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

by Robert Silverberg

  The first thing Judy said when she arrived was, “Let Leo out. I want to talk with him.”

  We opened the tank. Leo stepped forth, uneasy, abashed, shading his eyes against the strong light. He glanced at me, at Yost, at Jan, as if wondering which one of us was going to scold him; and then he saw Judy and it was as though he had seen a ghost. He made a hollow rasping sound deep in his throat and backed away. Judy signed hello and stretched out her arms to him. Leo trembled. He was terrified. There was nothing unusual about one of us going on leave and returning after a month or two, but Leo must not have expected Judy ever to return, must in fact have imagined her gone to the same place her husband had gone, and the sight of her shook him. Judy understood all that, obviously, for she quickly made powerful use of it, signing to Leo, “I bring you message from Vendelmans.”

  “Tell tell tell!”

  “Come walk with me,” said Judy.

  She took him by the hand and led him gently out of the punishment area and into the compound and down the hill toward. the meadow. I watched from the top of the hill, the tall, slender woman and the compact, muscular chimpanzee close together, side by side, hand in hand, pausing now to talk, Judy signing and Leo replying in a flurry of gestures, then Judy again for a long time, a brief response from Leo, another cascade of signs from Judy, then Leo squatting, tugging at blades of grass, shaking his head, clapping hand to elbow in his expression of confusion, then to his chin, then taking Judy’s hand. They were gone for nearly an hour. The other chimps did not dare approach them. Finally Judy and Leo, hand in hand, came quietly up the hill to headquarters again. Leo’s eyes were shining and so were Judy’s.

  She said, “Everything will be all right now. That’s so, isn’t it, Leo?”

  Leo said, “God is always right.”

  She made a dismissal sign and Leo went slowly down the hill. The moment he was out of sight, Judy turned away from us and cried a little, just a little; then she asked for a drink; and then she said, “It isn’t easy, being God’s messenger.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “That I had been in heaven visiting Hal. That Hal was looking down all the time and he was very proud of Leo, except for one thing, that Leo was sending too many chimpanzees to God too soon. I told him that God was not yet ready to receive Chicory and Buster and Mimsy, that they would have to be kept in storage cells for a long time until their true time came, and that was not good for them. I told him that Hal wanted Leo to know that God hoped he would stop sending him chimpanzees. Then I gave Leo Hal’s old wristwatch to wear when he conducts services, and Leo promised he would obey Hal’s wishes. That was all. I suspect I’ve added a whole new layer of mythology to what’s developing here, and I trust you won’t be angry with me for doing it. I don’t believe any more chimps will be killed. And I think I’d like another drink.”

  Later in the day we saw the chimps assembled by the stream. Leo held his arm aloft and sunlight blazed from the band of gold on his slim hairy wrist, and a great outcry of grunts in godtalk went up from the congregation and they danced before him, and then he donned the sacred hat and the sacred shirt and moved his arms eloquently in the secret sacred gestures of the holy sign language.

  There have been no more killings. I think no more will occur. Perhaps after a time our chimps will lose interest in being religious, and go on to other pastimes. But not yet, not yet. The ceremonies continue, and grow ever more elaborate, and we are compiling volumes of extraordinary observations, and God looks down and is pleased. And Leo proudly wears the emblems of his papacy as he bestows his blessing on the worshipers in the holy grove.

  Thesme and the Ghayrog

  The very active year of 1981, though it was a year in which I wrote only short stories, was colored for me in many ways by the publication the year before of the big novel Lord Valentine’s Castle, which had marked my return to writing after the four-year retirement period. The book got a lot of attention, and not simply because it demonstrated that I hadn’t really given up writing after all. It flirted for a little while with the best-seller lists; it gained me a Hugo nomination; and, as I looked at it a year or so after having written it, I realized that Majipoor, the giant world that I had created for it, was one of my most fully realized science-fictional inventions, and did not deserve to be abandoned after a single visit.

  So I began to prowl through the 14,000-year history of Majipoor that I had put together for Lord Valentine’s Castle, looking for episodes that deserved stories in their own right. When Underwood-Miller, a small press publisher then doing a great deal of high-quality work, asked me for an original novella, I responded in October of 1980 with a long Majipoor story, “The Desert of Stolen Dreams,” set about a thousand years before the novel. A few months later, George Scithers, then the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, suggested I do a Majipoor story for him, and I responded with another novella, “A Thief in Ni-Moya.” At that point I realized that I had now written about one-third of the material I would need for a collection of new Majipoor tales, and, since the huge planet abounded in potential story material, I set to work in earnest in the spring and summer of 1981 to bring that book into being.

  Story followed story quickly: one in April, one in May, one in June, three in July, one in August, and the tenth and last in September. By then I had found a new book publisher, Arbor House, run by the dynamic and irascible Don Fine, and I assembled the ten new stories into a sort of pseudo-novel for him under the title of Majipoor Chronicles, which would appear in 1982, with an actual sequel to Lord Valentine’s Castle called Valentine Pontifex to be written the following year.

  It would be impractical, of course, to include all ten of the Majipoor Chronicles stories in this volume of my collected short work. But it does seem appropriate to offer at least one example, and the one I have chosen is one of the three that I wrote in July of 1981: the opening story of the book, “Thesme and the Ghayrog”, which I held back from magazine publication and allowed to appear only in Chronicles. It is set in the early years of human settlement on Majipoor, long before the events depicted in Lord Valentine’s Castle, and, I think, provides a vivid glimpse into the relationships between the various intelligent species that had come from all over the galaxy to take up residence on that vast, all but infinite planet.

  ——————

  1

  For six months now Thesme had lived alone in a hut that she had built with her own hands, in the dense tropical jungle half a dozen miles or so east of Narabal, in a place where the sea breezes did not reach and the heavy humid air clung to everything like a furry shroud. She had never lived by herself before, and at first she wondered how good she was going to be at it; but she had never built a hut before either, and she had done well enough at that, cutting down slender sijaneel saplings, trimming away the golden bark, pushing their slippery sharpened ends into the soft moist ground, lashing them together with vines, finally tying on five enormous blue vramma leaves to make a roof. It was no masterpiece of architecture, but it kept out the rain, and she had no need to worry about cold. Within a month her sijaneel timbers, trimmed though they were, had all taken root and were sprouting leathery new leaves along their upper ends, just below the roof; and the vines that held them were still alive too, sending down fleshy red tendrils that searched for and found the rich fertile soil. So now the house was a living thing, daily becoming more snug and secure as the vines tightened and the sijaneels put on girth, and Thesme loved it. In Narabal nothing stayed dead for long; the air was too warm, the sunlight too bright, the rainfall too copious, and everything quickly transformed itself into something else with the riotous buoyant ease of the tropics.

  Solitude was turning out to be easy too. She had needed very much to get away from Narabal, where her life had somehow gone awry: too much confusion, too much inner noise, friends who became strangers, lovers who turned into foes. She was twenty-five years old and needed to stop, to take a long look at everything, to
change the rhythm of her days before it shook her to pieces. The jungle was the ideal place for that. She rose early, bathed in a pond that she shared with a sluggish old gromwark and a school of tiny crystalline chichibors, plucked her breakfast from a thokka vine, hiked, read, sang, wrote poems, checked her traps for captured animals, climbed trees and sunbathed in a hammock of vines high overhead, dozed, swam, talked to herself, and went to sleep when the sun went down. In the beginning she thought there would not be enough to do, that she would soon grow bored, but that did not seem to be the case; her days were full and there were always a few projects to save for tomorrow.

  At first she expected that she would go into Narabal once a week or so, to buy staple goods, to pick up new books and cubes, to attend an occasional concert or a play, even to visit her family or those of her friends that she still felt like seeing. For a while she actually did go to town fairly often. But it was a sweaty, sticky trek that took half a day, nearly, and as she grew accustomed to her reclusive life she found Narabal ever more jangling, ever more unsettling, with few rewards to compensate for the drawbacks. People there stared at her. She knew they thought she was eccentric, even crazy, always a wild girl and now a peculiar one, living out there by herself and swinging through the treetops. So her visits became more widely spaced. She went only when it was unavoidable. On the day she found the injured Ghayrog she had not been to Narabal for at least five weeks.

  She had been roving that morning through a swampy region a few miles northeast of her hut, gathering the sweet yellow fungi known as calimbots. Her sack was almost full and she was thinking of turning back when she spied something strange a few hundred yards away: a creature of some sort with gleaming, metallic-looking gray skin and thick tubular limbs, sprawled awkwardly on the ground below a great sijaneel tree. It reminded her of a predatory reptile her father and brother once had killed in Narabal Channel, a sleek, elongated, slow-moving thing with curved claws and a vast toothy mouth. But as she drew closer she saw that this lifeform was vaguely human in construction, with a massive rounded head, long arms, powerful legs. She thought it might be dead, but it stirred faintly when she approached and said, “I am damaged. I have been stupid and now I am paying for it.”

  “Can you move your arms and legs?” Thesme asked.

  “The arms, yes. One leg is broken, and possibly my back. Will you help me?”

  She crouched and studied it closely. It did look reptilian, yes, with shining scales and a smooth, hard body. Its eyes were green and chilly and did not blink at all; its hair was a weird mass of thick black coils that moved of their own accord in a slow writhing; its tongue was a serpent-tongue, bright scarlet, forked, flickering constantly back and forth between the narrow fleshless lips.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  “A Ghayrog. Do you know of my kind?”

  “Of course,” she said, though she knew very little, really. All sorts of nonhuman species had been settling on Majipoor in the past hundred years, a whole menagerie of aliens invited here by the Coronal Lord Melikand because there were not enough humans to fill the planet’s immensities. Thesme had heard that there were four-armed ones and two-headed ones and tiny ones with tentacles and these scaly snake-tongued snake-haired ones, but none of the alien beings had yet come as far as Narabal, a town on the edge of nowhere, as distant from civilization as one could get. So this was a Ghayrog, then? A strange creature, she thought, almost human in the shape of its body and yet not at all human in any of its details, a monstrosity, really, a nightmare being, though not especially frightening. She pitied the poor Ghayrog, in fact—a wanderer, doubly lost, far from its home world and far from anything that mattered on Majipoor. And badly hurt, too. What was she going to do with it? Wish it well and abandon it to its fate? Hardly. Go all the way into Narabal and organize a rescue mission? That would take at least two days, assuming anyone cared to help. Bring it back to her hut and nurse it to good health? That seemed the most likely thing to do, but what would happen to her solitude, then, her privacy, and how did one take care of a Ghayrog, anyway, and did she really want the responsibility? And the risk, for that matter: this was an alien being and she had no idea what to expect from it.

  It said, “I am Vismaan.”

  Was that its name, its title, or merely a description of its condition? She did not ask. She said, “I am called Thesme. I live in the jungle an hour’s walk from here. How can I help you?”

  “Let me brace myself on you while I try to get up. Do you think you are strong enough?”

  “Probably.”

  “You are female, am I right?”

  She was wearing only sandals. She smiled and touched her hand lightly to her breasts and loins and said, “Female, yes.”

  “So I thought. I am male and perhaps too heavy for you.”

  Male? Between his legs he was as smooth and sexless as a machine. She supposed that Ghayrogs carried their sex somewhere else. And if they were reptiles, her breasts would indicate nothing to him about her sex. Strange, all the same, that he should need to ask.

  She knelt beside him, wondering how he was going to rise and walk with a broken back. He put his arm over her shoulders. The touch of his skin against hers startled her: it felt cool, dry, rigid, smooth, as though he wore armor. Yet it was not an unpleasant texture, only odd. A strong odor came from him, swampy and bitter with an undertaste of honey. That she had not noticed it before was hard to understand, for it was pervasive and insistent; she decided she must have been distracted by the unexpectedness of coming upon him. There was no ignoring the odor now that she was aware of it, and at first she found it intensely disagreeable, though within moments it ceased to bother her.

  He said, “Try to hold steady. I will push myself up.”

  Thesme crouched, digging her knees and hands into the soil, and to her amazement he succeeded in drawing himself upward with a peculiar coiling motion, pressing down on her, driving his entire weight for a moment between her shoulder blades in a way that made her gasp. Then he was standing, tottering, clinging to a dangling vine. She made ready to catch him if he fell, but he stayed upright.

  “This leg is cracked,” he told her. “The back is damaged but not, I think, broken.”

  “Is the pain very bad?”

  “Pain? No, we feel little pain. The problem is functional. The leg will not support me. Can you find me a strong stick?”

  She scouted about for something he might use as a crutch and spied, after a moment, the stiff aerial root of a vine dangling out of the forest canopy. The glossy black root was thick but brittle, and she bent it backward and forward until she succeeded in snapping off some two yards of it. Vismaan grasped it firmly, draped his other arm around Thesme, and cautiously put his weight on his uninjured leg. With difficulty he took a step, another, another, dragging the broken leg along. It seemed to Thesme that his body odor had changed: sharper, now, more vinegar, less honey. The strain of walking, no doubt. The pain was probably less trivial than he wanted her to think. But he was managing to keep moving, at any rate.

  “How did you hurt yourself?” she asked.

  “I climbed this tree to survey the territory just ahead. It did not bear my weight.”

  He nodded toward the slim shining trunk of the tall sijaneel. The lowest branch, which was at least forty feet above her, was broken and hung down by nothing more than shreds of bark. It amazed her that he had survived a fall from such a height; after a moment she found herself wondering how he had been able to get so high on the slick smooth trunk in the first place.

  He said, “My plan is to settle in this area and raise crops. Do you have a farm?”

  “In the jungle? No, I just live here.”

  “With a mate?”

  “Alone. I grew up in Narabal, but I needed to get away by myself or a while.” They reached the sack of calimbots she had dropped when he first noticed him lying on the ground, and she slung it over her shoulder. “You can stay with me until your leg has healed. But it’
s going to take all afternoon to get back to my hut this way. Are you sure you’re able to walk?”

  “I am walking now,” he pointed out.

  “Tell me when you want to rest.”

  “In time. Not yet.”

  Indeed it was nearly half an hour of slow and surely painful hobbling before he asked to halt, and even then he remained standing, leaning against a tree, explaining that he thought it unwise to go through the whole difficult process of lifting himself from the ground a second time. He seemed altogether calm and in relatively little discomfort, although it was impossible to read expression into his unchanging face and unblinking eyes: the constant flickering of his forked tongue was the only indicator of apparent emotion she could see, and she had no idea how to interpret those ceaseless darting movements. After a few minutes they resumed the walk. The slow pace was a burden to her, as was his weight against her shoulder, and she felt her own muscles cramping and protesting as they edged through the jungle. They said little. He seemed preoccupied with the need to exert control over his crippled body, and she concentrated on the route, searching for shortcuts, thinking ahead to avoid streams and dense undergrowth and other obstacles he would not be able to cope with. When they were halfway back to her hut a warm rain began to fall, and after that they were enveloped in hot clammy fog the rest of the way. She was nearly exhausted by the time her little cabin came into view.

  “Not quite a palace,” she said, “but it’s all I need. I built it myself. You can lie down here.” She helped him to her zanja-down bed. He sank onto it with a soft hissing sound that was surely relief. “Would you like something to eat?” she asked.

  “Not now.”

  “Or to drink? No? I imagine you just want to get some rest. I’ll go outside so you can sleep undisturbed.”

  “This is not my season of sleep,” Vismaan said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We sleep only one part of the year. Usually in winter.”

  “And you stay awake all the rest of the time?”