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

  From the cliff, the starship had seemed only a little way from shore, but the actual distance was greater than I had thought. An endless time went by until at last I came to the ship.

  It had fallen into the sea in such a way that the entry hatch was on the underside, beneath the sea’s surface. I would have had to submerge myself completely in order to reach it, and that gave me pause for the first time since I had gone out from the shore; but also I realized that Theliane, intending a flight into the cold and darkness of the farther sky, would have dogged the hatch shut before taking off. I would never be able to enter it from without.

  Instead I began to clamber up the side of the ship, crawling hand to hand along its ridged skin. There were hand-holds there, perhaps for the use of maintenance personnel on that faraway planet from which it had been launched. Bright droplets of sea-stuff fell away from my hands and arms like glistening pearls as I emerged into the air.

  Near the top of the vessel is a porthole made of something like glass, though it is not glass, that provides a view for the occupant of the control cabin. In a desperate plodding way I pulled myself up the ship until I was looking in that porthole, and I looked upon the face of my daughter Theliane.

  Her eyes were open, but she was dead.

  I had no doubt of that, from the moment I first saw her. Her eyes, those lovely glowing eyes whose color was the delicate color of thyrla eggs, were glassy and unblinking, and filmed over with the unmistakable film of death. Her finely tapered nostril-slits were slack; her mouth drooped and sagged to one side. The posture of her body as she sat in the straps of the pilot’s cradle was the posture of the dead.

  The shock of the landing impact, no doubt, had killed her. I could not accept that thought, but neither could I deny it. I hammered my hands against the side of the ship until I thought my bones would break. I pressed my face against that porthole and shouted her name again and again, knowing that no sound from outside could possibly penetrate those metal walls. But in any case she could never have heard me.

  Then my strength failed me and I dropped away from the ship’s skin, falling free of the vessel’s flank and landing in the sea. My landing was soft and easy. The sea seemed to reach up to catch me and it drew me down gently into itself. Quietly I lay just beneath the surface, unmoving, not even bothering to breathe, cushioned by the density of the strange warm fluid. I floated. I drifted. I was in the caressing arms of a vast mother.

  It embraced me and enfolded me and very soon, I think, it would have begun to digest me. I imagined my skin and my flesh peeling painlessly away, and soon afterward my bones as well. The particles that had composed me would distribute themselves through the body of the sea, and I would be part of it forever.

  But that did not happen. Numbly, unthinkingly, I began to paddle with my arms, and after a moment more to drop my feet to the shallow bottom and to push myself forward, and step by step I made my way toward shore.

  I came to land close by the Tree of Purple Flame, far down the beach from the place where I had entered the sea. I saw the bright shaft of its smooth white trunk and the ghostly flickering of its unceasing purple radiance, and they drew me onward. The tree was singing, too, a low, gentle, soothing, wordless song of comfort and strength, and as I drew close to it I began to sing also.

  Its gnarled roots rose above the surface of the sea. I seized one and clung to it and pulled myself across its smooth slippery sides until I was up out of the sea entirely. I lay there for a time, gasping, looking up into the crown of the tree, seeing the faces there, the eyes, the coiling shapes, the beating wings. Then I rose and walked down the narrow ridge of the root’s upper face until I arrived at the trunk itself, and I embraced it, stretching out my arms as wide as they would go. But that was hardly enough to reach one-fiftieth of the way around that great trunk.

  People had come down the beach toward me. But they would not go close to the tree; they stood back, gaping, eyes very wide, whispering among themselves.

  I saw that the king himself was among them.

  “Majesty,” I said in a voice that was like a voice from the next world, and let go of the tree-trunk and took a few tottering steps toward him. “Majesty, I repaired the ship, and my daughter rode it into the sky without my knowledge or permission. She wanted to see the great comet at close range. And now the ship is in the Living Sea and she is dead within it.”

  For once there was no bluster about him and no foolishness either. His face was sad and solemn. “She had the same hunger for knowledge that burns in you, Kell.”

  “Yes. And a great deal more courage.”

  “She was very brave, yes.”

  I sank down on the sand before him and tried to make the gesture of obeisance, but I was trembling too much from my exertions to manage it. Hai-Theklon, bending, caught me by the elbows and lifted me to my feet. His eyes stared into mine.

  “What will you do now?” he asked me.

  “I will build a machine that will go out into the sea and bring the Tower back to shore,” I told him. “And I’ll open it up and take her from it, and carry her out of the city to the burial-place and do the things that are done there. And then—then—”

  I went faltering into silence. To my great surprise a wrenching sound came from me, from deep down in my throat, a sound that was something like the sound that the Alien had made that time when his face had become moist and he told me that he was expressing his happiness at the thought of going home. It had not seemed like a sound of happiness then. It was not a sound of happiness when it came from me now.

  “She was very brave,” said the king again. “And very beautiful, I am told.”

  “Very beautiful, yes, Sire,” I said. “She was that. And much more.”

  8.

  The next day I designed, and over the following week, under my direction, fifty artisans constructed, the machine that is to pull the Tower of the Alien from the place where it lies half submerged in the Living Sea. It is a great wooden framework on wheels, a kind of giant wagon, equipped at its front end with a large and sturdy leather hoop that can be tightened by the operation of an arrangement of cogs and wheels.

  Pulleys and levers connect the machine to a large and sturdy iron band that I have caused to be set into the face of the cliff along the shore. Pressure on the levers induces the pulleys to tighten, moving the wagon-wheels and thrusting the machine outward into the sea. Reversing the action of the levers will draw the wagon back toward land. It is a cunning device. The old artificer may have been shattered by grief, but he has not yet lost his skills.

  I will ride the wagon tomorrow as it goes into the sea. Despite my demonstration that it is possible for us to go into the Living Sea and return unharmed, there is still no one else who will venture close to its pink surf. But that is all right. I should be the one who brings Theliane back from the sea, and I will be the one who does it. From my seat atop the wagon, I will operate the controls that bring the hoop into place around the ship and tighten it; and then I will give the signal and the men on shore will pull the wagon and the ship up onto the land.

  And what will happen after that?

  “Do you think the ship can be repaired again?” I asked the Alien, the day before yesterday. I have gone to visit him every day, since Theliane’s death. He is nearly as deeply moved by it as I am.

  He said, “I think the ship will turn out not to be very seriously damaged, despite the crash.”

  “But it fell down into the sea!”

  “Not because of any mechanical failure, I think, but simply because she gave it the wrong commands,” the Alien said. “She must have become confused. She was speaking a foreign language, after all.”

  “Speaking?”

  “The ship responds to spoken commands. In the language of my planet.”

  “How would Theliane have known the language of your planet?”

  “I taught her,” he said quietly. “Years ago. She asked me to. It gave me great pleasure, being able to speak ag
ain with someone in my native language. And so she knew how to tell the ship what to do. But once it was aloft she must have become confused. If you give the ship conflicting commands, or say something that makes no sense to it, it might very well tumble out of control.”

  “Ah,” I said. There were signs of anguish plainly visible on his face again; and, I suspect, on mine. Together we had conspired to kill her, he and I, and we had not understood what we were doing at all.

  He held out his hands, his odd little stubby-fingered hands, and clasped my larger ones within them, and we stood like that for a while, face to face, one mourner to another. He made a small sound deep in his throat again; and I made one also. It gives some relief from sorrow, that sound.

  Then I said, “In two or three days we will pull the ship out of the sea, and after I have taken Theliane from it and sent her to her eternal rest, I will go into back it and do whatever has to be done to make sure that it is still in working order. And then, Alien, I will come for you here in the maze.”

  Color came into his long pallid face, and light. “Will you, then?”

  “By night, yes, when the guards are sleeping or drunk. And if your official guardian Kataphrazes the eunuch happens to be here, I will take him and turn him and turn him and turn him in circles until his hsorn-sense is altogether befuddled, and I will lock him up here in your apartment and bring you forth out of this maze that long ago I built for you, and we will go to the ship, you and I, and this time it will receive the proper instructions and it will take you into the sky.”

  “And you, Kell? Won’t the king punish you for that, as you said he would, once I’ve disappeared? He’ll know it was you that was responsible.”

  “The king will have to find me, first,” I said. “And I will be in the sky with you.”

  “What?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That is my plan.”

  Why not?

  Why not?

  Nothing holds me here now. I will go with him to his world, and let whatever may happen to me there happen. It will be my turn to be the Alien, there. Let them build a maze for me to live in, if that is what they want. Will that be any worse than the way I live here among my own people? I have always been a stranger in their midst. So I will leave, and I will be an alien among the aliens of the Alien’s world, and everything will be new and fresh and strange to me, and so be it.

  So be it.

  The comet, I noticed when I took my measurements last night, has passed its point of maximum brightness and soon will begin to fade. Day by day now it will grow ever dimmer, until at last it cannot be seen at all, and then it will be gone from our skies, perhaps for a hundred years, perhaps for a hundred thousand. And I will be gone with it, and gone forever.

  So I make my farewell now to this world, and even to its gods, for they will not go with me where I am going. I had faith in them: and what sort of faith did they keep with me, to take me from my only child? Kleysz, goodbye. Goodbye to you, Gamiridon of the bright sword. Maldaz who rules the sun, Hayna, ever-toiling Manibal, goodbye. And you also, Tulabaratha, you greatest of artificers. You served me well, even as I was serving you. I will take something of you with me, wherever it is that I go now. But I say farewell even to you.

  Perhaps the people, not knowing what has become of me, will tell one another gravely that the comet has carried me off to some place in the stars. I like that. Let them say it. “Kell’s Tree,” they always called it, in their invincible ignorance. The tree that grew from the sky. “The tree reached down to us to get him,” they will say. “And he has climbed it and vanished into the sky.” But no. No. Whatever they say, it was never a tree. A comet is what it is, and nothing else: my comet, Kell’s Comet. And now its brightness fades. It begins to take its leave of them. And so does the Artificer Kell.

  THE CHURCH AT MONTE SATURNO

  I generally learn quickly from my mistakes and therefore don’t often repeat them, but I am also a very stubborn man, and sometimes those two character traits turn out to be incompatible. I refer you to my introduction to “Diana of the Hundred Breasts,” in which I tell how I decide to write a story for Alice K. Turner of Playboy based on things I had seen on my recent trip to Turkey, and she turns it down, as she has turned down several previous stories of mine set in foreign lands, calling it an “IRS story” because she thinks my prime motivation for writing it is to establish a tax deduction for the trip.

  Now watch me do it all over again.

  It is June 12, 1996—almost exactly a year after I wrote the “Diana” story. Once again, uncharacteristically, I feel like doing some writing in the summer months, something I have avoided fairly assiduously for a long time. I will try another one for Alice, and, yes, it will be another IRS story, and this time I give her fair warning:

  “What I’d like to try,” I tell her, “is something in the direction of fantasy. (Not necessarily horror fantasy.) Probably one growing out of my travels & my interest in archaeology. Whenever I’ve offered you something in the past along those lines—one that was set in Mexico, and another in Israel, I recall, and the one last year in Ephesus, “Diana of the Hundred Breasts”—you’ve turned it down, whereas my batting average with you on science fiction is better than Ted Williams’s. I begin to wonder whether you’ve been implicitly telling me to stick to what I’m best known for....Or maybe it’s just the particular fantasy stories I’ve sent you that were the problem, not the fact that they were fantasies.”

  Alice replies a couple of days later that she has no objection to seeing fantasy from me, if it’s the right kind of fantasy. “I don’t think historical fantasy is a good bet for us, but if it was lively enough I might change my mind. What I definitely don’t want is one of those IRS stories of yours, all sightseeing and no plot.”

  So I have had fair warning too. And on July 16, 1996, I sent her “The Church at Monte Saturno,” with these comments appended:

  “So here’s the story. I figured it would turn out a fantasy (or a ghost story, or whatever) and so it has. I will undoubtedly write more science fiction one of these days, but it is not where my head, as they used to say, is at right this minute.

  “You will probably call it an IRS story. You keep calling them that, but it just isn’t so. The reality of the situation is that IRS will let me deduct overseas travel even if I don’t write stories about the places where I go, because the possibility always exists that I might, someday. There’s no telling what a writer might do, sooner or later, with material he’s gathered. In 39 years of deducting foreign travel I’ve never been challenged on this. So I have no sense of needing to write something about where I went on my last vacation purely to justify the writeoff.

  “The real situation is that I find the theme of the American who goes overseas and gets out of his depth in some spooky situation very appealing, and I keep playing with it, and I tend to set those stories in places where I’ve already been, because that makes more sense to me than trying to set them in places that I know about only from the National Geographic. Justifying a tax deduction never enters into my mind. You don’t want me to set everything in San Francisco, do you, or on some planet of Goofus IX? So I write about places I know something about where I don’t happen actually to live.

  “Here it is, anyway. May it meet a better fate at your hands than its predecessors. But stop hocking me about the IRS already, okay?”

  You can see from this that Alice and I have a very unusual author-editor relationship. You can probably see, also, that I am skating on very thin ice, and back to me almost immediately comes Alice’s letter of rejection:

  “OK, I promise not to make any more cracks about IRS stories, though I reserve the right to my private opinions. And of course I don’t want you to set everything in San Francisco, though I have no objections to the planet Goofus IX—it’s been a long time between visits.

  “But, that said, I’m going to reject this story. Very little happens in it, and it’s just not interesting or energetic enough, for me a
t any rate. Schematically, it’s man goes to strange place, sees strange thing, strange thing goes away, he goes away. Bye....Of course, it’s as smoothly done as ever, and I’m sure it will quickly find a home. But I’d prefer to wait for something a little more gripping. I’m sure it won’t be a long wait.”

  Ah, me. It’s the “Diana” outcome all over again, one year later. Once more Alice and I agree to disagree, and once more I take my story to Shawna McCarthy of Realms of Fantasy, who has no objections to it at all, and she publishes it in her April, 1997 issue. The next time I write a story for Alice Turner, I set it in such places as Istanbul, Rome, and Paris, all of which I have visited many times, writing off some of the cost of each trip as a research expense, and Alice buys it quickly without saying a word about the IRS.

  Serafina said, “You are English, no?”

  “American, actually,” Gardiner told her.

  “I would say English. The studious look. The glasses. The bad haircut. The way you dress. Like you have money but don’t think it’s nice to spend it. Very English, I think.”

  True enough. Only he wasn’t. And he had taken her at first glance for a simple Sicilian peasant girl, but obviously that was wrong also. There was nothing simple about her. Both of them, it seemed, had instantly invented imaginary identities for each other and were working their way backward now to the actual ones.

  “I’m a professor. An associate professor, actually. History of art.” Who had taught at three different universities in fourteen years, and still was only an associate professor. Who did not even have his doctorate. And now was roaming the edges of the classical world peering at Byzantine mosaics in the hope they would somehow rescue him. “Associate professors often tend to seem a little English. I dress like this because it’s what I can afford. It’s also very comfortable.”