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

by Robert Silverberg

  I went running after him, scrambling downhill, then onward along the main entrance road and onto the main highway. I’m in good running shape, but Charlie was moving with a maniacal zeal that left me hard pressed to keep up with him. Twenty feet apart, we came pounding down the road past the museum and into town. All the dinky restaurants were open, even this late, and little knots of Turks had emerged from them to gather in the crossroads. Some were kneeling in prayer, hammering their heads against the pavement, and others were wildly gesticulating at one other in obvious shock and bewilderment. Charlie, without breaking stride, called out to them in guttural Turkish and got a whole babble of replies.

  “Ayasuluk Hill,” he said to me. “That’s the direction she’s going in.”

  We crossed the broad boulevard that divides the town in half. As we passed the bus station half a dozen men came running out of a side street in front of us, screaming as though they had just been disemboweled. You don’t expect to hear adult male Turks screaming. They are a nation of tough people, by and large. These fellows went flying past us without halting, big men with thick black mustachios. Their eyes were wide and gleaming like beacons, their faces rigid and distended with shock and horror, as though twenty devils were coming after them.

  “Charlie—”

  “Look there,” he said, in an utterly flat voice, and pointed into the darkness.

  Something—something—was moving away from us down that side street, something very tall and very strange. I saw a tapering conical body, a hint of weird appendages, a crackling blue-white aura. It seemed to be floating rather than walking, carried along by a serene but inexorable drifting motion almost as if its feet were several inches off the ground. Maybe they were.

  As we watched, the thing halted and peered into the open window of a house. There was a flash of blinding light, intense but short-lived. Then the front door popped open and a bunch of frantic Turks came boiling out like a pack of Keystone Cops, running in sixty directions at once, yelling and flinging their arms about as though trying to surrender.

  One of them tripped and went sprawling down right at the creature’s feet. He seemed unable to get up; he knelt there all bunched up, moaning and babbling, shielding his face with outspread hands. The thing paused and looked down, and seemed to reach its arms out in fluid gestures, and the blue-white glow spread for a moment like a mantle over the man. Then the light withdrew from him and the creature, gliding smoothly past the trembling fallen man, continued on its serene silent way toward the dark hill that loomed above the town.

  “Come,” Charlie said to me.

  We went forward. The creature had disappeared up ahead, though we caught occasional glimpses of the blue-white light as it passed between the low little buildings of the town. We reached the man who had tripped; he had not arisen, but lay face down, shivering, covering his head with his hands. A low rumbling moan of fear came steadily from him. From in front of us, hoarse cries of terror drifted to us from here and there as this villager or that encountered the thing that was passing through their town, and now and again we could see that cool bright light, rising steadily above us until finally it was shining down from the upper levels of Ayasuluk Hill.

  “You really want to go up there?” I asked him.

  He didn’t offer me an answer, nor did he stop moving forward. I wasn’t about to turn back either, I realized. Willy-nilly I followed him to the end of the street, around a half-ruined mosque at the base of the hill, and up to a lofty metal gate tipped with spikes. Stoned on our own adrenaline, we swarmed up that gate like Crusaders attacking a Saracen fortress, went over the top, dropped down in the bushes on the far side. I was able to see, by the brilliant gleam of the full moon, the low walls of the destroyed Basilica of St. John just beyond, and, behind it, the massive Byzantine fortification that crowned the hill. Together we scrambled toward the summit.

  “You go this way, Tim. I’ll go the other and we’ll meet on the far side.”

  “Right.”

  I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just ran, leftward around the hill. Along the ramparts, into the church, down the empty aisles, out the gaping window-frames.

  Suddenly I caught a glimpse of something up ahead. Light, cool white light, an unearthly light very much like moonlight, only concentrated into a fiercely gleaming point hovering a couple of yards above the ground, thirty or forty feet in front of me.

  “Charlie?” I called. My voice was no more than a hoarse gasp.

  I edged forward. The light was so intense now that I was afraid it might damage my eyes. But I continued to stare, as if the thing would disappear if I were to blink for even a millionth of a second.

  I heard the wailing music again.

  Soft, distant, eerie. Cables rubbing together in a dark shaft. This time it seemed to be turned outward, rising far beyond me, reaching into distant space or perhaps some even more distant dimension. Something calling, announcing its regained freedom, summoning—whom? What?

  “Charlie?” I said. It was a barely audible croak. “Charlie?”

  I noticed him now, edging up from the other side. I pointed at the source of the light. He nodded.

  I moved closer. The light seemed to change, to grow momentarily less fierce. And then I was able to see her.

  She wasn’t exactly identical to the statues in the museum. Her face wasn’t really a face, at least not a human one. She had beady eyes, faceted the way an insect’s are. She had an extra set of arms, little dangling ones, coming out at her hips. And, though the famous breasts were there, at least fifty of them and maybe the hundred of legend, I don’t think they were actual breasts because I don’t think this creature was a mammal. More of a reptile, I would guess: leathery skin, more or less scaly the way a snake’s is, and tiny dots of nostrils, and a black slithery tongue, jagged like a lightning bolt, that came shooting quickly out between her slitted lips again and again and again, as though checking on the humidity or the ambient temperature or some such thing.

  I saw, and Charlie saw. For a fraction of a second I wanted to drop down on my knees and rub my forehead in the ground and give worship. And then I just wanted to run.

  I said, “Charlie, I definitely think we ought to get the hell out of—”

  “Cool it, bro,” he said. He stepped forward. Walked right up to her, stared her in the face. I was terrified for him, seeing him get that close. She dwarfed him. He was like a doll in front of her. How had a thing this big managed to fit in that opening in the tunnel wall? How had those ancient Greeks ever managed to get her in there in the first place?

  That dazzling light crackled and hissed around her like some sort of electrical discharge. And yet Charlie stood his ground, unflinching, rock-solid. The expression on my brother’s face was a nearly incomprehensible mixture of anger and fear.

  He jabbed his forefinger through the air at her.

  “You,” he said to her. It was almost a snarl. “Tell me what the hell you are.”

  They were maybe ten feet apart, the man and the—what? The goddess? The monster?

  Charlie had to know.

  “You speak English?” he demanded. “Turkish? Tell me. I’m the one who let you out of that hole. Tell me what you are. I want to know.” Eye to eye, face to face. “Something from another planet, are you, maybe? Another dimension? An ancient race that used to live on the Earth before humans did?”

  “Charlie,” I whispered.

  But he wouldn’t let up. “Or maybe you’re an actual and literal goddess,” he said. His tone had turned softer, a mocking croon now. “Diana of Ephesus, is that who you are? Stepping right out of the pages of mythology in all your fantastic beauty? Well, do me some magic, goddess, if that’s who you are. Do a miracle for me, just a little one.” The angry edge was back in his voice. “Turn that tree into an elephant. Turn me into a sheep, if you can. What’s the matter, Diana, you no spikka da English? All right. Why the hell should you? But how about Greek, then? Surely you can understand Greek.”
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  “For Christ’s sake, Charlie—”

  He ignored me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was talking to her in Greek, now. I suppose it was Greek. It was harsh, thick-sounding, jaggedly rhythmic. His eyes were wild and his face was flushed with fury. I was afraid that she would hurl a thunderbolt of blue-white light at him, but no, no, she just stood there through all his whole harangue, as motionless as those statues of her in the little museum, listening patiently as my furious brother went on and on and on at her in the language of Homer and Sophocles.

  He stopped, finally. Waited as if expecting her to respond.

  No response came. I could hear the whistling sound of her slow steady breathing; occasionally there was some slight movement of her body; but that was all.

  “Well, Diana?” Charlie said. “What do you have to say for yourself, Diana?”

  Silence.

  “You fraud!” Charlie cried, in a great and terrible voice. “You fake! Some goddess you are! You aren’t real at all, and that’s God’s own truth. You aren’t even here. You’re nothing but a fucking hallucination. A projection of some kind. I bet I could walk up to you and put my hand right through you.”

  Still no reaction. Nothing. She just stood there, those faceted eyes glittering, that little tongue flickering. Saying nothing, offering him no help.

  That was when he flipped out. Charlie seemed to puff up as if about to explode with rage, and went rushing toward her, arms upraised, fists clenched in a wild gesture of attack. I wanted desperately to stop him, but my feet were frozen in place. I was certain that he was going to die. We both were.

  “Damn you!” he roared, with something like a sob behind the fury. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

  But before he could strike her, her aura flared up around her like a sheath, and for a moment the air was full of brilliant flares of cold flame that went whirling and whirling around her in a way that was too painful to watch. I caught a glimpse of Charlie staggering back from her, and I backed away myself, covering my face with my forearm, but even so the whirling lights came stabbing into my brain, forcing me to the ground. It seemed then that they all coalesced into a single searing point of white light, which rose like a dagger into the sky, climbing, climbing, becoming something almost like a comet, and—then—

  Vanishing.

  And then I blanked out.

  It was just before dawn when I awakened. My eyes fluttered open almost hesitantly. The moon was gone, the first pink streaks of light beginning to appear. Charlie sat beside me. He was already awake.

  “Where is it?” I asked immediately.

  “Gone, bro.”

  “Gone?”

  He nodded. “Without a trace. If it ever was up here with us at all.”

  “What do you mean, if?”

  “If, that’s what I mean. Who the hell knows what was going on up here last night? Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, neither do I. All I know is that it isn’t going on any more. There’s nobody around but me and thee.”

  He was trying to sound like the old casual Charlie I knew, the man who had been everywhere and done everything and took it all in his stride. But there was a quality in his voice that I had never heard in it before, something entirely new.

  “Gone?” I said, stupidly. “Really gone?”

  “Really gone, yes. Vanished. You hear how quiet everything is?” Indeed the town, spread out below us, was silent except for the crowing of the first roosters and the far-off sound of a farm tractor starting up somewhere.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him.

  “Fine,” he said. “Absolutely fine.”

  But he said it through clenched teeth. I couldn’t bear to look at him. A thing had happened here that badly needed explanation, and no explanations were available, and I knew what that must be doing to him. I kept staring at the place where that eerie being had been, and I remembered that single shaft of light that had taken its place, and I felt a crushing sense of profound and terrible loss. Something strange and weirdly beautiful and utterly fantastic and inexplicable had been loose in the world for a little while, after centuries of—what? Imprisonment? Hibernation?—and now it was gone, and it would never return. It had known at once, I was sure, that this was no era for goddesses. Or whatever it was.

  We sat side by side in silence for a minute or two.

  “I think we ought to go back down now,” I said finally.

  “Right. Let’s go back down,” Charlie said.

  And without saying another word as we descended, we made our way down the hill of Ayasuluk, the hill of St. John the Apostle, who was the man who wrote the Book of Revelations.

  Mr. Gladstone was having breakfast in the hotel coffee shop when Charlie and I came in. He saw at once that something was wrong and asked if he could help in any way, and after some hesitation we told him something of what had happened, and then we told him more, and then we told him the whole story right to the end.

  He didn’t laugh and he didn’t make any sarcastic skeptical comments. He took it all quite seriously.

  “Perhaps the Seal of Solomon was what was on that marble slab,” he suggested. “The Turks would say some such thing, at any rate. King Solomon had power over the evil jinn, and locked them away in flasks and caves and tombs, and put his seal on them to keep them locked up. It’s in the Koran.”

  “You’ve read the Koran?” I asked, surprised.

  “I’ve read a lot of things,” said Mr. Gladstone.

  “The Seal of Solomon,” Charlie said, scowling. He was trying hard to be his old self again, and almost succeeding. Almost. “Evil spirits. Magic. Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “Perhaps,” said Mr. Gladstone.

  “What?” Charlie said.

  The little man from Ohio or Indiana or Iowa put his hand over Charlie’s. “If only I could help you,” he said. “But you’ve been undone, haven’t you, by the evidence of things seen.”

  “You have the quote wrong,” said Charlie. “‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Book of Hebrews, 11:1.”

  Mr. Gladstone was impressed. So was I.

  “But this is different,” he said to Charlie. “This time, you actually saw. You were, I think, a man who prided himself on believing in nothing at all. But now you can no longer even believe in your own disbelief.”

  Charlie reddened. “Saw what? A goddess? Jesus! You think I believe that that was a goddess? A genuine immortal supernatural being of a higher order of existence? Or—what?—some kind of actual alien creature? You want me to believe it was an alien that had been locked up in there all that time? An alien from where? Mars? And who locked it up? Or was it one of King Solomon’s jinn, maybe?”

  “Does it really matter which it was?” Mr. Gladstone asked softly.

  Charlie started to say something; but he choked it back. After a moment he stood. “Listen, I need to go now,” he said. “Mr. Gladstone—Timmo—I’ll catch up with you later, is that all right?”

  And then he turned and stalked away. But before he left, I saw the look in his eyes.

  His eyes. Oh, Charlie. Oh. Those eyes. Those frightened, empty eyes.

  BEAUTY IN THE NIGHT

  The Alien Years, which I look upon as one of the most successful novels I wrote in what I call my post-“retirement” period (I had, I thought, given up writing science fiction forever in 1975, but I didn’t stick to my resolve), had a curious composite history. Between 1983 and 1986 I had written a number of stories in which the Earth is invaded by virtually omnipotent alien beings. The first of these was “Against Babylon,” done late in 1983 for Omni (which took two years to publish it). Then came 1985’s “Hannibal’s Elephants,” also for Omni (published in 1988), and 1986’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” written for Playboy and published in 1987. These stories were in no way intended as a series, and in fact were contradictory and incompatible in most details beyond the basic concept of an invaded Earth. But over time it dawned on me t
hat the seeds of a major novel lay in these relatively light-hearted tales of interplanetary conquest.

  In 1995 I offered the book to HarperCollins, my publisher at that time, and wrote it in the winter of 1996-97. “Against Babylon,” virtually in its entirety, became the opening chapter. A small piece of “Hannibal’s Elephants” was incorporated into one of the early sequences. Then I used nearly all of “The Pardoner’s Tale” in the latter part of the book. In each case I altered the names of characters to make them fit the overall story I had devised for the novel.

  It was all done so smoothly that very few people—not even my own bibliographer—noticed that I had tucked two and a half decade-old short stories into the lengthy new novel. And to make life even more difficult for bibliographers, I then proceeded to carve three new stories out of the recently written part of the book and sell them as individual items to the glossy, high-paying new science-fiction magazine Science Fiction Age, which Scott Edelman was editing.

  They needed a little bending and polishing around the edges to turn into properly rounded short stories, of course. But the process of extraction and revision turned out to be a success. Especially the first of the three, “Beauty in the Night.” Scott used it in his September, 1997 issue, and it was chosen the following year not only for Gardner Dozois’s annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology but also for David Hartwell’s similar collection, Year’s Best SF. It has gone on to various other sorts of publication, both in the United States and abroad, since then.

  The other two—“On the Inside” (Science Fiction Age, November, 1997) and the novella “The Colonel in Autumn” (Science Fiction Age, March, 1998)—have had successful independent afterlives as well. But “Beauty in the Night” strikes me as the strongest of the extracted segments of The Alien Years, and a fitting representative of my work in the second half of the 1990s.