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

  “But even you had to die eventually, you old bastard,” Prime says, staring at the ferocious, implacable holographic face. “You fought and kicked all the way to the end, but the end couldn’t be avoided forever. Whereas the great lords and ladies of Earth—”

  Prime can’t stop thinking about them. Immortals who have to die! What a dirty joke the universe has played on them! What a nasty sense of irony the gods must have!

  Prime activated Captain Tio Patnact again.

  “If the Earthfolk are the perfect creatures that you say they are, and immortal besides,” he said, “what I want to know is, how do you think they feel about learning that they’re going to die when the stars fall into the Center of Things? Are they furious? Depressed? Trying desperately to find a way out of their trouble? Are they so calm and perfect and godlike that the thought of their planet’s being gobbled up by some kind of black hole doesn’t bother them at all? Or is it driving them out of their minds?”

  “Wouldn’t it bother you?” asked the captain, and vanished into silence.

  Standing by the screen, Prime watched Earth grow rapidly larger and larger. The shapes of the continents were visible now, great wedge-shaped chunks of deckle-edged brownness arranged like the spokes of a fan in the middle of an immense sea. At sparse intervals bright spots of heat and light rose from them, glaring out of the infrared, the spectral fingerprint of the fires of life: emanations of the settled areas, the magnificent castles of the grand and immortal Earthfolk.

  Prime felt a flicker of awe, a shiver of something close to fear. He caught his breath and clenched his fists. There was a pressure at his throat, a heaviness in his chest, a throbbing in his skull.

  Earth! The eternal mother of us all!—the ancestral world—the home of civilization for billions of years, layer upon layer of epochs going back through all nine mandalas and the disorganized forgotten eras that had preceded them.

  An encapsulated pulse of Earth’s enormous history came squirting out of his midbrain to bedazzle the outer lobes of his whirling mind. He struggled desperately to embrace the totality of that dizzying blurt, the knowledge of all those different races and civilizations and cultures and empires of mankind, rising up and falling down and being replaced by others that in turn would disappear, wave after wave of endlessly changing but still somehow identifiably human forms over uncountable spans of time, the Originals and the Basics and the Radiants and Serenities, the Masks and the Spinners and the Sorcerers and the Thrones, the Wanderers replacing the Star-Scriers and the Moon-Sweepers driving out the Wanderers and the Hive Folk overwhelming the Moon-Sweepers, and on and on and on, eon after eon, a great continuity of change, the whole thing forming the mountainous and incomprehensible agglomeration that was the turbulent history of the mother world. Most of which had been lost: what remained, names and dates and eras and annals, was only a tiny fragment of the whole, Hanosz Prime knew, only a snippet, only a slice, a faint film with most of the substance behind it gone.

  Prime was stunned, staggered, overwhelmed by the proximity of this ancientmost planet of the human realm, standing as it was atop the throne of its own gigantic past.

  “Help me,” he said. “I’m overloading. The whole weight of human history is falling on me. I’m choking under it.”

  The ship’s medic—Farfalla Vlinder was his name, a native of Boris in the Borboleta system, still alive there, as a matter of fact, but duplicated under contract for use in starships—said quickly, “Don’t try to take in all of Earth, its whole outrageous past and present, in a single gulp. No one can absorb all that. There’s too much, much too much.”

  “Yes—but—”

  “Think of now and nothing but now. Think just of a single district, a single town, a single house. Think of Sinon Kreidge’s great palace. And think of his daughter Kaivilda. Especially Kaivilda. How beautiful she is. How eager you are to see her.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  Yes. Prime will allow himself to think only of Kaivilda.

  He has no idea at this point what she looks like, other than that she is beautiful. In his dreams she is formless, nothing more than a golden aura stippled with amethyst and bright ruby. Her colors and textures call to him across the endless night of space.

  Of the real Kaivilda, though, Prime knows almost nothing.

  So Prime does the best he can. He summons up an ideal construct of Beauty, telling himself that it represents Kaivilda, and concentrates on that. A column of pure music shimmers in his mind. The lines of the full spectrum pulsate at its core. Umbrellas of cool light descend upon him.

  “Shall we begin landing procedures?” asks Captain Tio Pacnact.

  “Begin them, yes. Immediately.”

  The screen brightens. Earth rushes forward until it seems that the whole planet is leaping into his hands.

  The tiny scarlet teardrop that is his starship arches across the orbit of ponderous swirling Hjentiflir, which you would call Jupiter, and plunges past the great flower-shaped pattern of eternally blazing matter which the Star-Scrier people of the l04th Encompassment had fabricated for their amusement and pleasure from the otherwise useless clutter which we know as the asteroid belt, and swoops toward the landing stage of Sinon Kreidge’s Keep on the eastern coast of Earth’s great central continent.

  Prime steps from his ship. And instantly he sees that this is indeed a planet of wonders and miracles.

  Golden sunlight runs in rivers across the iron-blue sky, dazzling him. Stars shine at midday in the firmament. It is warm here, even on this mountaintop, much warmer than on snowy Prime. The sweet unfamiliar air of Earth, thin but not harsh, sweeps about him and as he sucks it in it seems to him that he is drinking down the mellowed wine of antiquity, thousands of cycles old. There is magic in that strange air. Ancient sorceries, floating dissolved in the fragrant atmosphere like flecks of gold in a rare elixir, penetrate his being.

  Prime looks around, numbed, dazed. A figure materializes out of the shimmering haze and gestures to him.

  It is Kaivilda. She has been waiting at the rim of the landing stage to greet him when he arrives; and now she moves toward him with heartrending grace, as though she is drifting weightless through the strange thin air.

  To his great relief Hanosz Prime, stepping from his ship into the warm alien air of Earth, was instantly struck by the perfection of Kaivilda’s beauty. It’s the good old click! we all know so well, still operating up there in the remote Ninth Mandala. For him, for her. Click! Ninth Mandala love is nothing very much like love as we understand the term, nor is sex, as you’ll see, nor is marriage. But the click!—the good old pheromonal click!—that hasn’t changed at all.

  Prime had known a little of what to expect, but Kaivilda goes far beyond anything he had imagined from the advance reports. She is wondrous—flawless—superb. She inspires in him immediately dreams of the activity that they call rapport and that you can’t really understand at all, which is the Ninth Mandala equivalent of love and sex and much more besides. And she is equally charmed by him. The mere sight of him has set her glowing all up and down the spectrum.

  Young love! At first sight, no less! In any era, it’s something to admire and envy.

  (But what an odd pair our young couple would seem to us to be! For them it’s love at first sight—sheer physical attraction. You, on the other hand, would probably find her exceedingly weird-looking and not in the least attractive, and him terrifying and downright repellent.)

  For this journey Hanosz Prime had had himself done up as an Authentic, awesome and swaggering and virile. As for Kaivilda, she had lately adopted the modularity known as the Serenity, which had come into fashion only recently. Like most of the modularities that were popular in this decadent age it was of an antiquarian nature: a resurrection of one of the many vanished forms through which the human species had passed in the course of its long voyage through time. The original Serenities, a long-vanished human species that had been dominant in the peaceful and cultivated period known as the Fi
fth Mandala, had been oval in form, tender and vulnerable in texture: tapering custardy masses of taut cream-hued flesh equipped with slender supporting limbs and ornamented along their upper surfaces with a row of unblinking violet eyes of the keenest penetration. The motions of a Serenity were heartbreakingly subtle, a kind of vagrant drifting movement that had the quality of a highly formal antique dance. All this had been quite accurately reproduced in the modern recreation.

  So neither Prime nor Kaivilda would appear to be in any way human to you, nor did either one look remotely like the other. But why should they? For one thing, there’s been all that time for evolutionary change to take place (not to mention a lot of deliberate genetic fiddling-around for cosmetic purposes) in the thousands of centuries that separate their time from ours. In the Ninth Mandala—when the various races of humanity were spread across billions of worlds and millions of light-years, and just about anything was technologically possible—you could, as we’ve already noted, take on any physical form you cared to; or none at all, for that matter. (The disembodied form—for those who liked to travel light—was still a minority taste, but not really rare.) No reasons existed for everyone to look like everyone else. Everybody understood this. Nobody was troubled by it.

  To you, then, Kaivilda would seem like a gigantic boiled egg, peeled of its shell, adorned with a row of blue eyes and a slit of a mouth and a few other external features like arms and a pair of spindly legs.

  It would be hard for you to find much physical appeal in that, I suspect. No matter how kinky you like to think you are, Kaivilda just wouldn’t be your type.

  But you aren’t Hanosz Prime of Prime, and this isn’t the 1111th Encompassment of the Ninth Mandala. Your tastes aren’t relevant to what turns Prime on, and vice versa. So maybe you’d be better off to forget what I’ve just told you about what she looks like. If you’re a man, you’ll have a lot simpler time of it if you try to see her as your own ideal of present-day feminine beauty, whatever that may be—a tall willowy blonde or a petite brunette or a voluptuous redhead, whatever kind of woman turns you on the most. And if you’re female you may find that it will also help to forget all I said about Hanosz Prime’s oppressive bulk and mass, the sharp bony quills jutting from his upper back, the other lethal-looking spurs and crests of bone sticking out elsewhere on his body, and those fleshy yellow frills dangling from his neck. Think of him as a lanky, good-looking young guy of about twenty-five who went to a nice Ivy League school, wears expensive sweaters, and drives a neat little Mercedes-Benz sports car.)

  (I suppose you may argue that that would be cheating. Okay: go ahead, then, and get yourself into a proper Ninth Mandala mind-set. Hanosz Prime looks like a cross between a compact two-legged dinosaur and a small battle-tank, and Kaivilda like a giant boiled egg mounted on a pair of very spindly legs. And each one thinks right away that the other is tremendously sexy, as that concept is understood in Ninth Mandala times, though I assure you that sex as we understand it is definitely not a custom of the era. There you are. Cope with it any way you can.)

  As Prime stood frozen and gaping with delight and awe, Kaivilda moved smoothly to his side and said, speaking softly with her fingertips, “Welcome to Kalahide Keep, Hanosz Prime.”

  “How beautiful it is to be here,” said Hanosz Prime. It was an effort for him to frame words at first, but he managed. “What a marvelous house. And what a glorious planet this is. How delighted I am to look upon its ancient hills and valleys.”

  (Meaning: How pleased I am to be near you. How satisfactory a being you seem to be. What a splendid challenge you are. Both of them understood this.)

  And now he comprehends the thing that he has come here to learn. The Earth will be destroyed, before very long on the cosmic scale of things, of that there is no doubt. Its immortal folk will surely perish with it. The galaxies themselves will crumble, sooner or later, although more likely later than sooner. But none of that matters today, to these happy people of Old Earth, for today is today, the finest day that ever was, and who, on a day like this, could fret about the morrow? Hanosz Prime understands that fully, now, for he is here with Kaivilda of Old Earth, and even if the universe were to end tomorrow, that makes no difference to him today. Let the future look after itself, he tells himself. We all live in the present, do we not, and isn’t the present a glorious place?

  “Come,” Kaivilda said. She took him by one of his bony wrist-spurs and gently drew him into the Keep.

  THE MILLENNIUM EXPRESS

  Do you remember the great Y2K crisis?

  We have to go all the way back to the closing years of the last century for the grim details. Western industrial civilization had made itself wholly dependent on computers; and, so we were told late in the final decade of the twentieth century, those computers hadn’t been properly programmed for the gigantic shift from years beginning in “19” to years beginning in “20”. As a result, on the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, every computer would be paralyzed: planes in flight would crash, trains would leave their tracks, power stations would shut down, et cetera, et cetera.

  In the hysteria that followed the Y2K revelations, billions of dollars were spent to upgrade everybody’s computer; and, as a result, the vast apocalyptic consequences that the new millennium was supposed to bring never occurred. But one consequence that did occur was a general focusing of everybody’s attention on the fact that we were about to enter a new millennium, and that led the editors of Playboy to make their January, 2000 issue a Special Millennium Issue.

  That meant, of course, a futuristic angle to most of the articles: a feature by Ray Bradbury about cities on the moon, William F. Buckley and his son Christopher discussing the future of vice and the future of virtue, Harry Dent forecasting Dow-Jones 41,000 in the upcoming millennium, and, well, a story by Robert Silverberg, who had been Playboy’s most prolific science-fiction contributor over the previous ten or twelve years.

  Alice K. Turner, Playboy’s redoubtable fiction editor, e-mailed me on September 17, 1998 to tell me about the planned special issue and to invite me to write something for it. “You have lots of time, about 9 months, to think about it,” she said, “and I trust you to come up with something terrific.”

  Crusty pedant that I am, I didn’t even think January 1, 2000 would mark the coming of the new millennium. (Pedants like me think that new centuries begin in years that end with the digit 1—1701, 1801, 1901, 2001—and that new millennia begin with the first year of the new century, since the first millennium had begun that way. But our modern civilization is not kind to pedants and their pedantry, and it was easy to see, well in advance of the actual event, that almost everybody else was going to hail January 1, 2000, as the first day of the third millennium.

  I decided not to fight it. I would celebrate the dawning of Y2K with the rest of the populace that day, reserving to myself a private conviction that it wasn’t really going to arrive for another year. And I certainly wasn’t going to let mere pedantry stand in my way of a sale to the highest-paying market in the business. I e-mailed back right away, accepting the assignment, and from Alice came a description of what I ought to write: “No alternate history, no aliens, no time-travel. It should be an ‘if this goes on’ story rather than a ‘what if.’ Upbeat would be better, if possible—I think the issue in general will be upbeat—so the consequences of over-population, the AIDS epidemic, the trashing of the rainforests, the overfishing of the oceans, the consequences of pollution might not be ideal subjects. Unless, of course, you solve these problems!”

  All that seemed pretty limiting, despite Alice’s cheery last sentences: “I’m sure you won’t feel constricted by these parameters. You’ll come up with something interesting, and I look forward to it.” But I replied, “I have no problem with upbeat—I can even do comic—and I will start thinking seriously about the story as soon as the weather stops being so goddamn Californian.”

  Perhaps they were expecting me to write about the Y2K crisis, but I had no
intention of doing a story that would be obsolete and irrelevant by January 2, 2000, and also I had my private doubts that Y2K was going to be as big a deal as the doomsayers were telling us. So later that fall I told Alice that I was going to write a story set on the eve of the fourth millennium, not the upcoming third one, and she found that a pleasing switcheroo. I did the story around Christmas week of 1998, tinkered with it for a little while, and sent it to her on January 14, 1999, with a covering letter saying, “Story herewith. I think it qualifies as upbeat. (Wouldn’t you say that having lovely villas with gardens of tropical palms near the summit of the Matterhorn is an upbeat interpretation of the greenhouse effect?”)

  “Upbeat” is a subjective term, I guess. To me, a story that ends with tears of joy streaming from a character’s eyes and a new era beginning with a clean slate is about as upbeat as a story needs to be. To my dismay, Alice didn’t agree, at least not on first reading. She reported herself “puzzled” by the story. I wrote back, “In all our various interactions over the decades, the one thing don’t think I’ve ever managed to is puzzle you, although I confess a couple of your rejections have puzzled me,” and, since she had also said her perceptions were a bit blurry because of the flu, I asked her to take a second look when she felt a little better. And so she did, and, she wrote me, she “decided that I had definitely been affected by flu crankiness, and that you had figured out a clever way to look at our past century as well as the future.” So I got my check—a very nice one—and the story ran as planned in Playboy’s first issue of what most people considered to be the new millennium.

  Though Playboy itself had some doubts about that. The opening sentence of the editorial introduction to the issue declared, “The millennium at last—or is it? Depends on how you want to divvy up the calendar.” But there it was, a big, glorious special issue, with my story on page 102, splendidly illustrated with a color plate of Messrs. Picasso, Einstein, Hemingway, and Cleversmith standing in front of the good old Louvre with, surprisingly, palm trees in its courtyard.