The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine Read online

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  And what I was thinking was, Zeus. Zeus. Zeus. Zeus.

  And so we travel about the world together, Aphrodite and I, seeing the things in it that are beautiful, and there are many of those; and so she distracts me from my true task. For the time being. It is very pleasant, traveling with Aphrodite; and so I permit myself to be distracted this way.

  But I have not forgotten my purpose. And this is my warning to the world.

  I am a restless being, a mighty thrusting force. I was created that way. My adversary doesn’t seem currently to be around. But Zeus is here somewhere. I know he is. He wears a mask. He disguises himself as a mortal, either because it amuses him to do so, or because he has no choice, for there is something in the world of which he is afraid, something from which he must hide himself, some god greater even than Zeus, as Zeus was greater than Cronus and Cronus was greater than Uranus.

  But I will find him. And when I do, I will drop this body and take on my own form again. I will stand mountain-high, and you will see my hundred heads, and my fires will flash and range. And Zeus and I will enter into combat once more, and this time I will surely win.

  It will happen.

  I promise you that, O small ones. I warn you. It will happen.

  You will tremble then. I’m sorry for that. The mind that came with this body I wear now has taught me something about compassion; and so I regret the destruction I will inevitably visit upon you, because it cannot be avoided, when Zeus and I enter into our struggle. You have my sincerest apologies, in advance. Protect yourselves as best you can. But for me there can be no turning away from my task.

  Zeus? This is Typhoeus the Titan who calls you!

  Zeus, where are you?

  THE TREE THAT GREW FROM THE SKY

  The behind-the-scenes story of this story will provide no astounding revelations. It was the spring of 1996; I had just finished writing the enormous novel Sorcerers of Majipoor, and somehow had a little creative vitality left over; and Scott Edelman, the editor of Science Fiction Age, asked me on the right day whether I might feel like contributing a longish story to his magazine. I had been reading something about the artificer Daedalos at the time, and also there was a beautiful comet with a hyphenated name that I have now forgotten hanging in the night sky over our garden just then. A little cross-pollination of the imagination took place and out came this story, which Edelman happily published and which went on to be a Hugo and Nebula nominee, though it won no awards.

  Science Fiction Age was a magazine that bore all the dreadful stigmata of modern science-fiction publishing: strikingly ugly cover lettering, gaudy and unpleasant full-page advertisements within for movies that I would never have dreamed of going to see, classified ads in back for psychics and pen-pal clubs and ghastly statuettes of dragons and elves. But that is what you have to do, in this vulgar, tacky age, if you want to succeed in science-fiction publishing. It also happened that Edelman, a man of wit and taste and much experience in science fiction, slipped a great many superb science-fiction stories and science articles in among all that tackiness. Nevertheless the magazine went out of business after five years or so. Did it fail because it wasn’t ugly enough, or because the stories were too good? We’ll never know. I was sorry to see it disappear, anyway, though editor Edelman—surely a man for modern times—did manage to land on his feet, moving over to some Internet publication about science-fiction movies and television shows. I hope he returns to the world of print publications, such as it is, sooner or later, because I know that that’s where his heart is.

  1.

  The visitor star, which the people foolishly think of as a tree, is growing larger overhead every night. Of course it is no sort of tree at all, but simply the kind of bright wandering star that star-watchers call a comet; but to the common folk it is a tree, a tree that is descending upon us from the heavens. They fear that it means to fall upon the world and bring about the destruction of all things.

  It is easy enough to see why the people believe that. Through all the weeks of its presence above us the visitor star has steadily gotten bigger and brighter; it has become amazingly bright by now, astonishingly huge above us. But I know that it will not fall on us. I have plotted its position night by night; I see that it moves constantly to the north and east in the sky all the while that it is approaching us.

  Plainly it will miss us by a goodly distance and sail onward through the cold empty spaces that surround us until it plummets into the sun. Or, what is more likely, it will not enter the sun but will swing on an arc about it like a pebble on a string, as comets of the past have been known to do, until finally it is caught in the hand of Maldaz, or perhaps one of the other gods that watch over us; and the god will hurl it back across the heavens to whatever place it came from.

  All this week I have wanted to speak with the Alien about the comet and its movements—soon, before the king changes his mind again and decides to have him put to death after all.

  The Alien, naturally, would understand these cometary matters much more deeply than I, because he has actually sailed across those dark seas of the night where the stars have their homes, and I have only looked up into them from below and wrestled with the gods for answers to my questions. During his years among us I have had many conversations with the Alien and he has taught me a great deal, but beyond doubt there will always be much more that I could learn from him.

  At the moment there is, however, the problem of gaining access to him. He has been in a foul, sour mood for weeks, now—ever since the coming of the comet, in fact—sequestering himself, allowing no guests to come to him. The maze in which he dwells not only pens him in but keeps outsiders from entering unbidden. Since the comet came to take on its full brilliance we have sometimes seen him emerge at night, pacing high up along the inner wall of his enclosure with his face turned toward the sky, as well he might, for the comet is an extraordinary sight and he has few diversions in the course of his daily life. But on those occasions he has taken no notice of us; and when my daughter Theliane went to visit him the day before yesterday, as she so often has in the past, he turned her angrily from the gate, even her, his one true friend.

  These moods have come to him often during his time among us, though not often with such intensity as at the present time. He has an angry heart, our Alien does. The burning poison of incurable loneliness and homesickness has spread through his veins in these fifteen years of his captivity.

  The Alien fascinates me. His mere presence among us tells me that the sky is full of worlds, and those worlds are peopled, and some of those peoples go to and fro among the stars as easily as I would go from Kevorn to Stoi, from Stoi to Shagrool, from Shagrool to Kinipoil. That is a miracle to me. We thought we were alone in the universe until the Alien came. Now we see the folly of that belief: I do, at least.

  How I would love to know all the things he knows! His head must be full of ideas and concepts never even dreamed by us, and what great wonders I might accomplish if I could call upon those ideas myself! His knowledge added to mine would allow me to achieve things never before attempted.

  Nevertheless, I should not be too disparaging of my gifts or my accomplishments. My own mind, on its own, is far from a trivial thing. It is able to meet most intellectual tasks with distinction. I look; I see; I think; I comprehend. And so I understand this visitor star, and therefore it does not frighten me.

  But the people will believe what they will believe, and how can I make them listen to me? I have never been able to make them listen to me. They respect me, yes. They employ my services and value my skills, yes. But to listen, when I tell them things?

  No.

  They will believe what they will believe. And the visitor star frightens them. The wide plain west of the city is bright with the fires of ghazul trees that they have set alight as offerings to the gods. They burn a tree to Maldaz, and nevertheless the visitor star draws ever nearer, and so they burn a tree to
Kleysz, and one to Hayna, and one to Gamiridon; and still it comes toward us.

  The ghazul trees are rare and very beautiful, and their sweet oil is precious for its seventy uses. It is a pity to waste them this way.

  But the people will believe, and their beliefs make them afraid.

  What can I do? Let them believe.

  2.

  At the beginning of the month, on a night when no moons were in the sky and the visitor star blazed out against the darkness like a river of light, the king sent word to me that I was to come to him in the Citadel, the great hilltop palace overlooking the Living Sea that I built for his father long ago, and explain to him the meaning of what was happening in the sky.

  It always gives me great pleasure to behold the Citadel. It is not the cleverest of my buildings—the cleverest one is the maze that I built as the Alien’s habitation and prison—but it is the largest and most magnificent. Still, the Citadel’s design is not without a cleverness of its own. Outside, it is massive and grand. The great sloping walls of greenish-black stone, the enormous gray exterior columns that support the heavy blue-tiled roof, the awesome lifelike images of gods and goddesses that I spent four years carving with my own hands in high relief on the western facade: all these testify to the power and might of the dynasty that has governed us these nine hundred years past.

  But once you are within the building, all is twisting and undulating and sly, and that testifies to the subtlety and vision of Kell the Artificer, who is the only man in the world who could have conceived such things. I am divine Tulabaratha’s creature, he who is the builder of palaces for his fellow gods, and he, who is by far the most skillful of all the godly ones in the making of things, the Artificer of Artificers, has shared his understanding with me in generous measure.

  The king was waiting for me in the Throne-Room of the Equinox. That is the long open hall on the second story at the palace’s eastern end, facing the sea. There is a day in the spring every year when the sun in its northward journey crosses the celestial equator, and a day every autumn when it crosses that equator again going in the other direction, and on both of those days the hours of light and the hours of darkness are exactly equal. I have positioned the throne in that throne-room in such a way that at the moment of the equinoctial crossing a long shaft of golden-red sunlight penetrates the room and strikes a polished bronze pommel that rises above the center of the throne.

  That was an easy enough effect to calculate; but King Thalk for whom I built the Citadel was so overwhelmed by his first sight of it that he paid me a bonus of five thousand pieces of gold, and King Hai-Theklon his son seats himself on the throne a day or two prior to the moment of the light-beam’s semi-annual advent, for fear it might come early some year and he would miss it. And there he sits for hour after hour every spring and every autumn, despite my having advised him that it is not necessary to do so, until Maldaz has indeed hurled his golden shaft against the consecrated sphere of bronze.

  I loved old King Thalk, but I have no great fondness for King Hai-Theklon his son. He was lazy and arrogant and unintelligent when he was a boy and I was his tutor; and though he is far from lazy now that he is king, he is still arrogant and unintelligent. Since he has kept those latter two qualities into his adult years, I wish he had kept his laziness as well: he would do less harm that way.

  He was standing right at the brink of the throne-room’s open side when I entered, hands clasped behind his back, head hunched forward, staring upward into the sky. One good shove from behind would have sent him down into the Living Sea. But I lack the blind courage of the assassin.

  “Kell?” he said, without turning.

  “I hail and obey, Majesty,” I said, and made the formal gesticulation of submission even though he was not looking my way. Now that he is king, he demands these formalities and I am careful not to forget that. It was once easier between him and me. For many years I called him “Choyin,” which was his father’s pet name for him, after his fancied resemblance to the little glassy-legged serpent of the Great Central Desert. If I dared to use that name for him now he would probably lock me up for the rest of my days in the maze where the Alien lives.

  Still not deigning to glance at me, he beckoned me toward him with a flick of his hand. I came up close, and impatiently he ordered me closer yet, right to the edge. Red waves of dizziness swept through me, but I took up my place right beside him at the brink and clamped my two long anchor-toes tightly around the stone rim. My hsorn-sense is keener than most—too keen, perhaps—and therefore I have some fear of edges. To soar through the air like a bird would afford me intense delight, I like to think, but standing at the very edge of a steep drop makes me queasy. Still, I forced myself.

  Just below us lay the roiling strangeness of the Living Sea. Which, to be accurate, is not exactly a sea at all, but rather an immense quivering pudding-like lake of a pale pink substance that is thicker than water but thinner than mud. It stretches eastward from this shore as far as anyone can imagine. Some say it goes halfway around the world.

  I have studied it for many years: I know that it is a live creature, a single tremendous entity that has some sort of intelligent mind, though of what quality that intelligence is, not even I can say. By day and by night a flickering pink radiance rises from it, and warmth. The people believe that anyone who enters it will instantly die.

  Despite the competing brightness that came from the sea, the visitor star stood out clearly and vividly against the dark moonless sky. The reason why the people spoke of it as a “tree” was obvious even to me, for the tail that splayed out behind it across much of the sky was particularly long and thick, indeed somewhat like the trunk of a tree, and terminated in a multitude of twisted curling streamers of light that could be construed as bearing some resemblance to a tree’s roots. Ignorant but imaginative folk might well think that what they saw was a great tapering narrow-headed tree tumbling crown-foremost toward the world.

  “This new star,” said the king. “Is it a tree or is it a comet, Kell?”

  “A comet that looks something like a tree, Majesty.”

  “A comet. You’re certain of that?”

  “A very bright and large comet, yes. A thing of dust and ice that comes out of the cold distant darkness trailing a white stream of light, crosses our course in the heavens, and vanishes again back into the darkness from which it came.”

  “‘No comets are seen when a poor man dies, but the fall of kings is blazoned in the skies,’” he intoned, in that dreadful pumped-up over-theatrical way that I had never succeeded in persuading him to abandon.“You know those lines, Master Kell?”

  “They are from my play Heyolf the Bold, Sire.” He had quoted the passage with uncharacteristic accuracy.

  “Yes. The wise old man Vithak speaks them. And then the young wizard Greyborn replies, ‘Comets, aye! Famine and pestilence pour down from them like rain from a cloud.’ The fall of kings, Kell. Famine and pestilence.” He still had not looked at me so much as once. His voice was hollow, sepulchral. “If your poetry has any truth to it, Master Kell, the coming of this comet means that the realm is in great danger.”

  “My poetry is only poetry. My play is just a play.”

  “All just a fabric of lies, is it, this great masterpiece of yours which once you forced me to commit to memory down to its final word?”

  “The play in its totality is a thing of wisdom and truth, Majesty. But it is the sum of its differing parts. Individual characters speak according to their individual ways of thinking, and those are not necessarily ones with which the author agrees. Old Vithak believes that comets are omens of evil, and so does the young wizard Greyborn. But the era in which they purportedly lived was long ago, when men were ignorant. It is a mistake to think that Kell the Master of Sciences, who created Vithak and Greyborn and put those words in their mouths, believes everything that they happen to believe.”

  “So I am mistaken, am I, Kell?”

  There was an ominous tone i
n his voice. The king is slight of build, and I am a heavy-set man; but it would have been easy enough for him to fling me into the sea with one petulant push. I found myself wondering if I would try to take him with me if he did.

  “It is not a useful policy to interpret the words of characters in a play as statements of scientific verities,” I said carefully. “Poetry is poetry and science is science.”

  “You are both a scientist and a poet, Kell. I have always assumed that your poetry is scientific.”

  “That is not a safe thing to assume, Majesty.”

  He was silent for a time, considering that. Then he said, “Is this comet going to crash into us, do you think?”

  “It will pass to the north and east, traveling toward the sun, and leave us in peace.”

  “Am I to take that answer as science or poetry, Kell?”

  “I have made observations every night since the comet appeared in the sky. It grows larger, yes, but also it travels upward and outward. Last week it was there; tonight it is here; next week it will be there.” I pointed far to the northeast.

  “Unless it decides to smash through the roof of this Citadel instead, and kill the king, and bring famine and pestilence to the world, as your wise men say in that play of yours.”

  “Comets make no decisions, Majesty. They follow the inexorable laws of nature. Just as a river will not suddenly decide to flow uphill, this comet will not decide to turn from its path and descend into our midst.”

  “The people think it will. I’ve sent men out into the city to listen to what they say. They think that the comet is a great tree that Kleysz has placed in the sky, or perhaps it was Hayna who put it there, and it grows downward from the heavens all the time, getting bigger and heavier, and eventually its roots will lose their hold on the sky and it will drop upon us in a terrible catastrophe. That is what they believe.”