Majipoor Chronicles

by Robert Silverberg

  Slowly, numbly, Lavon descended from the platform.

  He felt dazed and flushed. Something seemed broken within him. A ring of blurred figures surrounded him. Gradually he discerned eyes, mouths, the patterns of familiar faces. He started to say something, but no words would come, only sounds. He toppled and was caught and eased to the deck. Someone’s arm was around his shoulders; someone was giving him wine. “Look at his eyes,” he heard a voice say. “He’s gone into shock!” Lavon began to shiver. Somehow—he was unaware of being lifted—he found himself m his cabin with Vormecht bending over him and others standing behind.

  The first mate said quietly, “The ship is moving, captain.”

  “What? What? Hasz is dead. Galimoin killed Hasz and I killed Galimoin.”

  “It was the only possible thing to do. The man was insane.”

  “I killed him, Vormecht.”

  “We couldn’t have kept a madman locked up on board for the next ten years. He was dangerous to us all. His life was forfeit. You had the power. You acted rightly.”

  “We do not kill,” Lavon said. “Our barbarian ancestors took each other’s lives, on Old Earth long ago, but we do not kill I do not kill. We were beasts once, but that was in another era, on a different planet. I killed him, Vormecht.”

  “You are the captain. You had the right. He threatened the success of the voyage.”

  “Success? Success?”

  “The ship is moving again, captain.”

  Lavon stared, but could barely see. “What are you saying?”

  “Come. Look.”

  Four massive arms enfolded him and Lavon smelled the musky tang of Skandar fur. The giant crewman lifted him and carried him to the deck, and put him carefully down. Lavon tottered, but Vormecht was at his side, and Joachil Noor. The first mate pointed toward the sea. A zone of open water bordered the Spurifon along the entire length of her hull.

  Joachil Noor said, “We dropped cables into the water and gave the dragon-grass a good jolt of current. It shorted out their contractile systems. The ones closest to us died instantly and the rest began to pull back. There’s a clear channel in front of us as far as we can see.”

  “The voyage is saved,” said Vormecht. “We can go onward now, captain!”

  “No,” Lavon said. He felt the haze and confusion lifting from his mind. “Who’s navigator now? Have him turn the ship back toward Zimroel.”

  “But—”

  “Turn her around! Back to Zimroel!”

  They were gaping at him, bewildered, stunned. “Captain, you’re not yourself yet. To give such an order, in the very moment when all is well again—you need to rest, and in a few hours you’ll feel—”

  “The voyage is ended, Vormecht. We’re going back.”

  “No!”

  “No? Is this a mutiny, then?” Their eyes were blank. Their faces were expressionless. Lavon said, “Do you really want to continue? Aboard a doomed ship with a murderer for a captain? You were all sick of the voyage before any of this happened. Don’t you think I knew that? You were hungry for home. You didn’t dare say it, is all. Well, now I feel as you do.”

  Vormecht said, “We’ve been at sea five years. We may be halfway across. It might take us no longer to reach the farther shore than to return.”

  “Or it might take us forever,” said Lavon. “It does not matter. I have no heart for going forward.”

  “Tomorrow you may think differently, captain.”

  “Tomorrow I will still have blood on my hands, Vormecht. I was not meant to bring this ship safely across the Great Sea. We bought our freedom at the cost of four lives; but the voyage was broken by it.”

  “Captain—”

  “Turn the ship around,” said Lavon.

  When they came to him the next day, pleading to be allowed to continue the voyage, arguing that eternal fame and immortality awaited them on the shores of Alhanroel, Lavon calmly and quietly refused to discuss it with them. To continue now, he told them again, was impossible. So they looked at one another, those who had hated the voyage and yearned to be free of it and who in the euphoric moment of victory over the dragon-grass had changed their minds, and they changed their minds again, for without the driving force of Lavon’s will there was no way of going on. They set their course to the east and said no more about the crossing of the Great Sea. A year afterward they were assailed by storms and severely thrown about, and in the following year there was a bad encounter with sea-dragons that severely damaged the ship’s stern; but yet they continued, and of the hundred and sixty-three voyagers who had left Til-omon long before, more than a hundred were still alive, Captain Lavon among them, when the Spurifon came limping back into her home port in the eleventh year of the voyage.

  IV

  Calintane Explains

  HISSUNE IS DOWNCAST for days after that. He knows, of course, that the voyage failed: no ship has ever crossed the Great Sea, and no ship ever will, for the idea is absurd and realization of it is probably impossible. But to fail in such a way, to go so far and then turn back, not out of cowardice or because of illness or famine but rather from sheer moral despair—Hissune finds that hard to comprehend. He would never turn back. Through the fifteen years of his life he has always gone steadily forward toward whatever he perceived as his goal, and those who faltered along their own routes have always seemed to him idle and weak. But, then, he is not Sinnabor Lavon; and, too, he has never taken life. Such a deed of violence might shake anyone’s soul. For Sinnabor Lavon he feels a certain contempt, and a great deal of pity, and then, the more he considers the man, seeing him from within, a kind of admiration replaces the contempt, for he realizes that Sinnabor Lavon was no weakling but in fact a person of enormous moral strength. That is a startling insight, and Hissune’s depression lifts the moment he reaches it. My education, he thinks, continues.

  All the same he has gone to Sinnabor Lavon’s records in search of adventure and diversion, not such sober-minded philosophizing. He has not found quite what he sought. But a few years afterward, he knows, there was an event in this very Labyrinth that had diverted everyone most extremely, and that even after more than six thousand years still reverberates through history as one of the strangest events Majipoor has seen. When his duties permit, Hissune takes the time to do a bit of historical research; and then he returns to the Register of Souls to enter the mind of a certain young official at the court of the Pontifex Arioc of bizarre repute.

  On the morning after the day when the crisis had reached its climax and the final lunacies had occurred, a strange hush settled over the Labyrinth of Majipoor, as if everyone were too stunned even to speak. The impact of yesterday’s extraordinary events was just beginning to be felt, although even those who had witnessed what had taken place could not yet fully believe it. All the ministries were closed that morning, by order of the new Pontifex. The bureaucrats both major and minor had been put to extreme strain by the recent upheavals, and they were set at liberty to sleep it off, while the new Pontifex and the new Coronal—each amazed by the unanticipated attainment of kingship that had struck him with thunderclap force—withdrew to their private chambers to contemplate their astounding transformations. Which gave Calintane at last an opportunity to see his beloved Silimoor. Apprehensively—for he had treated her shabbily all month, and she was not an easily forgiving sort—he sent her a note that said, I know I am guilty of shameful neglect, but perhaps now you begin to understand. Meet me for lunch at the cafe by the Court of Globes at midday and I will explain everything.

  She had a quick temper at the best of times. It was virtually her only fault, but it was a severe one, and Calintane feared her wrath. They had been lovers a year; they were nearly betrothed to be betrothed; all the senior officials at the Pontifical court agreed he was making a wise match. Silimoor was lovely and intelligent and knowledgeable in political matters, and of good family, with three Coronals in her ancestry, including no less than the fabled Lord Stiamot himself. Plainly she would be an i
deal mate for a young man destined for high places. Though still some distance short of thirty, Calintane had already attained the outer rim of the inner circle about the Pontifex, and had been given responsibilities well beyond his years. Indeed, it was those very responsibilities that had kept him from seeing or even speaking at any length to Silimoor lately. For which he expected her to berate him, and for which he hoped without much conviction that she would eventually pardon him.

  All this past sleepless night he had rehearsed in his weary mind a long speech of extenuation that began, “As you know, I’ve been preoccupied with urgent matters of state these last weeks, too delicate to discuss in detail with you, and so—” And as he made his way up the levels of the Labyrinth to the Court of Globes for his rendezvous with her he continued to roll the phrases about. The ghostly silence of the Labyrinth this morning made him feel all the more edgy. The lowest levels, where the government offices were, seemed wholly deserted, and higher up just a few people could be seen, gathering in little knotted groups in the darkest corners, whispering and muttering as though there had been a coup d’etat, which in a sense was not far wrong. Everyone stared at him. Some pointed. Calintane wondered how they recognized him as an official of the Pontificate, until he remembered that he was still wearing his mask of office. He kept it on anyway, as a kind of shield against the glaring artificial light, so harsh on his aching eyes. Today the Labyrinth seemed stifling and oppressive. He longed to escape its somber subterranean depths, those levels upon levels of great spiralling chambers that coiled down and down. In a single night the place had become loathsome to him.

  On the level of the Court of Globes he emerged from the lift and cut diagonally across that intricate vastness, decorated with its thousands of mysteriously suspended spheres, to the little cafe on the far side. The midday hour struck just as he entered it. Silimoor was already there—he knew she would be; she used punctuality to express displeasure—at a small table along the rear wall of polished onyx. She rose and offered him not her lips but her hand, also as he expected. Her smile was precise and cool. Exhausted as he was, he found her beauty almost excessive: the short golden hair arrayed like a crown, the flashing turquoise eyes, the full lips and high cheekbones, an elegance too painful to bear, just now. “I’ve missed you so,” he said hoarsely.

  “Of course. So long a separation—it must have been a dreadful burden—”

  “As you know, I’ve been preoccupied with urgent matters of state these last weeks, too delicate to discuss in detail with you, and so—”

  The words sounded impossibly idiotic in his own ears. It was a relief when she cut him off, saying smoothly, “There’s time for all that, love. Shall we have some wine?”

  “Please. Yes.”

  She signaled. A liveried waiter, a haughty-looking Hjort, came to take the order, and stalked away.

  Silimoor said, “And won’t you even remove your mask?”

  “Ah. Sorry. It’s been such a scrambled few days—” He set aside the bright yellow strip that covered his nose and eyes and marked him as the Pontifex’s man. Silimoor’s expression changed as she saw him clearly for the first time; the look of serenely self-satisfied fury faded and something close to concern appeared on her face. “Your eyes are so bloodshot—your cheeks are so pale and drawn—”

  “I’ve had no sleep. It’s been a crazy time.”

  “Poor Calintane.”

  “Do you think I kept away from you because I wanted to? I’ve been caught up in this insanity, Silimoor.”

  “I know. I can see how much of a strain it’s been.”

  He realized suddenly that she was not mocking him, that she was genuinely sympathetic, that in fact this was possibly going to be easier than he had been imagining.

  He said, “The trouble with being ambitious is that you get engulfed in affairs far beyond your control, and you have no choice but to let yourself be swept along. You’ve heard what the Pontifex Arioc did yesterday?”

  She stifled a laugh. “Yes, of course. I mean, I’ve heard the rumors. Everyone has. Are they true? Did it really happen?”

  “Unfortunately, it did.”

  “How marvelous, how perfectly marvelous! But such a thing turns the world upside down, doesn’t it? It affects you in some dreadful way?”

  “It affects you, and me, and everyone in the world,” said Calintane, with a gesture that reached beyond the Court of Globes, beyond the Labyrinth itself, encompassing the entire planet beyond these claustrophobic depths, from the awesome summit of Castle Mount to the far-off cities of the western continent. “Affects us all to a degree that I hardly understand yet myself. But let me tell you the story from the beginning—”

  Perhaps you were not aware that the Pontifex Arioc has been behaving strangely for months. I suppose there’s something about the pressures of high office that eventually drives people crazy, or perhaps you have to be at least partly mad in the first place to aspire to high office. But you know that Arioc was Coronal for thirteen years under Dizimaule, and now he’s been Pontifex a dozen years more, and that’s a long time to hold that sort of power. Especially living here in the Labyrinth. The Pontifex must yearn for the outside world now and then, I’d imagine—to feel the breezes on Castle Mount or hunt gihornas in Zimroel or just to swim in a real river anywhere—and here he is miles and miles underground in this maze, presiding over his rituals and his bureaucrats until the end of his life.

  One day about a year ago Arioc suddenly began talking about making a grand processional of Majipoor. I was in attendance at court that day, along with Duke Guadeloom. The Pontifex called for maps and started laying out a journey down the river to Alaisor, over to the Isle of Sleep for a pilgrimage and a visit to the Lady at Inner Temple, then across to Zimroel, with stops at Piliplok, Ni-moya, Pidruid, Narabal, you know, everywhere, a tour that would last at least five years. Guadeloom gave me a funny look and gently pointed out to Arioc that it’s the Coronal who makes grand processionals, not the Pontifex, and that Lord Struin had only just come back from one a couple of years ago.

  “Then I am forbidden to do so?” the Pontifex asked.

  “Not precisely forbidden, your majesty, but custom dictates—”

  “That I remain a prisoner in the Labyrinth?”

  “Not at all a prisoner, your majesty, but—”

  “But I am rarely if ever to venture into the upper world?”

  And so on. I must say my sympathies were with Arioc; but remember that I am not, like you, a native of the Labyrinth, only one whose government duties have brought him here, and I do find life underground a little unnatural at times. At any rate Guadeloom did convince his majesty that a grand processional was out of the question. But I could see the restlessness in the Pontifex’s eyes.

  The next thing that happened was that his majesty started slipping out by night to wander around the Labyrinth by himself. No one knows how often he did it before we found out what was going on, but we began to hear odd rumors that a masked figure who looked much like the Pontifex had been seen in the small hours lurking about in the Court of Pyramids or the Hall of Winds. We regarded that as so much nonsense, until the night when some flunky of the bed-chamber imagined he had heard the Pontifex ring for service and went in and found the room empty. I think you will remember that night, Silimoor, because I was spending it with you and one of Guadeloom’s people hunted me down and made me leave, claiming that an urgent meeting of the high advisers had been convened and my services were needed. You were quite upset—furious, I’d say. Of course what the meeting was about was the disappearance of the Pontifex, though later we covered it up by claiming it was a discussion of the great wave that had devastated so much of Stoienzar.

  We found Arioc about four hours past midnight. He was in the Arena—you know, that stupid empty thing that the Pontifex Dizimaule built in one of his crazier moments—sitting crosslegged at the far side, playing a zootibar and singing songs to an audience of five or six ragged little boys. We brought h
im home. A few weeks later he got out again and managed to get as far up as the Court of Columns. Guadeloom discussed it with him: Arioc insisted that it is important for a monarch to go among his people and hear their grievances, and he cited precedents as far back as the kings of Old Earth. Quietly Guadeloom began posting guards in the royal precincts, supposedly to keep assassins out—but who would assassinate a Pontifex? The guards were put there to keep Arioc in. But though the Pontifex is eccentric he’s far from stupid, and despite the guards he slipped out twice more in the next couple of months. It was becoming a critical problem. What if he vanished for a week? What if he got out of the Labyrinth entirely, and went for a stroll in the desert?

  “Since we can’t seem to prevent him from roaming,” I said to Guadeloom, “why don’t we give him a companion, someone who’ll go on his adventures with him and at the same time see to it that no harm comes to him?”

  “An excellent idea,” the duke replied. “And I appoint you to the post. The Pontifex is fond of you, Calintane. And you are young enough and agile enough to be able to extricate him from any trouble into which he may stumble.”

  That was six weeks ago, Silimoor. You will surely recall that I suddenly ceased spending my nights with you at that time, pleading an increase of responsibilities at court, and thus our estrangement began. I could not tell you what duty it was that now occupied my nights, and I could only hope you did not suspect me of having shifted my affections to another. But I can now reveal that I was compelled to take up lodgings close by the bedchamber of the Pontifex and give him attendance every night; that I began to do most of my sleeping at random hours of the day; and that by one stratagem and another I became companion to Arioc on his nocturnal jaunts.