The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  Everything was ready by mid-afternoon. He slipped into the pilot’s seat and told the flitter, “Give me a systems checkout for extended flight.”

  Lights went on and off on the control panels. It was an impressive display of technological choreography, although Morrissey had forgotten what the displays signified. He called for verbal confirmation, and the flitter told him in a no-nonsense contralto that it was ready for takeoff.

  “Your course,” Morrissey said, “is due west for fifty kilometers at an altitude of five hundred meters, then north-northeast as far as Jane’s Town, east to Hawkman Farms, and southwest back to Argoview Dunes. Then without landing, head due north by the shortest route to Port Kato. Got it?”

  Morrissey waited for takeoff. Nothing happened.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Awaiting tower clearance,” said the flitter.

  “Consider all clearance programs revoked.”

  Still nothing happened. Morrissey wondered how to key in a program override. But the flitter evidently could find no reason to call Morrissey’s bluff, and after a moment takeoff lights glowed all over the cabin, a low humming came from aft. Smoothly the little vehicle retracted its wind jacks, gliding into flight position, and spun upward into the moist, heavy, turbulent air.

  He had chosen to begin his journey with a ceremonial circumnavigation of the immediate area—ostensibly to be sure that his flitter still could fly after all these years, but he suspected also that he wanted to show himself aloft to the fuxes of the district, to let them know that at least one human vehicle still traversed the skies. The flitter seemed all right. Within minutes he was at the beach, flying directly over his own cabin—it was the only one whose garden had not been overtaken by jungle scrub—and then out over the dark, tide-driven ocean. Up north then to the big port of Jane’s Town, where tourist cruisers lay rusting in the crescent harbor, and inland a little way to a derelict farming settlement where the tops of mighty gattabangus trees, heavily laden with succulent scarlet fruit, were barely visible above swarming strangler vines. And then back, over sandy scrubby hills, to the Dunes. Everything below was desolate and dismal. He saw a good many fuxes, long columns of them in some places, mainly six-leg females and some four-leg ones, with males leading the way. Oddly, they all seemed to be marching inland toward the dry Hotlands, as though some sort of migration were under way. Perhaps so. To a fux the interior was holier than the coast, and the holiest place of all was the great jagged central peak that the colonists called Mount Olympus, directly under Argo, where the air was hot enough to make water boil and only the most specialized of living creatures could survive. Fuxes would die in that blazing terrible highland desert almost as quickly as humans, but maybe, Morrissey thought, they wanted to get as close as possible to the holy mountain as the time of the earthquake approached. The coming round of the earthquake cycle was the central event of fux cosmology, after all—a millennial time, a time of wonders.

  He counted fifty separate bands of migrating fuxes. He wondered whether his friend Dinoov was among them. Suddenly he realized how strong was his need to find Dinoov waiting at Argoview Dunes when he returned from his journey around Medea.

  The circuit of the district took less than an hour. When the Dunes came in view again, the flitter performed a dainty pirouette over the town and shot off northward along the coast.

  The route Morrissey had in mind would take him up the west coast as far as Arca, across the Hotlands to Northcape and down the other coast to tropical Madagozar before crossing back to the Dunes. Thus he would neatly touch base wherever mankind had left an imprint on Medea.

  Medea was divided into two huge hemispheres separated by the watery girdle of the Ring Ocean. But Farside was a glaciated wasteland that never left Argo’s warmth, and no permanent settlements had ever been founded there, only research camps, and in the last four hundred years very few of those. The original purpose of the Medea colony had been scientific study, the painstaking exploration of a wholly alien environment, but, of course, as time goes along original purposes have a way of being forgotten. Even on the warm continent human occupation had been limited to twin arcs along the coasts from the tropics through the high temperate latitudes, and timid incursions a few hundred kilometers inland. The high desert was uninhabitable, and few humans found the bordering Hotlands hospitable, although the balloons and even some tribes of fuxes seemed to like the climate there. The only other places where humans had planted themselves was the Ring Ocean, where some floating raft-cities had been constructed in the kelp-choked equatorial water. But during the ten centuries of Medea the widely scattered human enclaves had sent out amoeboid extensions until they were nearly continuous for thousands of kilometers.

  Now, Morrissey saw, that iron band of urban sprawl was cut again and again by intrusions of dense underbrush. Great patches of orange and yellow foliage already had begun to smother highways, airports, commercial plazas, residential suburbs.

  What the jungle had begun, he thought, the earthquake would finish.

  On the third day Morrissey saw Hansonia Island ahead of him, a dark orange slash against the breast of the sea, and soon the flitter was making its approach to the airstrip at Port Kato on the big island’s eastern shore. Morrissey tried to make radio contact but got only static and silence. He decided to land anyway.

  Hansonia had never had much of a human population. It had been set aside from the beginning as an ecological-study laboratory, because its population of strange lifeforms had developed in isolation from the mainland for thousands of years, and somehow it had kept its special status even in Medea’s boom years.

  A few groundcars were parked at the airstrip: Morrissey found one that still held a charge, and ten minutes later he was in Port Kato.

  The place stank of red mildew. The buildings, wicker huts with thatched roofs, were falling apart. Angular trees of a species Morrissey did not know sprouted everywhere, in the streets, on rooftops, in the crowns of other trees. A cool hard-edged wind was blowing out of Farside. Two fuxes, four-leg females herding some young six-leggers, wandered out of a tumbledown warehouse and stared at him in what surely was astonishment. Their pelts were so blue they seemed black—the island species, different from mainlanders.

  “You come back?” one asked. Local accent, too.

  “Just for a visit. Are there any humans here?”

  “You,” said the other fux. He thought they laughed at him. “Ground shake soon. You know?”

  “I know,” he said.

  They nuzzled their young and wandered away.

  For three hours Morrissey explored the town, holding himself aloof from emotion, not letting the rot and decay and corruption get to him. It looked as if the place had been abandoned at least fifty years. More likely only five or six, though.

  Late in the day he entered a small house where the town met the forest and found a functioning persona-cube setup.

  The cubes were clever things. You could record yourself in an hour or so—facial gestures, motion habits, voice, speech patterns. Scanners identified certain broad patterns of mental response and coded those into the cube, too. What the cube playback provided was a plausible imitation of a human being, the best possible memento of a loved one or friend or mentor, an electronic phantom programmed to absorb data and modify its own program, so that it could engage in conversation, ask questions, pretend to be the person who had been cubed. A soul in a box, a cunning device.

  Morrissey jacked the cube into its receptor slot. The screen displayed a thin-lipped man with a high forehead and a lean, agile body. “My name is Leopold Brannum,” he said at once. “My specialty is xenogenetics. What year is this?”

  “It’s ’97, autumn,” Morrissey said. “Ten weeks and a bit before the earthquake.”

  “And who are you?”

  “Nobody particular. I just happen to be visiting Port Kato and I felt like talking to someone.”

  “So talk,” Brannum said. “What’s going on in Por
t Kato?”

  “Nothing. It’s pretty damned quiet here. The place is empty.”

  “The whole town’s been evacuated?”

  “The whole planet, for all I know. Just me and the fuxes and the balloons still around. When did you leave, Brannum?”

  “Summer of ’92,” said the man in the cube.

  “I don’t see why everyone ran away so early. There wasn’t any chance the earthquake would come before the predicted time.”

  “I didn’t run away,” Brannum said coldly. “I left Port Kato to continue my research by other means.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I went to join the balloons,” Brannum said.

  Morrissey caught his breath. The words touched his soul with wintry bleakness.

  “My wife did that,” he said after a moment. “Perhaps you know her now. Nadia Dutoit—she was from Chong, originally—”

  The face on the screen smiled sourly. “You don’t seem to realize,” Brannum said, “that I’m only a recording.”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  “I don’t know where your wife is now. I don’t even know where I am now. I can only tell you that wherever we are, it’s in a place of great peace, of utter harmony.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Morrissey remembered the terrible day when Nadia told him that she could no longer resist the spiritual communion of the aerial creatures, that she was going off to seek entry into the collective mind of the Ahya. All through the history of Medea some colonists had done that. No one had ever seen any of them again. Their souls, people said, were absorbed, and their bodies lay buried somewhere beneath the dry ice of Farside. Toward the end the frequency of such defections had doubled and doubled and doubled again, thousands of colonists every month giving themselves up to whatever mystic engulfment the balloons offered. To Morrissey it was only a form of suicide; to Nadia, to Brannum, to all those other hordes, it had been the path to eternal bliss. Who was to say? Better to undertake the uncertain journey into the great mind of the Ahya, perhaps, than to set out in panicky flight for the alien and unforgiving world that was Earth. “I hope you’ve found what you were looking for,” Morrissey said. “I hope she has.”

  He unjacked the cube and went quickly away.

  He flew northward over the fog-streaked sea. Below him were the floating cities of the tropical waters, that marvelous tapestry of rafts and barges. That must be Port Backside down there, he decided—a sprawling intricate tangle of foliage under which lay the crumbling splendors of one of Medea’s greatest cities. Kelp choked the waterways. There was no sign of human life down there and he did not land.

  Pellucidar, on the mainland, was empty also. Morrissey spent four days there, visiting the undersea gardens, treating himself to a concert in the famous Hall of Columns, watching the suns set from the top of Crystal Pyramid. That last evening dense drifts of balloons, hundreds of them, flew; oceanward above him. He imagined he heard them calling to him in soft sighing whispers, saying, I am Nadia. Come to me. There’s still time. Give yourself up to us, dear love. I am Nadia.

  Was it only imagination? The Ahya were seductive. They had called to Nadia, and ultimately Nadia had gone to them. Brannum had gone. Thousands had gone. Now he felt the pull himself, and it was real. For an instant it was tempting. Instead of perishing in the quake, life eternal—of a sort. Who knew what the balloons really offered? A merging, a loss of self, a transcendental bliss—or was it only delusion, folly, had the seekers found nothing but a quick death in the icy wastes? Come to me. Come to me. Either way, he thought, it meant peace.

  I am Nadia. Come to me.

  He stared a long while at the bobbing shimmering globes overhead, and the whispers grew to a roar in his mind.

  Then he shook his head. Union with the cosmic entity was not for him. He had sought no escape from Medea up till now, and now he would have none. He was himself and nothing but himself, and when he went out of the world he would still be only himself. And then, only then, the balloons could have his soul. If they had any use for it.

  It was nine weeks and a day before the earthquake when Morrissey reached sweltering Enrique, right on the equator. Enrique was celebrated for its Hotel Luxe, of legendary opulence. He took possession of its grandest suite, and no one was there to tell him no. The air conditioning still worked, the bar was well stocked, the hotel grounds still were manicured daily by fux gardeners who did not seem to know that their employers had gone away. Obliging servomechanisms provided Morrissey with meals of supreme elegance that would each have cost him a month’s earnings in the old days. As he wandered through the silent grounds, he thought how wonderful it would have been to come here with Nadia and Danielle and Paul. But it was meaningless now, to be alone in all this luxury.

  Was he alone, though? On his first night, and again the next, he heard laughter in the darkness, borne on the thick dense sweet-scented air. Fuxes did not laugh. The balloons did not laugh.

  On the morning of the third day, as he stood on his nineteenth-floor veranda, he saw movements in the shrubbery at the rim of the lawn. Five, seven, a dozen male fuxes, grim two-legged engines of lust, prowling through the bushes. And then a human form! Pale flesh, bare legs, long unkempt hair! She streaked through the underbrush, giggling, pursued by fuxes.

  “Hello!” Morrissey called. “Hey! I’m up here!”

  He hurried downstairs and spent all day searching the hotel grounds. Occasionally he caught glimpses of frenzied naked figures, leaping and cavorting far away. He cried out to them, but they gave no sign of hearing him.

  In the hotel office Morrissey found the manager’s cube and turned it on. She was a dark-haired young woman, a little wild-eyed. “Hey, is it earthquake time yet?” she asked.

  “Not quite yet.”

  “I want to be around for that. I want to see this stinking hotel topple into a million pieces.”

  “Where have you gone?” Morrissey asked.

  She snickered. “Where else? Into the bush. Off to hunt fuxes. And to be hunted.” Her face was flushed. “The old recombinant genes are still pretty hot, you know? Me for the fuxes and the fuxes for me. Get yourself a little action, why don’t you? Whoever you are.”

  Morrissey supposed he ought to be shocked. But he couldn’t summon much indignation. He had heard rumors of things like this already. In the final years before the cataclysm, he knew, several sorts of migration had been going on. Some colonists opted for the exodus to Earth and some for the surrender to the Ahya soul-collective, and others chose the simple reversion to the life of the beast. Why not? Every Medean, by now, was a mongrel. The underlying Earth stock was tinged with alien genes. The colonists looked human enough, but they were in fact mixed with balloon or fux or both. Without the early recombinant manipulations the colony could never have survived, for human life and native Medean organisms were incompatible, and only by genetic splicing had a race been brought forth that could overcome that natural biological enmity. So now, with doom-time coming near, how many colonists had simply kicked off their clothes and slipped away into the jungles to run with their cousins the fuxes? And was that any worse, he wondered, than climbing in panic aboard a ship bound for Earth or giving up your individuality to merge with the balloons? What did it matter which route to escape was chosen? But Morrissey wanted no escape. Least of all into the jungles, off to the fuxes.

  He flew on northward. In Catamount he heard the cube of the city’s mayor tell him, “They’ve all cleared out, and I’m going next Dimday. There’s nothing left here.” In Yellowleaf a cubed biologist spoke of genetic drift, the reversion of the alien genes. In Sandy’s Mishigos, Morrissey could find no cubes at all, but eighteen or twenty skeletons lay chaotically on the broad central plaza. Mass immolation? Mass murder, in the final hours of the city’s disintegration? He gathered the bones and buried them in the moist, spongy ochre soil. It took him all day. Then he went on, up the coast as far as Arca, through city after city.

  Wherever he stopped, it was t
he same story—no humans left, only balloons and fuxes, most of the balloons heading out to sea and most of the fuxes migrating inland. He jacked in cubes wherever he found them, but the cube-people had little new to tell him. They were clearing out, they said: one way or another they were giving up on Medea. Why stick around to the end? Why wait for the big shudder? Going home, going to the balloons, going to the bush-clearing out, clearing out, clearing out.

  So many cities, Morrissey thought. Such an immense outpouring of effort. We smothered this world. We came in, we built our little isolated research stations, we stared in wonder at the coruscating sky and the double suns and the bizarre creatures. And we transformed ourselves into Medeans and transformed Medea into a kind of crazy imitation of Earth. And for a thousand years we spread out along the coasts wherever our kind of life could dig itself in. Eventually we lost sight of our purpose in coming here, which in the beginning was to learn. But we stayed anyway. We just stayed. We muddled along. And then we found out that it was all for nothing, that with one mighty heave of its shoulders this world was going to cast us off, and we got scared and packed up and went away. Sad, he thought. Sad and foolish.

  He stayed at Arca a few days and turned inland, across the hot, bleak desert that sloped upward toward Mount Olympus. It was seven weeks and a day until the quake. For the first thousand kilometers or so he still could see encampments of migrating fuxes below him, slowly making their way into the Hotlands. Why, he wondered, had they permitted their world to be taken from them? They could have fought back. In the beginning they could have wiped us out in a month of guerrilla warfare. Instead they let us come in, let us make them into pets and slaves and flunkies while we paved the most fertile zones of their planet, and whatever they thought about us they kept to themselves. We never even knew their own name for Medea, Morrissey thought. That was how little of themselves they shared with us. But they tolerated us here. Why? Why?