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

by Robert Silverberg

  As things turned out, it would be my last contribution to Playboy after a twenty-year run. Alice Turner left the magazine soon after, and its fiction policies changed, and, with the fun of meeting Alice’s lofty editorial standards taken away and my own story output diminishing from year to year anyway, I saw no reason to continue submitting stories there. I even let my subscription lapse, around the time of my 70th birthday. A time comes, I guess, when even a hearty lad like me decides he’s done with Playboy.

  In a quiet moment late in the tranquil year of 2999 four men are struggling to reach an agreement over the details of their plan to blow up the Louvre. They have been wrangling for the last two days over the merits of implosion versus explosion. Their names are Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), and Vjong Cleversmith (2683-2804).

  Why, you may wonder, do these men want to destroy the world’s greatest repository of ancient art? And how does it come to pass that a man of the 28th century, more or less, is conspiring with three celebrities of a much earlier time?

  Strettin Vulpius (2953-), who has been tracking this impish crew across the face of the peaceful world for many months now, knows much more about these people than you do, but he too has yet to fathom their fondness for destruction and is greatly curious about it. For him it is a professional curiosity, or as close to professional as anything can be, here in this happy time at the end of the Third Millennium, when work of any sort is essentially a voluntary activity.

  At the moment Vulpius is watching them from a distance of several thousand meters. He has established himself in a hotel room in the charming little Swiss village of Zermatt and they are making their headquarters presently in a lovely villa of baroque style that nestles far above the town in a bower of tropical palms and brightly blossoming orchids on the lush green slopes of the Matterhorn. Vulpius has succeeded in affixing a minute spy-eye to the fleshy inner surface of the room where the troublesome four are gathered.

  It provides him with a clear image of all that is taking place in there.

  Cleversmith, who is the ringleader, says, “We need to make up our minds.” He is slender, agile, a vibrant long-limbed whip of a man. “The clock keeps on pulsing, you know. The Millennium Express is roaring toward us minute by minute.”

  “I tell you, implosion is the way for us to go,” says Einstein. He looks to be about forty, smallish of stature, with a great mop of curling hair and soft thoughtful eyes, incongruous above his deep chest and sturdy athletic shoulders. “An elegant symbolic statement. The earth opens; the museum and everything it contains quietly disappears into the chasm.”

  “Symbolic of what?” asks Picasso scornfully. He too is short and stocky, but he is almost completely bald, and his eyes, ferociously bright and piercing, are the antithesis of Einstein’s gentle ones. “Blow the damn thing up, I say. Let the stuff spew all around the town and come down like snow. A snowfall of paintings, the first snow anywhere in a thousand years.”

  Cleversmith nods. “A very pretty image, yes. Thank you, Pablo.—Ernest?”

  “Implode,” says the biggest of the men. “The quiet way, the subtle way.” He lounges against the wall closest to the great curving window with his back to the others, a massive burly figure, holding himself braced on one huge hand that is splayed out no more than five centimeters from the spy-eye as he stares down into the distant valley. He carries himself like a big cat, graceful, loose-jointed, subtly menacing. “The pretty way, eh?—Your turn, Vjong.”

  But Picasso says, before Cleversmith can reply, “Why be quiet or subtle about welcoming the new millennium? What we want to do is make a splash.”

  “My position precisely,” Cleversmith says. “My vote goes with you, Pablo. And so we are still deadlocked, it seems.”

  Hemingway says, still facing away from them, “Implosion reduces the chance that innocent passers-by will get killed.”

  “Killed?” cries Picasso, and claps his hands in amusement. “Killed? Who worries about getting killed, in the year 2999? It isn’t as though dying is forever.”

  “It can be a great inconvenience,” says Einstein quietly.

  “When has that ever concerned us?” Cleversmith says. Frowning, he glances around the room. “Ideally we ought to be unanimous on this, but at the very least we need a majority. It was my hope today that one of you would be willing to switch his vote.”

  “Why don’t you switch yours, then?” Einstein says. “Or you, Pablo: you of all people ought to prefer to have all those paintings and sculptures sink unharmed into the ground rather than having them be blown sky-high.”

  Picasso grins malevolently. “What fallacy is this, Albert? Why should I give a damn about paintings and sculptures? Do you care about—what was it called, physics? Does our Ernest write little stories?”

  “Is the Pope Catholic?” Hemingway says.

  “Gentlemen—gentlemen—”

  The dispute quickly gets out of hand. There is much shouting and gesticulation. Picasso yells at Einstein, who shrugs and jabs a finger at Cleversmith, who ignores what Einstein says to him and turns to Hemingway with an appeal that is met with scorn. They are all speaking Anglic, of course. Anything else would have been very strange. These men are not scholars of obsolete tongues.

  What they are, thinks the watching Vulpius, is monsters and madmen. Something must be done about them, and soon. As Cleversmith says, the clock is pulsing ceaselessly, the millennium is coming ever nearer.

  It was on a grassy hilltop overlooking the ruins of sunken Istanbul that he first had encountered them, about a year and a half earlier. A broad parapet placed here centuries ago for the benefit of tourists provided a splendid view of the drowned city’s ancient wonders, gleaming valiantly through the crystalline waters of the Bosporus: the great upjutting spears that were the minarets of Hagia Sophia and the Mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent and the other great buildings of that sort, the myriad domes of the covered bazaar, the immense walls of Topkapi Palace.

  Of all the submerged and partly submerged cities Vulpius had visited—New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, and the rest—this one was one of the loveliest. The shallow emerald waters that covered it could not fully conceal the intermingling layers upon layers of antiquity here, white marble and colored tile and granite slabs, Constantinople of the Byzantine Emperors, Stamboul of the Sultans, Istanbul of the Industrial Age: toppled columns, fallen friezes, ponderous indestructible fortifications, the vague chaotic outlines of the hilly city’s winding streets, the shadowy hints of archaic foundations and walls, the slumping mud-engulfed ruins of the sprawling hotels and office buildings of a much later era that itself was also long gone. What a density of history! Standing there on that flower-bedecked hillside he felt himself becoming one with yesterday’s seven thousand years.

  A mild humid breeze was blowing out of the hinterland to the east, bearing the pungent scent of exotic blooms and unidentifiable spices. Vulpius shivered with pleasure. It was a lovely moment, one of a great many he had known in a lifetime of travel. The world had gone through long periods of travail and over the centuries, but now it was wholly a garden of delight, and Vulpius had spent twenty years savoring its multitude of marvels, with ever so much still ahead for him.

  He was carrying, as he always did, a pocket mnemone, a small quasi-organic device, somewhat octopoid in form, in whose innumerable nodes and bumps were stored all manner of data that could be massaged forth by one who was adept in the technique. Vulpius aimed the instrument now at the shimmering sea below him and squeezed it gently, and in its soft, sighing, semi-sentient voice it provided him with the names of the half-visible structures and something of their functions in the days of the former world: this had been the Galata Bridge, this the Castle of Roumeli Hissar, this the Mosque of Mehmet the Conqueror, these were the scattered remnants of the great Byzantine imperial palace.

  “It tells you everything, does it?” said a deep voice behind him. Vulpius turned. A small b
ald-headed man, broad-shouldered and cocky-looking, grinning at him in a powerfully insinuating way. His obsidian eyes were like augers. Vulpius had never seen eyes like those. A second man, much taller, darkly handsome, smiling lazily, stood behind him. The little bald one pointed toward the place in the water where six graceful minarets came thrusting upward into the air from a single vast building just below the surface. “What’s that one, for instance?”

  Vulpius, who was of an obliging nature, massaged the mnemone. “The famous Blue Mosque,” he was told. “Built by the architect Mehmet Aga by order of Sultam Ahmet I in the seventeenth century. It was one of the largest mosques in the city and perhaps the most beautiful. It is the only one with six minarets.”

  “Ah,” said the small man. “A famous mosque. Six minarets. What, I wonder, could a mosque have been? Would you know, Ernest?” He looked over his shoulder at his hulking companion, who merely shrugged. Then, quickly, to Vulpius: “—But no, no, don’t bother to find out. It’s not important. Those things are the minarets, I take it?” He pointed again. Vulpius followed the line of the pointing hand. It seemed to him, just then, that the slender towers were gently swaying, as though they were mere wands moving in the breeze. The effect was quite weird. An earthquake, perhaps? No: the hillside here was altogether steady. Some hallucination, then? He doubted that. His mind was as lucid as ever.

  The towers were definitely moving from side to side, though, whipping back and forth now as if jostled by a giant hand. The waters covering the flooded city began to grow agitated. Wavelets appeared where all had been calm. A huge stretch of the surface appeared almost to be boiling. The disturbance was spreading outward from a central vortex of churning turmoil. What strange kind of upheaval was going on down there?

  Two minarets of the Blue Mosque tottered and fell into the water, and three more went down a moment later. And the effect was still expanding. Vulpius, stunned, appalled, scanned the sunken metropolis from one side to the other, watching the fabled ruins crumble and collapse and disappear into the suddenly beclouded Bosporus.

  He became aware then of two more men clambering up to the observation parapet, where they were exuberantly greeted by the first pair. The newcomers—one of them short, bushy-haired, soft-eyed, the other long and lean and fiercely energetic—seemed flushed, excited, oddly exhilarated.

  Much later, it was determined that vandalous parties unknown had placed a turbulence bomb just off shore, the sort of device that once had been used to demolish the useless and ugly remains of the half-drowned urban settlements that had been left behind in every lowland coastal area by the teeming populace of Industrial times. A thing that had once been employed to pulverize the concrete walls and patios of hideous tract housing and the squat squalid bulks of repellent cinderblock factory buildings had been utilized to shake to flinders the fantastic fairy-tale towers of the great imperial capital by the Golden Horn.

  Vulpius had no reason to connect the calamity that had befallen sunken Istanbul with the presence of the four men on the hillside across the way. Not until much later did that thought enter his mind. But the event would not leave him: he went over and over it, replaying its every detail in a kind of chilled fascination. He was deeply unsettled, of course, by what he had witnessed; but at the same time he could not deny having felt a certain perverse thrill at having been present at the moment of such a bizarre event. The shattering of the age-old city was the final paragraph of its long history, and he, Strettin Vulpius, had been on the scene to see it written. It was a distinction of a sort.

  Other equally mysterious disasters followed in subsequent months.

  The outer wall of the Park of Extinct Animals was breached and many of the inner enclosures were opened, releasing into the wilderness nearly the entire extraordinary collection of carefully cloned beasts of yesteryear: moas, quaggas, giant ground sloths, dodos, passenger pigeons, aurochses, oryxes, saber-toothed cats, great auks, wisents, cahows, and many another lost species that had been called back from oblivion by the most painstaking manipulation of fossil genetic material. Though the world into which they now had been so brusquely set loose was as close to a paradise as its human population could imagine, it was no place for most of these coddled and cherished creatures, for in their resuscitated existences at the Park they never had had to learn the knack of fending for themselves. All but the strongest met swift death in one fashion or another, some set upon by domestic cats and dogs, others drowned or lost in quagmires, a few killed inadvertently during attempts at recapturing them, many perishing quickly of starvation even amidst the plenty of the garden that was the world, and still others expiring from sheer bewilderment at finding themselves on their own in unfamiliar freedom. The loss was incalculable; the best estimate was that it would take a hundred years of intense work to restock the collection.

  The Museum of Industrial Culture was attacked next. This treasury of medieval technological artifacts was only perfunctorily guarded, for who would care to steal from a place that was everyone’s common storehouse of quaint and delightful objects? Society had long since evolved past such pathetic barbarism. All the same, a band of masked men broke into the building and ransacked it thoroughly, carrying off a mountain of booty, the curious relics of the harsh and bustling age that had preceded the present one: devices that had been used as crude computers, terrifying medical implements, machines that once had disseminated aural and visual images, weaponry of various sorts, simple vision-enhancing things worn on hooks that went around one’s ears, instruments used in long-distance communication, glass and ceramic cooking vessels, and all manner of other strange and oddly moving detritus of that vanished day. None of these items was ever recovered. The suspicion arose that they had all gone into the hands of private holders who had hidden them from sight, which would be an odd and troublesome revival of the seeking and secret hoarding of possessions that had caused so much difficulty in ancient times.

  Then came the undermining of the Washington Monument; the nearly simultaneous aerial explosion that ruptured the thousands of gleaming windows that still were intact in the gigantic abandoned buildings marking the watery site where Manhattan Island had been in the days before the Great Warming; the destruction through instantaneous metal fatigue of the Great Singapore Tower; and the wholly unexpected and highly suspicious eruption of Mount Vesuvius that sent new lava spilling down over the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  By this time Vulpius, like a great many other concerned citizens all over the world, had grown profoundly distressed by these wanton acts of desecration. They were so primitive, so crass, so horrifyingly atavistic. They negated all the great achievements of the Third Millennium.

  After all those prior centuries of war and greed and unthinkable human suffering, mankind had attained true civilization at last. There was an abundance of natural resources and a benevolent climate from pole to pole. Though much of the planet had been covered by water during the time of the Great Warming, humanity had moved to higher ground and lived there happily in a world without winter. A stable population enjoyed long life and freedom from want of any kind. One respected all things living and dead; one did no harm; one went about one’s days quietly and benignly. The traumas of previous epochs seemed unreal, almost mythical, now. Why would anyone want to disrupt the universal harmony and tranquility that had come to enfold the world here in the days just before the dawning of the thirty-first century?

  It happened that Vulpius was in Rome, standing in the huge plaza in front of St. Peter’s, when a great column of flame sprang into the sky before him. At first he thought it was the mighty basilica itself that was on fire. But no, the blaze seemed to be located to the right of the building, in the Vatican complex itself. Sirens now began to shriek; people were running to and fro in the plaza. Vulpius caught at the arm of a portly man with the florid jowly face of a Roman Caesar. “What’s going on? Where’s the fire?”

  “A bomb,” the man gasped. “In the Sistine Chapel!”

/>   “No,” cried Vulpius. “Impossible! Unthinkable!”

  “The church will go next. Run!” He broke free of Vulpius’s grasp and went sprinting away.

  Vulpius, though, found himself unable to flee. He took a couple of wobbly steps toward the obelisk at the center of the plaza. The pillar of fire above the Vatican roof was growing broader. The air was stiflingly hot. It will all be destroyed, he thought, the Chapel, the Rooms of Raphael, the Vatican library, the entire dazzling horde of treasures that he had visited only a few hours before. They have struck again, it seems. They. They.

  He reached the steps at the base of the obelisk and paused there, panting in the heat. An oddly familiar face swam up out of the smoky haze: bald head, prominent nose, intensely penetrating eyes. Unforgettable eyes.

  The little man from Istanbul, the day when the ruins had been destroyed.

  Beside him was the other little man, the one with the thick bushy hair and the moody, poetic gaze. Leaning against the obelisk itself was the very big one, the handsome man with the immense shoulders. And, next to him, the wiry, long-legged one.

  The same four men that Vulpius had seen at Istanbul. Staring wide-eyed, transfixed by the sight of the burning building. Their faces, red with the reflection of the fiery glow overhead, displayed a kind of grim joy, an almost ecstatic delight.

  Another catastrophe, and the same four men present at it? That went beyond the possibilities of coincidence.

  No. No.

  Not a coincidence at all.

  He has been pursuing them around the world ever since, traveling now not as a tourist but as a secret agent of the informal governmental police that maintains such order as is still necessary to be enforced in the world. He has seen them at their filthy work, again and again, one monstrous cataclysm after another. The trashing of the Taj Mahal; the attack on Tibet’s lofty Potala; the tumbling of the Parthenon, high on its acropolis above the lake that once was Athens. They are always present at these acts of pre-millennial vandalism. So is he, now. He has taken care, though, not to let them see him.