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

by Robert Silverberg

  “What’s this about Kleph, now?” Thimiroi said, after a time.

  “She’s become involved with the man that the Sanciscos are renting their house from.”

  “Involved?”

  “An affair,” said Laliene acidly. Her glistening eyes were trained remorselessly on his. “He goes to her room. She gives him too much tea, and has too much herself. She plays music for him, or they watch the simsos. And then—then—”

  “How do you know any of this?” Thimiroi asked.

  Laliene took a deep draught of the intoxicating tea, and her brow grew less furrowed, her dark rich-hued eyes less troubled. “She told Klia. Klia told me.”

  “And Omerie? Does he know?”

  “Of course. He’s furious. Kleph can sleep with anyone she cares to, naturally—but such a violation of the Travel rules, to get involved with one of these ancient people! And so stupid, too—spending so much of the precious time of her visit here letting herself get wrapped up in a useless diversion with some commonplace and extremely uninteresting man. A man who isn’t even alive, who’s been dead for all these centuries!”

  “He doesn’t happen to be dead right now,” Thimiroi said.

  Laliene gave him a look of amazement. “Are you defending her, Thimiroi?”

  “I’m trying to comprehend her.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. But certainly Kleph must see that although he may be alive at the present moment, technically speaking, the present moment itself isn’t really the present moment. Not if you see it from our point of view, and what other point of view is appropriate for us to take? What’s past is past, sealed and finished. In absolute reality this person of Kleph’s died long ago, at least so far as we’re concerned.” Laliene shook her head. “No, no, Thimiroi, completely apart from the issue of transgression against the rules of The Travel, it’s an unthinkably foolish adventure that Kleph’s let herself get into. Unthinkably foolish! It’s purely a waste of time. What kind of pleasure can she possibly get from it? She might as well be coupling with—with a donkey!”

  “Who is this man?” Thimiroi asked.

  “What does that matter? His name is Oliver Wilson. He owns that house where they are, the one that Hollia is trying to buy, and he lives there, too. Omerie neglected to arrange for him to vacate the premises for the month. You may have seen him: a very ordinary-looking pleasant young man with light-colored hair. But he isn’t important. What’s important is the insane, absurd, destructive thing Kleph is doing. Which particular person of this long-gone era she happens to be doing it with is completely beside the point.”

  Thimiroi studied her for a time.

  “Why are you telling me this, Laliene?”

  “Aren’t you interested in what your friends are getting themselves mixed up in?”

  “Is Kleph my friend?”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “We have come to the same place at the same time, Kleph and I,” Thimiroi said. “Does that make us friends? We know each other, Kleph and I. Possibly we were even lovers once, possibly not. My relationship with the Sanciscos in general and with Kleph in particular isn’t a close one nowadays. So far as this matters to me, Kleph can do what she likes with anyone she pleases.”

  “She runs the risk of punishment.”

  “She was aware of that. Presumably she chooses not to be troubled by it.”

  “She should think of Omerie, then. And Klia. If Kleph is forbidden to Travel again, they will be deprived of her company. They have always Traveled together. They are accustomed to Traveling together. How selfish of her, Thimiroi.”

  “Presumably she chooses not to be troubled by that, either,” said Thimiroi. “In any case, it’s no concern of yours or mine.” He hesitated. “Do you know what I think should trouble her, Laliene? The fact that she’s going to pay a very steep emotional price for what she’s doing, if indeed she’s actually doing it. That part of it ought to be on her mind, at least a little.”

  “What do you mean?” Laliene asked.

  “I mean the effect it will have on her when the meteor comes, and this man is killed by it. Or by what comes after the meteor, and you know what that is. If the meteor doesn’t kill him, the Blue Death will take him a week or two later. How will Kleph feel then, Thimiroi? Knowing that the man she loves is dead? And that she has done nothing, nothing at all, to spare him from the fate that she knew was rushing toward him? Poor Kleph! Poor foolish Kleph! What torment it will be for her!”

  “The man she loves?”

  “Doesn’t she?”

  Laliene looked astounded. “What ever gave you that idea? It’s a game, Thimiroi, only a silly game! She’s simply playing with him. And then she’ll move along. He won’t be killed by the meteor—obviously. He’ll be in the same house as all the rest of us when it strikes. And she’ll be at Charlemagne’s coronation by the time the Blue Death breaks out. She won’t even remember his name, Thimiroi. How could you possibly have thought that she—she—” Laliene shook her head. “You don’t understand a thing, do you?”

  “Perhaps I don’t.” Thimiroi put his cup down and stared at his fingers. They were trembling. “Would you like some more tea, Laliene?”

  “No, I—yes. Yes, another, if you will, Thimiroi.”

  He set about the task of brewing the euphoriac. His head was throbbing. Things were occurring to him that he had not bothered to consider before. While he worked, Laliene rose, roamed the room, toyed with this artifact and that, and drifted out into the hall that led to the bedroom. Did she suspect anything? Was she searching for something, perhaps? He wondered whether Christine had left any trace of her presence behind that Laliene might be able to detect, and decided that probably she had not. Certainly he hoped not. Considering how agitated Laliene seemed to be over Kleph’s little fling with her landlord, how would she react if she knew that he, too, was involved with someone of this era?

  Involved?

  How involved are you, really? he asked himself.

  He thought of all that they had said just now about Kleph and her odd little affair with Oliver Wilson. A cold, inescapable anguish began to rise in him. How sorry he had felt for Kleph, a moment ago! The punishment for transgression against the rules, yes—but also the high emotional price that he imagined Kleph would pay for entangling herself with someone who lay under sentence of immediate death—the guilt—the sense of irretrievable loss—

  The meteor—the Blue Death—

  “The tea is ready,” Thimiroi announced, and as he reached for the delicate cups he knocked one into the other, and both of the pretty things went tumbling from the tray, landing at the carpet’s edge and cracking like eggshells against the wooden floor. A little rivulet of euphoriac came swirling from them. He gasped, shocked and appalled. Laliene, emerging from one of the far rooms, looked down at the wreckage for a moment, then swiftly knelt and began to sweep the fragments together.

  “Oh, Thimiroi,” she said, glancing upward at him. “Oh, how sad, Thimiroi, how terribly sad—”

  After lunch the next day, he telephoned Christine, certain that she would be out and a little uneasy about that; but she answered on the second ring, and there was an eagerness in her voice that made him think she had been poised beside the phone for some time now, waiting for him to call. Did she happen to be free this afternoon? Yes, yes, she said, she was free. Did she care to—his mind went blank a moment—to go for a walk with him somewhere? Yes, yes, what a lovely idea! She sounded almost jubilant. A perfect day for a walk, yes!

  She was waiting outside her house when Thimiroi came down the street. It was a day much like all the other days so far, sharp cloudless sky, brilliant sun, gold blazing against blue. But there was a deeper tinge of warmth in the air, for May was near its end now and spring was relinquishing its hold to the coming summer. Trees which had seemed barely into leaf the week before now unfurled canopies of rich deep green.

  “Where shall we go?” she asked him.

  “This is your city. I don’t know the go
od places.”

  “We could walk in Baxter Park, I suppose.”

  Thimiroi frowned. “Isn’t that all the way on the other side of the river?”

  “Baxter Park? Oh, no, you must be thinking of Butterfield Gardens. Up on the high ridge, you mean, over there opposite us? The very big park, with the botanical gardens and the zoo and everything? Baxter Park’s right near here, just a few blocks up the hill. We could be there in ten minutes.”

  Actually it was more like fifteen, and no easy walk, but none of that mattered to Thimiroi. Simply being close to Christine awoke unfamiliar sensations of contentment in him. They climbed the steep streets side by side, saying very little as they made the difficult ascent, pausing now and again to catch their breaths. The city was like a giant bowl, cleft by the great river that ran through its middle, and they were nearing its rim.

  Baxter Park, like its counterpart across the river that Thimiroi had seen when he first arrived in the twentieth century, occupied a commanding position looking out and down toward the heart of the urban area. But apart from that the two parks were very different, for the other was intricately laid out, with roads and amusement sectors scattered through it, and this one seemed nothing more than a strip of rough, wild semi-forest that had been left undeveloped at the top of the city. Simple paths crudely paved led through its dense groves and tangles of underbrush.

  “It isn’t much, I know—” Christine said.

  “It’s beautiful here. So wild, so untamed. And so close to the city. We can look down and see houses and office buildings and bridges, and yet back here it’s just as it must have been ten thousand years ago. There is nothing like this where I come from.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “We took our wilderness away a long time ago. We should have kept a little—just a little, a reminder, the way you have here. But it’s too late now. It has been gone so long, so very long.” Thimiroi peered into the hazy distance. Shimmering in the mid-afternoon heat, the city seemed a fairytale place, enchanted, wondrous. Shading his eyes, he peered out and downward, past the residential district to the metropolitan center by the river, and beyond it to the bridges, the suburbs on the far side, the zone of parks and recreational areas barely visible on the opposite slope. How beautiful it all was, how majestic, how grand! The thought that it all must perish in just a matter of days brought the taste of bile to his mouth, and he turned away, coughing, sputtering.

  “Is something the matter?” Christine asked.

  “Nothing—no—I’ll be all right—”

  He wondered how far they were right now from the path along which the meteor would travel.

  As he understood it, it was going to come in from this side of the city, traveling low across the great urban bowl like a stone that a boy has sent skimming across a stream and striking somewhere midway down the slope, between the zone of older houses just below the Montgomery House hotel and the business district farther on. At the point of impact, of course, everything would be annihilated for blocks around. But the real devastation would come a moment later, so Kadro had explained: when the shock wave struck and radiated outward, flattening whole neighborhoods in a steadily widening circle, as if they had been swatted by a giant’s contemptuous hand.

  And then the fires, springing up everywhere—

  And then, a few days later, when the invading microbes had had a chance to spread through the contaminated water supply of the shattered city, the plague—

  “You look so troubled, Thimiroi,” Christine said, nestling up beside him, sliding her arm through his.

  “Do I?”

  “You must miss your homeland very much.”

  “No. No, that isn’t it.”

  “Why so sad, then?”

  “I find it extremely moving,” he said, “to look out over your whole city this way. Taking it all in in a single sweep. Seeing it in all its magnificence, all its power.”

  “But it’s not even the most important city in the—”

  “I know. But that doesn’t matter. The fact that there may be bigger cities takes nothing away from the grandeur of this one. Especially for me. Where I come from, there are no cities of any size at all. Our population is extremely small…extremely small.”

  “But it must be a very wealthy country, all the same.”

  Thimiroi shrugged. “I suppose it is. But what does that mean? I look at your city here and I think of the transience of all that is splendid and grand. I think of all the great empires of the past, and how they rose, and fell, and were swept away and forgotten. All the empires that ever were, and all those that will ever be.”

  To his surprise, she laughed. “Oh, how strange you are!”

  “Strange?”

  “So terribly solemn. So philosophical. Brooding about the rise and fall of empires on a glorious spring day like this. Standing here with the most amazing sunlight pouring down on us and telling me in those elocution-school tones of yours that empires that don’t even exist yet are already swept away and forgotten. How can something be forgotten that hasn’t yet even happened? And how can you even bother to think about anything morbid in a season like this one?” She moved closer to him, nuzzling against his side almost like a cat. “Do you know what I think, standing here right this minute looking out at the city? I think that the warmth of the sun feels wonderful and that the air is as fresh as new young wine and that the city has never seemed more sparkling or prosperous and that this is the most beautiful spring day in at least half a million years. And the last thing that’s going to cross my mind is that the weather may not hold or that the time of prosperity may not last or that great empires always crumble and are forgotten. But perhaps you and I are just different, Thimiroi. Some people are naturally gloomy, and always see the darkest side of everything, and then there are the people who couldn’t manage to be moody and broody even if their lives depended on—” She broke off suddenly. “Oh, Thimiroi, I don’t mean to offend you. You know that.”

  “You haven’t offended me.” He turned to her. “What’s an elocution-school voice?”

  “A trained one,” she said, smiling. “Like the voice of a radio or TV announcer. You have a marvelous voice, you know. You speak right from the center of your diaphragm, and you always pause for breath in the right places, and the tone is so rich, so perfect—a singer’s voice, really. You can sing very well, can’t you? I know you can. Later, perhaps, I could play for you, and you could sing for me, back at my place, some song of Stiino—of your own country—”

  “Yes,” he said. “We could try that, yes.”

  He kissed her, then, and it was a different sort of kiss from either of the two kisses of the day before, very different indeed; and as he held her his hands ran across her back, and over the nape of her neck, and down the sides of her arms, and she pressed herself close against him. Then after a long moment they moved apart again, both of them flushed and excited, and smiled, and looked at each other as though they were seeing each other for the first time.

  They walked hand in hand through the park, neither of them saying anything. Small animals were everywhere, birds and odd shiny bright-colored little insects and comical four-legged grayish beasts with big shaggy tails lalloping behind them. Thimiroi was amazed by the richness of all this wildlife, and the shrubs and wildflowers dazzling with early bloom, and the huge thick-boled trees that rose so awesomely above them. What an extraordinary place this century was, he told himself: what a fantastic mixture of the still unspoiled natural world and the world of technology and industry. They had these great cities, these colossal buildings, these immense bridges—and yet, also, they still had saved room for flowers, for beetles and birds, for little furry animals with enormous tails. When the thought of the meteor, and the destruction that it would cause, crept back into his mind, he forced it furiously away. He asked Christine to tell him the names of things: this is a squirrel, she said, and this is a maple tree, and this a grasshopper. She was surprised that he knew so little ab
out them, and asked him what kinds of insects and trees and animals they had in his own country.

  “Very few,” he told her. “All our wild things went from us long ago.”

  “Not even squirrels left? Grasshoppers?”

  “Nothing like that,” he said. “Nothing at all. That is why we travel—to experience life in places such as this. To experience squirrels. To experience grasshoppers.”

  “Of course. Everyone travels to see things different from what they have at home. But it’s hard to believe that there’s any country that’s done such ecological damage to itself that it doesn’t even have—”

  “Oh, the problem is not ecological damage,” said Thimiroi. “Not as you understand the term. Our country is very beautiful, in its way, and we care for it extremely well. The problem is that it is an extremely civilized place. Too civilized, I think. We have everything under control. And one thing that we controlled, a very long time ago, is the very thing that this park is designed to provide: the world of nature, as it existed before the cities ever were.”

  She stared. “Not even a squirrel.”

  “Not even a squirrel, no.”

  “Where is this country of yours? Did you say it was in Arabia? One of the oil kingdoms?”

  “No,” he said. “Not in Arabia.”

  They went onward. The afternoon’s heat was at its peak, now, and Thimiroi felt the moisture of the air clinging close against his skin, a strange and unusual sensation for him. Again they paused, after a while, to kiss, even more passionately than before.

  “Come,” Christine said. “Let’s go home.”

  They hurried down the hillside, taking it practically at a jog. But they slowed as the Montgomery House came into view. Thimiroi thought of inviting her to his room once again, but the thought of Laliene hovering nearby—spying on him, scowling her disapproval as he entered into the same transgression for which she had so sternly censured Kleph—displeased him. Christine reminded him, though, that she had offered to play the piano for him, and wanted him to sing for her. Gladly, eagerly, Thimiroi accepted the invitation to go with her to her house.