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

by Robert Silverberg

  Gardner Dozois published it in the March, 1989 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Tor brought it out the following year bound with Moore’s original story in a double volume.

  ——————

  The summer had been Capri, at the villa of Augustus, the high summer of the emperor at the peak of his reign, and the autumn had been the pilgrimage to golden Canterbury. Later they would all go to Rome for Christmas, to see the coronation of Charlemagne. But now it was the springtime of their wondrous journey, that glorious May late in the twentieth century that was destined to end in sudden roaring death and a red smoking sky. In wonder and something almost like ecstasy Thimiroi watched the stone walls of Canterbury fade into mist and this newest strange city take on solidity around him. The sight of it woke half-formed poems in his mind. He felt amazingly young, alive, open…vulnerable.

  “Thimiroi’s in a trance,” Denvin said in his light, mocking way, and winked and grinned. He stood leaning casually against the rail of the embankment, a compact, elegant little man, looking back at his two companions.

  “Let him alone,” said Laliene sharply. In anger she ran her hands over the crimson nimbus of her hair and down the sides of her sleek tanned cheeks. Her gray-violet eyes flashed with annoyance. “Can’t you see he’s overwhelmed by what he sees out there?”

  “By the monstrous ugliness of it?”

  “By its beauty,” Laliene said, with some ferocity. She touched Thimiroi’s elbow. “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  Thimiroi nodded.

  She gestured toward the city. “How wonderfully discordant it is! How beautifully strident! No two buildings alike. And the surfaces of everything so flat. But colors, shapes, sizes, textures, all different. Not even the trees showing any sort of harmony.”

  “And the noise,” said Denvin. “Don’t forget the noise, if you’re delighted by discordance. Machinery screeching and clanging and booming, and giving off smelly fumes besides—oh, it’s marvelous, Laliene! Those painted things are vehicles, aren’t they? Those boxy-looking machines. Honking and bellowing like crazed oxen with wheels. That thing flying around up there, too, the shining thing with wings—listen to it! Just listen!”

  “Stop it,” Laliene said. “You’re going to upset him.”

  “No,” Thimiroi said. “He’s not bothering me. But I do think it’s very beautiful. Beautiful in its ugliness. Beautiful in its discordance. There’s energy here. Whatever else this place may be, it’s a place of tremendous energy. And energy is always beautiful.” His heart was pounding. It had not pounded like this when they had arrived at any of the other places of their tour through antiquity. But the twentieth century was special: an apocalyptic time, a time of such potent darkness that it cast an eerie black radiance across half a dozen centuries to come. And this was its most poignant moment, when the century was at its highest point, all its earlier turmoil far behind—the moment when splendor and magnificence would be transformed in an instant, by nature’s malevolent prank, into stunning catastrophe. “Besides,” he said, “not everything here is ugly or discordant anyway. Look at the sky.”

  “Yes,” Laliene said. “That’s a sky to remember. It’s a sky that absolutely demands a great artist to capture, wouldn’t you say? Someone on the order of Nivander, or even Sathimon. Those blues, and the white of the clouds. And then those streaks of gold and purple and red.”

  “You mean the pollution?” Denvin asked.

  She glowered at him. “Don’t. Please. If you don’t want to be here, tell Kadro when he shows up, and he’ll send you home. But don’t spoil it for the rest of us.”

  “Sorry,” said Denvin, in a chastened tone. “I do have to admit that that sky is fantastic.”

  “So intense,” Laliene said. “It comes right down and wraps itself around the tops of the buildings like a shimmering blue cloak. And everything so sharp, so vivid, so clear. The sun was brighter back in these days, someone said. That must be why. And the air more transparent, a different mix of elements. Of course, this was an unusual season even for here. That’s well known. They say there had never been a month like this one, a magical springtime, everything perfect, almost as if it had been arranged that way for maximum contrast with—with—”

  Her voice trailed away.

  Thimiroi shook his head. “You both talk too much. Can’t you simply stand here and let it all come flooding into your souls? We came here to experience this place, not to talk about it. We’ll have the rest of our lives to talk about it.”

  They looked abashed. He grasped their hands in his and laughed—his rich, exuberant, pealing laugh, which some people thought was too much for their delicate sensibilities—to take the sting out of the rebuke. Denvin, after a moment, managed a smile. Laliene gave Thimiroi a curiously impenetrable stare; but then she, too, smiled, a warmer and more sincere one than Denvin’s. Thimiroi nodded and released them, and stepped forward to peer over the edge of the embankment.

  They had materialized just a few moments earlier, in what seemed to be a park on the highest slopes of a lush green hillside overlooking a broad, swiftly flowing river. The city was on the far side, stretching out before them in dizzying vastness. Where they stood was in a sort of overlook point, jutting out of the hill, protected by a dark metal railing. Their luggage was beside them. The hour appeared to be midday; the sun was high; the air was mild, and very still and clear. The park was almost empty, though Thimiroi could see a few people strolling on the paths below. Natives of this time and place, he thought. His heart went out to them. He would have run down to them and embraced them, if he could. He longed to know what they were really like, these ancients, these rough earthy primitives, these people of lost antiquity.

  Primitives, he thought? Well, yes, what else could they be called? They lived so long ago. But this city is no trifling thing. This is no squalid village of mud-and-wattle huts that lies before us.

  In silence Thimiroi stared across the river at the massive blocky gray towers and wide, busy streets of the great metropolis, and at the shimmering silvery bridges to his right and to his left, and at the endless rows of small white and pink houses that rose up and up and up through the green hills on the other side. The weight and size and power of the place were extraordinary. His soul quivered with—what? Joy? Amazement? Fear?—at such immensity. How many people lived here? A million? Five million? He could scarcely conceive of such a number, all packed into a single place. The other ancient cities they had visited on this tour, imperial capitals though they were, were mere citylets—towns, even; piddling little medieval settlements—however grand they might have imagined themselves to be. But the great cities of the twentieth century, he had always been told, marked the high point in human urban concentration: cities of ten million, fifteen million, twenty million people. Unimaginable. This one before him was not even the biggest one, not even close to the biggest. Never before in history had cities grown to this size—and never again, either. Never again. What an extraordinary sight! What an astounding thing to contemplate, this great humming throbbing hive of intense human activity, especially when one knew—when one knew—when one knew the fate that was soon to befall it—

  “Thimiroi?” Laliene called. “Kadro’s here!”

  He turned. The tour leader, a small, fragile-looking man with thick flame-red hair and eerie blue-violet eyes, held out his arms to them. He could only just have arrived himself—they had all been together mere minutes before, in Canterbury—but he was dressed already in twentieth-century costume, curious and quaint and awkward-looking, but oddly elegant on him. Thimiroi had no idea how that trick had been accomplished, but he accepted it untroubledly: The Travel was full of mysteries of all sorts, detours and overlaps and side-jaunts through time. It was Kadro’s business to understand such things, not his.

  “You’d better change,” Kadro said. “There’s a transport vehicle on the way up here to take you into town.”

  He touched something at his hip and a cloud of dark mis
t sprang up around them. Under its protective cover they opened their suitcases—their twentieth-century clothes were waiting neatly inside, and some of the strange local currency—and set about the task of making themselves look like natives.

  “Oh, how wonderful!” Laliene cried, holding a gleaming, iridescent green robe in front of herself and dancing around with it. “How did they think of such things? Look at how it’s cut! Look at the way it’s fitted together!”

  “I’ve seen you wearing a thousand things more lovely than those,” said Denvin sourly.

  She made a face at him. Denvin himself had almost finished changing: he was clad now in gray trousers, scarlet shirt open at the throat, charcoal-colored jacket cut with flaring lapels. Like Kadro, he looked splendid in his costume. But Kadro and Denvin looked splendid in anything they wore. The two of them were men of the same sort, Thimiroi thought, both of them dandyish, almost dainty. Perfect men of fashion. He himself, much taller than they and very muscular, almost rawboned, had never quite mastered their knack of seeming at utter ease in all situations. He often felt out of place among such smooth types as they, almost as though he were some sort of throwback, full of hot, primordial passions and drives rarely seen in the refined era into which he had happened to be born. It was, perhaps, his creative intensity, he often thought. His artistic nature. He was too earthy for them, too robust of spirit, too much the primitive. As he slipped into his twentieth-century clothes, the tight yellow pants, the white shirt boldly striped in blue, the jet-black jacket, the tapering black boots, he felt a curious sense of having returned home at last, after a long journey.

  “Here comes the car,” Kadro said. “Hold out your hands, quickly! I have your implants.”

  Thimiroi extended his arm. Something silvery-bright, like a tiny gleaming beetle, sparkled between two of Kadro’s fingers. He pressed it gently against Thimiroi’s skin, just above the long rosy scar of the inoculation, and it made the tiniest of whirring sounds.

  “This is their language,” said Kadro. He touched it to Denvin’s arm also, and to Laliene’s. “And this one, the technology and social customs. And this is your medical booster, just in case.” Buzz, buzz, buzz. Kadro smiled. He was very efficient. “You’re all ready for the twentieth century now. And just in time, too.”

  A vehicle had pulled up in the roadway behind them, yellow with black markings, and odd projections on its roof. Thimiroi felt a quick faint stab of nausea as a breeze, suddenly stirring out of the quiescent air, swept a whiff of the vehicle’s greasy fumes past his face.

  The driver hopped out. He was very big, bigger even than Thimiroi, with immense heavy shoulders and a massive column of a neck. His face was unusual, the lips strongly pronounced, the cheekbones broad and jutting like blades. His hair was black and woolly and grew very close to his skull. But the most surprising thing about him was the color of his skin. It was dark brown, almost black: his eyes were bright as beacons against that astonishing chocolate-hued backdrop. Thimiroi had never imagined that anyone might have skin of such a color. Was that what they all were like in the twentieth century? Skin the color of night? No one on Capri had looked like that, or in Canterbury.

  “You the people called for a taxi?” the driver asked. “Here—let me put those suitcases in the trunk—”

  Perhaps it is a form of ornamentation, Thimiroi thought. They have it artificially done. They think it makes them look more beautiful when they change their skins, when they change their faces, so that they are like this.

  And it was beautiful. There was a brooding somber power about this black man’s face. He was like something carved from a block of some precious and recalcitrant stone.

  “I’ll ride up front,” Kadro said. “You three get in back.” He turned to the driver. “The Montgomery House is where we are going. You know where that is?”

  The driver laughed. “Ain’t no one in town who don’t know the Montgomery House. But you sure you don’t want a hotel that’s a little cheaper?”

  “The Montgomery House will do,” said Kadro.

  They had ridden in mule-drawn carts on the narrow winding paths of hilly Capri, and in wagons drawn by oxen on the rutted road to Canterbury. That had been charming and pretty, to ride in such things, to feel the jouncing of the wheels and see the sweat glistening on the backs of the panting animals. There was nothing charming or pretty about traveling in this squat glass-walled wheeled vehicle, this taxi. It rumbled and quivered as if it were about to explode. It careered alarmingly around the sharp curves of the road, threatening at any moment to break free of the driver’s tenuous control and go spurting over the edge of the embankment in a cataclysmic dive through space. It poured forth all manner of dark noxious gases. It was an altogether terrifying thing.

  And yet fascinating and wonderful. Crude and scary though the taxi was, it was not really very different in fundamental concept or design from the silent, flawless vehicles of Thimiroi’s world. Contemplating that, Thimiroi had a keen sense of the kinship of this world to his own. We are not that far beyond them in time, he thought. They exist at the edge of the modern era, really. The Capri of the Romans, the Canterbury of the pilgrimage—those are truly alien places, set deep back in the pretechnological past. But there is not the same qualitative difference between our epoch and this twentieth century. The gulf is not so great. The seeds of our world can be found in theirs. Or so it seems to me, Thimiroi told himself, after five minutes’ acquaintance with this place.

  Kadro said, “Omerie and Kleph and Klia are here already. They’ve rented a house just down the street from the hotel where you’ll be staying.”

  Laliene smiled. “The Sanciscos! Oh, how I look forward to seeing them again! Omerie is such a clever man. And Kleph and Klia—how beautiful they are, how refreshing to spend time with them!”

  “The place they’ve taken is absolutely perfect for the end of the month,” said Kadro. “The view will be supreme. Hollia and Hara wanted to buy it, you know. But Omerie got to it ahead of them.”

  “Hollia and Hara are going to be here?” Denvin said, sounding surprised.

  “Everyone will be here. Who would miss it?” Kadro’s hands moved in a quick playful gesture of malicious pleasure. “Hollia was beside herself, of course. She couldn’t believe that Omerie had beaten her to that house. But, as you say, Laliene, Omerie is such a clever man.”

  “Hollia is ruthless,” said Denvin. “If the place is that good, she’ll try to get it away from the Sanciscos. Mark my words, Kadro. She’ll try some slippery little trick.”

  “She may very well. Not that there’s any real reason to. I understand that the Sanciscos are planning to invite all of us to watch the show from their front window. Including Hollia and Hara, naturally. So they won’t be the worse for it. Except that Hollia would have preferred to be the hostess herself. Cenbe will be coming, you know.”

  “Cenbe!” Laliene cried.

  “Exactly. To finish his symphony. Hollia would have wanted to preside over that. And instead it will be Omerie’s party, and Kleph’s and Klia’s, and she’ll just be one of the crowd.” Kadro giggled. “Dear Hollia. My heart goes out to her.”

  “Dear Hollia,” Denvin echoed.

  “Look there,” said Thimiroi, pointing out the side window of the taxi. He spoke brusquely, his voice deliberately rough. All this gossipy chatter bored and maddened him. Who cared whether it was Hollia who gave the party, or the Sanciscos, or the Emperor Augustus himself? What mattered was the event that was coming. The experience. The awesome, wondrous, shattering calamity. “Isn’t that Lutheena across the street?” he asked.

  They had emerged from the park, had descended to the bank of the river, were passing through a district of venerable-looking three-story wooden houses. One of the bridges was just ahead of them, and the towers of the downtown section rose like huge stone palisades on the other side of the river. Now they were halted at an intersection, waiting for the colored lights that governed the flow of traffic to change; and in t
he group of pedestrians waiting also to cross was an unmistakably regal figure—yes, it was Lutheena, who else could it be but Lutheena?—who stood among the twentieth-century folk like a goddess among mortals. The difference was not so much in her clothes, which were scarcely distinguishable from the street clothes of the people around her, nor in her features or her hair, perfect and flawless though they were, as in the way she bore herself: for though she was slender and of a porcelain frailty, and no more than ordinary in height, she held herself with such self-contained majesty, such imperious grace, that she seemed to tower above the others, coarse and clumsy with a thick-ankled peasant cloddishness about them, who waited alongside her.

  “I thought she was coming here after Charlemagne,” Denvin said. “And then going on to Canterbury.”

  Thimiroi frowned. What was he talking about? Whether she came here first and then went to Canterbury, or journeyed from Canterbury to here as they had done, would they not all be here at the same time? He would never understand these things. This was another of the baffling complexities of The Travel. Surely there was only one May like this one, and one 1347 November, and one 800 December? Though everyone seemed to make the tour in some private order of his own, some going through the four seasons in the natural succession, others hopping about as they pleased, certainly they must all converge on the same point in time at once—was that not so?