It was hard to tell whether they were repairing the van or stealing it, or both. Two of them were underneath, with their heads and shoulders poking into the propeller gearbox, and one was fiddling with the air intake filter. The rest were leaning against the van’s rear gate in a cozy proprietary way. All of them were armed. No one paid any attention to Tom at all.

  “Poor Tom,” he said tentatively, testing the situation. “Hungry Tom.” There didn’t seem to be any danger, though out here in the wild country you could never be sure. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, hoping one of them would notice him. He was a tall, lean, sinewy man with dark, tangled hair, somewhere around thirty-three, thirty-five years old: he gave various answers when he was asked, which wasn’t often. “Anything for Tom?” he ventured. “Tom’s hungry.”

  Still no one as much as glanced toward him. He might as well have been invisible. He shrugged and took his finger-piano from his pack, and began to strum the little metal keys. Quietly he sang:

  Time and the bell have buried the day,

  The black cloud carries the sun away—

  They went on ignoring him. That was all right with Tom. It was a lot better than being beaten up. They could see he was harmless, and most likely they’d help him out, sooner or later, if only to get rid of him. People generally did, even the really wild ones, the killer bandidos: not even they would want to hurt a poor crazy simpleton. Sooner or later, he figured, they’d let him have a bit of bread and a gulp or two of beer, and he’d thank them and move onward, westward, toward San Francisco or Mendocino or one of those places. But five minutes more went by, and they continued not to acknowledge his presence. It was almost like a game they were playing with him.

  Just then a hot, biting wind rose up suddenly out of the east. They paid attention to that. “Here comes the bad news breeze,” muttered a short thick-featured red-haired man, and they all nodded and swore. “God damn, just what we need, a wind full of hard garbage,” the red-haired man said. Scowling, glaring, he hunched himself down into his shoulders as if that would protect him from whatever radioactivity the wind might be carrying.

  “Turn on the props, Charley,” said one with blue eyes and rough, pitted skin. “Let’s blow the stuff back into Nevada where it came from, hey?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” one of the others said, a little sour-faced Latino. “That’s what we oughta do. Sure. Christ, blow it right back there.”

  Tom shivered. The wind was a mean one. The east wind always was. But it felt clean to him. He could usually tell when radiation was sailing on the wind that blew out of the dusted places. It set up a tingling sensation inside his skull, from an area just above his left ear to the edge of his eyebrow ridge. He didn’t feel that now.

  He felt something else, though, something that was getting to be very familiar. It was a sound deep in his brain, the roaring rush of sound that told him that one of his visions was starting to stir in him. And then cascades of green light began to sweep through his mind.

  He wasn’t surprised that it was happening here, now, in this place, at this hour, among these men. An east wind could do it to him, sometimes. Or a particular kind of light late in the day, or the coming of cold, clear air after a rainstorm. Or when he was with strangers who didn’t seem to like him. It didn’t take much. It didn’t take anything at all, a lot of the time. His mind was always on the edge of some sort of vision. They were boiling inside him, ready to seize control when the moment came. Strange images and textures forever churned in his head. He never fought them any longer. At first he had, because he thought they meant he was going crazy. But by now he didn’t care whether he was crazy o
r not, and he knew that fighting the visions would give him a headache at best, or if he struggled really hard he might get knocked to his knees, but in any case there was nothing he could do to keep the visions from coming on. It was impossible to hold them back, only to bang and jangle them around a little, and when he tried that he was the one who got most of the banging and jangling. Besides, the visions were the best thing that had ever happened to him. By now he loved his visions.

  One was happening now, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Coming on now, for sure. The green world again. Tom smiled. He relaxed and yielded himself to it.

  Hello, green world! Coming for to carry me home?

  Golden-green sunlight glimmered on smooth alien hills. He heard the surging and crashing of a distant turquoise sea. The heavy air was thick as velvet, sweet as wine. Shining elegant crystalline forms, still indistinct but rapidly coming into sharp focus, were beginning to glide across the screen of Tom’s soul: tall fragile figures that seemed to be fashioned of iridescent glass of many colors. They moved with astonishing grace. Their bodies were long and slender, with mirror-bright limbs sharp as spears. Their faceted eyes, glittering with wisdom, were set in rows of three on each of the four sides of their tapering diamond-shaped heads. It wasn’t the first time Tom had seen them. He knew who they were: the aristocrats, the princes and dukes and countesses and such, of that lovely green place.

  Through the vision he could still dimly make out the seven or eight scruffy men clustered around the ground-effect van. He had to tell them what he was seeing. He always did, whenever he was with other people when a vision struck. “It’s the green world,” he said. “You see the light? Can you? Can you? It’s like a flood of emeralds pouring down from the sky.” He stood with his legs braced far apart, his head thrown back, his shoulders curving around as if they were trying to meet behind him. Words spilled from his lips. “Look, there are seven crystallines walking toward the Summer Palace. Three females, two males, two of the other kind. Jesus, how beautiful! Like diamonds all up and down their skins. And their eyes, their eyes! Oh, God, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

  “Hey, what kind of nut do we have here?” someone asked.

  Tom barely heard. These ragged strangers hardly seemed real to him now. What was real was the lords and ladies of the green world, strolling in splendor through glades and mists. He gestured toward them. “That’s the Misilyne Triad, d’ye see? The three in the center, the tallest. And that’s Vuruun, who was ambassador to the Nine Suns under the old dynasty. And that one—oh, look there, toward the east! It’s the green aurora starting! Jesus, it’s like the sky’s on fire burning green, isn’t it? They see it too. They’re all pointing, staring—you see how excited they are? I’ve never seen them excited before. But something like this—”

  “A nut, all right. A real case. You could tell, right away, first thing when he walked up.”

  “Some of these crazies, they can get damn ugly when the fit’s on them. I heard stories. They bust loose, you can’t even tie them down, they’re so strong.”

  “You think he’s that bad?”

  “Who knows? You ever see anybody this crazy?”

  “Hey, crazy man! Hey, you hear me?”

  “Let him be, Stidge.”

  “Hey, crazy man! Hey, nutso!”

  Voices. Faint, far-off, blurred. Ghost-voices, buzzing and droning about him. What they were saying didn’t matter. Tom’s eyes were glowing. The green aurora whirled and blazed in the eastern sky. Lord Vuruun was worshipping it, holding his four translucent arms outstretched. The Triad was embracing. Music was coming from somewhere, now, a heavenly music resonating from world to world. The voices were only a tiny scratching sound lost somewhere within that great mantle of music.

  Then someone hit him hard in the stomach, and he doubled over, gagging and gasping and coughing. The green world whirled wildly around him and the image began to break up. Stunned, Tom rocked back and forth, not knowing where he was.

  “Stidge! Let him be!”

  Another punch, even harder. It dizzied him. Tom dropped to his knees and stared with unfocused eyes at brown wisps of withered grass. A thin stream erupted from him. It felt like his guts ripping loose and spewing out of his mouth. It was a mistake to have let himself fall down, he knew. They were going to start kicking him now. Something like this had happened to him last year up in Idaho, and his ribs had been six weeks healing.

  “Dumb—crazy—nut—”

  “Stidge! Damn you, Stidge!”

  Three kicks. Tom huddled low, fighting the pain. In some corner of his mind one last fragment of the vision remained, a sleek and gleaming crystalline shape, unrecognizable, vanishing. Then he heard shouts, curses, threats. He was aware that a fight was going on around him. He kept his eyes closed and drew his breath carefully, listening for the inner scrape of bone on bone. But nothing appeared to be broken.

  “Can you stand up?” a quiet voice asked, a little while later. “Come on. Nobody’s going to hurt you now. Look at me. Hey, guy, look at me.”

  Hesitantly Tom opened his eyes. A man whose face he did not know, a man with a short-cropped dense black beard and deep dark rings under his eyes—one of those who had been working inside the gearbox before, most likely—was crouching beside him. He looked just about as mean and rough as the others, but somehow there seemed to be something gentler about him. Tom nodded, and the man put his hands to Tom’s elbows and delicately lifted him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. Just shook, some. More than some.”

  Tom glanced around. The red-haired man was slumped down by the side of the van, spitting up blood and glaring. The others were standing back in a loose semicircle, frowning uneasily.

  “Who are you?” the black-bearded man asked.

  “He’s just a fucking nut!” the red-haired one said.

  “Shut up, Stidge.” To Tom the man said again, “What’s your name?”

  “Tom.”

  “Just Tom?”

  Tom shrugged. “Just Tom, yeah.”

  “Tom from where?”

  “Idaho, last. Heading for California.”

  “You’re in California,” the black-bearded man said. “You going toward San Francisco?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter a whole lot, does it?”

  “Get him out of here,” Stidge said. He was on his feet again. “God damn you, Charley, get that nut out of here before I—”

  The black-bearded man turned. “Christ, Stidge, you’re asking for a whole lot of trouble.” He brought his right arm up across his chest and cocked it. There was a laser bracelet on his wrist, with the yellow “ready” light glowing. Stidge looked at it in astonishment.

  “Jesus, Charley!”

  “Just sit back down over there, man.”

  “Jesus, he’s only a nut!”

  “Well, he’s my nut now. Anybody hurt him, he’s gonna get hard light through his belly. Okay, Stidge?”

  The red-haired man was silent.

  Charley said to Tom, “You hungry?”

  “You bet.”

  “We’ll give you something. You can stay with us a few days, if you like. We’ll be going toward Frisco if we can ever get this van moving.” His dark-ringed eyes scanned Tom closely. “You carrying anything?”

  Tom patted his backpack uncertainly. “Carrying?”

  “Weapons. Knife, gun, spike, bracelet, anything?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Walking around unarmed out here? Stidge is right. You got to be crazy.” Charley flicked a finger toward the blue-eyed pitted-faced man. “Hey, Buffalo, lend Tom a spike or something, you hear? He needs to be carrying something.”

  Buffalo held out a thin shining metal strip with a handle at one end and a teardrop-shaped point at the other. “You know how to use a spike?” he asked. Tom simply stared at it. “Go on,” Buffalo said. “Take it.”

  “I don’t want it,” Tom said. “Someone wants to hurt me, I figure th
at’s his problem, not mine. Poor Tom doesn’t hurt people. Poor Tom doesn’t want any spike. But thanks. Thanks anyway.”

  Charley studied him a long moment. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” Charley told him, shaking his head. “Okay. Whatever you say.”

  “They don’t come no crazier, do they?” the little Latino asked. “We give him a spike, he smiles and says no thanks. Out of his head crazy. Out of his head.”

  “There’s crazy and crazy,” said Charley. “Maybe he knows what he’s doing. You carry a spike, you likely to annoy somebody who’s got a bigger spike. You don’t carry any, maybe they let you pass. You see?” Charley grinned. He clapped his hand down on Tom’s bony shoulder, hard, and squeezed. “You’re my man, Tom. You and me, we going to learn a lot from each other, I bet. Anyone here touches you, you let me know, I’ll make him sorry.”

  Buffalo said, “You want to finish on the van now, Charley?”

  “To hell with it. Be too dark to work, another couple hours. Let’s get us some jackasses for dinner and we can do the van in the morning. You know how to build a fire, Tom?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right, build one. Don’t start no conflagration, though. We don’t want to call attention to ourselves.”

  Charley began pointing, sending his men off in different directions. Plainly they were his men. Stidge was the last to go, limping off sullenly, pausing to glower at Tom as though telling him that the only thing keeping him alive was Charley’s protection, but that Charley wouldn’t always be there to protect him. Tom took no notice. The world was full of men like Stidge; so far Tom had managed to cope with them well enough.

  He found a bare place in the dry grass that looked good for making a fire and began to arrange twigs and other bits of kindling. He had been working for about ten minutes, and the fire was going nicely, when he became aware that Charley had returned and was standing behind him, watching.

  “Tom?”