The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine Page 16

  The first few days there were purely exploratory ones. I made careful sketches of the panels and dials and levers that had puzzled me for so long, and took them to the Alien, who pored over them and tried to identify the role of each piece of equipment and determine whether it still might be capable of operation. Of course he had not been inside the ship for fifteen years, and much had grown unclear to him; but gradually the details started to return to his mind.

  It was on the fifth day that I first felt the emotion, unusual to me, of despair. The control mechanisms of the Alien’s ship had been defective to some degree in the first place, or he would never have had to make his forced landing here. They had been further damaged in that very landing, and afterward had suffered fifteen years of natural deterioration; and here was I, a man of a civilization entirely different from the one that had built this ship, trying to undo all those various kinds of damage without any knowledge of the underlying technology! It was the wildest sort of fantasy to think that I could succeed.

  I have not had much experience of despair in my life. I felt it as a leaden weight within my throat, and an aching behind my eyes, and a griping of my gut that left me unable for a day or more at a time to take sustenance.

  Theliane was dismayed by the darkness of my mood. “Perhaps I can help you with your work, father,” she suggested.

  I saw no way that she could. But she so fervently wanted to take part, and I was so reluctant to rebuff her in any way, that I began bringing her into the Tower with me. She stood at my side, she shined lights for me into the dusty crannies, she handed me tools as I requested them. Her very presence compelled me to moderate the pessimism that continued each night to mount in me. But I could not conceal from myself the reality of the situation, which was that I was making no progress.

  The intensity of the comet’s light was baleful now and disconcerting even to me. It illuminated the night sky almost like a second sun, though it was a sun that emitted no heat, only a cold terrible glow.

  One could see, even with the naked eye, the huge rocky sphere that was its head, jagged and ominous, with thick masses of luminous smoke streaming away behind it. The color of its long tail hadchanged, now, from its earlier pure white to a kind of frightful yellowish-green, with a hard metallic forcefulness to it that struck the eye the way the clangor of a bell strikes the ear. That change of color troubled me. Could the comet be closer than I had calculated, so close that the stream of gaseous matter that it threw off was reacting with the gases that make up our atmosphere? It was a terrible hour for me. Yet again I doubted my own figures; but I checked and rechecked, and came away convinced once more that I had made no error.

  The king called me to him once more. This time I found him in his private quarters in the Citadel, surrounded by the sculptures and paintings and tapestries I had so lovingly made for his father long ago.

  “Was it you that summoned the comet to our world, Kell?” he asked sternly.

  “You give me too much credit, Majesty. I have many skills, but drawing comets down from the skies is not among them.”

  “The people speak of it now as ‘Kell’s tree.’ Are you aware of that, Kell?”

  I sighed. “I am, yes. The people say many things, Sire, and not all of them are founded in fact. The comet is not a tree, and it is not mine.”

  “Finish the job of fixing the Alien’s ship,” he said, “and hurl it against this comet, and let us have an end to this thing. How goes the work?”

  “It goes very well, Majesty. I hope to have excellent news for you very soon.”

  That was an utter lie, not the first I had told this king. It is often necessary for an ordinarily trustworthy man to provide some sort of shady response to the peremptory demands of unreasonable people.

  But on that very night I made the first breakthrough toward success.

  By baleful comet-light I crossed from the Citadel to the Plaza of the Kings and entered the Tower of the Alien, and ascended the spiraling metal ramp to the control cabin at the top. Theliane was not with me on this particular evening; she had gone to the maze, to the Alien.

  I laid my hands against the plates and dials of the control panel, which I had inspected without avail so many times before. But this time, because of things the Alien had explained to me about functions and capacities that had suddenly begun to cohere in my mind, I began to see the pattern. I saw only its corner at first, and even that was shrouded in mist; but I am such that even if I see only the corner of a pattern, I often can in time make out the whole of it, and that was what happened now.

  I drew new sketches and brought them to the Alien, and he studied them and nodded and drew some sketches of his own, and asked certain questions of me and sent me back to the Tower to find the answers. And I found them; and that led to more questions, and more answers still. And one night a few days later I began to pull broken sections free from the master panel, and to set about the task of designing and forging replacements for them.

  So did the real work of repair begin, and so did it proceed. I will not claim that I understood all of what I was doing, or even a great deal of it. The mind that directed the work was the Alien’s, from a distance, guiding me from his prison as though he was standing by my shoulder and whispering instructions in my ear; what I contributed were the eyes and the hands, and the metallurgy, and the intuitive skills. It was as though a god had taken hold of me and was bringing forth wonders from me as I lay in his grasp.

  Theliane was of no small assistance. Her mind did not have the wide-ranging perception of mine, the ability to make sudden swooping leaps of comprehension and connection, but even so her learning and skills were far from trifling. She had helped me before; she knew why metals behave as they do, how they respond to temperature and pressure, how they are refined and annealed. She had learned more than a little of the purifying arts of melting and reducing and fusing.

  She worked with me step by step, phase by phase. She asked sensible and useful questions; she made keen observations. I was proud of her.

  I should have burned that Tower to the ground. Instead, with the aid of the Alien’s instructions and Theliane’s faithful help, and working as ever under the benevolent guidance of my patron god Tulabaratha who is the special deity of artificers, I succeeded in restoring it to working order. It was a triumphant demonstration of my skill. I never knew before that one might live to regret a triumph.

  7.

  On a day when I saw beyond any doubt that success was within my reach, that the completion of the task was at hand, I began to give some thought once again to the predicament I had been creating for myself.

  The king had ordered me to repair the Tower for the sake of using it to shatter the encroaching comet; but that, of course, was nonsense. What the ship would be used for was to facilitate the Alien’s escape from our world.

  And what would happen to me, once the Tower went roaring up into the sky with the Alien on board?

  Why, very likely the king would hold me responsible for his departure. I understood the workings of Hai-Theklon’s mind only too well. No matter that I had repaired the ship at the king’s own direct order; no matter that I had no apparent motive for aiding the Alien to flee; someone had to be the scapegoat, and I was the one who had done the work. The king would also probably hold me to blame for the coming of the comet, as so many others already were doing. So I would die in some ghastly fashion and the king’s anger would be assuaged, and sooner or later the comet would leave the vicinity of our world and Hai-Theklon would take credit for that, too. But I would still be dead.

  So the thought occurred to me that it might be a sensible thing for me to be on board that ship when the Alien took off for his home.

  I played with that idea as if it were some wondrous new toy that I had fashioned for myself. To rise into the heavens atop a bellowing column of flame; to soar across the darkness, looking down on our world from on high until it dwindled to the size of a grain of sand; to plunge outward into that
infinity of stars of which the Alien had so often spoken—what joy that would be!

  And then one day to arrive at the Alien’s own world! To behold that prodigiously fantastic landscape with my own eyes!

  The mere contemplation of that dizzied me. The blue-green water and the green-leafed trees; the gleaming titanic buildings rising like arrows into the cloud-flecked sky; the hordes of flat-faced people moving through the streets; the vehicles that go forward with no beasts to draw them, the air-ships that stay aloft without movement of their wings; the mountains that give forth bursts of flame and rivers of molten rock; the flakes of frozen water falling from the skies. I have traveled widely on this world of ours and I have seen many of its famous wonders, the wheel-beasts of the western plains and the phosphorescent lakes of Gemborionta and the voriagar hives of the Velk Peninsula and the trees of salt that grow in Domrin Land, and much else. I have been to the chapel of Kleysz at Galfi and the bottomless pools of Grelf, and I have seen what there is to see at Pangu and Rorm and Glay. But all those things would not be a patch on the marvels of the world of the Alien. Endless astonishments would await me there, all the days of my life.

  So much to see! So much to learn! The strangenesses, the wonders, the inexplicable enigmas with which I would wrestle. Things that were utterly unfamiliar, that had only shape and color, but no meaning. Things that were fascinating because they were incomprehensible: things whose purposes were unguessable, because they filled needs that were themselves beyond the compass of my mind. What ecstasy to confront such things! What delight to find in every hour of every day the necessity to struggle to understand the simplest things of that other world! I would be like a child again, wandering breathless through a world of mysteries, finding and solving puzzle after puzzle until the larger patterns began to connect themselves and overwhelming revelations came rushing in on my ever-avid mind.

  And then I thought of Theliane, and the whole fantasy collapsed into ashes.

  I could never leave her. She was the joy of my life, the music of my heart. Without her I would be nothing but a strange lonely old man with an unusual mind and an empty soul.

  But to bring her with me: how could I do that? To rip her away from all that was familiar to her, and carry her off to a world of unutterable alienness where every moment of every day would confront her with a bewildering jumble of insoluble riddles, and where she would grow old and die without ever having known the touch of a loving mate or heard the laughter of her own children?

  No. No. It was impossible. Insane. I banished the idea from my mind.

  The ship was ready, though, for testing. I had no idea what to do.

  And while I hesitated—concealing for the moment the extent of the recent progress I had made, both from the Alien and, of course, the king—catastrophe came down upon me.

  It was night. I was in my observatory, measuring the position of the comet. So concerned with my work was I that although I was aware of a curious booming sound, quite loud, and saw out of the corner of my eye an odd flash of red light passing just above the rooftops, it was thirty seconds, at least, before I reacted. By that time I could hear the first sounds of uproar in the city.

  “Theliane?” I called. “What’s going on out there?”

  No answer came. The noises from the street grew louder and more agitated: wild shouts, hysterical outcries of fear. Out of the midst of chaotic yelling came one man’s voice, loud and clear as a god’s, crying over and over, “The tree is falling into the city! We all are doomed! The tree! The tree! The tree!”

  The tree, yes. I knew what he meant by that. But the comet was still in its proper place in the sky, a fiercely bright yellowish-green slash across the belly of the darkness. It was not falling on us. It would not fall on us.

  I looked for Theliane downstairs, running from room to room, calling her name. She was nowhere in the house. But tacked to the inside of the front door was a note in her handwriting:

  Father—

  I have gone up into the sky to look at the tree. I must see; I must know. You understand what I am saying.

  I love you.

  Gods, no! No!

  A reverberating drumbeat of thunder rolled in my head. White fire flashed. I heard a loud buzzing as of ten thousand insects all at once, marching through my brain. For a moment everything grew disjointed, and I was unable to see. The faces of mocking gods whirled about me in a pulsating circle.

  Then I collected myself a little and stepped outside the house, and saw throngs running through the streets, hundreds of people, thousands, perhaps, many of them wild-eyed and screaming as they ran, and every one heading in the same direction, eastward, toward the cliffs, the shore, the Living Sea. It was a raging river of panicky humanity; and like a man caught up in some terrible nightmare I allowed myself to be engulfed by that river and borne along by it on its inexorable journey to the sea.

  Long before I reached the shore I was able to see what it was that was drawing them there. From the high rim of the cliff I saw it, by pale pink sea-glow and yellow comet-light. I would gladly have screened my eyes from the sight. But there was no hiding from it, none.

  Theliane’s flight in the starship had been very brief. The rust-flecked Tower of the Alien was lying on its side, a short distance out in the Living Sea, jutting up at an angle with perhaps half its length above the surface. Theliane had succeeded in getting the ship aloft, which was miraculous enough, but evidently she had been unable to control it, and it had executed a wobbly, erratic flight lasting no more than a matter of moments, during which it traveled just above rooftop level across the width of the city from its starting point in the Great Plaza of the Kings, over the temple district and the residential quarter and out past the hill of the royal Citadel, and onward a short distance over the sea.

  But there it had reached the end of its journey. The ship’s power must have cut off when Theliane was barely beyond the edge of the shore: in my mind’s eye I saw the vessel halting in mid-air, standing upright and seemingly motionless above the sea for a moment, and then toppling in a steady downward plunge.

  I tell you all this by putting one word after another, in calm, dispassionate, orderly fashion. But I assure you that I was neither calm nor dispassionate nor orderly as I went running down that sloping earthen path from the top of the cliff to the shore of the sea. Nothing was in my mind but the fact that the Tower had gone aloft and that it had crashed and that my daughter was in it, out there in the unknown and threatening substance that is the Living Sea. No: not even that. My only thought was that Theliane was in danger and I must rescue her.

  The crowd on the shore melted away to either side of me like mist before the piercing rays of the summer sun as I ran past. Do you know how you seem to move in a dream, as though floating, your feet not touching the ground? That was how I moved then.

  I reached the edge of the sea and I did not pause at all. In that dreamlike drifting way I moved out onto the strand of steaming pink mud that forms at the border between land and not-land, and, without breaking my stride, I continued unhesitatingly on out into the body of that great unknown thing that no one had ever entered before.

  What did I expect to happen to me? I expected nothing. I hoped only that I would survive the short journey out to the fallen ship, and bring Theliane forth from it alive.

  The sea was warm and steaming, and very shallow even when I was fifty or sixty paces out from shore, no more than chest-deep for me. It did not seem to grow deeper at all as I proceeded outward. Its strange odor, sweet and not unpleasant, struck my nostrils. I felt its pink substance warm about me, rising past my calves, my knees.

  It had a thick consistency, oddly agreeable to the touch. A quiet hissing sound came from it, a burbling, a kind of gentle squeak. Each step I took produced a soft sucking effect as I lifted my feet. Small wriggling protrusions rising from the surface of the sea danced playfully about me like little serpents standing on their tails.

  Was there pain? No. Were my legs di
ssolving? No. Was I being transformed into something unimaginably strange? No. I was still myself, still alive, still moving forward. The sea’s grasp was like a sly caress, unseen slithering tendrils sliding over my body, across my thighs, my belly, my loins. Sea-stuff was in my mouth, my eyes, my ears. A strand of it had wrapped itself around my throat.

  Colors flashed everywhere. There was purple haze all around me. I saw ghosts circling in a shimmering golden aura in the air, faces that seemed almost familiar, one that might have been my father’s, and one that resembled King Thalk, and one that could have been Theliane’s.

  I felt no fear. The sea was too warm, too welcoming, too comforting for that.

  What I did feel was a strange sense of contact, with the sea, with the sky, with everything that existed in the world. I was immensely extended; I was infinite; I understood what it must be like to be a god.

  It seemed to me that I could stretch out my arms and touch the fingertips of one hand to the cliffs behind me and those of the other to the coast of the distant unreachable eastern continent halfway around the world, where the three-eyed whistling Other Folk live. It seemed to me also that my head rose high above the clouds, so that I could stare face to face at the gleaming pockmarked visage of the comet, and it could stare at me. And I felt the roots of the planet beneath my feet, the tumbling, churning fires of the core, where the toiling god Manibal sweats eternally over the forge of creation.

  I touched a myriad souls at once: the soul of the king, and the soul of the Alien, and the souls of all the people who were clustered along the beach. I made contact with everyone in the world at once. Everyone except one; the only soul I could not find was that of my daughter.

  Once I glanced back toward the shore. It was surprisingly far away, a black line against the comet-riven sky. The multitude of townspeople who had gathered there now looked to me like so many insects. They stood motionless, watching, watching, watching, as Kell the lunatic artificer went striding ever farther into the Living Sea.