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

by Robert Silverberg

  “That’s very decent of you, old fellow. That’s extraordinary!”

  “I want her to be happy,” Mikkelsen said.

  Yvonne showed up just as night was falling. Mikkelsen had not seen her for years, and he was startled at how uninteresting she seemed, how bland, how unformed, almost adolescent. Of course, she was very pretty, close-cropped blonde hair, merry greenish-blue eyes, pert little nose, but she seemed girlish and alien to him, and he wondered how he could ever have become so involved with her. But of course all that was before Janine. Mikkelsen’s unscheduled return from Palm Beach surprised her, but not very much, and when he took her down to the beach to tell her that he had come to realize that she was really in love with Hambleton and he was not going to make a fuss about it, she blinked and said sweetly, “In love with Tommy? Well, I suppose I could be—though I never actually saw it like that. But I could give it a try, couldn’t I? That is, if you truly are tired of me, Nick.” She didn’t seem offended. She didn’t seem heartbroken. She didn’t seem to care much at all.

  He left the club soon afterward and got an express-fax message off to his younger self in Palm Beach: Yvonne has fallen for Tommy Hambleton. However upset you are, for God’s sake get over it fast, and if you happen to meet a young woman named Janine Carter, give her a close look. You won’t regret it, believe me. I’m in a position to know.

  He signed it A Friend, but added a little squiggle in the corner that had always been his own special signature-glyph. He didn’t dare go further than that. He hoped young Nick would be smart enough to figure out the score.

  Not a bad hour’s work, he decided. He drove back to the jaunt-shop in downtown San Diego and hopped back to his proper point in time.

  There was the taste of cotton in his mouth when he emerged. So it feels that way even when you phase yourself, he thought. He wondered what changes he had brought about by his jaunt. As he remembered it, he had made the hop in order to phase himself back into a marriage with a woman named Janine, who apparently he had loved quite considerably until she had been snatched away from him in a phasing. Evidently the unphasing had not happened, because he knew he was still unmarried, with three or four regular companions—Cindy, Melanie, Elena and someone else—and none of them was named Janine. Paula, yes, that was the other one. Yet he was carrying a note, already starting to fade, that said: You won’t remember any of this, but you were married in 2016 or 17 to the former Janine Carter, Tommy Hambleton’s ex-wife, and however much you may like your present life, you were a lot better off when you were with her. Maybe so, Mikkelsen thought. God knows he was getting weary of the bachelor life, and now that Gus and Donna were making it legal, he was the only singleton left in the whole crowd. That was a little awkward. But he hadn’t ever met anyone he genuinely wanted to spend the rest of his life with, or even as much as a year with. So he had been married, had he, before the phasing? Janine? How strange, how unlike him.

  He was home before dark. Showered, shaved, dressed, headed over to the Top of the Marina. Tommy Hambleton and Yvonne were in town, and he had agreed to meet them for drinks. Hadn’t seen them for years, not since Tommy had taken over his brother’s villa on the Riviera. Good old Tommy, Mikkelsen thought. Great to see him again. And Yvonne. He recalled her clearly, little snub-nosed blonde, good game of tennis, trim compact body. He’d been pretty hot for her himself, eleven or twelve years ago, back before Adrienne, before Charlene, before Georgiana, before Nedra, before Cindy, Melanie, Elena, Paula. Good to see them both again. He stepped into the skylift and went shooting blithely up the long swivel-stalk to the gilded little cupola high above the lagoon. Hambleton and Yvonne were already there.

  Tommy hadn’t changed much—same old smooth slickly dressed little guy—but Mikkelsen was astonished at how time and money had altered Yvonne. She was poised, chic, sinuous, all that baby-fat burned away, and when she spoke there was the smallest hint of a French accent in her voice. Mikkelsen embraced them both and let himself be swept off to the bar.

  “So glad I was able to find you,” Hambleton said. “It’s been years! Years, Nick!”

  “Practically forever.”

  “Still going great with the women, are you?”

  “More or less,” Mikkelsen said. “And you? Still running back in time to wipe your nose three days ago, Tommy?”

  Hambleton chuckled. “Oh, I don’t do much of that any more. Yvonne and I were to the Fall of Troy last winter, but the short-hop stuff doesn’t interest me these days. I—oh. How amazing?”

  “What is it?” Mikkelsen asked, seeing Hambleton’s gaze go past him into the darker corners of the room.

  “An old friend,” Hambleton said. “I’m sure it’s she! Someone I once knew—briefly, glancingly—” He looked toward Yvonne and said, “I met her a few months after you and I began seeing each other, love. Of course, there was nothing to it, but there could have been—there could have been—” A distant wistful look swiftly crossed Hambleton’s features and was gone. His smile returned. He said, “You should meet her, Nick. If it’s really she, I know she’ll be just your type. How amazing! After all these years! Come with me, man!”

  He seized Mikkelsen by the wrist and drew him, astounded, across the room.

  “Janine?” Hambleton cried. “Janine Carter?”

  She was a dark-haired woman, elegant, perhaps a year or two younger than Mikkelsen, with cool perceptive eyes. She looked up, surprised. “Tommy? Is that you?”

  “Of course, of course. That’s my wife, Yvonne, over there. And this—this is one of my oldest and dearest friends, Nick Mikkelsen. Nick—Janine—”

  She stared up at him. “This sounds absurd,” she said, “but don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  Mikkelsen felt a warm flood of mysterious energy surging through him as their eyes met. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Amanda and the Alien

  Some stories seem almost to write themselves. This was one of them. I wish they were all that easy, or that the results were always that pleasing.

  “Amanda” was a product of the rainy winter of 1981-2, when I was having a particularly fertile run of short-story writing. (Here I need to pause for a digression on California weather and my writing habits. California is one of five places in the world that have the so-called “Mediterranean” climate—the others are Chile, Western Australia, the western part of South Africa, and the Mediterranean region itself—in which the winters are mild and rainy and the summers are dry. Where I live, in the San Francisco region, the heaviest rains fall between November and March. Then they taper off, and from mid-April to early November there’s normally no rain at all. Rain in summertime here has been known to happen occasionally, but so rarely that it’s a front-page news item. My working pattern follows the weather: in the days when I was writing novels—it’s been a while since I last wrote one—I tended to write them during the period of maximum rainfall, tapering off to short stories as the season’s rains began to diminish in the spring, and doing as little work as my conscience would allow during the dry season. By fall, just as the rains were getting ready to return, I would warm up the machinery with a short story or two and then embark on the new season’s novel. But 1981 was an unusual year: instead of a novel, my book for the year was Majipoor Chronicles, which is actually a collection of short stories disguised as a novel, and I wrote it in the spring and summer instead of winter. When autumn came, I was out of sequence with my regular writing rhythm, and I decided to keep on doing short stories and get things straightened out later on.)

  And so “Amanda.” It wasn’t the story I had intended to do just then. I had promised one to Ellen Datlow, the new fiction editor of Omni, and what I had in mind was a sequel to “Dancers in the Time-Flux”—another tale of Olivier van Noort in the far future, this time encountering a Parisian woman from the year 1980 who was, like himself, a creature of antiquity, but nevertheless something out of his own future. My long
-range plan was to assemble another story cycle along the lines of Majipoor Chronicles, set in the Son of Man world. But something went wrong and the story died on me after about eight pages. I don’t know why. Unfinished stories are as rare around here as heavy rainfall in July. So far as I can recall, that’s the only story I’ve left unfinished in the past fifty years. I have those eight pages around here somewhere, I think, and maybe I’ll write the rest of the piece some day. Or maybe not: maybe it would be a mistake to try to return to the world of Son of Man, a closed chapter in my past.

  “The thing seems terribly slow and ponderous and wrong,” I told Ellen in a letter of February 20, 1982, “and after a few days of work I called a halt to find out what the trouble was. The trouble was, apparently, that I wanted to do a different sort of story for you, something bouncier and zippier and more contemporary. And before I really knew what was happening, the enclosed lighthearted chiller came galloping out of the typewriter.” Ellen bought it by return mail, and Terry Carr chose it for the 1983 volume of his annual Best SF of the Year anthology series.

  Instead of setting my story in the remote future world of “Dancers in the Time-Flux,” I had put it right here, in the San Francisco Bay Area of just a few years hence. And, though I wrote it in cool rainy February, I picked warm sunny September as the time in which it took place. Perhaps that was why I wrote it with such ease. It had been pouring outside for days, but in my mind our long golden summer had already come. And, with it, the utterly unscrupulous Amanda, an all too familiar California lifeform.

  Ellen Datlow published it in the May, 1983 issue of Omni. Some years later the talented young director Jon Kroll made a very funny television movie out of it, and careful observers will note that in it I made my film debut in a role (non-speaking) that had me on camera for approximately seventeen seconds.

  ——————

  Amanda spotted the alien late Friday afternoon outside the Video Center on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked across.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Amanda said. “Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are.”

  “Bug off,” the alien said.

  “No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center or don’t you?”

  The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, “I don’t know what the crap you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want to help you,” Amanda said. “I think you’re getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw deal? Hey, look, come home with me and I’ll teach you a few things about passing for human. I’ve got the whole friggin’ weekend now with nothing else to do anyway.”

  A flicker of interest came into the other girl’s dark chilly eyes. But it went quickly away and she said, “You some kind of lunatic?”

  “Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars. Let them lock you up again. Let them stick electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. That’s all I can do, is try,” Amanda said, shrugging. She began to saunter away. She didn’t look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some things, like Charley Taylor’s interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure. The whole county was buzzing about it—deadly nonhuman lifeform has escaped from the detention center out by Tracy, might be anywhere, Walnut Creek, Livermore, even San Francisco, dangerous monster, capable of mimicking human forms, will engulf and digest you and disguise itself in your shape, and there it was, Amanda knew, standing outside the Video Center. Amanda kept walking.

  “Wait,” the alien said finally

  Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “How can you tell?”

  Amanda grinned. “Easy. You’ve got a rain slicker on and it’s only September. Rainy season doesn’t start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old spandex kind. People like you don’t wear that stuff any more. Your face paint is San Jose colors, but you’ve got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. That’s just the first three things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else. It’s like you did a survey to see how you ought to appear, and tried a little of everything. The closer I study you, the more I see. Look, you’re wearing your headphones and the battery light is on, but there’s no cassette in the slot. What are you listening to, the music of the spheres? That model doesn’t have any FM tuner, you know. You see? You may think you’re perfectly camouflaged, but you aren’t.”

  “I could destroy yon,” the alien said.

  “What? Oh, sure. Sure you could. Engulf me right here on the street, all over in thirty seconds, little trail of slime by the door and a new Amanda walks away. But what then? What good’s that going to do you? You still won’t know which end is up. So there’s no logic in destroying me, unless you’re a total dummy. I’m on your side. I’m not going to turn you in.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because I’ve been talking to you for five minutes and I haven’t yelled for the cops yet. Don’t you know that half of California is out searching for you? Hey, can you read? Come over here a minute. Here.” Amanda tugged the alien toward the newspaper vending box at the curb. The headline on the afternoon Examiner was:

  BAY AREA ALIEN TERROR

  MARINES TO JOIN NINE-COUNTY HUNT

  MAYOR, GOVERNOR CAUTION AGAINST PANIC

  “You understand that?” Amanda asked. “That’s you they’re talking about. They’re out there with flame guns, tranquilizer darts, web snares, and God knows what else. There’s been real hysteria for a day and a half. And you standing around here with the wrong chevrons on! Christ. Christ! What’s your plan, anyway? Where are you trying to go?”

  “Home,” the alien said. “But first I have to rendezvous at the pickup point.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You think I’m stupid?”

  “Shit,” Amanda said. “If I meant to turn you in, I’d have done it five minutes ago. But okay. I don’t give a damn where your rendezvous point is. I tell you, though, you wouldn’t make it as far as San Francisco rigged up the way you are. It’s a miracle you’ve avoided getting caught until now.”

  “And you’ll help me?”

  “I’ve been trying to. Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ll take you home and fix you up a little. My car’s in the lot on the corner.”

  “Okay.”

  “Whew!”Amanda shook her head slowly. “Christ, some people are awfully hard to help.”

  As she drove out of the center of town, Amanda glanced occasionally at the alien sitting tensely to her right. Basically the disguise was very convincing, Amanda thought. Maybe all the small details were wrong, the outer stuff, the anthropological stuff, but the alien looked human, it sounded human, it even smelled human. Possibly it could fool ninety-nine people out of a hundred, or maybe more than that. But Amanda had always had a good eye for detail. And the particular moment she had spotted the alien on South Main she had been unusually alert, sensitive, all raw nerves, every antenna up. Of course, it wasn’t aliens she was hunting for, but just a diversion, a little excitement, something to fill the great gaping emptiness that Charley Taylor had left in her weekend.

  Amanda had been planning the weekend with Charley all month. Her parents were going to go off to Lake Tahoe for three days, her kid sister had wangled permission to accompany them, and Amanda was going to have the house to herself, just her and Macavity the cat. And Charley. He was going
to move in on Friday afternoon and they’d cook dinner together and get blasted on her stash of choice powder and watch five or six of her parents’ X-rated cassettes, and Saturday they’d drive over to the city and cruise some of the kinky districts and go to that bathhouse on Folsom where everybody got naked and climbed into the giant Jacuzzi, and then on Sunday—Well, none of that was going to happen. Charley had called on Thursday to cancel. “Something big came up,” he said, and Amanda had a pretty good idea what that was, which his hot little cousin from New Orleans who sometimes came flying out here on no notice at all; but the inconsiderate bastard seemed to be entirely unaware of how much Amanda had been looking forward to this weekend, how much it meant to her, how painful it was to be dumped like this. She had run through the planned events of the weekend in her mind so many times that she almost felt as though she had experienced them: it was that real to her. But overnight it had become unreal. Three whole days on her own, the house to herself, and so early in the semester that there was no homework to think about, and Charley had stood her up! What was she supposed to do now, call desperately around town to scrounge up some old lover as a playmate? Or pick up some stranger downtown? Amanda hated to fool around with strangers. She was half tempted to go over to the city and just let things happen, but they were all weirdos and creeps over there, anyway, and she knew what she could expect. What a waste, not having Charley! She could kill him for robbing her of the weekend.

  Now there was the alien, though. A dozen of these star people had come to Earth last year, not in a flying saucer as everybody had expected, but in little capsules that floated like milkweed seeds, and they had landed in a wide arc between San Diego and Salt Lake City. Their natural form, so far as anyone could tell for sure, was something like a huge jellyfish with a row of staring purple eyes down one wavy margin, but their usual tactic was to borrow any local body they found, digesting it and turning themselves into an accurate imitation of it. One of them had made the mistake of turning itself into a brown mountain bear and another into a bobcat—maybe they thought that those were the dominant lifeforms on Earth—but the others had taken on human bodies, at the cost of at least ten lives. Then they went looking to make contact with government leaders, and naturally they were rounded up very swiftly and interned, some in mental hospitals and some in county jails, but eventually—as soon as the truth of what they really were sank in—they were all put in a special detention camp in Northern California. Of course, a tremendous fuss was made over them, endless stuff in the papers and on the tube, speculation by this heavy thinker and that about the significance of their mission, the nature of their biochemistry, a little wild talk about the possibility that more of their kind might be waiting undetected out there and plotting to do God knows what, and all sorts of that stuff, and then came a government clamp on the entire subject, no official announcements except that “discussions” with the visitors were continuing; and after a while the whole thing degenerated into dumb alien jokes (“Why did the alien cross the road?”) and Halloween invader masks, and then it moved into the background of everyone’s attention and was forgotten. And remained forgotten until the announcement that one of the creatures had slipped out of the camp somehow and was loose within a hundred-mile zone around San Francisco. Preoccupied as she was with her anguish over Charley’s heartlessness, even Amanda had managed to pick up that news item. And now the alien was in her very car. So there’d be some weekend amusement for her after all. Amanda was entirely unafraid of the alleged deadliness of the star being: whatever else the alien might be, it was surely no dope, not if it had been picked to come halfway across the galaxy on a mission like this, and Amanda knew that the alien could see that harming her was not going to be in its own best interests. The alien had need of her, and the alien realized that. And Amanda, in some way that she was only just beginning to work out, had need of the alien.