The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine Page 15

  I ached for him. I am not a man of stone.

  But I said, “You know that that’s impossible.”

  “Is it? I thought ‘impossible’ is a word that isn’t in your vocabulary.”

  “There is a difference between things that are merely difficult to accomplish and things that cannot be accomplished at all.”

  “Yes, I know. But this one isn’t of that sort.” He gave me a curious look, fierce and sharp, like winter lightning out of nowhere. In a tone of voice that was oddly constricted, as though a band had tightened about his throat, he said, “Do you ever go into my ship, Kell?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “I thought you might. What condition is it in, inside?”

  I wondered at this. He rarely spoke of his ship: not at all, that I could remember, in several years. “It is as it was. We preserve it with care, as a holy monument. Grown somewhat rusty, perhaps, on the outside—”

  “And the inside?”

  “As it was on the day you last saw it.”

  “Sealed, is it, against rain, and insects, and general decay?”

  “Sealed, yes.”

  “Is it, now?” He fixed his gaze on me as though he were pinning me to a board with a dagger. He said, speaking with great precision and clarity in that same tight tone of voice, “It often crosses my mind, Kell, that it might not be difficult to put the ship back into good working order, if it hasn’t deteriorated since the time of my landing. And you lead me to think that it hasn’t.”

  Those quiet words rocked me like an earthquake.

  Hoarsely I said, “Can that be true?”

  “I’m sure of it.” The new intensity of his features was truly disturbing. There was a glow about him. It was as though fire streamed from his eyes. “The fundamental mechanisms were still intact when I made my landing. Certain components had broken down, others had become decalibrated, but the essential instrumentation was all right. Otherwise I couldn’t ever have made my landing. If nothing in it has suffered further damage since I was imprisoned here, it ought to be fixable. You and I, working together, could put everything back together.”

  It is the comet, I thought, that has aroused these thoughts in him. Awakening yearnings that have long lain dormant within his soul.

  “If my ship were to be repaired, I’d be able at the very least to get as far as one of the survey buoys ten or fifteen light-years from here and send a signal that would bring a rescue team to pick me up. And my ship can be repaired, Kell. By you. I’m certain of that.”

  I said nothing. I could scarcely bear to look at him.

  His strange five-fingered hands reached toward me in what could only have been an imploring gesture. They were shaking in agitation. His voice grew louder. “It’s not impossible. It isn’t! I know what kind of skills you have, Kell. You’re one of those amazing universal geniuses that come along maybe every five hundred years in a race’s history. No, don’t turn your head away like that—you know it’s true as well as I do, and this is no moment for false modesty. You’re an engineer and an architect, and you have an master artisan’s technical abilities and the mind of a great physicist, and you paint and sculpt and write plays and poetry as well, and I don’t know how many other things you can do, but the list probably includes just about everything.—Help me escape. Help me, Kell.”

  I stared at him. I begged him with my eyes not to go on.

  But he was merciless. “There’s no way you can refuse me. A man like you, Kell, with such a roving, questing, insatiable spirit: it surely can’t be hard for you to imagine what it would be like to be locked away like this for the rest of your life!”

  No. It was not hard at all. I shivered at the thought. But still I did not reply.

  He took my silence for assent. The agitation that had taken hold of him subsided somewhat, and his entire posture grew more relaxed. “Well, then. Are we agreed? The two of us, Kell, working side by side, would be able in a matter of months, maybe even only weeks, to—”

  “No,” I said, at last, and held up my hand to stem the fervid flow of his words. “Wait. Please. No more of this. I told you it isn’t possible, and I meant just that.”

  The light went from his face.

  “What would stand in the way?” he asked.

  I forced myself to speak calmly. “Alien, you have no comprehension of the realities of the situation. Do you seriously think that we could simply tell the king that you have decided that you would like to go home, whereupon the king would blithely release you from this maze and allow you to instruct me in how to make it possible for you to escape? Why would he be any more willing to do that than his father was?”

  “I understand that. But certainly you of all people must know how to get me out of this place. We could go to the ship secretly by night, and—”

  “Secretly. Yes. I drug the guards, let us say, and we sneak over there every night and work, and at dawn I bring you back here with no one the wiser. And finally one day the work is done and the ship is fixed and you get into your Tower and fly away to the stars, and what do you think will happen to me, when you have gone from here? Think, Alien, think! Will the king believe that you escaped from this maze by yourself, by means of some magical conjuration you knew? That you repaired your ship unaided? No, Alien, you will fly away home, and once you are gone I will die the most terrible death that any mind could invent. And that is why I say that what you ask is impossible. You want me to commit suicide for you. That is something I will not do.”

  5.

  Ultimately it did not greatly surprise him, I suspect, that I was unwilling to help. He knew what risks it would involve for me. But he would have had no peace if he had not asked.

  And I had no peace now that he had.

  I left him soon afterward. A deep and abiding melancholy had come over me and I needed to be alone. I walked through the streets of the city looking neither to the left nor the right, and responding not at all to such greetings as came my way, until I had left the paved streets behind and found myself on the earthen path that leads down to the shore of the Living Sea.

  Twilight was coming on, now. Two or three of the smaller moons had risen in the eastern sky. I stood beneath the cliff on which the royal Citadel sits and its long shadow stretched far out before me into the sea.

  In the changing light of the waning day the sea itself was taking on its evening colors, a deeper radiance, a stronger pink hue shot through with hints of crimson and aquamarine. The phantasmagorical giant creature that is the Living Sea is more active by night. It stirs and tosses and ripples; small spiky projections and scalloped turrets rise from its surface and are quickly reabsorbed; little bubbling mouths appear, gape two or three times, and vanish.

  I stood for a long while staring intently outward as if somehow I could see across to the mythical lands on its far shore, where the ones we call the Other Folk are said to dwell, those who subsist on nothing but stone and sand, and speak in whistling tones, and sacrifice three thousand wild song-birds to their sun-god every morning. They have a third eye set in the middle of their forehead, so we are told, and dozens of fingers clustering at the ends of their arms, and blue skin pockmarked everywhere with deep circular craters. But who knows if any of these things are true? Nobody in ten thousand years has crossed the Living Sea to visit the Other Folk; and tales ten thousand years old are no more to be trusted than the books we read in our dreams.

  Such a great sadness had taken hold of me after my visit to ther Alien that for a time I considered giving myself up to the sea then and there. I had felt that temptation often enough before, for I had long been curious about the occult transformative powers the mysterious substance of the sea was rumored to possess, and what better way to understand those powers than to experience them directly?

  But this was different. What was surging through me now was a yearning not for knowledge but for oblivion. Perhaps the sea would dissolve and consume me, as everyone believed it would consume any creature foolhardy
enough to enter it; or perhaps I would simply drown the way one might drown in a lake or river of ordinary water; or maybe the current would carry me eastward, on and on, until at last I came ashore in the land of the Other Folk, who would hail me as a god. Whatever happened, I would be relieved of the feelings of shame and guilt that gripped me now.

  But I knew what foolish, useless thoughts those were, and I put them from my mind.

  I put, indeed, everything from my mind. I turned myself into a statue of myself, and stood empty of thought, while the sky grew dark and the long glowing tree-shaped streak of white that was the comet came out of the southwest and took up its place high above me. And I remained that way for an hour, or perhaps two, or three, or maybe it was only a couple of minutes.

  I must have begun to walk along the shore, after a time, for when consciousness and volition returned to me I found myself far down at the southern end of the beach, where the Tree of Purple Flame stands in its great solitary splendor at the edge of the Living Sea.

  It is a marvelous thing, that mighty tree. Its roots go deep down into the bed of the sea and its trunk is a smooth white unbranching shaft that rises nearly as high as the cliffs that border the shore. I think the tree is made of sea-stuff too, for strange ghostly purple light emanates from it, and the shadow that it casts is blue, and its great spreading crown is in constant motion, everything writhing, swarming, changing, never the same for a moment. You can see eyes in that writhing crown, faces, beating wings, long serpentine shapes that coil about each other to form intricate knots.

  The tree surges and quivers with the constant transformation that is the essence of life. No one that I know of has ever dared to go close to it. Even the shadow that it casts is said to be deadly. But I have pondered that tree ever since I was a boy. To me it is a tree of magic. Now, standing nearer to it than I had ever been before, I pondered its nature yet again, for a time. There I stood, with one strange tree in front of me, another of a very different sort plunging through the dark sky overhead; and gradually my gloom and my pain went from me, and I was myself again, and I turned and went up the steep path that led from the seashore to the town.

  A message from the Citadel was waiting for me at my chambers. The king had sent for me again: I was to come at once.

  This time I found him not in his usual haunt, the Equinox throne-room, but rather in the Grand Council-Hall, which is the great room that occupies most of the third level of the building. That was a disturbing thing in itself, for the Grand Council-Hall is a huge and awesome place, and Hai-Theklon tends to go to it whenever some huge and awesome thought is rattling around in his mind. Which usually presages trouble for me.

  He was seated at the far end of the room, which obliged me to walk its entire considerable length before I could make my gesture of obeisance. A great fire was burning in each of the fire-pits down there, so that his kingly grandeur was enhanced by the impressive and dramatic shadows of him that flickered on the blank white wall behind him.

  He is fond of that effect. I spent five months painting vivid scenes from the lives of the gods all up and down the other walls of the Grand Council-Hall—I used a process I invented myself, grinding dry pigments into powder and applying them to the wall with a wet brush while the undercoating of freshly applied lime-plaster was still drying, so that the colors would set with the plaster and remain forever bright—but I deliberately left the rear wall unpainted, as though anticipating that King Thalk’s successor would want to magnify his own importance with this sort of shadow-show. I wonder if Hai-Theklon realizes that.

  He said right away, before I could rise from my deep genuflection, “I have thought of a way of defending ourselves against the comet, Kell.”

  “Did I not explain, Sire, that there is no need for—”

  He waved me to silence.

  “The metal tower, Master Kell, in which the Alien flew from his world to ours: is it not the case that it could be repaired, and made to fly through the heavens once again?”

  That stunned me, coming so soon after my conversation on the same subject with the Alien himself.

  Fumblingly I said, “Well, Majesty—it may well be that that can be done, but it is just as likely—that is—if the mechanisms that operate it—we know that they were already somewhat damaged when the Alien came, and the passage of time could well have—but—on the other hand—perhaps—”

  I have never sounded like such an idiot in all my life.

  The king cut serenely into my blathering babble. “No matter what the difficulties are, Kell, you can deal with them. I know that you can.”

  I said, making a desperate effort to recover some fragment of my poise, “I lack your assurance of that, Sire. But possibly—just possibly—” A hopeful, cajoling note came into my voice now. “Perhaps, Majesty, it could be done, yes. If the Alien were allowed to be with me in the Tower as I worked at the repairs—if he were to instruct and direct me, and even to assist me, let us say—”

  “No. He must not leave the maze, not now or ever.”

  “But how, then, will I be able—?”

  “He can tell you what must be done, and you can go there and do it, and when you are done the ship will fly again.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded solemnly. Then after a moment I said, very gently, “And may I ask, Sire, what connection this has with defending ourselves from the comet?”

  “Why, that ought to be obvious, Kell! Don’t you see, you can cause the ship to go aloft on a course that will send it crashing into the comet. Thus destroying it as it passes overhead, before it can do us any harm!”

  He was serious. It was all I could manage to keep from laughing aloud at this grotesque multiplication of absurdities.

  But I maintained a certain degree of gravity, and soberly told the king that I would give his plan the most careful consideration; and then I extricated myself from his presence as quickly as I could, before I betrayed my true opinion of his splendid idea.

  I hurried home and told Theliane of my conversations with the Alien and the king. She reacted with the greatest excitement and enthusiasm for the project. This, in my folly, I misinterpreted as growing entirely out of her affection for the hapless prisoner in the maze.

  The next day I told the Alien also of the king’s eagerness to have the ship repaired. The irony of the coincidence amused him greatly. He laughed—it has always seemed remarkable to me that the Alien’s way of showing amusement should be so much like our own—and shook his head in a sidewise fashion again and again, which is his sign of bemused disbelief. Then he turned his head away from me and put his hands over his face. His shoulders moved in an odd convulsive way, and a low muffled sound came from him, out of his throat and chest, that I had never heard him make before.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He swung around to face me. There was the sheen of fresh moisture on his cheeks, as if some unusual gland had discharged a substance from his eyes.

  “Expressing my happiness at the thought of going home,” he said.

  6.

  The comet grew even brighter in the days immediately following, so that it seemed to fill half the sky and obscured the light of the stars and the moons.

  And as it waxed ever more brilliant overhead, the mood in the city, already sufficiently ugly, turned much uglier still.

  Burning ghazul trees as offerings to the gods had been bad enough, I thought; but now the people began burning temples also. The gods, it now was widely declared, had withdrawn their favor from the city, and they must be informed that we were displeased by that. If they would threaten us with a comet, well, then, we would retaliate by threatening them with the loss of our love. And so there was a serious fire at the House of the Ceremonies and a lesser one, though still very destructive, at the lovely little Shrine of Kleysz. Two priests of the cult of Hayna were beaten in the streets, and one of them died. The sanctuary of Gamiridon was looted of
its treasures by an angry mob. An animal was slaughtered in a sacrilegious way at the foot of the golden statue of Maldaz in Pelathas Square.

  I would have told them, if anyone had been willing to listen to me, that the continuing increases in the comet’s brightness and apparent size were normal and not at all dangerous. I would have explained to them that the comet had not yet reached its closest point of approach to the world and would grow brighter yet in the days ahead before it grew smaller, but that it was still embarked on a course that would take it safely past us and out into the darkness of space again.

  But no one was willing to listen to me, nor in any case did I feel much desire to go forth expounding on these matters to those who do not have the capacity to understand them.

  Besides, it appeared that going out among the populace would have been dangerous for me. Theliane reported that she had heard tales circulating in the streets that blamed me, not the gods, for bringing the comet—“the tree,” they kept calling it, with idiotic persistence—down upon the world. It was all my fault; supposedly I had engaged in some grandiose scientific experiment that had gone awry and as a result the “tree” had been pulled toward our world from some other part of the heavens.

  “They have started speaking of it as ‘Kell’s tree,’” Theliane told me, trembling. I had never seen her show fear before. But it was for me, not herself, that she trembled.

  It was easy enough for me to keep out of sight. By day I was safe in the heart of the maze, receiving instruction from the Alien on the location and workings of his ship’s controls. And by night I was in the ship itself, striving to find some way of making the vessel functional again.