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

by Robert Silverberg

  Numbed, staggering, Helmut wandered in a lurching dazed way over the hotel’s vast grounds, looking for Marbella. He felt unclean and outcast; he could not bear to look at any of the other guests who amiably greeted him as he went by; he yearned to thrust his fouled body into a vat of corrosive acid. Infected! Quarantined! Exiled, maybe forever, from his home! No. No. It went beyond all comprehension. That he, that precise and intelligent and meticulous man, with his insurance policies and his alarm systems and his annual medical checkups, should—should have—

  He found her watching a game of body-tennis, caught her by the wrist from behind and whispered savagely, “I’ve got zanjak!”

  She looked at him, startled. “Of course you do, love.”

  “You say it so casually? You let me believe you were clean!”

  “Yes. Certainly. I knew you were already infected, even if you didn’t. Since you apparently didn’t know it yourself then, you’d never have gone to bed with me if I admitted I was carrying. And I wanted you so much, love. I’d have told any kind of harmless little lie then for the sake of—”

  “Wait a minute. What do you mean, you knew I was already carrying?”

  “That blonde bitch from Rigel, the night before you and I met—I saw the two of you together at dinner. I had my eye on you even then, you know. And I could tell that that unscrupulous little tramp would conceal from you that she was carrying. When I saw you go off to her room with her, I knew you’d be joining the club.”

  Icily he said, “I didn’t sleep with her, Marbella.”

  “What? But I was sure—”

  “You were, were you?” He laughed bitterly. “I walked her home and she told me she was a carrier and I kissed her goodnight and went away. You can’t catch it from a kiss, can you? Can you?”

  “No,” she said in a very small voice.

  “So you knowingly and shamelessly gave me a hideous incurable disease because you had decided I had been dumb enough to sleep with someone who was carrying it. I guess you were right about that, in a way.”

  She turned away, looking stricken. “Helmut, please—if you knew how sorry I am—”

  “No sorrier than I am. Do you realize I’m quarantined here, and maybe for life?”

  She shrugged. “Well, yes. So am I. There are worse places to spend one’s life.”

  “I ought to kill you!”

  She began to tremble. “I suppose I’d deserve it. Oh, Helmut—I was so completely fascinated by you—I didn’t want to take the slightest risk of losing you. I should have waited until the infection I thought you got from her had showed itself. Then it wouldn’t have mattered. But I couldn’t wait—I tried, I couldn’t—and I figured that we’d fall in love and by the time your zanjak showed it would be all right for me to admit that I had it, too.”

  He was silent a long moment. Then he said, “Maybe you figured that even if I didn’t have it, you’d give it to me, by way of making absolutely sure I’d be stuck here on Sempoanga?”

  “No. I swear it.” There was shock and horror in her eyes. “You have to believe me, Helmut!”

  “I could really kill you now,” he said, and for an instant he thought he would. But instead he turned and fled, running in long loping, crazy strides, across the field of octopus palms and down a garden of electric orchids that flashed indignant lights at him and rang their bells, and through a swamp of warm sticky mud filled with little furry snakes, and up the side of Stinivong Chute, thinking he might throw himself over the edge. But halfway up he yielded to exhaustion and fell to the ground and lay there panting and gasping for what seemed like hours. When he returned to his room at dusk, there was a thick packet of documents beside his bed—his responsibilities and rights under the quarantine, how to transfer assets from his home world, pros and cons of applying for Sempoangan citizenship, and much more. He skimmed it quickly and tossed it aside before he was midway through. Thinking about such things was impossible now. He closed his eyes and pressed his face against his pillow, and suddenly scenes from Waldemar burned in his mind: the Great Glacier at Christmas, the ice-yacht races, the warm well-lit tunnels of his city, his snug dome-roofed home, his last night in it with Elissa, his trim little office with the rows of communicator panels—

  He would never see any of that again, and it was all so stupid, so impossibly dumb, that he could not believe it.

  He could not go to the dining room for dinner that evening. He ordered a meal from room service but left it untouched and nibbled a little of it the next morning after a night of loathsome dreams. That day he wandered at random, alone, getting used to what had happened to him. It was a magnificent day, the sky pink and soft, the flame-trees glowing, but it was all lost on him now. Even though this place might be paradise, he was condemned to dwell in it, and paradise on that basis was not very different from hell.

  For two days he haunted the hotel grounds like his own ghost, speaking to no one. He didn’t see Marbella again until the third evening after the zanjak had emerged in him. To break free of his depression he had gone to the cocktail lounge, and she was there, alone, apparently brooding. She brightened when he appeared, but he glared coldly at her and went past, to the bar. A newcomer was sitting there by herself, an attractive fragile-looking woman with large dark eyes and frosted auburn hair. Deliberately, maliciously, Helmut made a point of picking her up in front of Marbella. Her name was Sinuise; she came from a planet called Donegal; like so many others here, she was trying to forget a bad marriage. When they left the cocktail lounge together, Helmut could feel Marbella’s eyes on him and it was like being skewered with hard radiation.

  He and Sinuise dined and danced and drifted toward the evening’s inevitable conclusion. In the casino he spotted Marbella again, watching them somberly from a distance. “Come,” he said to the woman from Donegal. “Let’s go for a walk.” He slipped his arm over her shoulder. She was delicate and lovely and beyond doubt she was hungry for warmth and closeness, and he knew that he need only ask and she would go to his room with him. But as they strolled down the leafy paths he knew he could not do it. To carry his revenge on Marbella to the point of giving zanjak to an unsuspecting woman—no. No.

  Under the rustling fronds of a limberwillow tree, he kissed her long and lovingly, and when he released her he said, “It’s been a beautiful evening, Sinuise.”

  “Yes. For me also.”

  “Perhaps we’ll go puff gliding tomorrow.”

  “I’d like that. But—tonight—I thought—”

  “I can’t. Not with you, I have zanjak , you know. And unless you’ve already got it also—”

  Her face seemed to crumple. The great dark eyes swam with tears. He took her hand lightly, but a convulsive quiver of disappointment and anguish ran through her, and she pulled away and fled from him, sobbing.

  “I’m sorry,” he called after her. “More than you can imagine!”

  Marbella was still in the casino, still alone. She looked astonished that he had returned. He shot her a venomous look and headed for the gravity-dice table, and in fifteen minutes managed to lose half the money he was carrying. He thought of lovely little Sinuise alone in her bed. He thought of Helmut Schweid, infested by bizarre alien organisms. He thought of Marbella, her energy, her passionate little cries, her quick wit and sly humor. Perhaps she was telling the truth, he thought bleakly. Perhaps she genuinely thought I had picked up a dose from the blonde from Rigel.

  Besides, what choice do I have now?

  Slowly, wearily, he made his way across the huge room. Marbella was playing five-chip cargo in a reckless way. He watched her lose her stake. Then he lightly touched her arm.

  “You win,” he said.

  They stayed together at the hotel another eight days, and then, because his money was gone and he would not take any from her, they moved to the Quarantine Center. It was, he quickly discovered, just as beautiful as the hotel, with glorious natural features every bit as strange and wonderful. They shared a small cabin and spent their
days swimming and fishing and their nights making love. Over the next ten weeks Marbella’s breasts grew heavy and her belly began to swell; but when her time came she would not go to the Quarantine Center hospital. Instead she bore her Sempoangan young behind the cabin, a litter of sleek little creatures like tiny green otters, ten or fifteen of them that came sliding out of her without effort. Helmut dug a pit and shoveled them all in, and after she had rested for an hour or so they went down to the beach to watch the translucent waves lapping against the azure sand. He thought of the snows of Waldemar, and of his home there, his lovers, his friends, and it all seemed terribly long ago and more than a million light-years far away.

  Jennifer’s Lover

  Now that I was writing short stories with fluency and ease once again, and selling them to high-paying slick magazines like Omni and Playboy, I began to look around for other markets of the same sort, since those two could handle only one or two Silverberg stories a year and at my current rate of production I would quickly exceed that figure. So my attention fastened on Penthouse, the chief competitor to Playboy in the field of slick-paper male-oriented magazines, which had published a story of mine (“In the Group”) in 1973. In what was for me the unusually active month of October, 1981, I wrote to Kathy Green, the fiction editor of Penthouse, asking whether she’d be interested in seeing the occasional short story of the sort that I was currently writing for Playboy and Omni. She was, and the following month yet another time-travel idea occurred to me and I sent her “Jennifer’s Lover,” which she promptly accepted, and used in her May, 1982 issue. But I never felt comfortable with Penthouse as a magazine, and did not make much of an attempt to develop a regular relationship there, as I had done with Playboy.

  ——————

  Finch had married very young—he had been only twenty-three, and Jennifer even younger—and even so he hoped they would live happily ever after. Marriage had been back in fashion for a few years, then, but all the same it was unusual to do it so early, and friends and relatives warned them of the risks. Get out and live in the adult world for a while, they said. There’s plenty of time later for settling down.

  But marrying was more than a matter of fashion for Finch. He had since adolescence felt himself to be a basically married person. Like one of the primordial creatures of Plato’s Symposium is how he saw himself—a twofold being that somehow had been divided and could not be happy until it had been reunited with its missing half. He searched diligently until he found Jennifer, who seemed to be that separated segment of himself; and then he quickly took care to join her securely to him once again. They settled in a sleek and snug Connecticut suburb. He sold portable computer terminals for a dynamic little hi-tech outfit in Bridgeport, and she worked for a publishing company in Greenwich, and before long they had a daughter named Samantha and a son named Jason, after which Jennifer quit her job and began doing some volunteer work at the local museum. Their parents, who had been pretty wild items in their own day, doing dope and marching for peace and trashing campuses, were amazed at the way everything had come around full circle in just one generation.

  Finch was on the road a lot, making sales calls in a territory that stretched from Rhode Island to Delaware, and occasionally he wondered if Jennifer might someday amuse herself with a lover. But the idea was really too alien to make sense to him. Even when he was away from home three or four nights in a row, sleeping in drab motels in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, he saw no need to go outside his warm and secure marriage, and he imagined Jennifer felt the same way. He wondered if that was naive and decided it wasn’t. As a couple they were complete, a single entity, a unity. Naturally the early raptures were only warm memories now, but the expectable cooling of passion had been followed by deep friendship. They were together even when they were apart; a lover would be a superfluity; Finch told himself that if he learned Jennifer had been unfaithful to him, he would not so much be jealous as merely mystified.

  And of course there were the children to bind them always: Samantha was already beautiful at seven, a slim golden creature who was as apt to speak French as English. She awed them both, and they were immensely proud of her precocious elegance. Jason, not quite six, was of a different substance, a stolid and literal person whose toys were made of microprocessors and LEDs. He had his father’s love of technology, and Finch saw in him a chance to create what he himself had not managed to be—a genuinely original scientific intellect rather than a peddler of other people’s inventions. Whenever he returned from a long trip he brought gifts for everyone, a book or a record for Jennifer, something pretty for Samantha, and invariably a computer game or mechanical puzzle for Jason. They were splendid children, and he and Jennifer often congratulated one another on having produced them.

  At a computer showroom in Philadelphia one rainy autumn afternoon, Finch bought a wonderful toy for Jason, a little synthesizer that played lively tunes when you tapped out signals in a binary code. Not only would it develop Jason’s musical skills—and that side of the brain needed to be trained too, Finch thought—but it would sharpen his ability to count in binary. It was so expensive that he felt guilty and eased his conscience by getting the new supercassette of Die Meistersinger for Jennifer and a sweater of some glittering furry fabric for Samantha; but on the long drive home he thought only of Jason creating buoyant melodies out of skeins of binary digits.

  Jason accepted it politely but seemed not very interested. He watched as Finch demonstrated it, and when it was his turn he generated a few fragmentary atonal squawks. Then a call from Jennifer’s parents interrupted things, and afterward, Finch noticed, the child wandered off to his room without taking the synthesizer with him. That was disappointing, but Finch reminded himself that six-year-olds had a way of being preoccupied with one thing at a time, and possibly Jason’s preoccupation of the moment was so compelling that even a wondrous new device could not gain much of a grip on his attention.

  After dinner, feeling a little miffed, Finch took the synthesizer to Jason’s room and found him hunched over an odd glowing thing the size of a large marble. When he saw Finch enter, the boy disingenuously pushed it into the clutter on his tabletop and pretended to be busy with his holographic viewer. “You left this in the living room,” Finch said, giving him the synthesizer. Jason took it and obligingly hit the keys in his mild, obedient way, but he looked uncomfortable and impatient. Finch said, pointing at the little glowing thing, “What’s that?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “It’s very pretty. Mind if I see it?”

  Jason shrugged. He generated a jagged screeching tune. Finch picked up the sphere. Jason looked even more restless.

  “What does it do?” Finch asked.

  “You press it in places. It turns colors. You have to get it the same color all over.”

  “Rubik’s Cube,” Finch said. “An old idea brought up to date, I guess.” He put his fingertips to the sphere and watched in surprise as colors of eerie indefinable hues came and went, blending, shifting. Touch it a certain way and there were stripes; another and there were triangular patterns; another and the surface of the sphere burst into thick, brilliant, throbbing patches of color, almost like a Van Gogh landscape. He had never seen anything like it. “Where’d you get it?” he asked. “Jennifer buy it for you?”

  “No.”

  “Grandpa Finch send it?”

  “No.”

  Finch felt himself growing annoyed. “Then who gave it to you?”

  The child looked momentarily troubled, tugging at his lower lip, twisting his head at a peculiar angle. Then he began to contemplate the synthesizer, and the old serene Jason, imperturbable, studious, returned.

  “Nort gave it to me,” he said.

  “Nort?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t. Who’s Nort?”

  Jason was manipulating the synthesizer, quickly getting the hang of it, making something close to a tune emerge. He had dismissed Finch from his awareness as thoroughly
as though Finch had been transported to Pluto. Gently Finch said, “You aren’t answering me. Who’s Nort?”

  “He plays with me sometimes.”

  Finch decided to drop it. Jason would tell him about Nort in his own good time, he supposed. Meanwhile the boy was mastering the synthesizer with gratifying swiftness; no point distracting him from that. Finch picked up the sphere again, stroked it so that it went through a whole new series of color changes, and brought it almost to the single hue that apparently one was meant to achieve. But he did something wrong and kicked it into a geometrical pseudo-Mondrian pattern instead. A clever gadget, he thought, and went off to find Jennifer and to catch up on local gossip. The mysterious Nort quickly slipped from his mind, and he might never have thought of him again at all if Samantha had not remarked, when he was in her room to say good night to her, “I’m glad you’re back. I don’t like Nort, really. I hope he doesn’t come here any more.”

  Very calmly Finch said, “Oh, he was here again?”

  “Two days, this time. Tell him not to come, will you?”

  “I don’t know if I can do that. You know who Nort is, after all, don’t you?”

  “Sure. Maman’s nephew. A nephew is something like a brother, n’est ce pas?”

  “A little bit,” said Finch. He kissed her lightly. “I’ll see what I can do about Nort, all right? And if he comes back when I’m gone, you tell me about it, sweet. I don’t think I like him either. But let’s not say anything about this to maman, okay? She’s very fond of her nephew, you know, and it would upset her if she knew that you and I didn’t like him.”

  He paused a moment in the hallway, pressing his forehead against the wall, catching his breath. Maman’s nephew. Jennifer had no nephews. Finch was trembling. Visiting lovers usually claimed to be uncles, he thought. A nephew? Jennifer’s lover? It was craziness, a phantasm, a melodrama of a tired mind. Jennifer had no lovers. Finch could visualize their marriage, that abstraction, as a solid concrete thing, a gleaming polished marble sphere rather like Jason’s glowing toy, and in the perfection of that sphere there was neither need nor room for lovers. In his own way he would find out who Nort was, he resolved, but above all else he would stay calm. He poured himself a drink and rejoined Jennifer, studying her covertly as if looking for signs of adultery on her forehead, in her cheeks. She was playing Meistersinger, humming along with the jollier choruses. When they went to bed, he turned to her as he always did when he came home from a long trip, but he imagined that something strange had descended between them like a curtain of metal links, and he was unable to embrace her. The unknown Nort lay as a barrier in their bed. Finch ran. his hands halfheartedly over her breasts and flanks but did nothing else. “You must be very tired,” Jennifer whispered.