Sailing to Byzantium - Six Novellas

by Robert Silverberg

  And then, as though they had scheduled the storm for their own purposes, a mob of fierce-faced people in gaudy robes burst into view. They wield clubs, pitchforks, rake handles, cleavers, and other improvised weapons; they scream incoherent, unintelligible slogans; and they rush into the midst of the Discerners, laying about them vigorously. “Death to the godless blasphemers!” is what they are shrieking, and similar phrases. Who are they, Gifford wonders? Awaiters. Propitiators. Diabolists. Apocalyptists. Perhaps a coalition of all cultists. The television helicopters descend to get a better view of the melee, and hang just out of reach, twenty or thirty feet above the struggle. Their powerful floodlights provide apocalyptic illumination. Gifford finds hands at his throat: a crazed woman, howling, grotesque. He pushes her away and she tumbles into the pit, landing on a stack of mud-crusted Bibles. A frantic stampede has begun; his people are rushing in all directions, followed by the vengeful servants of the Lord, who wield their weapons with vindictive glee. Gifford sees his friends fall, wounded, badly hurt, perhaps slain. Where are the police? Why are they giving no protection? “Kill all the blasphemers!” a maniac voice shrills near him. He whirls, ready to defend himself. A pitchfork. He feels a strange cold clarity of thought and moves swiftly in, feinting, seizing the handle of the pitchfork, wresting it from his adversary. The rain redoubles its force; a sheet of water comes between Gifford and the other, and when he can see again, he is alone at the edge of the pit. He hurls the pitchfork into the pit and instantly wishes he had kept it, for three of the robed ones are coming toward him. He breaks into a cautious trot, tries to move past them, puts on a sudden spurt of speed, and slips in the mud. He lands in a puddle; the taste of mud is in his mouth; he is breathless, terrified, unable to rise. They fling themselves upon him. “Wait,” he says. “This is madness!” One of them has a club. “No,” Gifford mutters. “No. No. No. No.”

  Fourteen

  The Seventh Seal

  1. AND WHEN HE HAD opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

  2. And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.

  3. And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.

  4. And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand.

  5. And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake.

  6. And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.

  7. The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

  8. And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood;

  9. And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.

  10. And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

  11. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

  12. And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.

  13. And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!

  Fifteen

  The Flight of the Prophet

  ALL, ALL OVER. Thomas weeps. The cities burn. The very lakes are afire. So many thousands dead. The Apocalyptists dance, for though the year is not yet sped the end seems plainly in view. The Church of Rome has pronounced anathema on Thomas, denying his miracle: he is the Antichrist, the Pope has said. Signs and portents are seen everywhere. This is the season of two-headed calves and dogs with cats’ faces. New prophets have arisen. God may shortly return, or He may not; revelations differ. Many people now pray for an end to all such visitations and miracles. The Awaiters no longer Await, but now ask that we be spared from His next coming; even the Diabolists and the Propitiators cry, Come not, Lucifer. Those who begged a Sign from God in June would be content now only with God’s renewed and prolonged absence. Let Him neglect us; let Him dismiss us from His mind. It is a time of torches and hymns. Rumors of barbaric warfare come from distant continents. They say the neutron bomb has been used in Bolivia. Thomas’ last few followers have asked him to speak with God once more, in the hope that things can still be set to rights, but Thomas refuses. The lines of communication to the Deity are closed. He dares not reopen them: see, see how many plagues and evils he has let loose as it is! He renounces his prophethood. Others may dabble in charismatic mysticism if they so please. Others may kneel before the burning bush or sweat in the glare of the pillar of fire. Not Thomas. Thomas’ vocation is gone. All over. All, all, all over.

  He hopes to slip into anonymity. He shaves his beard and docks his hair; he obtains a new wardrobe, bland and undistinguished; he alters the color of his eyes; he practices walking in a slouch to lessen his great height. Perhaps he has not lost his pocket-picking skills. He will go silently into the cities, head down, fingers on the ready, and thus he will make his way. It will be a quieter life.

  Disguised, alone, Thomas goes forth. He wanders unmolested from place to place, sleeping in odd corners, eating in dim rooms. He is in Chicago for the Long Sabbath, and he is in Milwaukee for the Night of Blood, and he is in St. Louis for the Invocation of Flame. These events leave him unaffected. He moves on. The year is ebbing. The leaves have fallen. If the Apocalyptists tell us true, mankind has but a few weeks left. God’s wrath, or Satan’s, will blaze over the land as the year 2000 sweeps in on December’s heels. Thomas scarcely minds. Let him go unnoticed and he will not mind if the universe tumbles about him.

  “What do you think?” he is asked on a street corner in Los Angeles. “Will God come back on New Year’s Day?”

  A few idle loungers, killing time. Thomas slouches among them. They do not recognize him, he is sure. But they want an answer. “Well? What do you say?”

  Thomas makes his voice furry and thick, and mumbles, “No, not a chance. He’s never going to mess with us again. He gave us a miracle and look what we made out of it.”

  “That so? You really think so?”

  Thomas nods. “God’s turned His back on us. He said, Here, I give you proof of My existence, now pull yourselves together and get somewhere. And instead we fell apart all the faster. So that’s it. We’ve had it. The end is coming.”

  “Hey, you might be right!” Grins. Winks.

  This conversation makes Thomas uncomfortable. He starts to edge away, elbows out, head bobbing clumsily, shoulders hunched. His new walk, his camouflage.

  “Wait,” one of them says. “Stick around. Let’s talk a little.”

  Thomas hesitates.

  “You know, I think you’re right, fellow. We made a royal mess. I tell you something else: we never should have started all that stuff. Asking for a Sign. Stopping the Earth. Would have been a lot better off if that Thomas had stuck to picking pockets, let me tell you.”

  “I agree three hundred percent,” Thomas says, flashing a quick smile, on-off. “If you’ll excuse me—”

  Again he starts to shuffle away. Ten paces. An office building’s door opens. A short, slender man steps out. Oh, G
od! Saul! Thomas covers his face with his hand and turns away. Too late. No use. Kraft recognizes him through all the alterations. His eyes gleam. “Thomas!” he gasps.

  “No. You’re mistaken. My name is—”

  “Where have you been?” Kraft demands. “Everyone’s searching for you, Thomas. Oh, it was wicked of you to run away, to shirk your responsibilities. You dumped everything into our hands, didn’t you? But you were the only one with the strength to lead people. You were the only one who—”

  “Keep your voice down,” Thomas says hoarsely. No use pretending. “For the love of God, Saul, stop yelling at me! Stop saying my name! Do you want everyone to know that I’m—”

  “That’s exactly what I want,” Kraft says. By now a fair crowd has gathered, ten people, a dozen. Kraft points. “Don’t you know him? That’s Thomas the Proclaimer! He’s shaved and cut his hair, but can’t you see his face all the same? There’s your prophet! There’s the thief who talked with God!”

  “No, Saul!”

  “Thomas?” someone says. And they all begin to mutter it. “Thomas? Thomas? Thomas?” They nod heads, point, rub chins, nod heads again. “Thomas? Thomas?”

  Surrounding him. Staring. Touching him. He tries to push them away. Too many of them, and no apostles, now. Kraft is at the edge of the crowd, smiling, the little Judas! “Keep back,” Thomas says. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m not Thomas. I’d like to get my hands on him myself. I—I—” Judas! Judas! “Saul!” he screams. And then they swarm over him.

  BORN WITH THE DEAD

  I remember 1973 as a very difficult year. Life was pretty crazy for most of us that year—the United States was suffering the gigantic hangover of the post-Vietnam years, and, even for the most prosaic suburban people, it was a time of weird clothing, weird hair styles, massive drug consumption, and outlandish sexual revelry. Here in California, we were churning through some sort of societal revolution every six weeks or so. My first marriage was falling apart, besides. And I was simply worn out after years and years of super-prolific writing. All that work had left me fairly independent financially, however, and although I was not yet 40, I was beginning to think of abandoning my career and spending the rest of my life traveling, reading, and caring for my new Californian garden of exotic semi-tropical plants.

  As a result, I wrote practically nothing in 1973—my output for the entire year was a piddling 81,000 words, which would have been two weeks’ work ten years before. Though whatever work I did manage to produce was, I thought, of a high level of quality, every word was an effort, and it was only the pressure of other people’s deadlines that got me to do anything at all.

  Nevertheless, in the middle of that deadly year, I embarked on a long story that surely ranks near the top of my entire vast array of work. Weary as I was, reluctant to work as I was, I found myself unable to keep this one from coming into being—thanks to a little timely encouragement from Ed Ferman of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  For most of its sixty-plus years of existence, the magazine formally known as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but more usually called F&SF, has been a bastion of civilized and cultivated material. That was true under its founding editors, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, and under such succeeding editors as Robert P. Mills and Avram Davidson. By the 1970s, editorial control had passed into the hands of Ed Ferman, who also happened to be the publisher of the magazine, and who functioned, in admirable fashion, in both capacities for many years thereafter.

  My fiction had been appearing on and off in F&SF since the days of the Boucher–McComas administration; but it was Ed Ferman who turned me into a steady contributor. He published a flock of my short stories in the 1960s—of which the best known was the much-anthologized “Sundance”and then, as I began to turn away from shorter fiction in favor of novellas and novels, Ferman let me know that he would be interested in publishing some of my longer work as well.

  In December, 1972, just after the publication of my novel Dying Inside, I got a note from Ed saying that he had just received a review copy of that book. “I simply wanted to tell you what a fine and moving and painful experience it was to read it,” he wrote, going on to compare the novel favorably to recent works by Bernard Malamud and Chaim Potok. And he added in a postscript, “The editor in me has just popped up, and I can’t help asking what I have to do to see your next novel. If it’s anything near the quality of Dying Inside, I’ll go higher than our top rate.”

  I already knew that I wasn’t going to write another novel just then, not with all the turbulence going on in my life, and perhaps would never write one ever again. Therefore, I felt uneasy about committing myself to any very lengthy work. And I was already working on a longish short story called “Trips” for an anthology Ferman was editing in collaboration with Barry Malzberg. But, despite everything, I did have another long story in mind to write after that, one that would probably run to novella length, and I could not keep myself from telling Ferman it was his, if he wanted it. He replied at once that he did.

  The story was “Born with the Dead.”

  It had the feel of a major story from the moment I conceived it. I had played with the idea of the resuscitation of the dead in fiction since my 1957 novel Recalled to Life, and now, I felt, I was ready to return to it with a kind of culminating statement on the subject. A few days after I began work on it, I let Ferman know that it was going to be a big one. To which he replied, on April 16, 1973, that I should make it as big as it needed to be, because he proposed to make the story the centerpiece of a special Robert Silverberg issue of the magazine.

  That had real impact on me. Over the years F&SF had done a handful of special issues honoring its favorite contributors—writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, James Blish. Each special issue featured a portrait of the writer on the cover, a major new story by him, several critical essays, and a bibliography. All of the writers chosen had been favorites of mine since my days as an avid adolescent reader; and now, suddenly, in my mid-thirties, and at what was plainly the peak of my career, I found myself chosen to join their company. It gave me a nice shiver down the spine.

  But of course I had to write a story worthy of that company—and this at a time when my private life was in chaos and the world about me, there in the apocalyptic days of the late Nixon era, was pretty chaotic, too. So every day’s work was an ordeal. Sometimes I managed no more than a couple of paragraphs. At best, I averaged about a page a day. Writing it required me to do battle with all kinds of internal demons, for the story sprung from areas within me that I found it taxing to explore: I had to confront my own attitudes toward death, love, marriage, responsibility, and the like in every paragraph. I was, in addition, growing ever more uneasy about my relationship to the science-fiction readership, and found myself wondering constantly whether one more Silverbergian exploration of the dark side of existence might not be asking too much. And I was mentally exhausted besides.

  The weeks dragged by. I entered the second month of the project with more than half the story still to tell. (By way of comparison: Dying Inside, also a difficult thing to write and three times as long, took me just nine weeks.) And now it was the middle of May; I had begun the story in late March. But somehow, finally, I regained my stride in early June, and the closing scenes, grim as their content was, were much easier to write than those that had gone before. One night in early June, I was at the movies—Marlon Brando’s Last Tango in Paris, it was—when the closing paragraphs of the story began to form in my mind. I turned to my wife and asked her for the notebook she always carried, and began to scribble sentences, in the dark, during the final minutes of the film. The movie ended; the lights came on; the theater emptied; and there I sat, still writing. “Are you a movie critic?” an usher asked me. I shook my head and went on writing.

  So the thing was done, and I knew that I had hooked me a big fish. The next day, I typed out what I had written in the theater, and set about preparing a
final draft for Ed. On June 16, 1973, I sent it to him with a note that said, “Here It Is. I feel exhausted, drained, relieved, pleased, proud, etc. I hope the thing is worthy of all the sweat that went into it. What I’m going to do tomorrow is don my backpack and head for the Sierra for a week in the back country at 10,000 feet, a kind of rite of purification after all these months of crazy intense typing.”

  “I could not be more pleased with ‘Born with the Dead’,” Ferman replied four days later. (E-mail was mere science fiction in those days.) “It seems to me that it brings to a peak the kind of thing you’ve been doing with Book of Skulls and Dying Inside.” (I had not noticed until that moment the string of death-images running through the titles of those three practically consecutive works of mine.) “I don’t think there is a wrong move in this story, and it comes together beautifully in the ending, which I found perfect and quite moving.”

  The story appeared in the April, 1974 F&SF, which was indeed the special Robert Silverberg issue—with an Ed Emshwiller portrait of me in my best long-haired 1970s psychedelic mode on the cover and essays about me by Barry Malzberg and Tom Clareson within, along with a Silverberg bibliography in very small type (so it didn’t fill half the issue). “Born with the Dead” went on to win the Nebula Award in 1975 and the Locus Award as well. In the Hugo voting, though, it finished second, an event which seemed to confirm what I had already come to believe, that my current output was far removed from the needs and interests of the science-fiction mass audience. But, Hugo or no, the story has, since then, been generally acclaimed as a classic. It has been reprinted in innumerable anthologies, translated into ten foreign languages, and optioned for motion-picture production.