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

by Robert Silverberg

  By this time he knows their names.

  The little one with the terrifying staring eyes is called Pablo Picasso. He had been cloned from the remains of some famous artist of a thousand years before. Vulpius has taken the trouble to look up some of the original Picasso’s work: there is plenty of it in every museum, wild, stark, garish, utterly incomprehensible paintings, women shown in profile with both eyes visible at once, humanoid monsters with the heads of bulls, jumbled gaudy landscapes showing scenes not to be found anywhere in the real world. But of course this Picasso is only a clone, fabricated from a scrap of the genetic material of his ancient namesake; whatever other sins he may have committed, he cannot be blamed for the paintings. Nor does he commit new ones of the same disagreeable sort, or of any sort at all. No one paints pictures any more.

  The other little man is Albert Einstein, another clone fashioned from a man of the previous millennium—a thinker, a scientist, responsible for something called the theory of relativity. Vulpius has been unable to discover precisely what that theory was, but it hardly matters, since the present Einstein probably has no idea of its meaning either. Science itself is as obsolete as painting. All that was in need of discovering has long since been discovered.

  The big husky man’s name is Ernest Hemingway. He too owes his existence to a shred of DNA retrieved from the thousand-years-gone corpse of a celebrated figure, this one a writer. Vulpius has retrieved some of the first Hemingway’s work from the archives. It means very little to him, but perhaps it has lost something in translation into modern Anglic. And in any case the writing and reading of stories are diversions that are no longer widely practiced. The twentieth-century historical context that Vulpius consults indicates that in his own time, at least, Hemingway was considered an important man of letters.

  Vjong Cleversmith, the fourth of the vandals, has been cloned from a man dead a little less than two hundred years, which means that no grave-robbing was necessary in order to obtain the cells from which he was grown. The ancestral Cleversmith, like nearly everyone else in recent centuries, had left samples of his genetic material on deposit in the cloning vaults. The record indicates that he was an architect: the Great Singapore Tower, brought now to ruination by his own posthumous gene-bearer, was regarded as his masterwork.

  The very concept of cloning makes Vulpius queasy. There is a ghoulishness about it, an eerieness, that he dislikes.

  There is no way to replicate in clones the special qualities, good or bad, that distinguished the people from whom they were drawn. The resemblance is purely a physical one. Those who specify that they are to be cloned after death may believe that they are attaining immortality of a sort, but to Vulpius it has always seemed that what is achieved is a facsimile of the original, a kind of animated statue, a mere external simulation. Yet the practice is all but universal. In the past five hundred years the people of the Third Millennium have come to dislike the risks and burdens of actual childbearing and childrearing. Even though a lifetime of two centuries is no longer unusual, the increasing refusal to reproduce and the slow but steady emigration to the various artificial satellite planetoids have brought the number of Earth’s inhabitants to its lowest level since prehistoric times. Cloning is practiced not only as an amusement but as a necessary means of fending off depopulation.

  Vulpius himself has occasionally played with the notion that he too is a clone. He has only vague memories of his parents, who are mere blurred elongated shadows in his mind, faceless and unknowable, and sometimes he thinks he has imagined even those. There is no evidence to support this: his progenitors’ names are set down in the archives, though the last contact he had with either of them was at the age of four. But again and again he finds himself toying with the thought that he could not have been conceived of man and woman in the ancient sweaty way, but instead was assembled and decanted under laboratory conditions. Many people he knows have this fantasy.

  But for this quartet, these men whom Vulpius has followed across the world all this year, clonehood is no fantasy. They are genuine replicas of men who lived long ago. And now they spend their days taking a terrible revenge against the world’s surviving antiquities. Why was that? What pleasure did this rampage of destruction give them? Could it be that clones were different from naturally conceived folk, that they lacked all reverence for the artifacts of other times?

  Vulpius wants very much to know what drives them. More than that: they must be stopped from doing further mischief. The time has come to confront them directly, straightforwardly, and command them in the name of civilization to halt.

  To do that, he supposes, he will have to hike up the flank of the Matterhorn to their secluded lodge close to the summit. He has been there once already to plant the spy-eye, and found it a long and arduous walk that he is not eager to make a second time. But luck is with him. They have chosen to descend into the town of Zermatt this bright warm afternoon. Vulpius encounters Hemingway and Einstein in the cobbled, swaybacked main street, outside a pretty little shop whose dark half-timbered facade gives it an look of incalculable age: a survivor, no doubt, of that long-ago era when there were no palm trees here, when this highland valley and the mighty Alpine peak just beyond it were part of winter’s bleak realm, a land eternally imprisoned in ice and snow, a playground for those who thrived on chilly pleasures.

  “Excuse me,” Vulpius says, approaching them boldly.

  They look at him uneasily. Perhaps they realize that they have seen him more than once before.

  But he intends to be nothing if not forthright with them. “Yes, you know me,” he tells them. “My name is Strettin Vulpius. I was there the day Istanbul was destroyed. I was in the plaza outside St. Peter’s when the Vatican burned.”

  “Were you, now?” says Hemingway. His eyes narrow like a sleepy cat’s. “Yes, come to think of it, you do look familiar.”

  “Agra,” Vulpius says. “Lhasa. Athens.”

  “He gets around,” says Einstein.

  “A world traveler,” says Hemingway, nodding.

  Picasso now has joined the group, with Cleversmith just behind him. Vulpius says, “You’ll be departing for Paris soon, won’t you?”

  “What’s that?” Cleversmith asks, looking startled.

  Hemingway leans over and whispers something in his ear. Cleversmith’s expression darkens.

  “Let there be no pretense,” says Vulpius stonily. “I know what you have in mind. The Louvre must not be touched.”

  Picasso says, “There’s nothing in it but a lot of dusty junk, you know.”

  Vulpius shakes his head. “Junk to you, perhaps. To the rest of us the things you’ve been destroying are precious. I say, enough is enough. You’ve had your fun. Now it has to stop.”

  Cleversmith indicates the colossal mass of the Matterhorn above the town. “You’ve been eavesdropping on us, have you?”

  “For the past five or six days.”

  “That isn’t polite, you know.”

  “And blowing up museums is?”

  “Everyone’s entitled to some sort of pastime,” says Cleversmith. “Why do you want to interfere with ours?”

  “You actually expect me to answer that?”

  “It seems like a reasonable question to me.”

  Vulpius does not quite know, for the moment, how to reply to that. Into his silence Picasso says, “Do we really need to stand here discussing all this in the public street? We’ve got some excellent brandy in our lodge.”

  It does not occur to Vulpius except in the most theoretical way that he might be in danger. Touching off an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, causing the foundation of the Washington Monument to give way, dropping a turbulence bomb amidst the ruins of Byzantium, all these are activities of one certain sort; actually taking human life is a different kind of thing entirely. It is not done. There has not been an instance of it in centuries.

  The possibility exists, of course, that these four might well be capable of it. No one has destroyed any museums in
a long time either, perhaps not since the savage and brutal twentieth century in which the originals of three of these four men lived their lives. But these are not actual men of the twentieth century, and, in any case, from what Vulpius knows of their originals he doubts that they themselves would have been capable of murder. He will take his chances up above.

  The brandy is, in fact, superb. Picasso pours with a free hand, filling and refilling the sparkling bowl-shaped glasses. Only Hemingway refuses to partake. He is not, he explains, fond of drinking.

  Vulpius is astonished by the mountaintop villa’s elegance and comfort. He had visited it surreptitiously the week before, entering in the absence of the conspirators to plant his spy-eye, but stayed only long enough then to do the job. Now he has the opportunity to view it detail. It is a magnificent eyrie, a chain of seven spherical rooms clinging to a craggy outthrust fang of the Matterhorn. Great gleaming windows everywhere provide views of the surrounding peaks and spires and the huge breathtaking chasm that separates the mountain from the town below. The air outside is moist and mild. Tropical vines and blossoming shrubs grow all about. It is hard even to imagine that this once was a place of glittering glaciers and killing cold.

  “Tell us,” Cleversmith says, after a while, “why it is you believe that the artifacts of the former world are worthy of continued preservation. Eh, Vulpius? What do you say?”

  “You have it upside down,” Vulpius says. “I don’t need to do any defending. You do.”

  “Do I? We do as we please. For us it is pleasant sport. No lives are lost. Mere useless objects are swept into nonexistence, which they deserve. What possible objection can you have to that?”

  “They are the world’s heritage. They are all we have to show for ten thousand years of civilization.”

  “Listen to him,” says Einstein, laughing. “Civilization!”

  “Civilization,” says Hemingway, “gave us the Great Warming. There was ice up here once, you know. There were huge ice packs at both poles. They melted and flooded half the planet. The ancients caused that to happen. Is that something to be proud of, what they did?”

  “I think it is,” Vulpius says, with a defiant glare. “It brought us our wonderful gentle climate. We have parks and gardens everywhere, even in these mountains. Would you prefer ice and snow?”

  “Then there’s war,” Cleversmith says. “Battle, bloodshed, bombs. People dying by tens of millions. We barely have tens of millions of people any more, and they would kill off that many in no time at all in their wars. That’s what the civilization you love so much accomplished. That’s what all these fancy temples and museums commemorate, you know. Terror and destruction.”

  “The Taj Mahal—the Sistine Chapel—”

  “Pretty in themselves,” says Einstein. “But you get behind the prettiness and you find that they’re just symbols of oppression, conquest, tyranny. Wherever you look in the ancient world, that’s what you find: oppression, conquest, tyranny. Better that all of that is swept away, wouldn’t you think?”

  Vulpius is speechless.

  “Have another brandy,” Picasso says, and fills everyone’s glass unasked.

  Vulpius sips. He’s already had a little too much, and perhaps there’s some risk in having more just now, because he feels it already affecting his ability to respond to what they are saying. But it is awfully good.

  He shakes his head to clear it and says, “Even if I were to accept what you claim, that everything beautiful left to us from the ancient world is linked in some way to the terrible crimes of the ancients, the fact is that those crimes are no longer being committed. No matter what their origin, the beautiful objects that the people of the past left behind ought to be protected and admired for their great beauty, which perhaps we’re incapable of duplicating today. Whereas if you’re allowed to have your way, we’ll soon be left without anything that represents—”

  “What did you say?” Cleversmith interrupts. “‘Which perhaps we’re incapable of duplicating today,’ wasn’t it? Yes. That’s what you said. And I quite agree. It’s an issue we need to consider, my friend, because it has bearing on our dispute. Where’s today’s great art? Or great science, for that matter? Picasso, Einstein, Hemingway—the original ones—who today can match their work?”

  Vulpius says, “And don’t forget your own ancestor, Cleversmith, who built the Great Singapore Tower, which you yourself turned to so much rubble.”

  “My point exactly. He lived two hundred years ago. We still had a little creativity left, then. Now we function on the accumulated intellectual capital of the past.”

  “What are you talking about?” Vulpius says, bewildered.

  “Come. Here. Look out this window. What do you see?”

  “The mountainside. Your villa’s garden, and the forest beyond.”

  “A garden, yes. A glorious one. And on and on right to the horizon, garden after garden. It’s Eden out there, Vulpius. That’s an ancient name for paradise. Eden. We live in paradise.”

  “Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “Nothing much gets accomplished in paradise,” Hemingway says.

  “Look at the four of us: Picasso, Hemingway, Einstein, Cleversmith. What have we created in our lives, we four, that compares with the work of the earlier men who had those names?”

  “But you aren’t those men. You’re nothing but clones.”

  They seem stung by that for an instant. Then Cleversmith, recovering quickly, says, “Precisely so. We carry the genes of great ancient overachievers, but we do nothing to fulfill our own potential. We’re superfluous men, mere genetic reservoirs. Where are our great works? It’s as though our famous forebears have done it all and nothing’s left for us to attempt.”

  “What would be the point of writing Hemingway’s books all over again, or painting Picasso’s paintings, or—”

  “I don’t mean that. There’s no need for us to do their work again, obviously, but why haven’t we even done our own? I’ll tell you why. Life’s too easy nowadays. I mean that without strife, without challenge—”

  “No,” Vulpius says. “Ten minutes ago Einstein here was arguing that the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel had to be destroyed because they’re symbols of a bloody age of tyranny and war. That thesis made very little sense to me, but let it pass, because now you seem to be telling me that what we need most in the world is a revival of war—”

  “Of challenge,” says Cleversmith. He leans forward. His entire body is taut. His eyes now have taken on some of the intensity of Picasso’s. In a low voice he says, “We are slaves to the past, do you know that? Out of that grisly brutal world that lies a thousand years behind us came the soft life that we all lead today, which is killing us with laziness and boredom. It’s antiquity’s final joke. We have to sweep it all away, Vulpius. We have to make the world risky again.—Give him another drink, Pablo.”

  “No. I’ve had enough.”

  But Picasso pours. Vulpius drinks.

  “Let me see if I understand what you’re trying to say—”

  Somewhere during the long boozy night the truth finds him like an arrow coursing through darkness: these men are fiercely resentful of being clones, and want to destroy the world’s past so that their own lives can at last be decoupled from it. They may be striking at the Blue Mosque and the Sistine Chapel, but their real targets are Picasso, Hemingway, Cleversmith, and Einstein. And, somewhere much later in that sleepless night, just as a jade-hued dawn streaked with broad swirling swaths of scarlet and topaz is breaking over the Alps, Vulpius’s own resistance to their misdeeds breaks down. He is more tipsy than he has ever been before, and weary almost to tears besides. And when Picasso suddenly says, “By the way, Vulpius, what are the great accomplishments of your life?” he collapses inwardly before the thrust.

  “Mine?” he says dully, blinking in confusion.

  “Yes. We’re mere clones, and nothing much is to be expected from us, but what have you managed to do with your time?”


  “Well—I travel—I observe—I study phenomena—”

  “And then what?”

  He pauses a moment. “Why, nothing. I take the next trip.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  Picasso’s cold smile is diabolical, a wedge that goes through Vulpius with shattering force. In a single frightful moment he sees that all is over, that the many months of his quest have been pointless. He has no power to thwart this kind of passionate intensity. That much is clear to him now. They are making an art-form out of destruction, it seems. Very well. Let them do as they please. Let them. Let them. If this is what they need to do, he thinks, what business is it of his? There’s no way that his logic can be any match for their lunacy.

  Cleversmith is saying, “Do you know what a train is, Vulpius?”

  “A train. Yes.”

  “We’re at the station. The train is coming, the Millennium Express. It’ll take us from the toxic past to the radiant future. We don’t want to miss the train, do we, Vulpius?”

  “The train is coming,” says Vulpius. “Yes.” Picasso, irrepressible, waves yet another flask of brandy at him. Vulpius shakes him off. Outside, the first shafts of golden sunlight are cutting through the dense atmospheric vapors. Jagged Alpine peaks, mantled in jungle greenery reddened by the new day, glow in the distance, Mont Blanc to the west, the Jungfrau in the north, Monte Rosa to the east. The gray-green plains of Italy unroll southward.

  “This is our last chance to save ourselves,” says Cleversmith urgently. “We have to act now, before the new era can get a grasp on us and throttle us into obedience.” He looms up before Vulpius, weaving in the dimness of the room like a serpent. “I ask you to help us.”