Sailing to Byzantium - Six Novellas

by Robert Silverberg

“I’ve already told you what it is. As for who built it, I don’t have any idea. Nobody does. We think it’s five or ten million years old, maybe. It could be older than that by a factor of ten. Or a factor of a hundred. We have no way of judging.”

  After a long silence I say, “You’re telling me that it’s an alien device?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We’ve never discovered any sign of intelligent alien life anywhere in the galaxy.”

  “There’s one right in front of you,” Oesterreich says. “It isn’t the only one.”

  “You’ve found aliens?”

  “We’ve found their matter-transmitters. A few of them, anyway. They still work. Are you ready to jump now, your grace?”

  I stare blankly at the three-sided doorway.

  “Where to?”

  “To a planet about five hundred lightyears from here, where we can catch the bus that’ll take us to the Goddess Avatar.”

  “You’re actually serious?”

  “Let’s go, your grace.”

  “What about lambda effects?”

  “There aren’t any. Lambda differentials are a flaw in the Velde technology, not in the universe itself. This system gets us around without any lambda problems at all. Of course, we don’t know how it works. Are you ready?”

  “All right,” I say helplessly.

  He beckons to me and together we step toward the doorway and simply walk through it, and out the other side into such astonishing beauty that I want to fall down and give praise. Great feathery trees rise higher than sequoias, and a milky waterfall comes tumbling down the flank of an ebony mountain that fills half the sky, and the air quivers with a diamond-bright haze. Before me stretches a meadow like a scarlet carpet, vanishing into the middle distance. There is a Mesozoic richness of texture to everything: it gleams, it shimmers, it trembles in splendor.

  A second doorway, identical to the first, is mounted against an enormous boulder right in front of us. It too is flanked by the triple star emblem.

  “Put your medallion on,” Oesterreich tells me.

  “My medallion?” I say, stupidly.

  “Put it on. The Goddess Avatar will wonder why you’re with me, and that’ll tell her.”

  “Is she here?”

  “She’s on the next world. This is just a way station. We had to stop here first. I don’t know why. Nobody does. Ready?”

  “I’d like to stay here longer.”

  “You can come back some other time,” he says. “She’s waiting for you. Let’s go.”

  “Yes,” I say, and fumble in my pocket and find my medallion, and put it around my throat. Oesterreich winks and puts his thumb and forefinger together approvingly. He takes my hand and we step through.

  She is a lean, leathery-looking woman of sixty or seventy years with hard bright blue eyes. She wears a khaki jacket, an olive-drab field hat, khaki shorts, heavy boots. Her graying hair is tucked behind her in a tight bun. Standing in front of a small tent, tapping something into a hand terminal, she looks like an aging geology professor out on a field trip in Wyoming. But next to her tent the triple emblem of the Goddess is displayed on a sandstone plaque.

  This is a Mesozoic landscape too, but much less lush than the last one: great red-brown cliffs sparsely peppered with giant ferns and palms, four-winged insects the size of dragons zooming overhead, huge grotesque things that look very much like dinosaurs warily circling each other in a stony arroyo out near the horizon. I see some other tents out there too. There is a little colony here. The sun is reddish-yellow, and large.

  “Well, what do we have here?” she says. “A Lord Magistrate, is it?”

  “He was nosing around on Zima and Entrada, trying to find out what was going on.”

  “Well, now he knows.” Her voice is like flint. I feel her contempt, her hostility, like something palpable. I feel her strength, too, a cold, harsh, brutal power. She says, “What was your house, Lord Magistrate?”

  “Senders.”

  She studies me as if I were a specimen in a display case. In all my life I have known only one other person of such force and intensity, and that is the Master. But she is nothing like him.

  “And now the Sender is sent?”

  “Yes,” I say. “There were deviations from the plan. It became necessary for me to resign my magistracy.”

  “We weren’t supposed to come out this far, were we?” she asks. “The light of that sun up there won’t get to Earth until the seventy-third century, do you know that? But here we are. Here we are!” She laughs, a crazed sort of cackle. I begin to wonder if they intend to kill me. The aura that comes from her is terrifying. The geology professor I took her for at first is gone: what I see now is something strange and fierce, a prophet, a seer. Then suddenly the fierceness vanishes too and something quite different comes from her: tenderness, pity, even love. The strength of it catches me unawares and I gasp at its power. These shifts of hers are managed without apparent means; she has spoken only a few words, and all the rest has been done with movement, with posture, with expression. I know that I am in the presence of some great charismatic. She walks over to me and with her face close to mine says, “We spoiled your plan, I know. But we too follow the divine rule. We discovered things that nobody had suspected, and everything changed for us. Everything.”

  “Do you need me, Lady?” Oesterreich asks.

  “No. Not now.” She touches the tips of her fingers to my medallion of office, rubbing it lightly as though it is a magic talisman. Softly she says, “Let me take you on a tour of the galaxy, Lord Magistrate.”

  One of the alien doorways is located right behind her tent. We step through it hand in hand, and emerge on a dazzling green hillside looking out over a sea of ice. Three tiny blue-white suns hang like diamonds in the sky. In the trembling air they look like the three six-pointed stars of the emblem. “One of their capital cities was here once,” she says. “But it’s all at the bottom of that sea now. We ran a scan on it and saw the ruins, and some day we’ll try to get down there.” She beckons and we step through again, and out onto a turbulent desert of iron-hard red sand, where heavily armored crabs the size of footballs go scuttling sullenly away as we appear. “We think there’s another city under here,” she says. Stooping, she picks up a worn shard of gray pottery and puts it in my hand. “That’s an artifact millions of years old. We find them all over the place.” I stare at it as if she has handed me a small fragment of the core of a star. She touches my medallion again, just a light grazing stroke, and leads me on into the next doorway, and out onto a world of billowing white clouds and soft dewy hills, and onward from there to one where trees hang like ropes from the sky, and onward from there, and onward from there—“How did you find all this?” I ask, finally.

  “I was living on Three Suns. You know where that is? We were exploring the nearby worlds, trying to see if there was anything worthwhile, and one day I stepped out of a Velde unit and found myself looking at a peculiar three-sided kind of doorway right next to it, and I got too close and found myself going through into another world entirely. That was all there was to it.”

  “And you kept on going through one doorway after another?”

  “Fifty of them. I didn’t know then how to tune for destination, so I just kept jumping, hoping I’d get back to my starting point eventually. There wasn’t any reason in the world why I should. But after six months I did. The Goddess protects me.”

  “The Goddess,” I say.

  She looks at me as though awaiting a challenge. But I am silent.

  “These doorways link the whole galaxy together like the Paris Metro,” she says after a moment. “We can go everywhere with them. Everywhere.”

  “And the Goddess? Are the doorways Her work?”

  “We hope to find that out some day.”

  “What about this emblem?” I ask, pointing to the six-pointed stars beside the gateway. “What does that signify?”

  “Her presence,” she says. “Come. I’l
l show you.”

  We step through once more, and emerge into night. The sky on this world is the blackest black I have ever seen, with comets and shooting stars blazing across it in almost comic profusion. There are two moons, bright as mirrors. A dozen meters to one side is the white stone temple of the chapel mural I saw on Eden, marked with the same hieroglyphs that are shown on the painting there and that are inscribed on all the alien doorways. It is made of cyclopean slabs of white stone that look as if they were carved billions of years ago. She takes my arm and guides me through its squared-off doorway into a high-vaulted inner chamber where the triple six-pointed triangle, fashioned out of the glossy doorway material, is mounted on a stone altar.

  “This is the only building of theirs we’ve ever found,” she says. Her eyes are gleaming. “It must have been a holy place. Can you doubt it? You can feel the power.”

  “Yes.”

  “Touch the emblem.”

  “What will happen to me if I do?”

  “Touch it,” she says. “Are you afraid?”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because the Goddess has used me to bring you to this place. Go on. Touch.”

  I put my hand to the smooth cool alien substance, and instantly I feel the force of revelation flowing through me, the unmistakable power of the Godhead. I see the multiplicity of worlds, an infinity of them circling an infinity of suns. I see the Totality. I see the face of God clear and plain. It is what I have sought all my life and thought that I had already found; but I know at once that I am finding it for the first time. If I had fasted for a thousand years, or prayed for ten thousand, I could not have felt anything like that. It is the music out of which all things are built. It is the ocean in which all things float. I hear the voice of every god and goddess that ever had worshippers, and it is all one voice, and it goes coursing through me like a river of fire.

  After a moment I take my hand away. And step back, trembling, shaking my head. This is too easy. One does not reach God by touching a strip of smooth plastic.

  She says, “We mean to find them. They’re still alive somewhere. How could they not be? And who could doubt that we were meant to follow them and find them? And kneel before them, for they are Whom we seek. So we’ll go on and on, as far as we need to go, in search of them. To the farthest reaches, if we have to. To the rim of the universe and then beyond. With these doorways there are no limits. We’ve been handed the key to everywhere. We are for the Dark, all of it, on and on and on, not the little hundred-light-year sphere that your Order preaches, but the whole galaxy and even beyond. Who knows how far these doorways reach? The Magellanic Clouds? Andromeda? M33? They’re waiting for us out there. As they have waited for a billion years.”

  So she thinks she can hunt Him down through doorway after doorway. Or Her. Whichever. But she is wrong. The One who made the universe made the makers of the doorways also.

  “And the Goddess—?” I say.

  “The Goddess is the Unknown. The Goddess is the Mystery toward which we journey. You don’t feel Her presence?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You will. If not now, then later. She’ll greet us when we arrive. And embrace us, and make us all gods.”

  I stare a long while at the six-pointed stars. It would be simple enough to put forth my hand again and drink in the river of revelation a second time. But there is no need. That fire still courses through me. It always will, drawing me onward toward itself. Whatever it may be, there is no denying its power.

  She says, “I’ll show you one more thing, and then we’ll leave here.”

  We continue through the temple and out the far side, where the wall has toppled. From a platform amid the rubble we have an unimpeded view of the heavens. An immense array of stars glitters above us, set out in utterly unfamiliar patterns. She points straight overhead, where a Milky Way in two whirling strands spills across the sky.

  “That’s Earth right up there,” she says. “Can you see it? Going around that little yellow sun, only a hundred thousand lightyears away? I wonder if they ever paid us a visit. We won’t know, will we, until we turn up one of their doorways somewhere in the Himalayas, or under the Antarctic ice, or somewhere like that. I think that when we finally reach them, they’ll recognize us. It’s interesting to think about, isn’t it.” Her hand rests lightly on my wrist. “Shall we go back now, Lord Magistrate?”

  So we return, in two or three hops, to the world of the dinosaurs and the giant dragonflies. There is nothing I can say. I feel storms within my skull. I feel myself spread out across half the universe.

  Oesterreich waits for me now. He will take me back to Phosphor, or Entropy, or Entrada, or Zima, or Cuchulain, or anywhere else I care to go.

  “You could even go back to Earth,” the Goddess Avatar says. “Now that you know what’s happening out here. You could go back home and tell the Master all about it.”

  “The Master already knows, I suspect. And there’s no way I can go home. Don’t you understand that?”

  She laughs lightly. “Darklaw, yes. I forgot. The rule is that no one goes back. We’ve been catapulted out here to be cleansed of original sin, and to return to Mother Earth would be a crime against the laws of thermodynamics. Well, as you wish. You’re a free man.”

  “It isn’t Darklaw,” I say. “Darklaw doesn’t bind anyone any more.”

  I begin to shiver. Within my mind shards and fragments are falling from the sky: the House of Senders, the House of the Sanctuary, the whole Order and all its laws, the mountains and valleys of Earth, the body and fabric of Earth. All is shattered; all is made new; I am infinitely small against the infinite greatness of the cosmos. I am dazzled by the light of an infinity of suns.

  And yet, though I must shield my eyes from that fiery glow, though I am numbed and humbled by the vastness of that vastness, I see that there are no limits to what may be attained, that the edge of the universe awaits me, that I need only reach and stretch, and stretch and reach, and ultimately I will touch it.

  I see that even if she has made too great a leap of faith, even if she has surrendered herself to assumptions without basis, she is on the right path. The quest is unattainable because its goal is infinite. But the way leads ever outward. There is no destination, only a journey. And she has traveled farther on that journey than anyone.

  And me? I had thought I was going out into the stars to spin out the last of my days quietly and obscurely, but I realize now that my pilgrimage is nowhere near its end. Indeed it is only beginning. This is not any road that I ever thought I would take. But this is the road that I am taking, all the same, and I have no choice but to follow it, though I am not sure yet whether I am wandering deeper into exile or finding my way back at last to my true home.

  What I cannot help but see now is that our Mission is ended and that a new one has begun; or, rather, that this new Mission is the continuation and culmination of ours. Our Order has taught from the first that the way to reach God is to go to the stars. So it is. And so we have done. We have been too timid, limiting ourselves to that little ball of space surrounding Earth. But we have not failed. We have made possible everything that is to follow after.

  I hand her my medallion. She looks at it the way I looked at that bit of alien pottery on the desert world, and then she starts to hand it back to me, but I shake my head.

  “For you,” I say. “A gift. An offering. It’s of no use to me now.”

  She is standing with her back to the great reddish-yellow sun of this place, and it seems to me that light is streaming from her as it does from the Master, that she is aglow, that she is luminous, that she is herself a sun.

  “Goddess save you, Lady,” I say quietly.

  All the worlds of the galaxy are whirling about me. I will take this road and see where it leads, for now I know there is no other.

  “Goddess save you,” I say. “Goddess save you, Lady.”

  THE SECRET SHARER

  I make no secret of my a
dmiration for the work of Joseph Conrad. (Or for Conrad himself, the tough, stubborn little man who—although English was only his third language, after Polish and French—was able not only to pass the difficult oral qualifying exam to become a captain in the British merchant marine, but then, a decade or so later, transformed himself into one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century English literature.) Most of what I owe to Conrad as a writer is buried deep in the substructure of my stories—a way of looking at narrative, a way of understanding character. But occasionally I’ve made the homage more visible. My 1970 novel Downward to the Earth is a kind of free transposition of his novella “Heart of Darkness” to science fiction, a borrowing that I signaled overtly by labeling my most tormented character with the name of Kurtz. Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” when I first encountered it as a reader almost fifty years ago, had been packaged as half of a two-novella paperback collection, the other story being his “The Secret Sharer.” And some time late in 1986, I felt the urge, I know not why—a love of symmetry? A compulsion toward completion?—to finish what I had begun in Downward to the Earth by writing a story adapted from the other great novella of that paperback of long ago.

  This time I was less subtle than before, announcing my intentions not by using one of Conrad’s character names, but by appropriating his story’s actual title. (This produced a pleasantly absurd result when my story was published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and a reader wrote to the editor, somewhat indignantly, to ask whether I knew that the title had already been used by Joseph Conrad!) I swiped not only the title but Conrad’s basic story situation, that of the ship captain who finds a stowaway on board and eventually is drawn into a strange alliance with him. (Her, in my story.) But otherwise I translated the Conrad into purely science-fictional terms and produced something that I think represents completely original work, however much it may owe to the structure of a classic earlier story.

  “Translate” is perhaps not the appropriate term for what I did. A “translation,” in the uncompromising critical vocabulary set forth by Damon Knight and James Blish in the 1950s, upon which I based much of my own fiction-writing esthetic, is defined as an adaptation of a stock format of mundane fiction into s-f by the simple one-for-one substitution of science-fictionish noises for the artifacts of the mundane genre. That is, change “Colt .44” to “laser pistol” and “horse” to “greeznak” and “Comanche” to “Sloogl” and you can easily generate a sort of science fiction out of a standard western story, complete with cattle rustlers, scalpings, and cavalry rescues. But you don’t get real science fiction; you don’t get anything new and intellectually stimulating, just a western story that has greeznaks and Sloogls in it. Change “Los Angeles Police Department” to “Dry-lands Patrol” and “crack dealer” to “canal-dust dealer” and you’ve got a crime story set on Mars, but so what? Change “the canals of Venice” to “the marshy streets of Venusburg” and the sinister agents of S.M.E.R.S.H. to the sinister agents of A.A.A.A.R.G.H. and you’ve got a James Bond story set on the second planet, but it’s still a James Bond story.