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

by Robert Silverberg

  “Yes,” he said. “I am finished with this year’s sleep. I understand it is different with humans.”

  “Extremely different,” she told him. “I’ll leave you to rest by yourself, anyway. You must be terribly tired.”

  “I would not drive you from your home.”

  “It’s all right,” Thesme said, and stepped outside. The rain was beginning again, the familiar, almost comforting rain that fell every few hours all day long. She sprawled out on a bank of dark yielding rubbermoss and let the warm droplets of rain wash the fatigue from her aching back and shoulders.

  A houseguest, she thought. And an alien one, no less. Well, why not? The Ghayrog seemed undemanding: cool, aloof, tranquil even in calamity. He was obviously more seriously hurt than he was willing to admit, and even this relatively short journey through the forest had been a struggle for him. There was no way he could walk all the way into Narabal in this condition. Thesme supposed that she could go into town and arrange for someone to come out in a floater to get him, but the idea displeased her. No one knew where she was living and she did not care to lead anyone here, for one thing. And she realized in some confusion that she did not want to give the Ghayrog up, that she wanted to keep him here and nurse him until he had regained his strength. She doubted that anyone else in Narabal would have given shelter to an alien, and that made her feel pleasantly perverse, set apart in still another way from the citizens of her native town. In the past year or two she had heard plenty of muttering about the offworlders who were coming to settle on Majipoor. People feared and disliked the reptilian Ghayrogs and the giant hulking hairy Skandars and the little tricky ones with the many tentacles—Vroons, were they?—and the rest of that bizarre crew, and even though aliens were still unknown in remote Narabal the hostility toward them was already there. Wild and eccentric Thesme, she thought, was just the kind who would take in a Ghayrog and pat his fevered brow and give him medicine and soup, or whatever you gave a Ghayrog with a broken leg. She had no real idea of how to care for him, but she did not intend to let that stop her. It occurred to her that she had never taken care of anyone in her life, for somehow there had been neither opportunity nor occasion; she was the youngest in her family and no one had ever allowed her any sort of responsibility, and she had not married or borne children or even kept pets, and during the stormy period of her innumerable turbulent love affairs she had never seen fit to visit any of her lovers while he was ill. Quite likely, she told herself, that was why she was suddenly so determined to keep this Ghayrog at her hut. One of the reasons she had quitted Narabal for the jungle was to live her life in a new way, to break with the uglier traits of the former Thesme.

  She decided that in the morning she would go into town, find out if she could what kind of care the Ghayrog needed, and buy such medicines or provisions as seemed appropriate.

  2

  After a long while she returned to the hut. Vismaan lay as she had left him, flat on his back with arms stiff against his sides, and he did not seem to be moving at all, except for the perpetual serpentine writhing of his hair. Asleep? After all his talk of needing none? She went to him and peered down at the strange massive figure on her bed. His eyes were open, and she saw them tracking her.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Not well. Walking through the forest was more difficult than I realized.”

  She put her hand to his forehead. His hard scaly skin felt cool. But the absurdity of her gesture made her smile. What was a Ghayrog’s normal body temperature? Were they susceptible to fever at all, and if so, how could she tell? They were reptiles, weren’t they? Did reptiles run high temperatures when they were sick? Suddenly it all seemed preposterous, this notion of nursing a creature of another world.

  He said, “Why do you touch my head?”

  “It’s what we do when a human is sick. To see if you have a fever. I have no medical instruments here. Do you know what I mean by running a fever?”

  “Abnormal body temperature. Yes. Mine is high now.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Very little. But my systems are disarranged. Can you bring me some water?”

  “Of course. And are you hungry? What sort of things do you normally eat?”

  “Meat. Cooked. And fruits and vegetables. And a great deal of water.”

  She fetched a drink for him. He sat up with difficulty—he seemed much weaker than when he had been hobbling through the jungle; most likely he was suffering a delayed reaction to his injuries—and drained the bowl in three greedy gulps. She watched the furious movements of his forked tongue, fascinated. “More,” he said, and she poured a second bowl. Her water-jug was nearly empty, and she went outside to fill it at the spring. She plucked a few thokkas from the vine, too, and brought them to him. He held one of the juicy blue-white berries at arm’s length, as though that was the only way he could focus his vision properly on it, and rolled it experimentally between two of his fingers. His hands were almost human, Thesme observed, though there were two extra fingers and he had no fingernails, only lateral scaly ridges running along the first two joints.

  “What is this fruit called?” he asked.

  “Thokka. They grow on a vine all over Narabal. If you like them, I’ll bring you as many as you want.”

  He tasted it cautiously. Then his tongue flickered more rapidly, and he devoured the rest of the berry and held out his hand for another. Now Thesme remembered the reputation of thokkas as aphrodisiacs, but she looked away to hide her grin, and chose not to say anything to him about that. He described himself as male, so the Ghayrogs evidently had sexes, but did they have sex? She had a sudden fanciful image of male Ghayrogs squirting milt from some concealed orifice into tubs into which female Ghayrogs climbed to fertilize themselves. Efficient but not very romantic, she thought, wondering if that was actually how they did it—fertilization at a distant remove, like fishes, like snakes.

  She prepared a meal for him of thokkas and fried calimbots and the little many-legged delicate-flavored hiktigans that she netted in the stream. All her wine was gone, but she had lately made a kind of fermented juice from a fat red fruit whose name she did not know, and she gave him some of that. His appetite seemed healthy. Afterward she asked him if she could examine his leg, and he told her she could.

  The break was more than midway up, in the widest part of his thigh. Thick though his scaly skin was, it showed some signs of swelling there. Very lightly she put her fingertips to the place and probed. He made a barely audible hiss but otherwise gave no sign that she might be increasing his discomfort. It seemed to her that something was moving inside his thigh. The broken ends of the bone, was it? Did Ghayrogs have bones? She knew so little, she thought dismally—about Ghayrogs, about the healing arts, about anything.

  “If you were human,” she said, “we would use our machines to see the fracture, and we would bring the broken place together and bind it until it knitted. Is it anything like that with your people?”

  “The bone will knit of its own,” he replied. “I will draw the break together through muscular contraction and hold it until it heals. But I must remain lying down for a few days, so that the leg’s own weight does not pull the break apart when I stand. Do you mind if I stay here that long?”

  “Stay as long as you like. As long as you need to stay.”

  “You are very kind.”

  “I’m going into town tomorrow to pick up supplies. Is there anything you particularly want?”

  “Do you have entertainment cubes? Music, books?”

  “I have just a few here. I can get more tomorrow.”

  “Please. The nights will be very long for me as I lie here without sleeping. My people are great consumers of amusement, you know.”

  “I’ll bring whatever I can find,” she promised.

  She gave him three cubes—a play, a symphony, a color composition—and went about her after-dinner cleaning. Night had fallen, early as always, this close to the equator. She heard
a light rainfall beginning again outside. Ordinarily she would read for a while, until it grew too dark, and then lie down to sleep. But tonight everything was different. A mysterious reptilian creature occupied her bed; she would have to put together a new sleeping-place for herself on the floor; and all this conversation, the first she had had in so many weeks, had left her mind buzzing with unaccustomed alertness. Vismaan seemed content with his cubes. She went outside and collected bubblebush leaves, a double armful of them and then another, and strewed them on the floor near the door of her hut. Then, going to the Ghayrog, she asked if she could do anything for him; he answered by a tiny shake of his head, without taking his attention from the cube. She wished him a good night and lay down on her improvised bed. It was comfortable enough, more so than she had expected. But sleep was impossible. She turned this way and that, feeling cramped and stiff, and the presence of the other a few yards away seemed to announce itself by a tangible pulsation in her soul. And there was the Ghayrog’s odor, too, pungent and inescapable. Somehow she had ceased noticing it while they ate, but now, with all her nerve-endings tuned to maximum sensitivity as she lay in the dark, she perceived it almost as she would a trumpet-blast unendingly repeated. From time to time she sat up and stared through the darkness at Vismaan, who lay motionless and silent. Then at some point slumber overtook her, for when the sounds of the new morning came to her, the many familiar piping and screeching melodies, and the early light made its way through the door-opening, she awakened into the kind of disorientation that comes often when one has been sleeping soundly in a place that is not one’s usual bed. It took her a few moments to collect herself, to remember where she was and why.

  He was watching her. “You spent a restless night. My being here disturbs you.”

  “I’ll get used to it. How do you feel?”

  “Stiff. Sore. But I am already beginning to mend, I think. I sense the work going on within.”

  She brought him water and a bowl of fruit. Then she went out into the mild misty dawn and slipped quickly into the pond to bathe. When she returned to the hut the odor hit her with new impact. The contrast between the fresh air of morning and the acrid Ghayrog-flavored atmosphere indoors was severe; yet soon it passed from her awareness once again.

  As she dressed she said, “I won’t be back from Narabal until nightfall. Will you be all right here by yourself?”

  “If you leave food and water within my reach. And something to read.”

  “There isn’t much. I’ll bring more back for you. It’ll be a quiet day for you, I’m afraid.”

  “Perhaps there will be a visitor.”

  “A visitor?” Thesme cried, dismayed. “Who? What sort of visitor? No one comes here! Or do you mean some Ghayrog who was traveling with you and who’ll be out looking for you?”

  “Oh, no, no. No one was with me. I thought, possibly friends of yours—”

  “I have no friends,” said Thesme solemnly.

  It sounded foolish to her the instant she said it—self-pitying, melodramatic. But the Ghayrog offered no comment, leaving her without a way of retracting it, and to hide her embarrassment she busied herself elaborately in the job of strapping on her pack.

  He was silent until she was ready to leave. Then he said, “Is Narabal very beautiful?”

  “You haven’t seen it?”

  “I came down the inland route from Tilomon. In Tilomon they told me how beautiful Narabal is.”

  “Narabal is nothing,” Thesme said. “Shacks. Muddy streets. Vines growing over everything, pulling the buildings apart before they’re a year old. They told you that in Tilomon? They were joking with you. The Tilomon people despise Narabal. The towns are rivals, you know—the two main tropical ports. If anyone in Tilomon told you how wonderful Narabal is, he was lying, he was playing games with you.”

  “But why do that?”

  Thesme shrugged. “How would I know? Maybe to get you out of Tilomon faster. Anyway, don’t look forward to Narabal. In a thousand years it’ll be something, I suppose, but right now it’s just a dirty frontier town.”

  “All the same, I hope to visit it. When my leg is stronger, will you show me Narabal?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Why not? But you’ll be disappointed, I promise you. And now I have to leave. I want to get the walk to town behind me before the hottest part of the day.”

  3

  As she made her way briskly toward Narabal she envisioned herself turning up in town one of these days with a Ghayrog by her side. How they’d love that, in Narabal! Would she and Vismaan be pelted with rocks and clots of mud? Would people point and snicker, and snub her when she tried to greet them? Probably. There’s that crazy Thesme, they would say to each other, bringing aliens to town, running around with snaky Ghayrogs, probably doing all sorts of unnatural things with them out in the jungle. Yes. Yes. Thesme smiled. It might be fun to promenade about Narabal with Vismaan. She would try it as soon as he was capable of making the long trek through the jungle.

  The path was no more than a crudely slashed track, blaze-marks on the trees and an occasional cairn, and it was overgrown in many places. But she had grown skilled at jungle travel and she rarely lost her way for long; by late morning she reached the outlying plantations, and soon Narabal itself was in view, straggling up one hillside and down another in a wobbly arc along the seashore.

  Thesme had no idea why anyone had wanted to put a city here—halfway around the world from anywhere, the extreme southwest point of Zimroel. It was some idea of Lord Melikand’s, the same Coronal who had invited all the aliens to settle on Majipoor, to encourage development on the western continent. In Lord Melikand’s time Zimroel had only two cities, both of them terribly isolated, virtual geographic accidents founded in the earliest days of human settlement on Majipoor, before it became apparent that the other continent was going to be the center of Majipoori life. There was Pidruid up in the northwest, with its wondrous climate and its spectacular natural harbor, and there was Piliplok all the way across on the eastern coast, where the hunters of the migratory sea-dragons had their base. But now also there was a little outpost called Ni-moya on one of the big inland rivers, and Tilomon had sprung up on the western coast at the edge of the tropical belt, and evidently some settlement was being founded in the central mountains, and supposedly the Ghayrogs were building a town a thousand miles or so east of Pidruid, and there was Narabal down here in the steaming rainy south, at the tip of the continent with sea all around. If one stood by the shore of Narabal Channel and looked toward the water one felt the terrible weight of the knowledge that at one’s back lay thousands of miles of wilderness, and then thousands of miles of ocean, separating one from the continent of Alhanroel where the real cities were. When she was young Thesme had found it frightening to think that she lived in a place so far from the centers of civilized life that it might as well be on some other planet; and other times Aihanroel and its thriving cities seemed merely mythical to her, and Narabal the true center of the universe. She had never been anywhere else, and had no hope of it. Distances were too great. The only town within reasonable reach was Tilomon, but even that was far away, and those who had been there said it was much like Narabal, anyway, only with less rain and the sun standing constantly in the sky like a great boring inquisitive green eye.

  In Narabal she felt inquisitive eyes on her wherever she turned: everyone staring, as though she had come to town naked. They all knew who she was—wild Thesme who had run off to the jungle—and they smiled at her and waved and asked her how everything was going, and behind those trivial pleasantries were the eyes, intent and penetrating and hostile, drilling into her, plumbing her for the hidden truths of her life. Why do you despise us? Why have you withdrawn from us? Why are you sharing your house with a disgusting snake-man? And she smiled and waved back, and said, “Nice to see you again,” and “Everything’s just fine,” and replied silently to the probing eyes, I don’t hate anybody, I just needed to get away from myself, I’m
helping the Ghayrog because it’s time I helped someone and he happened to come along. But they would never understand.

  No one was at home at her mother’s house. She went to her old room and stuffed her pack with books and cubes, and ransacked the medicine cabinet for drugs that she thought might do Vismaan some good, one to reduce inflammation, one to promote healing, a specific for high fever, and some others—probably all useless to an alien, but worth trying, she supposed. She wandered through the house, which was becoming strange to her even though she had lived in it nearly all her life. Wooden floors instead of strewn leaves—real transparent windows—doors on hinges—a cleanser, an actual mechanical cleanser with knobs and handles!—all those civilized things, the million and one humble little things that humanity had invented so many thousands of years ago on another world, and from which she had blithely walked away to live in her humid little hut with live branches sprouting from its walls—

  “Thesme?”

  She looked up, taken by surprise. Her sister Mirifaine had come in: her twin, in a manner of speaking, same face, same long thin arms and legs, same straight brown hair, but ten years older, ten years more reconciled to the patterns of her life, a married woman, a mother, a hard worker. Thesme had always found it distressing to look at Mirifaine. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing herself old.

  Thesme said, “I needed a few things.”

  “I was hoping you’d decided to move back home.”

  “What for?”

  Mirifaine began to reply—most likely some standard homily, about resuming normal life, fitting into society and being useful, et cetera, et cetera—but Thesme saw her shift direction while all that was still unspoken, and Mirifaine said finally, “We miss you, love.”

  “I’m doing what I need to do. It’s been good to see you, Mirifaine.”

  “Won’t you at least stay the night? Mother will be back soon—she’d be delighted if you were here for dinner—”

  “It’s a long walk. I can’t spend more time here.”