The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark

by Robert Silverberg

  Actually they were all there, parents, stepparents, the various children by the various second marriages. Timothy seemed to be no more than a waxen doll. They had brought him books, tapes, even a laptop computer, but everything was pushed to the corners of the bed. The shrunken figure in the middle barely raised the level of the coverlet a few inches. They had him on an IV unit and a whole webwork of other lines and cables ran to him from the array of medical machines surrounding him. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be staring into some other world, perhaps that same world of rampaging bacteria and quivering molecules that had haunted my sleep a few nights before. He seemed perhaps to be smiling.

  “He collapsed at school,” his mother whispered.

  “In the computer lab, no less,” said his father, with a nervous ratcheting laugh. “He was last conscious about two hours ago, but he wasn’t talking coherently.”

  “He wants to go inside his computer,” one of the little boys said. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?” He might have been seven.

  “Timothy’s going to die, Timothy’s going to die,” chanted somebody’s daughter, about seven.

  “Christopher! Bree! Shhh, both of you!” said about three of the various parents, all at once.

  I said, “Has he started to respond to the IV?”

  “They don’t think so. It’s not at all good,” his mother said. “He’s right on the edge. He lost three pounds this week. We thought he was eating, but he must have been sliding the food into his pocket, or something like that.” She shook her head. “You can’t be a policeman.”

  Her eyes were cold. So were her husband’s, and even those of the stepparents. Telling me, This is your fault, we counted on you to make him stop starving himself. What could I say? You can only heal the ones you can reach. Timothy had been determined to keep himself beyond my grasp. Still, I felt the keenness of their reproachful anger, and it hurt.

  “I’ve seen worse cases than this come back under medical treatment,” I told them. “They’ll build up his strength until he’s capable of talking with me again. And then I’m certain I’ll be able to lick this thing. I was just beginning to break through his defenses when—when he—”

  Sure. It costs no more to give them a little optimism. I gave them what I could: experience with other cases of severe food deprivation, positive results following a severe crisis of this nature, et cetera, et cetera, the man of science dipping into his reservoir of experience. They all began to brighten as I spoke. They even managed to convince themselves that a little color was coming into Timothy’s cheeks, that he was stirring, that he might soon be regaining consciousness as the machinery surrounding him pumped the nutrients into him that he had so conscientiously forbidden himself to have.

  “Look,” this one said, or that one. “Look how he’s moving his hands! Look how he’s breathing. It’s better, isn’t it!”

  I actually began to believe it myself.

  But then I heard his dry thin voice echoing in the caverns of my mind. I can never get far enough. I have to be weightless in order to get there. Where I am now, it’s only a beginning. I need to lose all the rest.

  I want to disappear.

  That night, a third dream, vivid, precise, concrete. I was falling and running at the same time, my legs pistoning like those of a marathon runner in the twenty-sixth mile, while simultaneously I dropped in free fall through airless dark toward the silver-black surface of some distant world. And fell and fell and fell, in utter weightlessness, and hit the surface easily and kept on running, moving not forward but downward, the atoms of the ground parting for me as I ran. I became smaller as I descended, and smaller yet, and even smaller, until I was a mere phantom, a running ghost, the bodiless idea of myself. And still I went downward toward the dazzling heart of things, shorn now of all impediments of the flesh.

  I phoned the hospital the next morning. Timothy had died a little after dawn.

  Did I fail with him? Well, then, I failed. But I think no one could possibly have succeeded. He went where he wanted to go; and so great was the force of his will that any attempts at impeding him must have seemed to him like the mere buzzings of insects, meaningless, insignificant.

  So now his purpose is achieved. He has shed his useless husk. He has gone on, floating, running, descending: downward, inward, toward the core, where knowledge is absolute and uncertainty is unknown. He is running among the shining electrons, now. He is down there among the angstrom units at last.

  A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING

  The Benford and Greenberg alternative-universe anthology for which I wrote “To the Promised Land” was followed by a second volume of similar stories. The first had concentrated on alterations of a single historical event; this one dealt with changes in the lives of great history-making individuals. Again I was invited to contribute; and the individual I chose was Genghis Khan.

  His name, of course, has come to be used as an archetype of the monstrous slaughtering-and-plundering barbarian chieftain. Indeed he probably wasn’t a nice sort of person, and it’s certainly all right with me that the twentieth century, amidst its Hitlers and Stalins and such, didn’t have to deal with Genghis Khan as well. But the historical truth is that he was not merely an invincible conqueror but a complex and intelligent leader: an empire-builder who followed a distinctive plan of conquest that not only created a vast realm but also brought governmental order where only anarchy and chaos had been. I’d like to think that he had more in common with Augustus Caesar or Alexander the Great than he did with the classic butchers of history.

  But the Mongol Empire’s limitations—the limitations inherent in having a family-controlled elite of nomadic horsemen trying to rule vast bureaucratic states—eventually set bounds on the ambitions of Genghis and his descendants. What, I asked myself, would the world have been like if Genghis Khan, that singular man of formidable drive and energy, hadn’t been raised as a Mongol nomad at all, but as a civilized city-dweller—as a Byzantine Christian, say? That was the point from which this story emerged. Alice Turner bought it for Playboy, publishing it in the July, 1989 issue. The following year it appeared in the Benford and Greenberg collection Alternate Heroes, and Don Wollheim chose it for his best-of-the-year anthology.

  ——————

  “Channeling?” I said. “For Christ’s sake, Joe! You brought me all the way down here for dumb bullshit like that?”

  “This isn’t channeling,” Joe said.

  “The kid who drove me from the airport said you’ve got a machine that can talk with dead people.”

  A slow, angry flush spread across Joe’s face. He’s a small, compact man with very glossy skin and very sharp features, and when he’s annoyed he inflates like a puff adder.

  “He shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here?” I asked. “Some sort of channeling experiments?”

  “Forget that shithead word, will you, Mike?” Joe sounded impatient and irritable. But there was an odd fluttery look in his eye, conveying—what? Uncertainty? Vulnerability? Those were traits I hadn’t ever associated with Joe Hedley, not in the 30 years we’d known each other. “We aren’t sure what the fuck we’re doing here,” he said. “We thought maybe you could tell us.”

  “Me?”

  “You, yes. Here, put the helmet on. Come on, put it on, Mike. Put it on. Please.”

  I stared. Nothing ever changes. Ever since we were kids, Joe’s been using me for one cockeyed thing or another, because he knows he can count on me to give him a sober-minded, common-sense opinion. Always bouncing this bizarre scheme or that off me, so he can measure the caroms.

  The helmet was a golden strip of wire mesh studded with a row of microwave pickups the size of a dime and flanked by a pair of suction electrodes that fit over the temples. It looked like some vagrant piece of death-house equipment.

  I ran my fingers over it. “How much current is this thing capable of sending through my head?”

  He looked even angrier. �
�Oh, fuck you, you hypercautious bastard! Would I ever ask you to do anything that could harm you?”

  With a patient little sigh I said, “OK. How do I do this?”

  “Ear to ear, over the top of your head. I’ll adjust the electrodes for you.”

  “You won’t tell me what any of this is all about?”

  “I want an uncontaminated response. That’s science talk, Mike. I’m a scientist. You know that, don’t you?”

  “So that’s what you are. I wondered.”

  Joe bustled about above me, moving the helmet around, pressing the electrodes against my skull.

  “How does it fit?”

  “Like a glove.”

  “You always wear your gloves on your head?” he asked.

  “You must be goddamn nervous if you think that’s funny.”

  “I am,” he said “You must be, too, if you take a line like that seriously. But I tell you that you won’t get hurt. I promise you that, Mike.”

  “All right.”

  “Just sit down here. We need to check the impedances, then we can get going.”

  “I wish I understood at least a little bit about—”

  “Please,” he said. He gestured through a glass partition at a technician in the adjoining room, and she began to do things with dials and switches. This was turning into a movie, a very silly one, full of mad doctors in white jackets and sputtering electrical gadgets. The tinkering went on and on, and I felt myself passing beyond apprehension and annoyance into a kind of gray realm of Zen serenity, the way I sometimes do while sitting in the dentist’s chair waiting for the scraping and poking to begin.

  On the hillside visible from the laboratory window, yellow hibiscus was blooming against a background of billowing scarlet bougainvillea in brilliant California sunshine. It had been cold and raining, this February morning, when I drove to Sea-Tac Airport 1300 miles to the north. Hedley’s lab is just outside La Jolla, on a sandy bluff high up over the blue Pacific. When Joe and I were kids growing up in Santa Monica, we took this kind of luminous winter day for granted, but I had lived in the Northwest for 20 years now, and I couldn’t help thinking I’d gone on a day trip to Eden. I studied the colors on the hillside until my eyes began to get blurry.

  “Here we go now,” Joe said, from a point somewhere far away behind my left shoulder.

  It was like stepping into a big cage full of parakeets and mynahs and crazed macaws. I heard scratchy screeching sounds, and a harsh loony almost-laughter that soared through three or four octaves, and a low, ominous burbling noise, as if some hydraulic device was about to blow a gasket. I heard weird wire-edged shrieks that went tumbling away as though the sound was falling through an infinite abyss. I heard queeblings. I heard hissings.

  Then came a sudden burst of clearly enunciated syllables, floating in isolation above the noise:

  Onoodor.

  That startled me.

  A nonsense word? No, no, a real one, one that had meaning for me, a word in an obscure language that I just happen to understand.

  “Today,” that’s what it means. In Khalkha. My specialty. But it was crazy that this machine would be speaking Khalkha to me. This had to be some sort of coincidence. What I’d heard was a random clumping of sounds that I must automatically have arranged into a meaningful pattern. I was kidding myself. Or else Joe was playing an elaborate joke. Only he seemed very serious.

  I strained to hear more. But everything was babble again.

  Then, out of the chaos:

  Usan deer.

  Khalkha, again: “On the water.” It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  More noise. Skwkaark skreek yubble gobble.

  Aawa namaig yawuulawa.

  “Father sent me.”

  Skwkaark. Yabble. Eeeeesh.

  “Go on,” I said. I felt sweat rolling down my back. “Your father sent you where? Where? Khaana. Tell me where.”

  Usan deer.

  “On the water, yes.”

  Yarkhh. Skreek. Tshhhhhhh.

  Akhanartan.

  “To his elder brother. Yes.”

  I closed my eyes and let my mind rove out into the darkness. It drifted on a sea of scratchy noise. Now and again, I caught an actual syllable, half a syllable, a slice of a word, a clipped fragment of meaning. The voice was brusque, forceful, a drill-sergeant voice, carrying an undertone of barely suppressed rage.

  Somebody very angry was speaking to me across a great distance, over a channel clotted with interference, in a language that hardly anyone in the United States knew anything about: Khalkha. Spoken a little oddly, with an unfamiliar intonation, but plainly recognizable.

  I said, speaking very slowly and carefully and trying to match the odd intonation of the voice at the other end, “I can hear you and I can understand you. But there’s a lot of interference. Say everything three times and I’ll try to follow.”

  I waited. But now there was only a roaring silence in my ears. Not even the shrieking, not even the babble.

  I looked up at Hedley like someone coming out of a trance.

  “It’s gone dead.”

  “You sure?”

  “I don’t hear anything, Joe.”

  He snatched the helmet from me and put it on, fiddling with the electrodes in that edgy, compulsively precise way of his. He listened for a moment, scowled, nodded. “The relay satellite must have passed around the far side of the sun. We won’t get anything more for hours if it has.”

  “The relay satellite? Where the hell was that broadcast coming from?”

  “In a minute,” he said. He reached around and took the helmet off. His eyes had a brassy gleam and his mouth was twisted off to the corner of his face, almost as if he’d had a stroke. “You were actually able to understand what he was saying, weren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew you would. And was he speaking Mongolian?”

  “Khalkha, yes. The main Mongolian dialect.”

  The tension left his face. He gave me a warm, loving grin. “I was sure you’d know. We had a man in from the university here, the comparative-linguistics department—you probably know him, Malmstrom’s his name—and he said it sounded to him like an Altaic language, maybe Turkic—is that right, Turkic?—but more likely one of the Mongolian languages, and the moment he said Mongolian I thought, That’s it, get Mike down here right away…” He paused. “So it’s the language that they speak in Mongolia right this very day, would you say?”

  “Not quite. His accent was a little strange. Something stiff about it, almost archaic.”

  “Archaic.”

  “It had that feel, yes. I can’t tell you why. There’s just something formal and old-fashioned about it, something, well—”

  “Archaic,” Hedley said again. Suddenly, there were tears in his eyes. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him cry before.

  What they have, the kid who picked me up at the airport had said, is a machine that lets them talk with the dead.

  “Joe?” I said. “Joe, what in God’s name is this all about?”

  We had dinner that night in a sleek restaurant on a sleek, quiet La Jolla street of elegant shops and glossy-leaved trees, just the two of us, the first time in a long while that we’d gone out alone like that. Lately, we tended to see each other once or twice a year at most, and Joe, who is almost always between marriages, would usually bring along his latest squeeze, the one who was finally going to bring order and stability and other such things to his tempestuous private life. And since he always needs to show the new one what a remarkable human being he is, he’s forever putting on a performance, for the woman, for me, for the waiters, for the people at the nearby tables. Generally, the fun’s at my expense, for compared with Hedley, I’m very staid and proper and I’m 18 years into my one and only marriage so far, and Joe often seems to enjoy making me feel that there’s something wrong with that. I never see him with the same woman twice, except when he happens to marry one of them. But tonight, it was all different. He was alone,
and the conversation was subdued and gentle and rueful, mostly about the years we’d put in knowing each other, the fun we’d had, the regret Joe felt during the occasional long periods when we didn’t see much of each other. He did most of the talking. There was nothing new about that. But mostly it was just chatter. We were three quarters of the way down the bottle of silky Cabernet before Joe brought himself around to the topic of the experiment. I hadn’t wanted to push.

  “It was pure serendipity,” he said. “You know, the art of finding what you’re not looking for. We were trying to clean up some problems in radio transmission from the Icarus relay station—that’s the one that the Japs and the French hung around the sun inside the orbit of Mercury—and we were fiddling with this and fiddling with that, sending out an assortment of test signals at a lot of different frequencies, when out of nowhere, we got a voice coming back at us. A man’s voice. Speaking a strange language. Which turned out to be Chaucerian English.”

  “Some kind of academic prank?” I suggested.

  He looked annoyed. “I don’t think so. But let me tell it, Mike, OK? OK?” He cracked his knuckles and rearranged the knot of his tie. “We listened to this guy and gradually we figured out a little of what he was saying and we called in a grad student from UCSD who confirmed it—Fourteenth Century English—and it absolutely knocked us on our asses.” He tugged at his earlobes and rearranged his tie again. A sort of manic sheen was coming into his eyes. “Before we could even begin to comprehend what we were dealing with, the Englishman was gone and we were picking up some woman making a speech in medieval French. Like we were getting a broadcast from Joan of Arc, do you see? Not that I’m arguing that that’s who she was. We had her for half an hour, a minute here and a minute there with a shitload of interference, and then came a solar flare that disrupted communications, and when we had things tuned again we got a quick burst of what turned out to be Arabic, and then someone else talking in Middle English, and then, last week, this absolutely incomprehensible language, which Malmstrom guessed was Mongolian and you have now confirmed. The Mongol has stayed on the line longer than all the others put together.”