The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 2: To the Dark Star: 1962-69

by Robert Silverberg

  “I am ready,” said Bolzano.

  The robot offered a question. “What is the excretory unit of the vertebrate kidney called?”

  Bolzano contemplated. He had no idea. The computer could tell him, but the computer lay strapped to fallen Lipescu. No matter. The robot wanted truth, inwardness, understanding. Those things were not necessarily the same as information. Lipescu had offered information. But Lipescu had perished.

  “The frog in the pond,” Bolzano said, “utters an azure cry.”

  There was silence. Bolzano watched the robot’s front, waiting for the panel to slide open, the sinuous something to chop him in half.

  The robot said, “During the War of Dogs on Vanderveer IX, the embattled colonists drew up thirty-eight dogmas of defiance. Quote the third, the ninth, the twenty-second, and the thirty-fifth.”

  Bolzano pondered. This was an alien robot, product of unknown hand. How did its maker’s mind work? Did it respect knowledge? Did it treasure facts for their own sake? Or did it recognize that information is meaningless, insight a non-logical process?

  Lipescu had been logical. He lay in pieces.

  “The mereness of pain,” Bolzano responded, “is ineffable and refreshing.”

  The robot said, “The monastery of Kwaisen was besieged by the soldiers of Oda Nobunaga on the third of April, 1582. What words of wisdom did the abbot utter?”

  Bolzano spoke quickly and buoyantly. “Eleven, forty-one, elephant, voluminous.”

  The last word slipped from his lips despite an effort to retrieve it. Elephants were voluminous, he thought. A fatal slip? The robot did not appear to notice.

  Sonorously, ponderously, the great machine delivered the next question.

  “What is the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere of Muldonar VII?”

  “False witness bears a swift sword,” Bolzano replied.

  The robot made an odd humming sound. Abruptly it rolled on massive treads, moving some six feet to its left. The gate of the treasure-trove stood wide, beckoning.

  “You may enter,” the robot said.

  Bolzano’s heart leaped. He had won! He had gained the high prize!

  Others had failed, their bones glistened on the plain. They had tried to answer the robot, sometimes giving right answers, sometimes giving wrong ones, and they had died. Bolzano lived.

  It was a miracle, he thought. Luck? Shrewdness? Some of each, he told himself. He had watched a man give eighteen right answers and die. So the accuracy of the responses did not matter to the robot. What did? Inwardness. Understanding. Truth.

  There could be inwardness and understanding and truth in random answers, Bolzano realized. Where earnest striving had failed, mockery had succeeded. He had staked his life on nonsense, and the prize was his.

  He staggered forward, into the treasure-trove. Even in the light gravity, his feet were like leaden weights. Tension ebbed in him. He knelt among the treasures.

  The tapes, the sharp-eyed televector scanners, had not begun to indicate the splendor of what lay here. Bolzano stared in awe and rapture at a tiny disk, no greater in diameter than a man’s eye, on which myriad coiling lines writhed and twisted in patterns of rare beauty. He caught his breath, sobbing with the pain of perception as a gleaming marble spire, angled in mysterious swerves, came into view. Here, a bright beetle of some fragile waxy substance rested on a pedestal of yellow jade. There, a tangle of metallic cloth spurted dizzying patterns of luminescence. And over there—and beyond—and there—

  The ransom of a universe, Bolzano thought.

  It would take many trips to carry all this to his ship. Perhaps it would be better to bring the ship to the hoard, eh? He wondered, though, if he would lose his advantage if he stepped back through the gate. Was it possible that he would have to win entrance all over again? And would the robot accept his answers as willingly the second time?

  It was something he would have to chance, Bolzano decided. His nimble mind worked out a plan. He would select a dozen, two dozen of the finest treasures, as much as he could comfortably carry, and take them back to the ship. Then he would lift the ship and set it down next to the gate. If the robot raised objections about his entering, Bolzano would simply depart, taking what he had already secured. There was no point in running undue risks. When he had sold this cargo, and felt pinched for money, he could always return and try to win admission once again. Certainly, no one else would steal the hoard if he abandoned it.

  Selection, that was the key now.

  Crouching, Bolzano picked through the treasure, choosing for portability and easy marketability. The marble spire? Too big. But the coiling disk, yes, certainly, and the beetle, of course, and this small statuette of dull hue, and the cameos showing scenes no human eye had ever beheld, and this, and this, and this—

  His pulse raced. His heart thundered. He saw himself traveling from world to world, vending his wares. Collectors, museums, governments would vie with one another to have these prizes. He would let them bid each object up into the millions before he sold. And, of course, he would keep one or two for himself, or perhaps three or four, souvenirs of this great adventure.

  And someday when wealth bored him he would return, and face the challenge again. And he would dare the robot to question him, and he would reply with random absurdities, demonstrating his grasp of the fundamental insight that in knowledge there is only hollow merit. And the robot would admit him once more to the treasure-trove.

  Bolzano rose. He cradled his lovelies in his arms. Carefully, carefully, he thought. Turning, he made his way through the gate.

  The robot had not moved. It had shown no interest as Bolzano plundered the hoard. The small man walked calmly past it.

  The robot said, “Why have you taken those? What do you want with them?”

  Bolzano smiled. Nonchalantly he replied, “I’ve taken them because they’re beautiful. Because I want them. Is there a better reason?”

  “No,” the robot said, and the panel slid open in its ponderous black chest.

  Too late, Bolzano realized that the test had not yet ended, that the robot’s question had arisen out of no idle curiosity. And this time he had replied in earnest, speaking in rational terms.

  Bolzano shrieked. He saw the brightness coming toward him.

  Death followed instantly.

  FLIES

  So I was writing science fiction again, and beginning to edit it, too. An anthology of reprints called Earthmen and Strangers was the first one I did, and for my sins I chose to include a story by Harlan Ellison in it. Ellison was willing to grant me permission to use his story, but not without a lot of heavy muttering and grumbling about the terms of the contract, to which I replied on October 2, 1965:

  “Dear Harlan: You’ll be glad to know that in the course of a long and wearying dream last night I watched you win two Hugos at last year’s Worldcon. You acted pretty smug about it, too. I’m not sure which categories you led, but one of them was probably Unfounded Bitching. Permit me a brief and fatherly lecture in response to your letter of permission on the anthology…”

  Whereupon I dealt with his complaints at some length, and then, almost gratuitously, threw in a postscript:

  “Why don’t you do an anthology? HARLAN ELLISON PICKS OFFBEAT CLASSICS OF SF, or something…”

  From the placement of the italicized word in that sentence, I surmise that I must already have suggested to Harlan that he edit an anthology of controversial s-f—he was running a paperback line then called Regency Books, published out of Chicago—but for some reason he had brushed the idea aside. Now, though, my suggestion kindled something in him. He was back to me right away, by telephone this time, to tell me in some excitement that he would do a science-fiction anthology, all right, but for some major publishing house instead of Regency, and instead of putting together a mere compilation of existing material he would solicit previously unpublished stories, the kind of science fiction that no magazine of that era would dare to publish. Truly dangerous
stories, Harlan said—a book of dangerous visions. “In fact, that’s what I’ll call it,” he told me, really excited now. “Dangerous Visions. I want you to write a story for it, too.”

  And so I unwittingly touched off a publishing revolution.

  By the 18th of October Harlan had sold the book to Doubleday and was soliciting stories far and wide. Requests for material—material of the boldest, most uncompromising kind—went out to the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Frederik Pohl, Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber, J.G. Ballard, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, Lester del Rey, Larry Niven, R.A. Lafferty, John Brunner, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany. Dick, Pohl, Sturgeon, Anderson, del Rey, Farmer, Brunner, Aldiss, and Leiber were well-established authors, but the work of Ballard, Zelazny, Delany, Niven, and Spinrad, believe it or not, was only just beginning to be known in the United States in 1965. Harlan’s eye for innovative talent had always been formidably keen.

  As the accidental instigator of the whole thing—and the quickest man with an s-f story since Henry Kuttner in his prime—I sat down right away and wrote the very first dangerous vision, “Flies,” in November of 1965, just as soon as Harlan told me the deal was set. It was about as dangerous as I could manage: a demonstration of the random viciousness of the universe and a little blasphemy on the side. (I would return to both these themes again and again in the years ahead: my novel Thorns of 1966 was essentially a recasting of the underlying material of “Flies” at greater length.) Back at once came Harlan’s check for $88.

  Which was the first of many, for Dangerous Visions, would turn out to be the most significant s-f anthology of the decade, destined to go through edition after edition. (It is back in print yet again, four decades after its first publication.) All of the extraordinary writers whose names I rattled off above came through with brilliant stories, along with fifteen or twenty others, some well known at the time but forgotten now, some obscure then and still obscure, but all of them fiercely determined to live up to Harlan’s demand for the kind of stories that other s-f editors would consider too hot to handle.

  Dangerous Visions appeared in 1967. “An event,” said the New York Times, “a jubilee of fresh ideas…what we mean when we say an important book.” Its success led to the publication of an immense companion volume in 1972, Again, Dangerous Visions—760 pages of stories by writers who hadn’t contributed to the first book (Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Gregory Benford, James Tiptree, Jr…) And ultimately Harlan began to assemble the mammoth third book in the series, The Last Dangerous Visions, publication of which is—ah—still being eagerly awaited.

  I knew not what I was setting in motion with my casual postscript of October 2, 1965, suggesting that Harlan edit an anthology. Certainly I had no idea that I was nudging him toward one of the great enterprises of his career. Nor did I suspect that my own 4400-word contribution to the book would open a new and darker phase of my own career—in which, ultimately, almost everything I wrote would become a dangerous vision of sorts.

  ——————

  Here is Cassiday:

  transfixed on a table.

  There wasn’t much left of him. A brain-box; a few ropes of nerves; a limb. The sudden implosion had taken care of the rest. There was enough, though. The golden ones didn’t need much to go by. They had found him in the wreckage of the drifting ship as it passed through their zone, back of Iapetus. He was alive. He could be repaired. The others on the ship were beyond hope.

  Repair him? Of course. Did one need to be human in order to be humanitarian? Repair, yes. By all means. And change. The golden ones were creative.

  What was left of Cassiday lay in dry dock on a somewhere table in a golden sphere of force. There was no change of season here; only the sheen of the walls, the unvarying warmth. Neither day nor night, neither yesterday nor tomorrow. Shapes came and went about him. They were regenerating him, stage by stage, as he lay in complete mindless tranquility. The brain was intact but not functioning. The rest of the man was growing back: tendon and ligament, bone and blood, heart and elbows. Elongated mounds of tissue sprouted tiny buds that enlarged into blobs of flesh. Paste cell to cell together, build a man from his own wreckage—that was no great chore for the golden ones. They had their skills. But they had much to learn, too, and this Cassiday could help them learn it.

  Day by day Cassiday grew toward wholeness. They did not awaken him. He lay cradled in warmth, unmoving, unthinking, drifting on the tide. His new flesh was pink and smooth, like a baby’s. The epithelial thickening came a little later. Cassiday served as his own blueprint. The golden ones replicated him from a shred of himself, built him back from his own polynucleotide chains, decoded the proteins and reassembled him from the template. An easy task, for them. Why not? Any blob of protoplasm could do it—for itself. The golden ones, who were not protoplasm, could do it for others.

  They made some changes in the template. Of course. They were craftsmen. And there was a good deal they wanted to learn.

  Look at Cassiday:

  the dossier.

  BORN 1 August 2316

  PLACE Nyack, New York

  PARENTS Various

  ECONOMIC LEVEL Low

  EDUCATIONAL LEVEL Middle

  OCCUPATION Fuel technician

  MARITAL STATUS Three legal liaisons, duration eight months, sixteen months, and two months

  HEIGHT Two meters

  WEIGHT 96 kg

  HAIR COLOR Yellow

  EYES Blue

  BLOOD TYPE A +

  INTELLIGENCE LEVEL High

  SEXUAL, INCLINATIONS Normal

  Watch them now:

  changing him.

  The complete man lay before them, newly minted, ready for rebirth. Now come the final adjustments. They sought the gray brain within its pink wrapper, and entered it, and traveled through the bays and inlets of the mind, pausing now at this quiet cove, dropping anchor now at the base of that slab-sided cliff. They were operating, but doing it neatly. Here were no submucous resections, no glittering blades carving through gristle and bone, no sizzling lasers at work, no clumsy hammering at the tender meninges. Cold steel did not slash the synapses. The golden ones were subtler; they tuned the circuit that was Cassiday, boosted the gain, damped out the noise, and they did it very gently.

  When they were finished with him, he was much more sensitive. He had several new hungers. They had granted him certain abilities.

  Now they awakened him.

  “You are alive, Cassiday,” a feathery voice said. “Your ship was destroyed. Your companions were killed. You alone survived.”

  “Which hospital is this?”

  “Not on Earth. You’ll be going back soon. Stand up, Cassiday. Move your right hand. Your left. Flex your knees. Inflate your lungs. Open and close your eyes several times. What’s your name, Cassiday?”

  “Richard Henry Cassiday.”

  “How old?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “Look at this reflection. Who do you see?”

  “Myself.”

  “Do you have any further questions?”

  “What did you do to me?”

  “Repaired you, Cassiday. You were almost entirely destroyed.”

  “Did you change me any?”

  “We made you more sensitive to the feelings of your fellow man.”

  “Oh,” said Cassiday.

  Follow Cassiday as he journeys:

  back to Earth.

  He arrived on a day that had been programmed for snow. Light snow, quickly melting, an esthetic treat rather than a true manifestation of weather. It was good to touch foot on the homeworld again. The golden ones had deftly arranged his return, putting him back aboard his wrecked ship and giving him enough of a push to get him within range of a distress sweep. The monitors had detected him and picked him up. How was it you survived the disaster unscathed, Spaceman Cassiday? Very simple, sir, I was outside the ship when it happened. It just went swoosh and everybody was killed. A
nd I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  They routed him to Mars and checked him out, and held him awhile in a decontamination lock on Luna, and finally sent him back to Earth. He stepped into the snowstorm, a big man with a rolling gait and careful calluses in all the right places. He had few friends, no relatives, enough cash units to see him through for a while, and a couple of ex-wives he could look up. Under the rules, he was entitled to a year off with full pay as his disaster allotment. He intended to accept the furlough.

  He had not yet begun to make use of his new sensitivity. The golden ones had planned it so that his abilities would remain inoperative until he reached the homeworld. Now he had arrived, and it was time to begin using them, and the endlessly curious creatures who lived back of Iapetus waited patiently while Cassiday sought out those who had once loved him.

  He began his quest in Chicago Urban District, because that was where the spaceport was, just outside of Rockford. The slidewalk took him quickly to the travertine tower, festooned with radiant inlays of ebony and violet-hued metal, and there, at the local Televector Central, Cassiday checked out the present whereabouts of his former wives. He was patient about it, a bland-faced, mild-eyed mass of flesh, pushing the right buttons and waiting placidly for the silken contacts to close somewhere in the depths of the Earth. Cassiday had never been a violent man. He was calm. He knew how to wait.

  The machine told him that Beryl Fraser Cassiday Mellon lived in Boston Urban District. The machine told him that Lureen Holstein Cassiday lived in New York Urban District. The machine told him that Mirabel Gunryk Cassiday Milman Reed lived in San Francisco Urban District.

  The names awakened memories: warmth of flesh, scent of hair, touch of hand, sound of voice. Whispers of passion. Snarls of contempt. Gasps of love.

  Cassiday, restored to life, went to see his ex-wives.

  We find one now:

  safe and sound.

  Beryl Fraser Cassiday Mellon’s eyes were milky in the pupil, greenish where they should have been white. She had lost weight in the last ten years, and now her face was parchment stretched over bone, an eroded face, the cheekbones pressing from within against the taut skin and likely to snap through at any moment. Cassiday had been married to her for eight months when he was twenty-four. They had separated after she insisted on taking the Sterility pledge. He had not particularly wanted children, but he was offended by her maneuver all the same. Now she lay in a soothing cradle of webfoam, trying to smile at him without cracking her lips.