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

by Robert Silverberg

  No, she thought. Not even Charley would be so tacky as to bring his date over to Amanda’s house tonight. And Charley never watched the news or read a paper. He wouldn’t have a clue as to what Connie really was until it was too late for him to run.

  Seven o’clock. Time to head for home.

  The sun was sinking behind her as she turned onto the freeway. By quarter past she was approaching her house. Charley’s old red Honda was parked outside. Amanda left hers across the street and cautiously let herself in, pausing just inside the front door to listen.

  Silence.

  “Connie?”

  “In here,” said Charley’s voice.

  Amanda entered the living room. Charley was sprawled out comfortably on the couch. There was no sign of Connie.

  “Well?” Amanda said. “How did it go?”

  “Easiest thing in the world,” the alien said. “He was sliding his hands under my T-shirt when I let him have the nullifier jolt.”

  “Ah. The nullifier jolt.”

  “And then I completed the engulfment and cleaned up the carpet. God, it feels good not to be hungry again. You can’t imagine how tough it was to resist engulfing you, Amanda. For the past hour I kept thinking of food, food, food—”

  “Very thoughtful of you to resist.”

  “I knew you were out to help me. It’s logical not to engulf one’s allies.”

  “That goes without saying. So you feel well fed, now? He was good stuff?”

  “Robust, healthy, nourishing—yes.”

  “I’m glad Charley turned out to be good for something. How long before you get hungry again?”

  The alien shrugged. “A day or two. Maybe three, on account of he was so big. Give me more oregano, Amanda?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Sure.” She felt a little let down. Not that she was remorseful about Charley, exactly, but it all seemed so casual, so offhanded—there was something anticlimactic about it, in a way. She suspected she should have stayed and watched while it was happening. Too late for that now, though.

  She took the oregano from her purse and dangled the jar teasingly. “Here it is, babe. But you’ve got to earn it first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I was looking forward to a big weekend with Charley, and the weekend is here, and Charley’s here too, more or less, and I’m ready for fun. Come show me some fun, big boy.”

  She slipped Charley’s Hendrix cassette into the deck and turned the volume way up.

  The alien looked puzzled. Amanda began to peel off her clothes.

  “You too,” Amanda said. “Come on. You won’t have to dig deep into Charley’s mind to figure out what to do. You’re going to be my Charley for me this weekend, you follow? You and I are going to do all the things that he and I were going to do. Okay? Come on. Come on.” She beckoned. The alien shrugged again and slipped out of Charley’s clothes, fumbling with the unfamiliarities of his zipper and buttons. Amanda, grinning, drew the alien close against her and down to the livingroom floor. She took its hands and put them where she wanted them to be. She whispered instructions. The alien, docile, obedient, did what she wanted.

  It felt like Charley. It smelled like Charley. It even moved pretty much the way Charley moved.

  But it wasn’t Charley, it wasn’t Charley at all, and after the first few seconds Amanda knew that she had goofed things up very badly. You couldn’t just ring in an imitation like this. Making love with this alien was like making love with a very clever machine, or with her own mirror image. It was empty and meaningless and dumb.

  Grimly she went on to the finish. They rolled apart, panting, sweating.

  “Well?” the alien said. “Did the earth move for you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. It was wonderful—Charley.”

  “Oregano?”

  “Sure,” Amanda said. She handed the spice jar across. “I always keep my promises, babe. Go to it. Have yourself a blast. Just remember that that’s strong stuff for guys from your planet, okay? If you pass out, I’m going to leave you right there on the floor.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Okay. You have your fun. I’m going to clean up, and then maybe we’ll go over to San Francisco for the nightlife. Does that interest you?”

  “You bet, Amanda.” The alien winked—one eye, then the other—and gulped a huge pinch of oregano. “That sounds terrific.”

  Amanda gathered up her clothes, went upstairs for a quick shower, and dressed. When she came down the alien was more than half blown away on the oregano, goggle-eyed, loll-headed, propped up against the couch and crooning to itself in a weird atonal way. Fine, Amanda thought. You just get yourself all spiced up, love. She took the portable phone from the kitchen, carried it with her into the bathroom, locked the door, dialed the police emergency number.

  She was bored with the alien. The game had worn thin very quickly. And it was crazy, she thought, to spend the whole weekend cooped up with a dangerous extraterrestrial creature when there wasn’t going to be any fun in it for her. She knew now that there couldn’t be any fun at all. And in a day or two the alien was going to get hungry again.

  “I’ve got your alien,” she said. “Sitting in my living room, stoned out of its head on oregano. Yes, I’m absolutely certain. It was disguised as a Chicana girl first, Concepcion Flores, but then it attacked my boyfriend Charley Taylor, and—yes, yes, I’m safe. I’m locked in the john. Just get somebody over here fast—okay, I’ll stay on the line—what happened was, I spotted it downtown, it insisted on coming home with me—”

  The actual capture took only a few minutes. But there was no peace for hours after the police tactical squad hauled the alien away, because the media was in on the act right away, first a team from Channel 2 in Oakland, and then some of the network guys, and then the Chronicle, and finally a whole army of reporters from as far away as Sacramento, and phone calls from Los Angeles and San Diego and—about three that morning—New York. Amanda told the story again and again until she was sick of it, and just as dawn was breaking she threw the last of them out and barred the door.

  She wasn’t sleepy at all. She felt wired up, speedy, and depressed all at once. The alien was gone, Charley was gone, and she was all alone. She was going to be famous for the next couple of days, but that wouldn’t help. She’d still be alone. For a time she wandered around the house, looking at it the way an alien might, as though she had never seen a stereo cassette before, or a television set, or a rack of spices. The smell of oregano was everywhere. There were little trails of it on the floor.

  Amanda switched on the radio and there she was on the six a.m. news. “—the emergency is over, thanks to the courageous Walnut Creek high school girl who trapped and outsmarted the most dangerous lifeform in the known universe—”

  She shook her head. “You think that’s true?” she asked the cat. “Most dangerous lifeform in the universe? I don’t think so, Macavity. I think I know of at least one that’s a lot deadlier. Eh, kid?” She winked. “If they only knew, eh? If they only knew.” She scooped the cat up and hugged it, and it began to purr. Maybe trying to get a little sleep would be a good idea around this time, she told herself. And then she had to figure out what she was going to do about the rest of the weekend.

  Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake

  We are still in the busy winter of 1982—still in rainy February, in fact. I have just finished “Amanda and the Alien,” and the creative urge is still buzzing in me. In my revived career as a short-story writer, Omni and Playboy have become my two primary markets. Neither one can handle more than one or two stories a year from me; “Amanda” has just found a home at Omni, so it’s time for me to begin thinking about something for Playboy.

  As it turned out, the fiction editor of Playboy had the same thought in mind. I mean the redoubtable Alice K. Turner, of course, with whom I had struck up an instant editorial rapport of the most remarkable kind while we were butting heads over revisions to my first Playboy stor
y, “Gianni,” early in 1981. Now, a year later, Alice found herself with two illustrations on hand and no stories to go with them. She phoned me: Would I consider looking at the paintings in the hope one of them would inspire a story? I laughed. In the bad old days of penny-a-word pulp magazines, many editors had routinely bought cover paintings first and then asked writers to concoct stories to go with them. I had done my share of those arsy-versy projects back then, but it was close to twenty years since I had last written a story around an illustration. I told Alice it would be fun to try again, both for nostalgia’s sake and for the challenge it represented.

  She sent me photostats of two paintings. One showed a naked lady—a very satisfactory one, as I recall, but she wasn’t engaged in doing anything that sparked a story idea. The other, a lovely work by Brad Holland, depicted a man of about 35 releasing a snake at least fifteen feet long from a beautiful ceramic jug against a sleek featureless background of hills and meadows. I liked it very much. But why was that suburban-looking guy pouring a snake out of a jug?

  The old craftsman’s rule about writing stories around illustrations is that only a dolt tries to use the picture in any literal way. The idea always is to take it as metaphor, as analogy, as something other than what it purports to be. With the usual inexplicable swiftness of the old pro I saw that snake-as-telepathic-image was more likely to generate an interesting science-fiction story than snake-as-snake, and off I went. By the end of the month I had my story.

  Alice was no easy editor to deal with. She came back at me a couple of weeks later with requests for cuts in the middle of the story, some retuning of the dialog, and a restructuring of my pattern of snake/ocean symbolism. As usual, I put up a fight over some things (mainly the dialog changes), made some of the cuts she wanted, and beefed up one erotic passage, not because Playboy necessarily insisted that its stories contain a lot of sexy stuff but because she thought the story lacked vigor just where it needed it most and I agreed. She yielded where I could defend my choices and I yielded where her criticisms seemed apt, which was most of the time. Her ideas about the symbolic substructure, for example, were right on target and I rearranged things slightly and sent her an insert to use midway through the story. Thus “Snake and Ocean” went through what by now had become the familiar knock-down-drag-out dialectic process by which Alice and I got most of my stories for her into final shape, and it duly appeared in the June 1984 issue of Playboy.

  Alice had one last revision up her sleeve. When she printed the story she changed the title to “The Affair.” She was a terrific editor, but she wasn’t infallible. Whenever I’ve used the story in a collection of mine, I’ve kept all the textual changes she proposed, but I’ve reverted to my original title. You be the judge.

  ——————

  He found her by accident, the way it usually happens, after he had more or less given up searching. For years he had been sending out impulses like messages in bottles, random waves of telepathic energy, Hello, hello, hello, one forlorn SOS after another from the desert isle of the soul on which he was a castaway. Occasionally messages came back, but all they amounted to was lunacy, strident nonsense, static, spiritual noise, gabble up and down the mind band. There were, he knew, a good many like him out there—a boy in Topeka, an old woman in Buenos Aires, another one in Fort Lauderdale, someone of indeterminate sex in Manitoba, and plenty of others, each alone, each lonely. He fell into short-lived contact with them, because they were, after all, people of his special kind. But they tended to be cranky, warped, weird, often simply crazy, all of them deformed by their bizarre gift, and they could not give him what he wanted, which was communion, harmony, the marriage of true minds. Then one Thursday afternoon when he was absentmindedly broadcasting his identity wave, not in any way purposefully trolling the seas of perception but only humming, so to speak, he felt a sudden startling click, as of perfectly machined parts locking into place. Out of the grayness in his mind an unmistakably warm, eager image blossomed, a dazzling giant yellow flower unfolding on the limb of a gnarled spiny cactus, and the image translated itself instantly into Hi there. Where’ve you been all my life?

  He hesitated to send an answering signal, because he knew that he had found what he was looking for and he was aware how much of a threat that was to the fabric of the life he had constructed for himself. He was thirty-seven years old, stable, settled. He had a wife who tried her best to be wonderful for him, never knowing quite what it was that she lacked but seeking to compensate for it anyway, and two small pleasing children who had not inherited his abnormality, and a comfortable house in the hills east of San Francisco, and a comfortable job as an analyst for one of the big brokerage houses. It was not the life he had imagined in his old romantic fantasies, but it was not a bad life, either, and it was his life, familiar and in its way rewarding; and he knew he was about to rip an irreparable hole in it. So he hesitated. And then he transmitted an image as vivid as the one he had received: a solitary white gull soaring in enormous sweeps over the broad blue breast of the Pacific.

  The reply came at once: the same gull, joined by a second one that swooped out of a cloudless sky and flew tirelessly at its side. He knew that if he responded to that, there could be no turning back, but that was all right. With uncharacteristic recklessness he switched to the verbal mode.

  —Okay. Who are you?

  —Laurel Hammett. I’m in Phoenix. I read you clearly. This is better than telephone.

  —Cheaper, too. Chris Maitland. San Francisco.

  —That’s far enough away, I guess.

  He didn’t understand, then, what she meant by that. But he let the point pass.

  —You’re the first one I’ve found who sends images, Laurel.

  —I found one once, eight years ago, in Boston. But he was crazy. Most of us are crazy, Chris.

  —I’m not crazy.

  —Oh, I know! Oh, God, I know!

  So that was the beginning. He got very little work done that afternoon. He was supposed to be preparing a report on oil royalty trusts, and after fifteen minutes of zinging interchanges with her he actually did beg off; she broke contact with a dazzling series of visuals, many of them cryptic, snowflakes and geometrical diagrams and fields of blazing red poppies. Depletion percentages and windfall-profits tax recapture were impossible to deal with while those brilliant pictures burned in his mind. Although he had promised not to reach toward her again until tomorrow—judicious self-denial, she observed, is the fuel of love—he finally did send out a flicker of abashed energy, and drew from her a mingling of irritation and delight. For five minutes they told each other it was best to go slow, to let it develop gradually, and again they vowed to keep mental silence until the next day. But when he was crossing the Bay Bridge a couple of hours later, heading for home, she tickled him suddenly with a quick flash of her presence and gave him a wondrous view of the Arizona sunset, harsh chocolate-brown hills under a purple-and-gold sky. That evening he felt shamefully and transparently adulterous, as if he had come home flushed and rumpled, with lipstick on his shirt. He pretended to be edgy and wearied by some fictitious episode of office politics, and helped himself to two drinks before dinner, and was more than usually curious about the details of his wife’s day, the little suburban crises, the small challenges, the tiny triumphs. Jan was playful, amiable, almost kittenish. That told him she had not seen through him to the betrayal within, however blatant it seemed to him. She was no actress; there was nothing devious about her.

  The transformation of their marriage that had taken place that afternoon saddened him, and yet not deeply, because it was an inevitable one. He and Jan were not really of the same species. He had loved her as well and honestly as was possible for him, but what he had really wanted was someone of his kind, with whom he could join mind and soul as well as body, and it was only because he had not been able to find her that he had settled for Jan. And now he had found her. Where that would lead, and what it meant for Jan and him, he had no idea yet. Poss
ibly he would be able to go on sharing with her the part of his life that they were able to share, while secretly he got from the other woman those things that Jan had never been able to give him: possibly. When they went to bed he turned to her with abrupt passionate ferocity, as he had not for a long time, but even so he could not help wondering what Laurel was doing now, in her bed a thousand miles to the east, and with whom.

  During the morning commute Laurel came to him with stunning images of desert landscapes, eroded geological strata, mysterious dark mesas, distant flame-colored sandstone walls. He sent her Pacific surf, cypresses bending to the wind, tidepools swarming with anemones and red starfish. Then, timidly, he sent her a kiss, and had one from her in return, and then, as he was crossing the toll plaza of the bridge, she shifted to words.