Sailing to Byzantium - Six Novellas

by Robert Silverberg

  “Yes,” I say. “What else is there to tell?”

  Guardiano had told me before I left Cuchulain, of course, that the world I was going to had been settled by emigrants from Russia. It was one of the first to be colonized, in the early years of the Mission. One would expect our Earthly ways to begin dropping away, and something like an indigenous culture to have begun evolving, in that much time. But I am startled, all the same, by how far they have drifted. At least Marfa Ivanova—who is, I imagine, a third-generation Ziman—knows what Darklaw is. But is it observed? They have named their world Winter, at any rate, and not New Russia or New Moscow or something like that, which Darklaw would have forbidden. The new worlds in the stars must not carry such Earthly baggage with them. But whether they follow any of the other laws, I cannot say. They have reverted to their ancient language here, but they know Anglic as well, as they should. The robe of the Order means something to her, but not, it would seem, a great deal. She speaks of spies, of killing. Here at the outset of my journey I can see already that there will be many surprises for me as I make my way through the Dark.

  The voivode Ilya Alexandrovich is a small, agile-looking man, brown-faced, weatherbeaten, with penetrating blue eyes and a great shock of thick, coarse white hair. He could be any age at all, but from his vigor and seeming reserves of power I guess that he is about forty. In a harsh climate the face is quickly etched with the signs of age, but this man is probably younger than he looks.

  Voivode, he tells me, means something like “mayor,” or “district chief.” His office, brightly lit and stark, is a large ground-floor room in an unassuming two-story aluminum shack that is, I assume, the town hall. There is no place for me to sit. I stand before him, and the three husky boyars, who do not remove their fur jackets, stand behind me, arms folded ominously across their breasts.

  I see a desk, a faded wall map, a terminal. The only other thing in the room is the immense bleached skull of some alien beast on the floor beside his desk. It is an astounding sight, two meters long and a meter high, with two huge eye-sockets in the usual places and a third set high between them, and a pair of colossal yellow tusks that rise straight from the lower jaw almost to the ceiling. One tusk is chipped at the tip, perhaps six centimeters broken off. He sees me staring at it. “You ever see anything like that?” he asks, almost belligerently.

  “Never. What is it?”

  “We call it a bolshoi. Animal of the northern steppe, very big. You see one five kilometers away and you shit your trousers, I tell you for true.” He grins. “Maybe we send one back to Earth some day to show them what we have here. Maybe.”

  His Anglic is much more heavily accented than Marfa Ivanovna’s, and far less fluent. He seems unable to hold still very long. The district that he governs, he tells me, is the largest on Zima. It looks immense indeed on his map, a vast blue area, a territory that seems to be about the size of Brazil. But when I take a closer look I see three tiny dots clustered close together in the center of the blue zone. They are, I assume, the only villages. He follows my gaze and strides immediately across the room to tap the map. “This is Tyomni,” he says. “That is this village. This one here, it is Doch. This one, Sin. In this territory we have six thousand people altogether. There are two other territories, here and here.” He points to regions north and south of the blue zone. A yellow area and a pink one indicate the other settlements, each with two towns. The whole human population of this planet must be no more than ten thousand.

  Turning suddenly toward me, he says, “You are big priest in the Order?”

  “I was Lord Magistrate, yes. The House of Senders.”

  “Senders. Ah. I know Senders. The ones who choose the colonists. And who run the machinery, the transmitters.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you are the bolshoi Sender? The big man, the boss, the captain?”

  “I was, yes. This robe, this medallion, those are signs of my office.”

  “A very big man. Only instead of sending, you are sent.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And you come here, why? Nobody from Earth comes here in ten, fifteen years.” He no longer makes even an attempt to conceal his suspicions, or his hostility. His cold eyes flare with anger. “Being boss of Senders is not enough for you? You want to tell us how to run Zima? You want to run Zima yourself?”

  “Nothing of that sort, believe me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Do you have a map of the entire Dark?”

  “The Dark,” he says, as though the word is unfamiliar to him. Then he says something in Russkiye to one of the boyars. The man leaves the room and returns, a few moments later, with a wide, flat black screen that turns out to be a small version of the wall screen in the Master’s office. He lights it and they all look expectantly at me.

  The display is a little different from the one I am accustomed to, since it centers on Zima, not on Earth, but the glowing inner sphere that marks the location of the Mission stars is easy enough to find. I point to that sphere and I remind them, apologizing for telling them what they already know, that the great plan of the Mission calls for an orderly expansion through space from Earth in a carefully delimited zone a hundred lightyears in diameter. Only when that sphere has been settled are we to go farther, not because there are any technical difficulties in sending our carrier ships a thousand lightyears out, or ten thousand, but because the Master has felt from the start that we must assimilate our first immense wave of outward movement, must pause and come to an understanding of what it is like to have created a galactic empire on so vast a scale, before we attempt to go onward into the infinity that awaits us. Otherwise, I say, we risk falling victim to a megalomaniacal centrifugal dizziness from which we may never recover. And so Darklaw forbids journeys beyond the boundary.

  They watch me stonily throughout my recital of these overfamiliar concepts, saying nothing.

  I go on to tell them that Earth now is receiving indications that voyages far beyond the hundred-light-year limit have taken place.

  Their faces are expressionless.

  “What is that to us?” the voivode asks.

  “One of the deviant tracks begins here,” I say.

  “Our Anglic is very poor. Perhaps you can say that another way.”

  “When the first ship brought the Velde receiver to Zima, it built replicas of itself and of the receiver, and sent them onward to other stars farther from Earth. We’ve traced the various trajectories that lead beyond the Mission boundaries, and one of them comes out of a world that received its Velde equipment from a world that got its equipment from here. A granddaughter world, so to speak.”

  “This has nothing to do with us, nothing at all,” the voivode says coolly.

  “Zima is only my starting point,” I say. “It may be that you are in contact with these outer worlds, that I can get some clue from you about who is making these voyages, and why, and where he’s setting out from.”

  “We have no knowledge of any of this.”

  I point out, trying not to do it in any overbearing way, that by the authority of Darklaw vested in me as a Plenipotentiary of the Order he is required to assist me in my inquiry. But there is no way to brandish the authority of Darklaw that is not overbearing, and I see the voivode stiffen at once, I see his face grow black, I see very clearly that he regards himself as autonomous and his world as independent of Earth.

  That comes as no surprise to me. We were not so naive, so innocent of historical precedent, as to think we could maintain control over the colonies. What we wanted was quite the opposite, new Earths free of our grasp—cut off, indeed, by an inflexible law forbidding all contact between mother world and colony once the colony has been established—and free, likewise, of the compulsion to replicate the tragic mistakes that the old Earth had made. But because we had felt the hand of God guiding us in every way as we led mankind forth into the Dark, we believed that God’s law as we understood it would never be repudiated by those
whom we had given the stars. Now, seeing evidence that His law is subordinate out here to the will of willful men, I fear for the structure that we have devoted our lives to building.

  “If this is why you really have come,” the voivode says, “then you have wasted your time. But perhaps I misunderstand everything you say. My Anglic is not good. We must talk again.” He gestures to the boyars and says something in Russkiye that is unmistakably a dismissal. They take me away and give me a room in some sort of dreary lodging-house overlooking the plaza at the center of town. When they leave, they lock the door behind them. I am a prisoner.

  It is a harsh land. In the first few days of my internment there is a snowstorm every afternoon. First the sky turns metal-gray, and then black. Then hard little pellets of snow, driven by the rising wind, strike the window. Then it comes down in heavy fluffy flakes for several hours. Afterwards machines scuttle out and clear the pathways. I have never before been in a place where they have snow. It seems quite beautiful to me, a kind of benediction, a cleansing cover.

  This is a very small town, and there is wilderness all around it. On the second day and again on the third, packs of wild beasts go racing through the central plaza. They look something like huge dogs, but they have very long legs, almost like those of horses, and their tails are tipped with three pairs of ugly-looking spikes. They move through the town like a whirlwind, prowling in the trash, butting their heads against the closed doors, and everyone gets quickly out of their way.

  Later on the third day there is an execution in the plaza, practically below my window. A jowly, heavily bearded man clad in furs is led forth, strapped to a post, and shot by five men in uniforms. For all I can tell, he is one of the three boyars who took me to the voivode on my first day. I have never seen anyone killed before, and the whole event has such a strange, dreamlike quality for me that the shock and horror and revulsion do not strike me until perhaps half an hour later.

  It is hard for me to say which I find the most alien, the snowstorms, the packs of fierce beasts running through the town, or the execution.

  My food is shoved through a slot in the door. It is rough, simple stuff, stews and soups and a kind of gritty bread. That is all right. Not until the fourth day does anyone come to see me. My first visitor is Marfa Ivanovna, who says, “They think you’re a spy. I told you to tell them the truth.”

  “I did.”

  “Are you a spy?”

  “You know that I’m not.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I know. But the voivode is troubled. He thinks you mean to overthrow him.”

  “All I want is for him to give me some information. Then I’ll be gone from here and won’t ever return.”

  “He is a very suspicious man.”

  “Let him come here and pray with me, and see what my nature is like. All I am is a servant of God. Which I hope is true of the voivode as well.”

  “He is thinking of having you shot,” Marfa Ivanovna says.

  “Let him come to me and pray with me,” I tell her.

  The voivode comes to me, not once but three times. We do no praying—in truth, any mention of God, or Darklaw, or even the Mission, seems to make him uncomfortable—but gradually we begin to understand each other. We are not that different. He is a hard, dedicated, cautious man governing a harsh troublesome land. I have been called hard and dedicated and cautious myself. My nature is not as suspicious as his, but I have not had to contend with snowstorms and wild beasts and the other hazards of this place. Nor am I Russian. They seem to be suspicious from birth, these Russians. And they have lived apart from Earth a long while. That too is Darklaw: we would not have the new worlds contaminated with our plagues of the spirit or of the flesh, nor do we want alien plagues of either kind carried back from them to us. We have enough of our own already.

  I am not going to be shot. He makes that clear. “We talked of it, yes. But it would be wrong.”

  “The man who was? What did he do?”

  “He took that which was not his,” says the voivode, and shrugs. “He was worse than a beast. He could not be allowed to live among us.”

  Nothing is said of when I will be released. I am left alone for two more days. The coarse dull food begins to oppress me, and the solitude. There is another snowstorm, worse than the last. From my window I see ungainly birds something like vultures, with long naked yellow necks and drooping reptilian tails, circling in the sky. Finally the voivode comes a second time, and simply stares at me as though expecting me to blurt out some confession. I look at him in puzzlement, and after long silence he laughs explosively and summons an aide, who brings in a bottle of a clear fiery liquor. Two or three quick gulps and he becomes expansive, and tells me of his childhood. His father was voivode before him, long ago, and was killed by a wild animal while out hunting. I try to imagine a world that still has dangerous animals roaming freely. To me it is like a world where the gods of primitive man are real and alive, and go disguised among mortals, striking out at them randomly and without warning.

  Then he asks me about myself, wanting to know how old I was when I became a priest of the Order, and whether I was as religious as a boy as I am now. I tell him what I can, within the limits placed on me by my vows. Perhaps I go a little beyond the limits, even. I explain about my early interest in technical matters, my entering the Order at seventeen, my life of service.

  The part about my religious vocation seems odd to him. He appears to think I must have undergone some sudden conversion midway through my adolescence. “There has never been a time when God has not been present at my side,” I say.

  “How very lucky you are,” he says.

  “Lucky?”

  He touches his glass to mine.

  “Your health,” he says. We drink. Then he says, “What does your Order really want with us, anyway?”

  “With you? We want nothing with you. Three generations ago we gave you your world; everything after that is up to you.”

  “No. You want to dictate how we shall live. You are people of the past, and we are people of the future, and you are unable to understand our souls.”

  “Not so,” I tell him. “Why do you think we want to dictate to you? Have we interfered with you up till now?”

  “You are here now, though.”

  “Not to interfere. Only to gain information.”

  “Ah. Is this so?” He laughs and drinks. “Your health,” he says again.

  He comes a third time a couple of days later. I am restless and irritable when he enters; I have had enough of this imprisonment, these groundless suspicions, this bleak and frosty world; I am ready to be on my way. It is all I can do to keep from bluntly demanding my freedom. As it is I am uncharacteristically sharp and surly with him, answering in quick snarling monosyllables when he asks me how I have slept, whether I am well, is my room warm enough. He gives me a look of surprise, and then one of thoughtful appraisal, and then he smiles. He is in complete control, and we both know it.

  “Tell me once more,” he says, “why you have come to us.”

  I calm myself and run through the whole thing one more time. He nods. Now that he knows me better, he tells me, he begins to think that I may be sincere, that I have not come to spy, that I actually would be willing to chase across the galaxy this way in pursuit of an ideal. And so on in that vein for a time, both patronizing and genuinely friendly almost in the same breath.

  Then he says, “We have decided that it is best to send you onward.”

  “Where?”

  “The name of the world is Entrada. It is one of our daughter worlds, eleven lightyears away, a very hot place. We trade our precious metals for their spices. Someone came from there not long ago and told us of a strange man named Oesterreich, who passed through Entrada and spoke of undertaking journeys to new and distant places. Perhaps he can provide you with the answers that you seek. If you can find him.”

  “Oesterreich?”

  “That is the name, yes.”

  “Can you
tell me any more about him than that?”

  “What I have told you is all that I know.”

  He stares at me truculently, as if defying me to show that he is lying. But I believe him.

  “Even for that much assistance, I am grateful,” I say.

  “Yes. Never let it be said that we have failed to offer aid to the Order.” He smiles again. “But if you ever come to this world again, you understand, we will know that you were a spy after all. And we will treat you accordingly.”

  Marfa Ivanovna is in charge of the Velde equipment. She positions me within the transmitting doorway, moving me about this way and that to be certain that I will be squarely within the field. When she is satisfied, she says, “You know, you ought not ever come back this way.”

  “I understand that.”

  “You must be a very virtuous man. Ilya Alexandrovitch came very close to putting you to death, and then he changed his mind. This I know for certain. But he remains suspicious of you. He is suspicious of everything the Order does.”

  “The Order has never done anything to injure him or anyone else on this planet, and never will.”

  “That may be so,” says Marfa Ivanovna. “But still, you are lucky to be leaving here alive. You should not come back. And you should tell others of your sort to stay away from Zima too. We do not accept the Order here.”

  I am still pondering the implications of that astonishing statement when she does something even more astonishing. Stepping into the cubicle with me, she suddenly opens her fur-trimmed jacket, revealing full round breasts, very pale, dusted with the same light red freckles that she has on her face. She seizes me by the hair and presses my head against her breasts, and holds it there a long moment. Her skin is very warm. It seems almost feverish.

  “For luck,” she says, and steps back. Her eyes are sad and strange. It could almost be a loving look, or perhaps a pitying one, or both. Then she turns away from me and throws the switch.