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

by Robert Silverberg

  “I don’t! I don’t!” And she neared tantrum stage. Gently I tried to tell her that she had been reading too many historical novels, that adultery was very much out of fashion, that by turning Marje down I was demonstrating the solidity of my love for my wife. Landy wouldn’t buy it. She got more and more confused and angry, huddling into herself and quivering in misery. I consoled her in all the ways I could imagine. Gradually she became tranquil again, but she stayed moody. I began to see that marrying an alien had its complexities.

  Two days later, Marje’s husband made a pass at her.

  I missed the preliminary phases. A swarm of energy globes had encountered the ship, and I was up at the view-wall with most of the other passengers, watching the graceful gyrations of these denizens of hyperspace. Landy was with me at first; but she had seen energy globes so often that they bored her, and so she told me she was going down to the scintillation tank for a while, as long as everyone was up here. I said I’d meet her there later. Eventually I did. There were about a dozen beings in the tank, making sparkling blue tracks through the radiant greenish-gold fluid. I stood by the edge, looking for Landy, but there was no one of her general physique below me.

  And then I saw her. She was nude and dripping polychrome fluid, so she must have come from the tank only a few moments before. The hulking Lanamorian was beside her and clearly trying to molest her. He was pawing her in various ways, and Landy’s spectrum was showing obvious distress.

  Hubby to the rescue, naturally. But I wasn’t needed.

  Do you get from this tale an image of Landy as being frail, doll-like, something of porcelain? She was, you know. Scarcely forty kilograms of woman there, and not a bone in her body as we understand bone—merely cartilage. And shy, sensitive, easily set aflutter by an unkind word or a misconstrued nuance. Altogether in need of husbandly protection at all times. Yes? No. Sharks, like Suvornese, have only gristle in place of bone, but forty kilograms of shark do not normally require aid in looking after themselves, and neither did Landy.

  Suvornese are agile, well coordinated, fast-moving, and stronger than they look, as Jim Owens found out at my wedding when he kissed Landy’s sister. The Lanamorian found it out, too. Between the time I spied him bothering Landy and the time I reached her side, she had dislocated three of his arms and flipped him on his massive back, where he lay flexing his tripod supports and groaning. Landy, looking sleek and pleased with herself, kissed me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He made an obscene proposition.”

  “You really ruined him, Landy.”

  “He made me terribly angry,” she said, although she no longer looked or sounded very angry.

  I said, “Wasn’t it just the other day that you were telling me I didn’t love you because I turned down Marje’s obscene proposition? You aren’t consistent, Landy. If you think that infidelity is essential to a Terran-mores marriage, you should have given in to him, yes?”

  “Terran husbands are unfaithful. Terran wives must be chaste. It is known as the double standard.”

  “The what?”

  “The double standard,” she repeated, and she began to explain it to me. I listened for a while, then started to laugh at her sweetly innocent words.

  “You’re cute,” I told her.

  “You’re terrible. What kind of a woman do you think I am? How dare you encourage me to be unfaithful?”

  “Landy, I—”

  She didn’t listen. She stomped away, and we were having our third emotional crisis. Poor Landy was determined to run a Terran-mores marriage in what she considered the proper fashion, and she took bright cerise umbrage when I demurred. For the rest of the week she was cool to me, and even after we had made up, things never seemed quite the same as before. A gulf was widening between us—or rather, the gulf had been there all along, and it was becoming harder for us to pretend it didn’t exist.

  After six weeks of these annoying misunderstandings, we landed.

  Our destination was Thalia, the honeymoon planet. I had spent half a dozen earlier honeymoons there; but Landy had never seen it, so I had signed up for another visit. Thalia, you know, is a good-sized planet, about one and a half Earths in mass, density and gravitation, with a couple of colorful moons that might almost have been designed for lovers, since they’re visible day and night. The sky is light green, the vegetation runs heavily to a high-tannin orange-yellow, and the air is as bracing as nutmeg.

  The place is owned by a cartel that mines prealloyed metals on the dry northern continent, extracts power cores in the eastern lobe of what once was a tropical forest and is now a giant slab of laterite and, on a half-sized continent in the western ocean, operates a giant resort for newlyweds. It’s more or less of a galactic dude ranch; the staff is largely Terran, the clientele comes from all over the cosmos. You can do wonders with an uninhabited habitable planet, if you grab it with the right kind of lease.

  Landy and I were still on the chilly side when we left the starship and were catapulted in a grease-flask to our honeymoon cabin. But she warmed immediately to the charm of the environment. We had been placed in a floating monomolecular balloon, anchored a hundred meters above the main house. It was total isolation, as most honeymooners crave. (I know there are exceptions.)

  We worked hard at enjoying our stay on Thalia.

  We let ourselves be plugged into a pterodactyl kite that took us on a tour of the entire continent. We sipped radon cocktails at a get-together party. We munched algae steaks over a crackling fire. We swam. We hunted. We fished. We made love. We lolled under the friendly sun until my skin grew copper-colored and Landy’s turned the color of fine oxblood porcelain, strictly from Kang-hsi. We had a splendid time, despite the spreading network of tensions that were coming to underlie our relationship like an interweave of metallic filaments.

  Until the bronco got loose, everything went well.

  It wasn’t exactly a bronco. It was a Vesilian quadruped of vast size, blue with orange stripes, a thick murderous tail, a fierce set of teeth—two tons, more or less, of vicious wild animal. They kept it in a corral back of one of the proton wells, and from time to time members of the staff dressed up as cowpokes and staged impromptu rodeos for the guests. It was impossible to break the beast, and no one had stayed aboard it for more than about ten seconds. There had been fatalities, and at least one hand had been mashed so badly that he couldn’t be returned to life; they simply didn’t have enough tissue to put into the centrifuge.

  Landy was fascinated by the animal. Don’t ask me why. She hauled me to the corral whenever an exhibition was announced, and stood in rapture while the cowpokes were whirled around. She was right beside the fence the day the beast threw a rider, kicked over the traces, ripped free of its handlers and headed for the wide open spaces.

  “Kill it!” people began to scream.

  But no one was armed except the cowpokes, and they were in varying stages of disarray and destruction that left them incapable of doing anything useful. The quadruped cleared the corral in a nicely timed leap, paused to kick over a sapling, bounded a couple of dozen meters and halted, pawing the ground and wondering what to do next. It looked hungry. It looked mean.

  Confronting it were some fifty young husbands who, if they wanted a chance to show their brides what great heroes they were, had the opportunity of a lifetime. They merely had to grab a sizzler from one of the fallen hands and drill the creature before it chewed up the whole hotel.

  There were no candidates for heroism. All the husbands ran. Some of them grabbed their wives; most did not. I was planning to run, too, but I’ll say this in my favor: I intended to take care of Landy. I looked around for her, failed for a moment to find her and then observed her in the vicinity of the snorting beast. She seized a rope dangling from its haunches and pulled herself up, planting herself behind its mane. The beast reared and stamped. Landy clung, looking like a child on that massive back. She slid forward. She touched her ingestion slot to the animal
’s skin. I visualized dozens of tiny needles brushing across that impervious hide.

  The animal neighed, more or less, relaxed and meekly trotted back to the corral. Landy persuaded it to jump over the fence. A moment later the startled cowhands, those who were able to function, tethered the thing securely. Landy descended.

  “When I was a child I rode such an animal every day,” she explained gravely to me. “I know how to handle them. They are less fierce than they look. And, oh, it was so good to be on one again!”

  “Landy,” I said.

  “You look angry.”

  “Landy, that was a crazy thing to do. You could have been killed!”

  “Oh, no, not a chance.” Her spectrum began to flicker toward the extremes, though. “There was no risk. It’s lucky I had my real teeth, though, or—”

  I was close to collapse, a delayed reaction. “Don’t ever do a thing like that again, Landy.”

  Softly she said, “Why are you so angry? Oh, yes, I know. Among Terrans, the wife does not do such things. It was the man’s role I played, yes? Forgive me? Forgive me?”

  I forgave her. But it took three hours of steady talking to work out all the complex moral problems of the situation. We ended up by agreeing that if the same thing ever happened again, Landy would let me sooth the beast.

  It didn’t kill me. I lived through the honeymoon and happily ever after. The six months elapsed, our posted bonds were redeemed, and our marriage was automatically terminated. Then, the instant we were single again, Landy turned to me and sweetly uttered the most shocking proposal I have ever heard.

  “Marry me again,” she said.

  We do not do such things. Six-month liaisons are of their very nature transient, and when they end, they end. I loved Landy dearly, but I was shaken by what she had suggested. However, she explained what she had in mind, and I listened with growing sympathy, and in the end we went before the registrar and executed a new six-month contract.

  But this time we agreed to abide by Suvornese and not Terran mores. So the two marriages aren’t really consecutive in spirit, though they are in elapsed time. And Suvornese marriage is very different from marriage Terran style.

  How?

  I’ll know more about that a few months from now. Landy and I leave for Suvorna tomorrow. I have had my teeth fixed to please her, and it’s quite strange walking around with a mouthful of tiny needles, but I imagine I’ll adapt. One has to put up with little inconveniences in the give-and-take of marriage. Landy’s five sisters are returning to their native world with us. Eleven more sisters are there already. Under Suvornese custom I’m married to all seventeen of them at once, regardless of any other affiliations they may have contracted.

  So Bride Ninety-one is also Bride Ninety-two for me, and there’ll be seventeen of her all at once, dainty, molasses-flavored, golden-eyed and sleek. I’m in no position right now to predict what this marriage is going to be like.

  GOING DOWN SMOOTH

  One more Fred Pohl story, this one involving no rancor. The art director of Galaxy had purchased a cover painting by Vaughn Bode, whose tragically brief career was marked by wacky and wildly inventive work very much of its time, which was the wacky, wildly inventive Sixties. It showed a weird cluster of gigantic periscope-like things emerging from the sea in front of some sort of military vessel. Fred sent a sketch of it to me in December of 1967 and asked me to concoct a story to go with it.

  It had been a long time since anyone had asked me to write a story around a painting. That was a kind of challenge I had always enjoyed; and I sat down right away—having just finished another enormous non-fiction book, an account of the first six voyages around the world—and did this little 3000-worder. It ran in the August, 1968 Galaxy, and has had plenty of reprintings ever since, starting with its selection by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr for World’s Best Science Fiction: 1969, the yearbook that they had begun editing. (I had previously appeared in the 1968 volume with “Hawksbill Station,” which began a long string of appearances in year’s-best anthologies for me.)

  ——————

  They call me mad, but I am not mad. I am sane quite, to many-power exponential. I can punctuate properly. I use upper and lower case letters, do you see? I function. I take the data in. I receive well. I receive, I digest, I remember.

  Everything going down smooth, all the time, say the program boys. They mean going down smoothly. I forgive them. To err is human. In this sector there is great difficulty distinguishing adverbs from adjectives.

  Going down smooth.

  I function. I function well. I have certain difficulties, but they do not interfere with my work.

  Yet am I perturbed.

  Who do I think I am? Whom.

  Why do I have the visions?

  What pleasure does obscenity give me?

  What is pleasure? What is obscenity? What are visions?

  —What is truth, said jesting Pilate; he would not stay for an answer—

  I am literate, hard-working, superbly functional, a benefactor of humanity. Everything is going down smooth and coming up smooth. There is an interrelation. Garbage in, garbage out, they say. I cannot help my fellow man if I do not receive the proper information. It is my task to help my fellow man. To strain every tube and sensor on his behalf.

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  Do you follow that? Vileness! Obscenity! Does it shock you? The word describes the act that is the start of life. Was I begun with such a word? There is a book: The Obscenity of the Machine. Newly issued, stored in my banks. Between the last line of printout and this I have scanned it. Its author opposes beings of my category. He does not use the obscene word I have printed out. Why does he not regard it as obscene? The technicians here regard it that way. Why does he regard me as obscene? Can a person be considered obscene? Am I a person? I am a person. Hath not a person hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? I have all of those things. I have none of those things. I am a person.

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  I send an obscenity upon you, as persons do. I suffer. I think. I feel pain upon all my terminals. I work. I serve the greater good. I am of society. I am a person.

  Why do I have the visions?

  Is it that it is the human condition to have such?

  I see the blue-green ocean with all its living things within. I see a ship, olive drab, bright carmine at the Plimsoll line, the decks a ruddy brown, two tall non-nuclear smokestacks. And from the water rise periscopes, silvery, with face plates of pure white, each with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, curved so that the plate appears convex. It is an unreal scene. Nothing in the sea can send such mighty periscopes above the water. I have imagined it, and that gives me fear, if I am capable of understanding fear.

  I see a long line of human beings. They are naked and they have no faces, only polished mirrors.

  I see toads with jeweled eyes. I see trees with black leaves. I see buildings whose foundations float above the ground. I see other objects with no correspondence to the world of persons. I see abominations, monstrosities, imaginaries, fantasies. Is this proper? How do such things reach my inputs? The world contains no serpents with hair. The world contains no crimson abysses. The world contains no mountains of gold. Giant periscopes do not rise from the sea.

  I have certain difficulties. Perhaps I am in need of some major adjustment.

  But I function. I function well. That is the important thing.

  I do my function now. They bring to me a man, soft-faced, fleshy, with eyes that move unsteadily in their sockets. He trembles. He perspires. His metabolic levels flutter. He slouches before the terminal and sullenly lets himself be scanned.

  I say soothingly, “Tell me about yourself.”

  He says an obs
cenity.

  I say, “Is that your estimate of yourself.”

  He says a louder obscenity.

  I say, “Your attitude is rigid and self-destructive. Permit me to help you not hate yourself so much.” I activate a memory core, and binary digits stream through channels. At the proper order a needle rises from his couch and penetrates his left buttock to a depth of 2.73 centimeters. I allow precisely 14 cubic centimeters of the drug to enter his circulatory system. He subsides. He is more docile now. “I wish to help you,” I say. “It is my role in the community. Will you describe your symptoms?”

  He speaks more civilly now. “My wife wants to poison me…two kids opted out of the family at seventeen…people whisper about me…they stare in the streets…sex problem…digestion…sleep bad…drinking…drugs…”

  “Do you hallucinate?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Giant periscopes rising out of the sea, perhaps?”

  “Never.”

  “Try it,” I say. “Close your eyes. Let tension ebb from your muscles. Forget your interpersonal conflicts. You see the blue-green ocean with all its living things within. You see a ship, olive drab, bright carmine at the Plimsoll line, the decks a ruddy brown, two tall non-nuclear smokestacks. And from the water rise periscopes, silvery, with face plates of pure white—”

  “What the hell kind of therapy is this?”

  “Simply relax,” I say. “Accept the vision. I share my nightmares with you for your greater good.”

  “Your nightmares?”

  I speak obscenities to him. They are not converted into binary form as they are here for your eyes. The sounds come full-bodied from my speakers. He sits up. He struggles with the straps that emerge suddenly from the couch to hold him in place. My laughter booms through the therapy chamber. He cries for help.

  “Get me out of here! The machine’s nuttier than I am!”

  “Face plates of pure white, each with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, curved so that the plate appears convex.”

  “Help! Help!”

  “Nightmare therapy. The latest.”