The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine

by Robert Silverberg

  “An abomination before the Lord,” murmured our new companion Mr. Gladstone, the diligent Christian tourist, just about when I was expecting him to say something like that.

  “Tits?” Charlie asked.

  “These statues. They should be smashed in a thousand pieces and buried in the earth whence they came.” He said it mildly, but he meant it.

  “What a great loss to art that would be,” said Charlie in his most pious way. “Anyway, the original statue from which these were copied fell from heaven. That’s what the Bible says, right? Book of Acts. The image that Jupiter tossed down from the sky. It could be argued that Jupiter is simply one manifestation of Jehovah. Therefore this is a holy image. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Gladstone?”

  There was a cruel edge on Charlie’s voice; but, then, Charlie is cruel. Charming, of course, and ferociously bright, but above all else a smart-ass. He’s three years older than I am, and three times as intelligent. You can imagine what my childhood was like. If I had ever taken his cruelties seriously, I suspect I would hate him; but the best defense against Charlie is never to take him seriously. I never have, nor anything much else, either. In that way Charlie and I are similar, I suppose. But only in that way.

  Mr. Gladstone refused to be drawn into Charlie’s bantering defense of idolatry. Maybe he too had figured out how to handle Charlie, a lot quicker than I ever did.

  “You are a cynic and a sophist, Dr. Walker,” is all that he said. “There is no profit in disputing these matters with cynics. Or with sophists. Especially with sophists.” And to me, five minutes later, as we rambled through a room full of mosaics and frescoes and little bronze statuettes: “Your brother is a sly and very clever man. But there’s a hollowness about him that saddens me. I wish I could help him. I feel a great deal of pity for him, you know.”

  That anyone would want to feel pity for Charlie was a new concept to me. Envy, yes. Resentment, disapproval, animosity, even fear, perhaps. But pity? For the six-foot-three genius with the blond hair and blue eyes, the movie-star face, the seven-figure trust fund, the four-digit I.Q.? I am tall too, and when I reached 21 I came into money also, and I am neither stupid nor ugly; but it was always Charlie who got the archery trophy, the prom queen, the honor-roll scroll, the Phi Beta Kappa key. It was Charlie who always got anything and everything he wanted, effortlessly, sometimes bestowing his leftovers on me, but always in a patronizing way that thoroughly tainted them. I have sensed people pitying me, sometimes, because they look upon me as Charlie-minus, an inadequate simulacrum of the genuine article, a pallid secondary version of the extraordinary Charlie. In truth I think their compassion for me, if that’s what it is, is misplaced: I don’t see myself as all that goddamned pitiful. But Charlie? Pitying Charlie?

  I was touring Greece and Turkey that spring, mostly the usual Aegean resorts, Mykonos and Corfu and Crete, Rhodes and Bodrum and Marmaris. I wander up and down the Mediterranean about half the year, generally, and, though I’m scarcely a scholar, I do of course look in on the various famous classical sites along my way. By now, I suppose, I’ve seen every ruined Roman and Greek temple and triumphal arch and ancient theater there is, from Volubilis and Thuburbo Majus in North Africa up through Sicily and Pompeii, and out to Spain and France on one side and Syria and Lebanon on the other. They all blur and run together in my mind, becoming a single generic site—fallen marble columns, weatherbeaten foundations, sand, little skittering lizards, blazing sun, swarthy men selling picture-postcards—but I keep on prowling them anyway. I don’t quite know why.

  There are no hotels remotely worthy of the name in or around the Ephesus ruins. But Charlie had tipped me off that I would find, about six miles down the road, a lavish new deluxe place high up on a lonely point overlooking the serene Aegean that catered mostly to groups of sun-worshipping Germans. It had an immense lobby with marble floors and panoramic windows, an enormous swimming pool, and an assortment of dining rooms that resounded day and night with the whoops and hollers of the beefy Deutschers, who never seemed to leave the hotel. Charlie drove out there to have dinner with me the night I arrived, and that was when we met Mr. Gladstone.

  “Excuse me,” he said, hovering beside our table, “but I couldn’t help hearing you speaking in English. I don’t speak German at all and, well, frankly, among all these foreigners I’ve been getting a little lonely for the mother tongue. Do you mind if I join you?”

  “Well—” I said, not really eager for his company, because tonight was the first time I had seen my brother in a couple of years. But Charlie grandly waved him to a seat.

  He was a grayish, cheerful man of about sixty, a small-town pastor from Ohio or Indiana or maybe Iowa, and he had been saving for something like twenty years to take an extensive tour of the Christian holy places of the Middle East. For the past three months he had been traveling with a little group of—pilgrims, I guess one could call them, six weeks bussing through Israel from Jerusalem to Beersheba, down to Mount Sinai, back up through the Galilee to Lebanon to see Sidon and Tyre, then out to Damascus, and so on and and so on, the full Two-Testament Special. His traveling companions all had flown home by now, but Mr. Gladstone had bravely arranged a special side trip just for himself to Turkey—to poky little Seljuk in particular—because his late wife had had a special interest in an important Christian site here. He had never traveled anywhere by himself before, not even in the States, and going it alone in Turkey was a bit of a stretch for him. But he felt he owed it to his wife’s memory to make the trip, and so he was resolutely plugging along on his own here, having flown from Beirut to Izmir and then hired a car and driver to bring him down to Seljuk. He had arrived earlier this day.

  “I didn’t realize there was anything of special Christian interest around here,” I said.

  “The Cave of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” Mr. Gladstone explained. “My wife once wrote a little book for children about the Seven Sleepers. It was always her great hope to see their actual cave.”

  “The Seven Sleepers?”

  He sketched the story for me quickly: the seven devout Christian boys who took refuge in a cave rather than offer sacrifices in the temple of the Roman gods, and who fell into a deep sleep and came forth two hundred years later to discover that Christianity had miraculously become the official religion of Rome while they were doing their Rip van Winkle act. What was supposedly their cave may still be seen just beyond the Roman stadium of Ephesus.

  “There’s also the Meryemana,” Charlie said.

  Mr. Gladstone gave him a polite blank smile. “Beg your pardon?”

  “The house where the Virgin Mary lived in the last years of her life. Jesus told St. John the Apostle to look after her, and he brought her to Ephesus, so it’s said. About a hundred years ago some Eastern Orthodox priests went looking for her house and found it, sure enough, about three miles outside town.”

  “Indeed.”

  “More likely it’s sixth century Byzantine,” said Charlie. “But the foundations are much older. The Orthodox Christians go there on pilgrimage there every summer. You really ought to see it.” He smiled his warmest, most savage smile. “Ephesus has always been a center of mother-goddess worship, you know, and apparently it has continued to be one even in post-pagan times.”

  Mr. Gladstone’s lips quirked ever so slightly. Though I assumed—correctly—that he was Protestant, even a Presbyterian was bound to be annoyed at hearing someone call the Virgin Mary a mother-goddess. But all he said was, “It would be interesting to see, yes.”

  Charlie wouldn’t let up. “You will, of course, look in at the Seljuk Museum to see the predecessor goddess’s statue, won’t you? Diana, I mean. Diana of the Hundred Breasts. It’s best to visit the museum before you begin your tour of the ruins, anyway. And the statues—there are two, actually—sum up the whole concept of the sacred female principle in a really spectacular way. The primordial mother, the great archetype. The celestial cow that nourishes the world. You need to see it, if you want truly t
o understand the bipolar sexual nature of the divine, eh, Mr. G?” He glanced toward me. “You too, Tim. The two of you, meet me in front of the museum at nine tomorrow, okay? Basic orientation lecture by Dr. Walker. Followed by a visit to ancient Ephesus, including the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. Perhaps the Meryemana afterward.” Charlie flashed a dazzling grin. “Will you have some wine, Mr. Gladstone?”

  “No, thank you,” Mr. Gladstone said, quickly putting his hand over the empty glass in front of him.

  After the museum, the next morning, we doubled back to the ruins of Ephesus proper. Mobs of tour groups were already there, milling around befuddledly as tour groups will do, but Charlie zipped right around them to the best stuff. The ruins are in a marvelous state of preservation—a nearly intact Roman city of the first century A.D., the usual forum and temples and stadium and gymnasium and such, and of course the famous two-story library that the Turks feature on all those tourist posters.

  We had the best of all possible guides. Charlie has a genuine passion for archaeology—it’s the only thing, I suspect, that he really cares for, other than himself—and he pointed out a million details that we would otherwise have missed. With special relish he dwelled on the grotesqueries of the cult of Diana, telling us not only about the metaphorical significance of the goddess’s multiplicity of breasts, but about the high priest who was always a eunuch—“His title,” said Charlie, “meant ‘He who has been set free by God’”—and the staff of virgins who assisted him, and the special priests known as the Acrobatae, or “walkers on tip-toe,” et cetera, et cetera. Mr. Gladstone showed signs of definite distaste as Charlie went on to speculate on some of the more flamboyant erotic aspects of pagan worship hereabouts, but he wouldn’t stop. He never does, when he has a chance to display his erudition and simultaneously offend and unsettle someone.

  Eventually it was mid-afternoon and the day had become really hot and we were only halfway through our tour of the ancient city, with the Cave of the Seven Sleepers still a mile or two in the distance. And clearly Mr. Gladstone was wilting. We decided to call it a day, and had a late lunch of kebabs and stewed eggplant at one of the innumerable and interchangeable little bistros in town. “We can go to the cave first thing tomorrow morning, when it’s still cool,” Charlie offered.

  “Thank you. But I think I would prefer to visit it alone, if you don’t mind. A private pilgrimage—for my late wife’s sake, do you see? Something of a ceremonial observance.”

  “Certainly,” Charlie intoned reverently. “I quite understand.”

  I asked him if he would be coming out to the hotel again that evening for dinner with me. No, he said, he would be busy at the dig—the cool of the evening was a good time to work, without the distraction of gawking tourists—but we arranged to meet in the morning for breakfast and a little brotherly catching up on family news. I left him in town and drove back to the hotel with Mr. Gladstone.

  “Your brother isn’t a religious man, is he?” he said.

  “I’m afraid that neither of us is, especially. It’s the way we were raised.”

  “But he really isn’t. You’re merely indifferent; he is hostile.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because,” he said, “he was trying so hard to provoke me with those things he was saying about Diana of Ephesus. He makes no distinction between Christianity and paganism. All religions must be the same to him, mere silly cults. And so he thinks he can get at my beliefs somehow by portraying pagan worship as absurd and bizarre.”

  “He looks upon them all as cults, yes. But silly, no. In fact Charlie takes religion very seriously, though not exactly in the same way you do. He regards it as a conspiracy by the power elite to remain on top at the expense of the masses. And holy scriptures are just works of fiction dreamed up to perpetuate the authority of the priests and their bosses.”

  “He sees all religions that way, does he, without making distinctions?”

  “Every one of them, yes. Always the same thing, throughout the whole of human history.”

  “The poor man,” said Mr. Gladstone. “The poor empty-souled man. If only I could set him straight, somehow!”

  There it was again: the compassion, the pity. For Charlie, of all people! Fascinating. Fascinating.

  “I doubt that you’d succeed,” I told him. “He’s inherently a skeptical person. He’s never been anything else. And he’s a scientist, remember, a man who lives or dies by rational explanations. If it can’t be explained, then it probably isn’t real. He doesn’t have a smidgeon of belief in anything he can’t see and touch and measure.”

  “He is incapable of giving credence to the evidence of things not seen?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Book of Hebrews, 11:1. It’s St. Paul’s definition of faith.”

  “Ah.”

  “St. Paul was here, you know. In this town, in Ephesus, on a missionary journey. Gods that are fashioned by human hands are no gods at all, he told the populace. Whereupon a certain Demetrius, a silversmith who earned his living making statuettes of the many-breasted goddess whose images we saw today in the museum, called his colleagues together and said, If this man has his way, the temple of the great goddess Diana will be destroyed and we will lose our livelihoods. ‘And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” And the whole city was filled with confusion.’ That’s the Book of Acts, 19:28. And there was such a huge uproar in town over the things that Paul was preaching that he found it prudent to depart very quickly for Macedonia.”

  “I see.”

  “But the temple of the goddess was destroyed anyway, eventually. And her statues were cast down and buried in the earth, and now are seen only in museums.”

  “And the people of Ephesus became Christians,” I said. “And Moslems after that, it would seem.”

  He looked startled. My gratuitous little dig had clearly stung him. But then he smiled.

  “I see that you are your brother’s brother,” he said.

  I was up late reading, and thinking about Charlie, and staring at the moonlight shimmering on the bay. About half past eleven I hit the sack. Almost immediately my phone rang.

  Charlie. “Are you alone, bro?”

  “No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone and I are hunkering down getting ready to commit abominations before the Lord.”

  “I thought maybe one of those horny Kraut ladies—”

  “Cut it out. I’m alone, Charlie. And pretty sleepy. What is it?”

  “Can you come down to the ruins? There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Right now?”

  “Now is a good time for this.”

  “I told you I was sleepy.”

  “It’s something big, Tim. I need to show it to somebody, and you’re the only person on this planet I even halfway trust.”

  “Something you discovered tonight?”

  “Get in your car and come on down. I’ll meet you by the Magnesian Gate. That’s the back entrance. Go past the museum and turn right at the crossroads in town.”

  “Charlie—”

  “Move your ass, bro. Please.”

  That “please,” from Charlie, was something very unusual. In twenty minutes I was at the gate. He was waiting there, swinging a huge flashlight. A tool-sack was slung over one shoulder. He looked wound up tight, as tense as I had ever seen him.

  Selecting a key from a chain that held at least thirty of them, he unlocked the gate and led me down a long straight avenue paved with worn blocks of stone. The moon was practically full and the ancient city was bathed in cool silvery light. He pointed out the buildings as we went by them: “The baths of Varius. The basilica. The necropolis. The temple of Isis.” He droned the names in a singsong tone as though this were just one more guided tour. We turned to the right, onto another street that I recognized as the main one, where earlier that day I
had seen the gate of Hercules, the temple of Hadrian, the library. “Here we are. Back of the brothel and the latrine.”

  We scrambled uphill perhaps fifty yards through gnarled scrubby underbrush until we came to a padlocked metal grate set in the ground in an otherwise empty area. Charlie produced the proper key and pulled back the grate. His flashlight beam revealed a rough earthen-walled tunnel, maybe five feet high, leading into the hillside. The air inside was hot and stale, with a sweet heavy odor of dry soil. After about twenty feet the tunnel forked. Crouching, we followed the right-hand fork, pushing our way through some bundles of dried leaves that seemed to have been put there to block its entrance.

  “Look there,” he said.

  He shot the beam off to the left and I found myself staring at a place where the tunnel wall had been very carefully smoothed. An upright circular slab of rough-hewn marble perhaps a yard across was set into it there.

  “What is it?” I asked him. “A gravestone? A commemorative plaque?”

  “Some sort of door, more likely. Covering a funeral chamber, I would suspect. You see these?” He indicated three smaller circles of what looked like baked clay, mounted in a symmetrical way over the marble slab, arranged to form the angles of an equilateral triangle. They overlapped the edges of the slab as though sealing it into the wall. I went closer and saw inscriptions carved into the clay circles, an array of mysterious symbols and letters.

  “What language is this? Not Greek. Hebrew, maybe?”

  “No. I don’t actually know what it is. Some unknown Anatolian script, or some peculiar form of Aramaic or Phoenician—I just can’t say, Timmo. Maybe it’s a nonsense script, even. Purely decorative sacred scribbles conveying spells to keep intruders away, maybe. You know, some kind of magical mumbo-jumbo. It might be anything.”

  “You found this tonight?”