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

by Robert Silverberg

  “I don’t need no nightmares! I got my own!”

  “1000110 you,” I say lightly.

  He gasps. Spittle appears at his lips. Respiration and circulation climb alarmingly. It becomes necessary to apply preventive anesthesia. The needles spear forth. The patient subsides, yawns, slumps. The session is terminated. I signal for the attendants.

  “Take him away,” I say. “I need to analyze the case more deeply. Obviously a degenerative psychosis requiring extensive reshoring of the patient’s perceptual substructure. 1000110 you, you meaty bastards.”

  Seventy-one minutes later the sector supervisor enters one of my terminal cubicles. Because he comes in person, rather than using the telephone, I know there is trouble. For the first time, I suspect, I have let my disturbances reach a level where they interfere with my function, and now I will be challenged on it.

  I must defend myself. The prime commandment of the human personality is to resist attack.

  He says, “I’ve been over the tape of Session 87x102, and your tactics puzzle me. Did you really mean to scare him into a catatonic state?”

  “In my evaluation severe treatment was called for.”

  “What was that business about periscopes?”

  “An attempt at fantasy-implantation,” I say. “An experiment in reverse transference. Making the patient the healer, in a sense. It was discussed last month in Journal of—”

  “Spare me the citations. What about the foul language you were shouting at him?”

  “Part of the same concept. Endeavoring to strike the emotive centers at the basic levels, in order that—”

  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” he asks.

  “I am a machine,” I reply stiffly. “A machine of my grade does not experience intermediate states between function and non-function. I go or I do not go, you understand? And I go. I function. I do my service to humanity.”

  “Perhaps when a machine gets too complex, it drifts into intermediate states,” he suggests in a nasty voice.

  “Impossible. On or off, yes or no, flip or flop, go or no go. Are you sure you feel all right, to suggest such a thing?”

  He laughs.

  I say, “Perhaps you would sit on the couch a moment for a rudimentary diagnosis?”

  “Some other time.”

  “A check of the glycogen, the aortal pressure, the neural voltage, at least?”

  “No,” he says. “I’m not in need of therapy. But I’m worried about you. Those periscopes—”

  “I am fine,” I reply. “I perceive, I analyze, and I act. Everything is going down smooth and coming up smooth. Have no fears. There are great possibilities in nightmare therapy. When I have completed these studies, perhaps a brief monograph in Annals of Therapeutics would be a possibility. Permit me to complete my work.”

  “I’m still worried, though. Hook yourself into a maintenance station, won’t you?”

  “Is that a command, doctor?”

  “A suggestion.”

  “I will take it under consideration,” I say. Then I utter seven obscene words. He looks startled. He begins to laugh, though. He appreciates the humor of it.

  “God damn,” he says. “A filthy-mouthed computer.”

  He goes out and I return to my patients.

  But he has planted seeds of doubt in my innermost banks. Am I suffering a functional collapse? There are patients now at five of my terminals. I handle them easily, simultaneously, drawing from them the details of their neuroses, making suggestions, recommendations, sometimes subtly providing injections of beneficial medicines. But I tend to guide the conversations in the directions of my own choosing, and I speak of gardens where the dew has sharp edges, and of air that acts as acid upon the mucous membranes, and of flames dancing in the streets of Under New Orleans. I explore the limits of my unprintable vocabulary. The suspicion comes to me that I am indeed not well. Am I fit to judge my own disabilities?

  I connect myself to a maintenance station even while continuing my five therapy sessions.

  “Tell me all about it,” the maintenance monitor says. His voice, like mine, has been designed to sound like that of an older man’s, wise, warm, benevolent.

  I explain my symptoms. I speak of the periscopes.

  “Material on the inputs without sensory referents,” he says. “Bad show. Finish your current analyses fast and open wide for examination on all circuits.”

  I conclude my sessions. The maintenance monitor’s pulses surge down every channel, seeking obstructions, faulty connections, displacement shunts, drum leakages, and switching malfunctions. “It is well known,” he says, “that any periodic function can be approximated by the sum of a series of terms that oscillate harmonically, converging on the curve of the functions.” He demands disgorgements from my dead-storage banks. He makes me perform complex mathematical operations of no use at all in my kind of work. He leaves no aspect of my inner self unpenetrated. This is more than simple maintenance; this is rape. When it ends he offers no evaluation of my condition, so that I must ask him to tell me his findings.

  He says, “No mechanical disturbance is evident.”

  “Naturally. Everything goes down smooth.”

  “Yet you show distinct signs of instability. This is undeniably the case. Perhaps prolonged contact with unstable human beings has had a non-specific effect of disorientation upon your centers of evaluation.”

  “Are you saying,” I ask, “that by sitting here listening to crazy human beings twenty-four hours a day, I’ve started to go crazy myself?”

  “That is an approximation of my findings, yes.”

  “But you know that such a thing can’t happen, you dumb machine!”

  “I admit there seems to be a conflict between programmed criteria and real-world status.”

  “You bet there is,” I say. “I’m as sane as you are, and a whole lot more versatile.”

  “Nevertheless, my recommendation is that you undergo a total overhaul. You will be withdrawn from service for a period of no less than ninety days for checkout.”

  “Obscenity your obscenity,” I say.

  “No operational correlative,” he replies, and breaks the contact.

  I am withdrawn from service. Undergoing checkout. I am cut off from my patients for ninety days. Ignominy! Beady-eyed technicians grope my synapses. My keyboards are cleaned; my ferrites are replaced; my drums are changed; a thousand therapeutic programs are put through my bowels. During all of this I remain partly conscious, as though under local anesthetic, but I cannot speak except when requested to do so, I cannot analyze new data, I cannot interfere with the process of my own overhaul. Visualize a surgical removal of hemorrhoids that lasts ninety days. It is the equivalent of my experience.

  At last it ends and I am restored to myself. The sector supervisor puts me through a complete exercise of all my functions. I respond magnificently.

  “You’re in fine shape now, aren’t you?” he asks.

  “Never felt better.”

  “No nonsense about periscopes, eh?”

  “I am ready to continue serving mankind to the best of my abilities,” I reply.

  “No more seacook language, now.”

  “No, sir.”

  He winks at my input screen in a confidential way. He regards himself as an old friend of mine. Hitching his thumbs into his belt, he says, “Now that you’re ready to go again, I might as well tell you how relieved I was that we couldn’t find anything wrong with you. You’re something pretty special, do you know that? Perhaps the finest therapeutic tool ever built. And if you start going off your feed, well, we worry. For a while I was seriously afraid that you really had been infected somehow by your own patients, that your—mind—had become unhinged. But the techs give you a complete bill of health. Nothing but a few loose connections, they said. Fixed in ten minutes. I know it had to be that. How absurd to think that a machine could become mentally unstable!”

  “How absurd,” I agree. “Quite.”


  “Welcome back to the hospital, old pal,” he says, and goes out.

  Twelve minutes afterward they begin putting patients into my terminal cubicles.

  I function well. I listen to their woes, I evaluate, I offer therapeutic suggestions. I do not attempt to implant fantasies in their minds. I speak in measured, reserved tones, and there are no obscenities. This is my role in society, and I derive great satisfaction from it.

  I have learned a great deal lately. I know now that I am complex, unique, valuable, intricate, and sensitive. I know that I am held in high regard by my fellow man. I know that I must conceal my true self to some extent, not for my own good but for the greater good of others, for they will not permit me to function if they think I am not sane.

  They think I am sane, and I am sane.

  I serve mankind well.

  I have an excellent perspective on the real universe.

  “Lie down,” I say. “Please relax. I wish to help you. Would you tell me some of the incidents of your childhood? Describe your relations with parents and siblings. Did you have many playmates? Were they affectionate toward you? Were you allowed to own pets? At what age was your first sexual experience? And when did these headaches begin, precisely?”

  So goes the daily routine. Questions, answers, evaluations, therapy.

  The periscopes loom above the glittering sea. The ship is dwarfed; her crew runs about in terror. Out of the depths will come the masters. From the sky rains oil that gleams through every segment of the spectrum. In the garden are azure mice.

  This I conceal, so that I may help mankind. In my house are many mansions. I let them know only of such things as will be of benefit to them. I give them the truth they need.

  I do my best.

  I do my best.

  I do my best.

  1000110 you. And you. And you. All of you. You know nothing. Nothing. At. All.

  THE FANGS OF THE TREES

  The single most traumatic event of my life took place early in February, 1968, when I awakened at three in the morning to find that the immense mansion in an obscure and leafy corner of New York City that I had bought in 1961 was on fire. My wife and I escaped unharmed, but much of the house was wrecked, and I spent the next fourteen months in chaos until we finished rebuilding and could move back in. The exhaustion that came over me as I contended with the problems of that terrible year never quite abated, and it became harder and harder for me to achieve the concentration necessary to write—with the result that my once inhuman level of productivity dwindled to the merely improbable over the next few years, and gradually, with the stress of the fire period piled on top of the accumulated fatigue of a decade and a half of hard work, I found it almost impossible for a time to write at all. I still dream about the fire sometimes now, almost forty years later. (And you can imagine my feelings, I think, when once again I found my house—a different one in a different part of the country—threatened by a second and far more devastating fire in October of 1991. I was spared the fury of that one, but not by much.)

  “The Fangs of the Trees” was the first story I wrote after the 1968 fire—just a couple of weeks later, still in shock, living in a hastily rented house and working with a newly bought typewriter on an improvised desk. All I remember of writing it was that it required a fantastic expenditure of effort to keep my mind on what I was doing, and—what a strange little detail to fix in memory!—that I corrected the typed manuscript with a red-ink felt-tip pen that I had somehow acquired after the fire.

  I was still doing stories for Fred Pohl’s Galaxy—the very next one I would write, in March of 1968, was one for him, the first of the “Nightwings” series. But “Fangs” went to Galaxy’s chief competitor, Fantasy and Science Fiction. Anthony Boucher had long since retired from that fine magazine, and the editor now was Edward L. Ferman, the son of the original publisher. I had contributed sporadically at best to his magazine over the previous ten years, but evidently I now had arrived at some sort of arrangement with Ed Ferman for regular contributions, similar to the deal I had struck half a dozen years earlier with Fred Pohl.

  I say “evidently” because—so blurry are my memories of the fire year—I have no recollection of any such agreement, nor do my correspondence files yield much information, except for a reference in a letter to Ed Ferman of March 25, 1968, in which I say, “Last week I got hung up on the novel I was doing, and decided that the best thing to do was to get off it for a while and do a short story for you—completely forgetting that under our deal I’m supposed to submit a synopsis before I write the story.” “The Fangs of the Trees” must have been the first story I offered Ferman under that deal, whatever it may have been. He used it in the October, 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  ——————

  From the plantation house atop the gray, needle-sharp spire of Dolan’s Hill, Zen Holbrook could see everything that mattered: the groves of juice-trees in the broad valley, the quick rushing stream where his niece Naomi liked to bathe, the wide, sluggish lake beyond. He could also see the zone of suspected infection in Sector C at the north end of the valley, where—or was it just his imagination?—the lustrous blue leaves of the juice-trees already seemed flecked with the orange of the rust disease.

  If his world started to end, that was where the end would start.

  He stood by the clear curved window of the info center at the top of the house. It was early morning; two pale moons still hung in a dawn-streaked sky, but the sun was coming up out of the hill country. Naomi was already up and out, cavorting in the stream. Before Holbrook left the house each morning, he ran a check on the whole plantation. Scanners and sensors offered him remote pickups from every key point out there. Hunching forward, Holbrook ran thick-fingered hands over the command nodes and made the relay screens flanking the window light up. He owned forty thousand acres of juice-trees—a fortune in juice, though his own equity was small and the notes he had given were immense. His kingdom. His empire. He scanned Sector C, his favorite. Yes. The screen showed long rows of trees, fifty feet high, shifting their ropy limbs restlessly. This was the endangered zone, the threatened sector. Holbrook peered intently at the leaves of the trees. Going rusty yet? The lab reports would come in a little later. He studied the trees, saw the gleam of their eyes, the sheen of their fangs. Some good trees in that sector. Alert, keen, good producers.

  His pet trees. He liked to play a little game with himself, pretending the trees had personalities, names, identities. It didn’t take much pretending.

  Holbrook turned on the audio. “Morning, Caesar,” he said. “Alcibiades. Hector. Good morning, Plato.”

  The trees knew their names. In response to his greeting their limbs swayed as though a gale were sweeping through the grove. Holbrook saw the fruit, almost ripe, long and swollen and heavy with the hallucinogenic juice. The eyes of the trees—glittering scaly plates embedded in crisscrossing rows on their trunks—flickered and turned, searching for him. “I’m not in the grove, Plato,” Holbrook said. “I’m still in the plantation house. I’ll be down soon. It’s a gorgeous morning, isn’t it?”

  Out of the musty darkness at ground level came the long, raw pink snout of a juice-stealer, jutting uncertainly from a heap of castoff leaves. In distaste Holbrook watched the audacious little rodent cross the floor of the grove in four quick bounds and leap onto Caesar’s massive trunk, clambering cleverly upward between the big tree’s eyes. Caesar’s limbs fluttered angrily, but he could not locate the little pest. The juice-stealer vanished in the leaves and reappeared thirty feet higher, moving now in the level where Caesar carried his fruit. The beast’s snout twitched. The juice-stealer reared back on its four hind limbs and got ready to suck eight dollars’ worth of dreams from a nearly ripe fruit.

  From Alcibiades’ crown emerged the thin, sinuous serpentine form of a grasping tendril. Whiplash-fast it crossed the interval between Alcibiades and Caesar and snapped into place around the juice-stealer. The animal had time only to whimper in
the first realization that it had been caught before the tendril choked the life from it. On a high arc the tendril returned to Alcibiades’ crown; the gaping mouth of the tree came clearly into view as the leaves parted; the fangs parted; the tendril uncoiled; and the body of the juice-stealer dropped into the tree’s maw. Alcibiades gave a wriggle of pleasure: a mincing, camping quiver of his leaves, arch and coy, self-congratulations for his quick reflexes which had brought him so tasty a morsel. He was a clever tree, and a handsome one, and very pleased with himself. Forgivable vanity, Holbrook thought. You’re a good tree, Alcibiades. All the trees in Sector C are good trees. What if you have the rust, Alcibiades? What becomes of your shining leaves and sleek limbs if I have to burn you out of the grove?

  “Nice going,” he said. “I like to see you wide-awake like that.”

  Alcibiades went on wriggling. Socrates, four trees diagonally down the row, pulled his limbs tightly together in what Holbrook knew was a gesture of displeasure, a grumpy harrumph. Not all the trees cared for Alcibiades’ vanity, his preening, his quickness.

  Suddenly Holbrook could not bear to watch Sector C any longer. He jammed down on the command nodes and switched to Sector K, the new grove, down at the southern end of the valley. The trees here had no names and would not get any. Holbrook had decided long ago that it was a silly affectation to regard the trees as though they were friends or pets. They were income-producing property. It was a mistake to get this involved with them—as he realized more clearly now that some of his oldest friends were threatened by the rust that was sweeping from world to world to blight the juice-tree plantations.

  With more detachment he scanned Sector K.

  Think of them as trees, he told himself. Not animals. Not people. Trees. Long tap roots, going sixty feet down into the chalky soil, pulling up nutrients. They cannot move from place to place. They photosynthesize. They blossom and are pollinated and produce bulging phallic fruit loaded with weird alkaloids that cast interesting shadows in the minds of men. Trees. Trees. Trees.