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

by Robert Silverberg

  “You look good, you know. Tanned, healthy. I suppose being a hermit agrees with you, Thesme.”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “You don’t mind living alone?”

  “I adore it,” Thesme said. She began to adjust her pack. “How are you, anyway?”

  A shrug. “The same. I may go to Tilomon for a while.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I think so. I wouldn’t mind getting out of the mildew zone for a little holiday. Holthus has been working up there all month, on some big scheme to build new towns in the mountains—housing for all these aliens that are starting to move in. He wants me to bring the children up, and I think I will.”

  “Aliens?” Thesme said.

  “You don’t know about them?”

  “Tell me.”

  “The offworlders that have been living up north are starting to filter this way, now. There’s one kind that looks like lizards with human arms and legs that’s interested in starting farms in the jungles.”

  “Ghayrogs.”

  “Oh, you’ve heard of them, then? And another kind, all puffy and warty, frog-faced ones with dark gray skins—they do practically all the government jobs now in Pidruid, Holthus says, the customs-inspectors and market clerks and things like that—well, they’re being hired down here too, and Holthus and some syndicate of Tilomon people are planning housing for them inland—”

  “So that they won’t smell up the coastal cities?”

  “What? Oh, I suppose that’s part of it—nobody knows how they’ll fit in here, after all—but really I think it’s just that we don’t have accommodations for a lot of immigrants in Narabal, and I gather it’s the same in Tilomon, and so—”

  “Yes, I see,” said Thesme. “Well, give everyone my love. I have to begin heading back. I hope you enjoy your holiday in Tilomon.”

  “Thesme, please—”

  “Please what?”

  Mirifaine said sadly, “You’re so brusque, so distant, so chilly! It’s been months since I’ve seen you, and you barely tolerate my questions, you look at me with such anger—anger for what, Thesme? Have I ever hurt you? Was I ever anything other than loving? Were any of us? You’re such a mystery, Thesme.”

  Thesme knew it was futile to try once more to explain herself. No one understood her, no one ever would, least of all those who said they loved her. Trying to keep her voice gentle, she said, “Call it an overdue adolescent rebellion, Miri. You were all very kind to me. But nothing was working right and I had to run away.” She touched her fingertips lightly to her sister’s arm. “Maybe I’ll be back one of these days.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Just don’t expect it to happen soon. Say hello to everybody for me,” said Thesme, and went out.

  She hurried through town, uneasy and tense, afraid of running into her mother or any of her old friends and especially any of her former lovers; and as she carried out her errands she looked about furtively, like a thief, more than once ducking into an alleyway to avoid someone she needed to avoid. The encounter with Mirifaine had been disturbing enough. She had not realized, until Mirifaine had said it, that she had been showing anger; but Miri was right, yes, Thesme could still feel the dull throbbing residue of fury within her. These people, these dreary little people with their little ambitions and their little fears and their little prejudices, going through the little rounds of their meaningless days—they infuriated her. Spilling out over Majipoor like a plague, nibbling at the unmapped forests, staring at the enormous uncrossable ocean, founding ugly muddy towns in the midst of astounding beauty, and never once questioning the purpose of anything—that was the worst of it, their bland unquestioning natures. Did they never once look up at the stars and ask what it all meant, this outward surge of humanity from Old Earth, this replication of the mother world on a thousand conquered planets? Did they care? This could be Old Earth for all it mattered, except that that was a tired drab plundered forgotten husk of a world and this, even after centuries and centuries of human occupation, was still beautiful; but long ago Old Earth had no doubt been as beautiful as Majipoor was now; and in five thousand more years Majipoor would be the same way, with hideous cities stretching for hundreds of miles wherever you looked, and traffic everywhere, and filth in the rivers, and the animals wiped out and the poor cheated Shapeshifters penned up in reservations somewhere, all the old mistakes carried out once again on a virgin world. Thesme boiled with an indignation so fierce it amazed her. She had never known that her quarrel with the world was so cosmic. She had thought it was merely a matter of failed love affairs and raw nerves and muddled personal goals, not this irate dissatisfaction with the entire human universe that had so suddenly overwhelmed her. But the rage held its power in her. She wanted to seize Narabal and push it into the ocean. But she could not do that, she could not change a thing, she could not halt the spread of what they called civilization here; all she could do was flee, back to her jungle, back to the interlacing vines and the steamy foggy air and the shy creatures of the marshes, back to her hut, back to her lame Ghayrog, who was himself part of the tide that was overwhelming the planet but for whom she would care, whom she would even cherish, because the others of her kind disliked or even hated him and so she could use him as one of her ways of distinguishing herself from them, and because also he needed her just now and no one had ever needed her before.

  Her head was aching and the muscles of her face had gone rigid, and she realized she was walking with her shoulders hunched, as if to relax them would be to surrender to the way of life that she had repudiated. As swiftly as she could, she escaped once again from Narabal; but it was not until she had been on the jungle trail for two hours, and the last outskirts of the town were well behind her, that she began to feel the tensions ebbing. She paused at a little lake she knew and stripped and soaked herself in its cool depths to rid herself of the last taint of town, and then, with her going-to-town clothes slung casually over her shoulder, she marched naked through the jungle to her hut.

  4

  Vismaan lay in bed and did not seem to have moved at all while she was gone. “Are you feeling better?” she asked. “Were you able to manage by yourself?”

  “It was a very quiet day. There is somewhat more of a swelling in my leg.”

  “Let me see.”

  She probed it cautiously. It did seem puffier, and he pulled away slightly as she touched him, which probably meant that there was real trouble in there, if the Ghayrog sense of pain was as weak as he claimed. She debated the merit of getting him into Narabal for treatment. But he seemed unworried, and she doubted that the Narabal doctors knew much about Ghayrog physiology anyway. Besides, she wanted him here. She unpacked the medicines she had brought from town and gave him the ones for fever and inflammation, and then prepared fruits and vegetables for his dinner. Before it grew too dark she checked the traps at the edge of the clearing and found a few small animals in them, a young sigimoin and a couple of mintuns. She wrung their necks with a practiced hand—it had been terribly hard at first, but meat was important to her and no one else was likely to do her killing for her, out here—and dressed them for roasting. Once she had the fire started she went back inside. Vismaan was playing one of the new cubes she had brought him, but he put it aside when she entered.

  “You said nothing about your visit to Narabal,” he remarked.

  “I wasn’t there long. Got what I needed, had a little chat with one of my sisters, came away edgy and depressed, felt better as soon as I was in the jungle.”

  “You have great hatred for that place.”

  “It’s worth hating. Those dismal boring people, those ugly squat little buildings—” She shook her head. “Oh: my sister told me that they’re going to found some new towns inland for offworlders, because so many are moving south. Ghayrogs, mainly, but also some other kind with warts and gray skins—”

  “Hjorts,” said Vismaan.

  “Whatever. They like to work as customs-inspectors, she
told me. They’re going to be settled inland because no one wants them in Tilomon or Narabal, is my guess.”

  “I have never felt unwanted among humans,” the Ghayrog said.

  “Really? Maybe you haven’t noticed. I think there’s a great deal of prejudice on Majipoor.”

  “It has not been evident to me. Of course, I have never been in Narabal, and perhaps it is stronger there than elsewhere. Certainly in the north there is no difficulty. You have never been in the north?”

  “No.

  “We find ourselves welcome among humans in Pidruid.”

  “Is that true? I hear that the Ghayrogs are building a city for themselves somewhere east of Pidruid, quite a way east, on the Great Rift. If everything’s so wonderful for you in Pidruid, why settle somewhere else?”

  Vismaan said calmly, “It is we who are not altogether comfortable living with humans. The rhythms of our lives are so different from yours—our habits of sleep, for instance. We find it difficult living in a city that goes dormant eight hours every night, when we ourselves remain awake. And there are other differences. So we are building Dulorn. I hope you see it some day. It is quite marvelously beautiful, constructed entirely from a white stone that shines with an inner light. We are very proud of it.”

  “Why don’t you live there, then?”

  “Is your meat not burning?” he asked.

  She reddened and ran outside, barely in time to snatch dinner from the spits. A little sullenly she sliced it and served it, along with some thokkas and a flask of wine she had bought that afternoon in Narabal. Vismaan sat up, with some awkwardness, to eat.

  He said after a while, “I lived in Dulorn for several years. But that is very dry country, and I come from a place on my planet that is warm and wet, like Narabal. So I journeyed down here to find fertile lands. My distant ancestors were farmers, and I thought to return to their ways. When I heard that in the tropics of Majipoor one could raise six harvests a year, and that there was land everywhere for the claiming, I set out to explore the territory.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone, yes. I have no mate, though I intend to obtain one as soon as I am settled.”

  “And you’ll raise crops and market them in Narabal?”

  “So I intend. On my home world there is scarcely any wild land anywhere, and hardly enough remaining for agriculture. We import most of our food, do you know that? And so Majipoor has a powerful appeal for us, this gigantic planet with its sparse population and its great wilderness awaiting development. I am very happy to be here. And I think that you are not right, about our being unwelcome among your fellow citizens. You Majipoori are kind and gentle folk, civil, law-abiding, orderly.”

  “Even so; if anyone knew I was living with a Ghayrog, they’d be shocked.”

  “Shocked? Why?”

  “Because you’re an alien. Because you’re a reptile.”

  Vismaan made an odd snorting sound. Laughter? “We are not reptiles! We are warm-blooded, we nurse our young—”

  “Reptilian, then. Like reptiles.”

  “Externally, perhaps. But we are nearly as mammalian as you, I insist.”

  “Nearly?”

  “Only that we are egg-layers. But there are some mammals of that sort, too. You much mistake us if you think—”

  “It doesn’t really matter. Humans perceive you as reptiles, and we aren’t comfortable with reptiles, and there’s always going to be awkwardness between humans and Ghayrogs because of that. It’s a tradition that goes back into prehistoric times on Old Earth. Besides—” She caught herself just as she was about to make a reference to the Ghayrog odor. “Beside,” she said clumsily, “you look scary.”

  “More so than a huge shaggy Skandar? More so than a Su-Suheris with two heads?” Vismaan turned toward her and fixed his unsettling lidless eyes on her. “I think you are telling me that you are uncomfortable with Ghayrogs yourself, Thesme.”

  “No.”

  “The prejudices of which you speak have never been visible to me. This is the first time I have heard of them. Am I troubling to you, Thesme? Shall I go?”

  “No. No. You’re completely misunderstanding me. I want you to stay here. I want to help you. I feel no fear of you at all, no dislike, nothing negative whatever. I was only trying to tell you—trying to explain about the people in Narabal, how they feel, or how I think they feel, and—” She took a long gulp of her wine. “I don’t know how we got into all of this. I’m sorry. I’d like to talk about something else.”

  “Of course.”

  But she suspected that she had wounded him, or at least aroused some discomfort in him. In his cool alien way he seemed to have considerable insight, and maybe he was right, maybe it was her own prejudice that was showing, her own uneasiness. She had bungled all of her relationships with humans; quite conceivably she was incapable of getting along with anyone, she thought, human or alien, and had shown Vismaan in a thousand unconscious ways that her hospitality was merely a willed act, artificial and half reluctant, intended to cover an underlying dislike for his presence here. Was that so? She understood less and less of her own motivations, it appeared, as she grew older. But wherever the truth might lie, she did not want him to feel like an intruder here. In the days ahead, she resolved, she would find ways of showing him that her taking him in and caring for him were genuinely founded.

  She slept more soundly that night than the one before, although she was still not accustomed to sleeping on the floor in a pile of bubblebush leaves or having someone with her in the hut, and every few hours she awakened. Each time she did, she looked across at the Ghayrog, and saw him each time busy with the entertainment cubes. He took no notice of her. She tried to imagine what it was like to do all of one’s sleeping in a single three-month stretch, and to spend the rest of one’s time constantly awake; it was, she thought, the most alien thing about him. And to lie there hour after hour, unable to stand, unable to sleep, unable to hide from the discomfort of the injury, making use of whatever diversion was available to consume the time—few torments could be worse. And yet his mood never changed: serene, unruffled, placid, impassive. Were all Ghayrogs like that? Did they never get drunk, lose their tempers, brawl in the streets, bewail their destinies, quarrel with their mates? If Vismaan was a fair sample, they had no human frailties. But, then, she reminded herself, they were not human.

  5

  In the morning she gave the Ghayrog a bath, sponging him until his scales glistened, and changed his bedding. After she had fed him she went off for the day, in her usual fashion; but she felt guilty wandering the jungle by herself while he remained marooned in the hut, and wondered if she should have stayed with him, telling him stories or drawing him into a conversation to ease his boredom. But she was aware that if she were constantly at his side they would quickly run out of things to talk about, and very likely get on each other’s nerves; and he had dozens of entertainment cubes to help him ward off boredom, anyway. Perhaps he preferred to be alone most of the time. In any case she needed solitude herself, more than ever now that she was sharing her hut with him, and she made a long reconnaissance that morning, gathering an assortment of berries and roots for dinner. At midday it rained, and she squatted under a vramma tree whose broad leaves sheltered her nicely. She let her eyes go out of focus and emptied her mind of everything, guilts, doubts, fears memories, the Ghayrog, her family, her former lovers, her unhappiness, her loneliness. The peace that settled over her lasted well into the afternoon.

  She grew used to having Vismaan living with her. He continued to be easy and undemanding, amusing himself with his cubes, showing great patience with his immobility. He rarely asked her questions or initiated any sort of talk, but he was friendly enough when she spoke with him, and told her about his home world—shabby and horribly overpopulated, from the sound of things—and about his life there, his dream of settling on Majipoor, his excitement when he first saw the beauty of his adopted planet. Thesme tried to visualize him showing excitemen
t. His snaky hair jumping around, perhaps, instead of just coiling slowly. Or maybe he registered emotion by changes of body odor.

  On the fourth day he left the bed for the first time. With her help he hauled himself upward, balancing on his crutch and his good leg and tentatively touching the other one to the ground. She sensed a sudden sharpness of his aroma—a kind of olfactory wince—and decided that her theory must be right, that Ghayrogs did show emotion that way.

  “How does it feel?” she asked. “Tender?”

  “It will not bear my weight. But the healing is proceeding well. Another few days and I think I will be able to stand. Come, help lift walk a little. My body is rusting from so little activity.”

  He leaned on her and they went outside, to the pond and back at a slow, wary hobble. He seemed refreshed by the little journey. To her surprise she realized that she was saddened by this first show of progress, because it meant that soon—a week, two weeks?—he would be strong enough to leave, and she did not want him to leave. She did not want him to leave. That was so odd a perception that it astonished her. She longed for her old reclusive life, the privilege of sleeping in her own bed and going about her forest pleasures without worrying about whether her guest was being sufficiently well amused, and all of that; in some ways she was finding it more and more irritating to have the Ghayrog around. And yet, and yet, and yet, she felt downcast and disturbed at the thought that he would shortly leave her. How strange, she thought, how peculiar, how very Thesme-like.

  Now she took him walking several times a day. He still could not use the broken leg, but he grew more agile without it, and he said that the swelling was abating and the bone appeared to be knitting properly. He began to talk of the farm he would establish, the crops, the ways of clearing the jungle.

  One afternoon at the end of the first week Thesme, as she returned from a calimbot-gathering expedition in the meadow where she had first found the Ghayrog, stopped to check her traps. Most were empty or contained the usual small animals; but there was a strange violent thrashing in the underbrush beyond the pond, and when she approached the trap she had placed there she discovered she had caught a bilantoon. It was the biggest creature she had ever snared. Bilantoons were found all over western Zimroel—elegant fast-moving little beasts with sharp hooves, fragile legs, a tiny upturned tufted tail—but the Narabal form was a giant, twice the size of the dainty northern one. It stood as high as a man’s waist, and was much prized for its tender and fragrant meat. Thesme’s first impulse was to let the pretty thing go: it seemed much too beautiful to kill, and much too big, also. She had taught herself to slaughter little things that she could seize in one hand, but this was another matter entirely, a major animal, intelligent-looking and noble, with a life that it surely valued, hopes and needs and yearnings, a mate probably waiting somewhere nearby. Thesme told herself that she was being foolish. Droles and mintuns and sigimoins also very likely were eager to go on living, certainly as eager as this bilantoon was, and she killed them without hesitation. It was a mistake to romanticize animals, she knew—especially when in her more civilized days she had been willing to eat their flesh quite gladly, if slain by other hands. The bilantoon’s bereaved mate had not mattered to her then.