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

  “I know that. Believing a thing doesn’t make it so.”

  “But what am I to do, Kell?”

  “About their beliefs? Very little can be done about those, I would expect. Go before them and tell them that their fears are needless, that the visitor star cannot possibly do us any—”

  “Any harm, yes,” he cut in, drawling the words derisively, before I could finish the sentence. “And next you will say that time will prove me right and the people will rejoice. Fine. And if the comet falls upon us anyway, what then?”

  “Why, then, we will all be dead. But it is not going to happen.”

  “You are the great artificer, Kell. You are Tulabaratha’s own likeness come to dwell among us. Fashion something for me that will blow this thing, this tree, this comet, from the skies before it can do any injury to us. Some great projectile hurled from a mighty catapult, for example, that will shatter it into a million harmless fragments.”

  “That is not only unnecessary, Sire—I can show you mathematical proof that the comet will pass us by—it also happens to be impossible.”

  “A word you rarely use,” he said, and laughed.

  “But appropriate in this case.”

  “How am I to trust these mathematical proofs of yours? What if they mean no more than the words of the characters in that play of yours?”

  “We could get the Alien out of his prison and question him about these matters. He has traveled between the stars; very likely he has seen comets journeying in their courses; he will know the law by which they must abide. And they will be exactly as I have told you they are.”

  “The Alien,” said the king moodily. “I should take him out of that maze and have his throat cut on the high altar.”

  I gave him a look of horror. “Sire?”

  “I’ve felt since I was a boy that letting him live among us is dangerous. The place he comes from is one where the gods we love are unknown. He owes them no allegiance, indeed probably denies their very existence. His coddled existence here is a mockery in their faces. For fifteen years they’ve waited for us to destroy him; and, since we don’t do it, they’ve hurled this tree at him to do the job. The fact that the tree will smash us up too is unimportant to them, I suppose.”

  “A comet, Sire. Not a tree.”

  “Whatever. If it should collide with the world—”

  “It will not. And the Alien is a poor stranded wayfarer whose life among us is a misery of loneliness. He is here through no choice of his own, but while he is here he is our guest, and guests are sacred. If you were to kill him, the gods might indeed be annoyed enough to hurl something our way. I beg you, Majesty, put all thought of sacrificing him out of your mind.”

  “Well—”

  “And your fears as well. No harm will come to us from this comet.”

  “Well,” he said again. “Perhaps so, Master Kell.”

  3.

  I backed most humbly and properly out of the royal presence then, even though the king still stood with his face turned from me, looking outward to the sky, and made my way through the splendors of the palace that I had so cunningly built for his father—through the Room of Nine Metals, and past the Pool of Nine Waters, and down the spiral staircase that I had fashioned so that it drills like an auger into the Nine Levels of the world’s core, far below the Citadel itself. It may be blasphemy to say so, but the divine Tulabaratha by whose grace I have attained all my skills could not have done better. And then I passed beneath the bronze dragons with which I had bedecked the Lesser Gate and was outside in the night, and saw the comet hanging overhead, a dazzling shaft of cool white fire in the sky, bright as the sword of Gamiridon.

  The king’s anxieties had been allayed, for the moment, and all was well.

  But with Hai-Theklon all was never well for long. He is just intelligent enough to be restless of mind, but not sufficiently intelligent to know when he is putting that restlessness to a foolish purpose. It is hard for him to hold to a steady course. Would he think once again, tomorrow, that it was a good idea to have me build a catapult with which to destroy the comet as it hovers above us? Would he begin toying again with the notion of sacrificing the Alien as an offering to the angry gods? Or sacrificing me, for that matter, if the panic among the common folk continued to grow? I am more useful to him than any ten thousand of them could ever be; but logic has never prevented kings from acting against their own best interests. They usually have the luxury of surviving their mistakes and continuing as before. I though, have only one life.

  Confident though I was of my own conclusions concerning the comet, I resolved to check and recheck all my calculations to make absolutely certain that this comet, unusually big as it is, would behave like all previous ones known to history and swing past the world at a comfortable distance. A conversation on that subject with the Alien would be in order, too, I thought. I have, and never have made any secret about it, high regard for my own powers of mind; but I am wise enough to know that I am not infallible. That is one of the ways in which I am different from a king.

  I was positive that the comet would not hit us. But what if it came very close, much closer than I expected it to, and swept like an avenging scimitar above the tops of our tallest buildings? The people would doubtless go berserk. In their terror they would surely burn the city and perhaps try to kill the king; and the king, as the wild mobs approached the Citadel, very likely would turn his anger on me.

  So my figures had to be utterly trustworthy. If I saw any possibility of error in them, it would probably behoove me to disappear from the capital until the comet had passed by, or even, perhaps, to seek permanent service with some other king. There are many who would have me, and gladly.

  I would set to work on my recalculations at once, that very night.

  The quickest route from the Citadel to the compound where I have my observatory and workshop passes through the Great Plaza of the Kings. That is where the Tower of the Alien, which long ago had carried its lone passenger across the great sea of suns to our world, had made its landing on the astounding day when it came hurtling down through the sky, and that was where it had stood ever since, precisely in the center of the plaza, on the grassy lawn where King Mosa-Bodrik slew his fifty brothers in the time of the myths. The grass for a considerable distance around it was badly charred, but has long since grown back. “How I marvel at the elegant way you came down in the one open space in the midst of our city without harming a thing,” I told the Alien once; to which he replied, not at all flattered, “Elegant? It was outrageous idiocy. I had no business landing in the city at all. But the ship was out of control and I was doing the best I could. It was just blind luck that I didn’t kill fifty thousand people.”

  The Tower has never ceased to fascinate me. It summons for me a deep and shivering sense of the vastness and wondrousness of the universe; and never had I crossed the Great Plaza of the Kings without pausing a moment or two to stare at it in awe. And, sometimes, not simply to stare; on many occasions I had actually entered it, clambering up the winding staircase within it in order to study the array of mysterious devices in the cabin at its summit. No one else, to my knowledge, ever went into it. No one would dare.

  They utterly baffled me, those devices. But just as one will probe with one’s tongue at a sore tooth, so had I gone back again and again into the Tower to stare in bewilderment at those perplexing banks of mechanisms. I am not accustomed to bewilderment, nor to perplexity. Solutions to problems, even the hardest ones, have a way of presenting them to me, after a time. But not these. The devices in the Tower were alien mechanisms and the problems they offered were alien problems; and my mind, for all its versatility, is deeply rooted in the things of this world.

  This night the Tower seemed more wondrous even than usual. Rust, over the years, has flecked its battered metal skin with a coating of brilliant colors, ochre and auburn and scarlet and emerald, but now, lit by the comet’s white glare, it had taken on a whole host of unfamiliar and won
derful new hues.

  As I stood then before it there leaped into my mind’s eye the thought of making a painting of what I beheld at that moment, the comet splitting the sky with its light and the Tower beneath it all ablaze with the colors engendered by the reflection of that light. It would be a considerable challenge to reproduce the myriad interwoven coruscating tones of the Tower and the cool contrasting brilliance of the comet with mere pigment on canvas; but when had I ever turned away from challenge?

  There was, however, no time for making paintings just now. So that night I merely walked entirely around it, briefly stopping several times to admire the eerie starlit beauty of its patina, and after a few moments of that I went on my way.

  When I reached my observatory I made that night’s measurements and etched them on the screen that gives me my comparative locations of the comet; and I saw that it had continued to move in the direction in which I believed it should be traveling, and at the requisite velocity. I held up to the sky the instrument that tells me the size of heavenly objects, and saw that the tail had once more extended its length. This, too, was completely in accordance with my prediction.

  Then I took out the calculating machine that I had fabricated from strips of reed and slivers of copper wire, and went through all my numbers from the very first, plotting the actual course of the comet across the sky against my original predictions of them. And I confirmed, to my great satisfaction, that I had been correct at every step.

  These things took me all night. Just before dawn Theliane came to me, sleepy and puzzled-looking, a candle in her hand.

  “Father? I awoke and saw a light in here. Is there anything wrong?”

  “Only in King Hai-Theklon’s head,” I answered. “He’s been reading old plays of mine and something he found in one of them made him start to think the comet was going to hit us after all. So I’ve been rechecking my calculations. It’s taken me a while. The figures are right.”

  Of Hai-Theklon’s notion of putting the Alien to death to propitiate angry gods, I said nothing. I knew of the deep love she bore for that creature from another world. And I suspected that Hai-Theklon, like his father before him, both dreaded and to some degree revered the Alien, and would not dare to harm him, so why arouse needless apprehension in her?

  “Only he would doubt that your figures are right!” she said indignantly. “But it does seem so close, all the same. And constantly getting closer. I can see why he’d be worried. The whole city’s muttering, you know.”

  “It isn’t close at all,” I said.

  “It isn’t?”

  “When the comet comes into the sky each night, it’s in approximately the same place as the night before, right? It’s moved a little to the north, a little to the east, but you still see the same stars in the background behind it, Ligur, Izka, Semilgat, Vroz. Yes?”

  “Well—yes.”

  “The world turns, and the comet goes out of view as morning nears, and the next night it’s back again. Ligur, Izka, Semilgat, Vroz. Whereas the moons, which everybody agrees are very close to us, go whizzing across the sky from horizon to horizon. If the position of the comet against the background of the stars doesn’t change very much, it must be farther away than the moons, is that not so? A good deal farther, as a matter of fact. And no one worries about the moons colliding with us. Nor should we worry about the comet. It’s well out there in space, and though it’s going to get closer to us before it starts going away, it’s not going to hit us. I promise you that, Theliane. There are laws that all comets obey—laws not made by kings, but by the gods themselves—and this comet will behave the way all the others have.”

  “So it’s definitely a comet, then, and not some kind of gigantic tree that’s dropping down on us?”

  “Theliane!”

  “Did I say something stupid again, father? You know I’m not really stupid. But I suppose to you everybody, even someone with a reasonable amount of intelligence, must seem not much better than a moron.”

  “Hardly so,” I told her.

  And I scarcely need observe that Theliane was not stupid at all: simply not a genius. Not being a genius is no sin, though, or the priests would be busy kindling absolution-offerings all day and all night. But Theliane’s mind was agile enough, as the minds of ordinary folk go, and her beauty was so remarkable that I often wondered how such a creature as she could have come from the loins of one like me.

  I must concede, however, that I had assistance in the fashioning of her. In the distribution of parental traits Theliane may have received only a portion of her father’s boiling intelligence, but a full measure of her mother’s beauty. Better that, I suppose, than the other way around; and had she been given intellectual gifts on a par with her physical ones, the gods would have had to destroy her out of sheer envy.

  She said, peering through the observatory window at the paling sky, from which the comet had vanished some hours before, “Do you know, father, I wish that it really was a tree with a great solid trunk, and that it would come close enough for me to climb up into it.”

  “You do? You would?”

  One other trait of mine that had not been inherited by her was my overriding caution.

  “Wouldn’t you, father? No, perhaps you wouldn’t. But I’d do it in a flash. It must be half as big as the world, wouldn’t you say? And I’d climb right to the top of it. Imagine the view from up there! All the stars at once, and moons that no one can see from down here. And the other planets practically within my reach. Just stretch out my arm, like this—and touch—”

  She laughed. Her eyes were bright with yearning. She was twenty years old, and still had a child’s eager desire to enfold the universe in her arms.

  “It’s not a tree,” I said. “And ninety-nine percent of what you see up there is nothing but a bright stream of gas. You’d have a hard time climbing that.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “If I could, I would. Maybe somehow I will.”

  I smiled and set about putting my instruments away, and she, perhaps already beginning to plan the scheme that would cause me so much grief, went off to bring me my morning meal. She was always solicitous in that way. None of my wives ever cared for me the way Theliane did. I have had no luck in my choice of women, not even once, except that one of them, sullen and cold though she was, gave me Theliane.

  As she spread the food-bowls before me I said to her, “I need to talk with the Alien. But he’s been so peculiar, lately. You said he wouldn’t let even you visit him the other day.”

  The Alien had always regarded Theliane with great warmth, ever since she was a small child. There is no one in the world who has ever been closer to him than she. He was often surly and curt, but never with her. His skill in our language was something he owed to her, the long hours she had spent cloistered with him in his prison cell across fifteen years. Now that she was grown, she would have become his lover, I suppose, if such a thing had been physically possible between a man of his race and a woman of ours.

  “It must be the sky-tree that agitates him so,” she said. “The comet, I mean to say. Ever since it first came into view he’s been getting edgier and edgier. What can that mean?”

  I had no idea. Nor did she. But she promised to try again to get him to allow her through the gate, and to win his permission for me to enter also.

  I slept from dawn to mid-morning, which is all the sleep I need. When I awakened, I heard Theliane moving about on the lower level of my chambers, singing prettily to herself as she tidied and dusted. She told me, when I went downstairs to her, that she had been to the Alien, who seemed more calm today; that he had admitted her to the maze in friendly enough fashion; that he was willing to let me speak with him that very afternoon.

  I clasped her in my arms and tenderly touched my forehead to hers.

  “What would I do without you?” I asked her. “What would I ever do?”

  4.

  The maze of the Alien, as I have said, is my most ingenious creation. Ol
d King Thalk, may the gods ever caress him, told me to spare no expense: to make it a monument that would stand for the ages, a work of wonder that would outlast him and me both and the Alien as well, and by its unique distinction of design and elegance of artifice to announce to all the world in centuries to come that it was our city that had been singled out by the gods to be the home for this extraordinary being from the far stars.

  It is a building fashioned out of spirals, a great many of them, some of which go upward and some down. They interlock and overlap in an artful way that dizzies the mind: you will be carefully following a downward-sloping spiral that seems to be a direct route inward, and, though you are diligently ignoring the temptations of dead-end side-passages and brightly lit major corridors that clearly go nowhere, it will suddenly occur to you from the effort of your movements that you have somehow ceased to descend and begun to climb a steep ramp, all the while thinking you were continuing down, and that you now are heading toward the perimeter of the maze rather than toward its center. Or you will be under the impression that you are ascending until you find out that you are not, and so forth.

  There are, naturally, dozens of passages that double back in short order upon themselves and return you swiftly and mockingly to your starting point. There are some that seem agreeably straightforward until they terminate in impassable walls. There are high-vaulted galleries flanked with five or six doorways of which two or three appear to lead onward in useful directions, but none of which in fact go anywhere. And so on and so on, a delicious little city of mysteries. Though many paths will take you easily and encouragingly inward through the outer third of the maze, only a few will carry you very far into the middle third, and only one will bring you to the innermost zone.

  I made the maze beautiful, too, though few in our lifetimes would have a chance to appreciate its beauty. The floors of the great galleries are decorated with a host of eerie little tapering mounds of carved white stone, much like the stalagmites one finds in caves. From certain angles they have the look of animals, or people, or gods; but then when you walk around to the other side of them they become incomprehensible lumps of shapeless rock, and you wonder how you could have recognized any sort of form in them whatever.