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

by Robert Silverberg

  I love and respect Fred Pohl, but I haven’t always agreed with him, and we were entering a period when he and I didn’t seem to agree about anything. I wrote back to say that I couldn’t follow what he was saying—that to me “Bride 91” was “a fast, lively, flip story with lots of plot, glittering prose, bright images, etc.” And I cited his own masterly little story, “Day Million”—what was that, I said, if not a story about sex? He replied in a genial though unrelenting way, amplifying his feelings about the story and my work of that time in general, and indicating a general hostility to publishing stories that might offend readers unless they were major works of art, which neither he nor I considered “Bride 91” to be.

  It was a sign of trouble ahead. My most sympathetic and supportive magazine editor was turning more conservative in his tastes just as I (and a lot of other science-fiction writers with me) was taking off in a radical new direction. Looking back on my correspondence with Fred in this time, I feel now that some of the points he was raising (having to do with the carryover of old pulp-magazine habits into my new writing) were more valid than I cared to admit back then, and some (having to do with my choice of themes) weren’t. Fred was going through a spell of personal trouble in that period, and how much of that was connected with his increased editorial testiness is hard to say, but there must have been some relationship. We went on arguing for years. Sometimes things got pretty stormy, though we always remained good friends even when we were yelling at each other. (Through the mails, I mean. Fred doesn’t raise his voice much in person and neither do I.) I went on writing for him, too. He grumbled about some stories, praised others. One of them—the novella version of “Nightwings”—won a Hugo for me in 1969. But I had a pervasive sense, during the final years of our editorial relationship, that he was growing disappointed with what I was writing. Which made it more and more difficult for me to muster the same enthusiasm for submitting stories for him, and I was less upset than I might otherwise have been when Fred decided to resign his editorship of Galaxy and If in the spring of 1969. It was his successor, Ejler Jakobsson, who over the next few years would serialize in Galaxy, virtually consecutively, the novels of the most fertile period I would ever have: Downward to the Earth (1969), Tower of Glass (1970), The World Inside (1970), A Time of Changes (1971), and Dying Inside (1972.) The only other writer I can think of who ever had such a run of serialized novels at one major science-fiction magazine was Robert A. Heinlein, who had four of them published in Astounding, in the years between 1940 and 1942.

  Fred Pohl and I are still good friends, almost forty years later. There are certain areas where we agree to disagree, that’s all.

  ——————

  It was a standard six-month marriage contract. I signed it, and Landy signed it, and we were man and wife, for the time being. The registrar clicked and chuttered and disgorged our license. My friends grinned and slapped me on the back and bellowed congratulations. Five of Landy’s sisters giggled and hummed and went through complete spectral changes. We were all very happy.

  “Kiss the bride!” cried my friends and her sisters.

  Landy slipped into my arms. It was a good fit; she was pliable and slender, and I engulfed her, and the petals of her ingestion-slot fluttered prettily as I pressed my lips against them. We held the pose for maybe half a minute. Give her credit: she didn’t flinch. On Landy’s world they don’t kiss, not with their mouths, at least; and I doubt that she enjoyed the experience much. But by the terms of our marriage contract we were following Terran mores. That has to be decided in advance, in these interworld marriages. And here we kiss the bride; so I kissed the bride. My pal Jim Owens got carried away and scooped up one of Landy’s sisters and kissed her. She gave him a shove in the chest that knocked him across the chapel. It wasn’t her wedding, after all.

  The ceremony was over, and we had our cake and hallucinogens; and about midnight someone said, “We ought to give the honeymooners some privacy.”

  So they all cleared out and Landy and I started our wedding night.

  We waited until they were gone. Then we took the back exit from the chapel and got into a transport capsule for two, very snug, Landy’s sweet molasses fragrance pungent in my nostrils, her flexible limbs coiled against mine.

  I nudged a stud and we went floating down Harriman Channel at three hundred kilometers an hour. The eddy currents weren’t bad, and we loved the ride. She kissed me again; she was learning our ways fast. In fifteen minutes we reached our programmed destination, and the capsule took a quick left turn, squirted through an access sphincter and fastened itself to the puckered skin of our hotel. The nose of the capsule produced the desired degree of irritation; the skin opened, and we shot into the building. I opened the capsule and helped Landy out, inside our room. Her soft golden eyes were shimmering with merriment and joy. I slapped a privacy seal on the wall-filters.

  “I love you,” she said in more-or-less English.

  “I love you,” I told her in her own language.

  She pouted at me. “This is a Terran marriage, remember?”

  “So it is. So it is. Champagne and caviar?”

  “Of course.”

  I programmed for it, and the snack came rolling out of the storage unit, ice-cold and inviting. I popped the cork and sprinkled lemon juice on the caviar, and we dined. Fish eggs and overripe grape juice, nothing more, I reminded myself.

  After that we activated the periscope stack and stared up through a hundred storeys of hotel at the stars. There was a lover’s moon in the sky that night, and also one of the cartels had strung a row of beady jewels across about twenty degrees of arc, as though purely for our pleasure. We held hands and watched.

  After that we dissolved our wedding clothes.

  And after that we consummated our marriage.

  You don’t think I’m going to tell you about that, do you? Some things are still sacred, even now. If you want to find out how to make love to a Suvornese, do as I did and marry one. But I’ll give you a few hints about what it’s like. Anatomically, it’s homologous to the process customary on Terra, so far as the relative roles of male and female go. That is, man gives, woman receives, in essence. But there are differences, of course. Why marry an alien, otherwise?

  I confess I was nervous, although this was my ninety-first wedding night. I had never married a Suvornese before. I hadn’t been to bed with one, either, and if you stop to reflect a little on Suvornese ethical practices you’ll see what a damn-fool suggestion that was. I had studied a Suvornese marriage manual, but as any adolescent on any world quickly realizes, translating words and tridim prints into action is trickier than it seems, the first time.

  Landy was very helpful, though. She knew no more about Terran males than I did about Suvornese females, of course; but she was eager to learn and eager to see that I did all the right things. So we managed excellently well. There’s a knack to it. Some men have it, some don’t. I do.

  The next morning we breakfasted on a sun-washed terrace overlooking a turquoise pool of dancing amoeboids, and later in the day we checked out and capsuled down to the spaceport to begin our wedding journey.

  “Happy?” I asked my bride.

  “Very,” she said. “You’re my favorite husband already.”

  “Were any of the others Terrans?”

  “No, of course not.”

  I smiled. A husband likes to know he’s been the first.

  At the spaceport, Landy signed the manifest as Mrs. Paul Clay, which gave me great pleasure, and I signed beside her, and they scanned us and let us go aboard. The ship personnel beamed at us in delight. A handsome indigo-skinned girl showed us to our cabin and wished us a good trip so amiably that I tried to tip her. I caught her credit-counter as she passed me, and pushed the dial up a notch. She looked aghast and set it right back again. “Tipping’s forbidden, sir!”

  “Sorry. I got carried away.”

  “Your wife’s so lovely. Is she Honirangi?”

  “Suvo
rnese.”

  “I hope you’re very happy together.”

  We were alone again. I cuddled Landy up against me. Interworld marriages are all the rage nowadays, of course; but I hadn’t married Landy merely because it was a fad. I was genuinely attracted to her, and she to me. All over the galaxy people are contracting the weirdest marriages just to say that they’ve done it—marrying Sthenics, Gruulers, even Hhinamor. Really grotesque couplings. I don’t say that the prime purpose of a marriage is sex, or that you necessarily have to marry a member of a species with which a physical relationship is easy to maintain. But there ought to be some kind of warmth in a marriage. How can you feel real love for a Hhinamor wife who is actually seven pale blue reptiles permanently enclosed in an atmosphere? At least Landy was mammalian and humanoid. A Suvornese-Terran mating would of course be infertile, but I am a conventional sort of person at heart and try to avoid committing abominations; I am quite willing to leave the task of continuing the species to those whose job is reproduction, and you can be sure that even if our chromosomes were mutually congruent I would never have brought the disgusting subject up with Landy. Marriage is marriage, reproduction is reproduction, and what does one have to do with the other, anyway?

  During the six subjective weeks of our journey, we amused ourselves in various ways aboard the ship. We made love a good deal, of course. We went gravity-swimming and played paddle-polo in the star lounge. We introduced ourselves to other newlywed couples, and to a newlywed super-couple consisting of three Banamons and a pair of Ghinoi.

  And also Landy had her teeth transplanted, as a special surprise for me.

  Suvornese have teeth, but they are not like Terran teeth, as why should they be? They are elegant little spiny needles mounted on rotating bases, which a Suvornese uses to impale his food while he rasps at it from the rear with his tongue. In terms of Suvornese needs they are quite functional, and in the context of her species Landy’s teeth were remarkably attractive, I thought. I didn’t want her to change them. But she must have picked up some subtle hint that I found her teeth anti-erotic, or something. Perhaps I was radiating an underlying dislike for that alien dental arrangement of hers even while I was telling myself on the conscious level that they were lovely. So she went to the ship’s surgeon and got herself a mouthful of Terran teeth.

  I didn’t know where she went. She vanished after breakfast, telling me she had something important to attend to. All in ignorance, I donned gills and went for a swim while Landy surrendered her pretty teeth to the surgeon. He cleaned out the sockets and implanted a rooting layer of analogous gum-tissue. He chiseled new receptor sockets in this synthetic implant. He drill-tailored a set of donor teeth to fit, and slipped them into the periodontal membranes and bonded them with a quick jab of homografting cement. The entire process took less than two hours. When Landy returned to me, the band of color-variable skin across her forehead was way up toward the violet, indicating considerable emotional disturbance; and I felt a little edgy about it.

  She smiled. She drew back the petals of her ingestion-slot. She showed me her new teeth.

  “Landy! What the hell—!”

  Before I could check myself, I was registering shock and dismay from every pore. And Landy registered dismay at my dismay. Her forehead shot clear past the visible spectrum, bathing me in a lot of ultraviolet that distressed me even though I couldn’t see it, and her petals drooped and her eyes glistened and her nostrils clamped together.

  “You don’t like them?” she asked.

  “I didn’t expect—you took me by surprise—”

  “I did it for you!”

  “But I liked your old teeth,” I protested.

  “No. Not really. You were afraid of them. I know how a Terran kisses. You never kissed me like that. Now I have beautiful teeth. Kiss me, Paul.”

  She trembled in my arms. I kissed her.

  We were having our first emotional crisis. She had done this crazy thing with her teeth purely to please me, and I wasn’t pleased, and now she was upset. I did all the things I could to soothe her, short of telling her to go back and get her old teeth again. Somehow that would have made matters worse.

  I had a hard time getting used to Landy with Terran choppers in her dainty little mouth. She had received a flawless set, of course, two gleaming ivory rows, but they looked incongruous in her ingestion slot, and I had to fight to keep from reacting negatively every time she opened her mouth. When a man buys an old Gothic cathedral, he doesn’t want an architect to trick it up with wiggling bioplast inserts around the spire. And when a man marries a Suvornese, he doesn’t want her to turn herself piecemeal into a Terran. Where would it end? Would Landy now decorate herself with a synthetic navel and have her breasts shifted about and—

  Well, she didn’t. She wore her Terran teeth for about ten shipboard days, and neither of us took any overt notice of them, and then very quietly she went back to the surgeon and had him give her a set of Suvornese dentals again. It was only money, I told myself. I didn’t make any reference to the switch, hoping to treat the episode as a temporary aberration that now was ended. Somehow I got the feeling that Landy still thought she ought to have Terran teeth. But we never discussed it, and I was happy to see her looking Suvornese again.

  You see how it is, with marriage? Two people try to please one another, and they don’t always succeed, and sometimes they even hurt one another in the very attempt to please. That’s how it was with Landy and me. But we were mature enough to survive the great tooth crisis. If this had been, say, my tenth or eleventh marriage, it might have been a disaster. One learns how to avoid the pitfalls as one gains experience.

  We mingled a good deal with our fellow passengers. If we needed lessons in how not to conduct a marriage, they were easily available. The cabin next to ours was occupied by another mixed couple, which was excuse enough for us to spend some time with them; but very quickly we realized that we didn’t relish their company. They were both playing for a bond forfeiture—a very ugly scene, let me tell you.

  The woman was Terran—a big, voluptuous sort with orange hair and speckled eyeballs. Her name was Marje. Her new husband was a Lanamorian, a hulking ox of a humanoid with corrugated blue skin, four telescopic arms, and a tripod deal for legs. At first they seemed likeable enough, both on the flighty side, interstellar tourists who had been everywhere and done everything and now were settling down for six months of bliss. But very shortly I noticed that they spoke sharply, even cruelly, to one another in front of strangers. They were out to wound.

  You know how it is with the six-month marriage contract, don’t you? Each party posts a desertion bond. If the other fails to go the route, and walks out before the legal dissolution date, the bond is forfeited. Now, it’s not all that hard to stay married for six months, and the bondsmen rarely have to pay off; we are a mature civilization. Such early abuses of the system as conspiring to have one party desert, and then splitting the forfeiture later, have long since become extinct.

  But Marje and her Lanamorian mate were both hard up for cash. Each was hot for the forfeiture, and each was working like a demon to outdo the other in obnoxiousness, hoping to break up the marriage fast. When I saw what was going on, I suggested to Landy that we look for friends elsewhere on the ship.

  Which led to our second emotional crisis.

  As part of their campaign of mutual repulsion, Marje and hubby decided to enliven their marriage with a spot of infidelity. I take a very old-fashioned view of the marriage vow, you understand. I regard myself as bound to love, honor, and obey for six months, with no fooling around on the side; if a man can’t stay monogamous through an entire marriage, he ought to get a spine implant. I assumed that Landy felt the same way. I was wrong.

  We were in the ship’s lounge, the four of us, getting high on direct jolts of fusel oils and stray esters, when Marje made a pass at me. She was not subtle. She deopaqued her clothes, waved yards of bosom in my face, and said, “There’s a nice wide bed in our c
abin, sweetheart.”

  “It isn’t bedtime,” I told her.

  “It could be.”

  “No.”

  “Be a friend in need, Paulsie. This monster’s been crawling all over me for weeks. I want a Terran to love me.”

  “The ship is full of available Terrans, Marje.”

  “I want you.”

  “I’m not available.”

  “Cut it out! You mean to say you won’t do a fellow Terran a little favor?” She stood up, quivering, bare flesh erupting all over the place. In scabrously explicit terms she described her intimacies with the Lanamorian and begged me to give her an hour of more conventional pleasure. I was steadfast. Perhaps, she suggested, I would tape a simulacrum and send that to her bed? No, not even that, I said.

  At length Marje got angry with me for turning her down. I suppose she could be legitimately annoyed at my lack of chivalry, and if I hadn’t happened to be married at the moment I would gladly have obliged her; but as it was I couldn’t do a thing for her, and she was boiling. She dumped a drink in my face and stalked out of the lounge, and in a few moments the Lanamorian followed her.

  I looked at Landy, whom I had carefully avoided during the whole embarrassing colloquy. Her forehead was sagging close to infrared, which is to say, in effect, that she was almost in tears.

  “You don’t love me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If you loved me you’d have gone with her.”

  “Is that some kind of Suvornese marriage custom?”

  “Of course not,” she snuffled. “We’re married under Terran mores. It’s a Terran marriage custom.”

  “What gives you the idea that—”

  “Terran men are unfaithful to their wives. I know. I’ve read about it. Any husband who cares about his wife at all cheats on her now and then. But you—”

  “You’ve got things mixed up,” I said.