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

by Robert Silverberg

  He goes to his terminal and calls up two final angels before bedtime: Leviathan and Behemoth. Behemoth is the great hippopotamus-angel, the vast beast of darkness, the angel of chaos. Leviathan is his mate, the mighty she-whale, the splendid sea serpent. They dance for him on the screen: Behemoth’s huge mouth yawns wide. Leviathan gapes even more awesomely. “We are getting hungry,” they tell him. “When is feeding time?” In rabbinical lore, these two will swallow all the damned souls at the end of days. Cunningham tosses them some electronic sardines and sends them away. As he closes his eyes he invokes Poteh, the angel of oblivion, and falls into a black dreamless sleep.

  At his desk the next morning he is at work on a standard item, a glitch-clearing program for the third-quadrant surveillance satellites, when he finds himself unaccountably trembling. That has never happened to him before. His fingernails look almost white, his wrists are rigid, his hands are quivering. He feels chilled. It is as though he has not slept for days. In the washroom he clings to the sink and stares at his pallid, sweaty face. Someone comes up behind him and says, “You all right, Dan?”

  “Yeah. Just a little attack of the queasies.”

  “All that wild living in the middle of the week wears a man down,” the other says, and moves along. The social necessities have been observed: a question, a noncommittal answer, a quip, goodbye. He could have been having a stroke here and they would have played it the same way. Cunningham has no close friends at the office. He knows that they regard him as eccentric—eccentric in the wrong way, not lively and quirky but just a peculiar kind of hermit—and getting worse all the time. I could destroy the world, he thinks. I could go into the Big Room and type for fifteen seconds, and we’d be on all-out alert a minute later and the bombs would be coming down from orbit six minutes later. I could give that signal. I could really do it. I could do it right now.

  Waves of nausea sweep him and he grips the edge of the sink until the last racking spasm is over. Then he cleans his face and, calmer now, returns to his desk to stare at the little green symbols on the screen.

  That evening, still trying to find a function for Basileus, Cunningham discovers himself thinking of demons, and of one demon not in the classical demonology—Maxwell’s Demon, the one that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell postulated to send fast-moving molecules in one direction and slow ones in another, thereby providing an ultraefficient method for heating and refrigeration. Perhaps some sort of filtering role could be devised for Basileus. Last week a few of the loftier angels had been complaining about the proximity to them of certain fallen angels within the computer. “There’s a smell of brimstone on this disk that I don’t like,” Gabriel had said. Cunningham wonders if he could make Basileus a kind of traffic manager within the program: let him sit in there and ship the celestial angels into one sector of a disk, the fallen ones to another.

  The idea appeals to him for about thirty seconds. Then he sees how fundamentally trivial it is. He doesn’t need an angel for a job like that; a little simple software could do it. Cunningham’s corollary to Kant’s categorical imperative: Never use an angel as mere software. He smiles, possibly for the first time all week. Why, he doesn’t even need software. He can handle it himself, simply by assigning princes of Heaven to one file and demons to a different one. It hadn’t seemed necessary to segregate his angels that way, or he would have done it from the start. But if they were complaining—

  He begins to flange up a sorting program to separate the files. It should have taken him a few minutes, but he finds himself working in a rambling, muddled way, doing an untypically sloppy job. With it quick swipe he erases what he has done. Gabriel would have to put up with the reek of brimstone a little longer, he thinks.

  There is a dull throbbing pain just behind his eyes. His throat is dry, his lips feel parched. Basileus would have to wait a little longer, too. Cunningham keys up another angel, allowing his fingers to choose for him, and finds himself looking at a blank-faced angel with a gleaming metal skin. One of the early ones, Cunningham realizes. “I don’t remember your name,” he says. “Who are you?”

  “I am Anaphaxeton.”

  “And your function?”

  “When my name is pronounced aloud, I will cause the angels to summon the entire universe before the bar of justice on Judgment Day.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Cunningham says. “I don’t want you tonight.”

  He sends Anaphaxeton away and finds himself with the dark angel Apollyon, fish scales, dragon wings, bear feet, breathing fire and smoke, holding the key to the Abyss. “No,” Cunningham says, and brings up Michael, standing with drawn sword over Jerusalem, and sends him away only to find on the screen an angel with 70,000 feet and 4,000 wings, who is Azrael, the angel of death. “No,” says Cunningham again. “Not you. Oh, Christ!” A vengeful army crowds his computer. On his screen there passes a flurrying regiment of wings and eyes and beaks. He shivers and shuts the system down for the night. Jesus, he thinks. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. All night long suns explode in his brain.

  On Friday his supervisor, Ned Harris, saunters to his desk in an unusually folksy way and asks him if he’s going to be doing anything interesting this weekend. Cunningham shrugs. “A party Saturday night, that’s about all. Why?”

  “Thought you might be going off on a fishing trip or something. Look like the last nice weekend before the rainy season sets in, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’m not a fisherman, Ned.”

  “Take some kind of trip. Drive down to Monterey, maybe. Or up into the wine country.”

  “What are you getting at?” Cunningham asks.

  ‘You look like you could use a little change of pace,” Harris says amiably. “A couple of days off. You’ve been crunching numbers so hard they’re starting to crunch you, is my guess.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  Harris nods. “You’re tired, Dan. It shows. We’re a little like air traffic controllers around here, you know, working so hard we start to dream about blips on the screen. That’s no good. Get the hell out of town, fellow. The Defense Department can operate without you for a while. Okay? Take Monday off. Tuesday, even. I can’t afford to have a fine mind like yours going goofy from fatigue, Dan.”

  “All right, Ned. Sure. Thanks.”

  His hands are shaking again. His fingernails are colorless.

  “And get a good early start on the weekend, too. No need for you to hang around here today until four.”

  “If that’s okay—”

  “Go on. Shoo!”

  Cunningham closes down his desk and makes his way uncertainly out of the building. The security guards wave at him. Everyone seems to know he’s being sent home early. Is this what it’s like to crack up on the job? He wanders about the parking lot for a little while, not sure where he has left his car. At last he finds it, and drives home at thirty miles an hour, with horns honking at him all the way as he wanders up the freeway.

  He settles wearily in front of his computer and brings the system on line, calling for Harahel. Surely the angel of computers will not plague him with apocalyptic matters.

  Harahel says, “Well, we’ve worked out your Basileus problem for you.”

  “You have?”

  “Uriel had the basic idea, building on your Maxwell’s Demon notion. Israfel and Azrael developed it some. What’s needed is an angel embodying God’s justice and God’s mercy. A kind of evaluator, a filtering angel. He weighs deeds in the balance, and arrives at a verdict.”

  “What’s new about that?” Cunningham asks. “Something like that’s built into every mythology from Sumer and Egypt on. There’s always a mechanism for evaluating the souls of the dead—this one goes to Paradise, this one goes to Hell—”

  “Wait,” Harahel says. “I wasn’t finished. I’m not talking about the evaluation of individual souls.”

  “What, then?”

  “Worlds,” the angel replies. “Basileus will be the judge of worlds. He holds an entire planet up to scrutiny and
decides whether it’s time to call for the last trump.”

  “Part of the machinery of Judgment, you mean?”

  “Exactly. He’s the one who presents the evidence to God and helps Him make his decision. And then he’s the one who tells Israfel to blow the trumpet, and he’s the one who calls out the name of Anaphaxeton to bring everyone before the bar. He’s the prime apocalyptic angel, the destroyer of worlds. And we thought you might make him look like—”

  “Ah,” Cunningham says. “Not now. Let’s talk about that some other time.”

  He shuts the system down, pours himself a drink, sits staring out the window at the big eucalyptus tree in the front yard. After a while it begins to rain. Not such a good weekend for a drive into the country after all, he thinks. He does not turn the computer on again that evening.

  Despite everything, Cunningham goes to the party. Joanna is not there. She has phoned to cancel, late Saturday afternoon, pleading a bad cold. He detects no sound of a cold in her voice, but perhaps she is telling the truth. Or possibly she has found something better to do on Saturday night. But he is already geared for party-going, and he is so tired, so eroded, that it is more effort to change his internal program than it is to follow through on the original schedule. So about eight that evening he drives up to San Mateo, through a light drizzle.

  The party turns out not to be in the glamorous hills west of town, but in a small cramped condominium close to the heart of the city, furnished with what looks like somebody’s college-era chairs and couches and bookshelves. A cheap stereo is playing the pop music of a dozen years ago, and a sputtering screen provides a crude computer-generated light show. The host is some sort of marketing exec for a large video-games company in San Jose, and most of the guests look vaguely corporate too. The futurologist from New York has sent his regrets; the famous sociobiologist has also somehow failed to arrive; the video poets are two San Francisco gays who will talk only to each other, and stray not very far from the bar; the expert on teaching chimpanzees to speak is in the red-faced-and-sweaty stage of being drunk, and is working hard at seducing a plump woman festooned with astrological jewelry. Cunningham, numb, drifts through the party as though he is made of ectoplasm. He speaks to no one, no one speaks to him. Some jugs of red wine are open on a table by the window, and he pours himself a glassful. There he stands, immobile, imprisoned by inertia. He imagines himself suddenly making a speech about angels, telling everyone how Ithuriel touched Satan with his spear in the Garden of Eden as the Fiend crouched next to Eve, and how the hierarch Ataphiel keeps Heaven aloft by balancing it on three fingers. But he says nothing. After a time he finds himself approached by a lean, leathery-looking woman with glittering eyes, who says, “And what do you do?”

  “I’m a programmer,” Cunningham says. “Mainly I talk to angels. But I also do national security stuff.”

  “Angels?” she says, and laughs in a brittle, tinkling way. “You talk to angels? I’ve never heard anyone say that before.” She purrs herself a drink and moves quickly elsewhere.

  “Angels?” says the astrological woman. “Did someone say angels?”

  Cunningham smiles and shrugs and looks out the window. It is raining harder. I should go home, he thinks. There is absolutely no point in being here. He fills his glass again. The chimpanzee man is still working on the astrologer, but she seems to be trying to get free of him and come over to Cunningham. To discuss angels with him? She is heavy-breasted, a little wall-eyed, sloppy-looking. He does not want to discuss angels with her. He does not want to discuss angels with anyone. He holds his place at the window until it definitely does appear that the astrologer is heading his way; then he drifts toward the door. She says, “I heard you say you were interested in angels. Angels are a special field of mine, you know. I’ve studied with—”

  “Angles,” Cunningham says. “I play the angles. That’s what I said. I’m a professional gambler.”

  “Wait,” she says, but he moves past her and out into the night. It takes him a long while to find his key and get his car unlocked, and the rain soaks him to the skin, but that does not bother him. He is home a little before midnight.

  He brings Raphael on line. The great archangel radiates a beautiful golden glow.

  “You will be Basileus,” Raphael tells him. “We’ve decided it by a vote, hierarchy by hierarchy. Everyone agrees.”

  “I can’t be an angel. I’m human,” Cunningham replies.

  “There’s ample precedent. Enoch was carried off to Heaven and became an angel. So was Elijah. St. John the Baptist was actually an angel. You will become Basileus. We’ve already done the program for you. It’s on the disk: just call him up and you’ll see. Your own face, looking out at you.”

  “No,” Cunningham says.

  “How can you refuse?”

  “Are you really Raphael? You sound like someone from the other side. A tempter. Asmodeus. Astaroth. Belphegor.”

  “I am Raphael. And you are Basileus.”

  Cunningham considers it. He is so very tired that he can barely think.

  An angel. Why not? A rainy Saturday night, a lousy party, a splitting headache: come home and find out you’ve been made an angel, and given a high place in the hierarchy. Why not? Why the hell not?

  “All right,” he says. “I’m Basileus.”

  He puts his hands on the keys and taps out a simple formulation that goes straight down the pipe into the Defense Department’s big Northern California system. With an alteration of two keystrokes he sends the same message to the Soviets. Why not? Redundancy is the soul of security. The world now has about six minutes left. Cunningham has always been good with computers. He knows their secret language as few people before him have.

  Then he brings Raphael on the screen again.

  “You should see yourself as Basileus while there’s still time,” the archangel says.

  “Yes. Of course. What’s the access key?”

  Raphael tells him. Cunningham begins to set it up.

  Come now, Basileus! We are one!

  Cunningham stares at the screen with growing wonder and delight, while the clock continues to tick.

  Homefaring

  I had always had a sneaking desire to write the definitive giant-lobster story. Earlier science-fiction writers had preempted most of the other appealing monstrosities—including giant aunts (sic!), dealt with by Isaac Asimov in his classic story “Dreamworld,” which I have just ruined forever for you by giving away its punchline. But giant lobsters remained fair game. And when George Scithers, the new editor of the venerable science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories, asked me in the autumn of 1982 to do a lengthy story for him, I decided that it was time at last for me to give lobsters their due.

  The obvious giant-lobster story, in which horrendous pincer-wielding monsters twenty feet long come ashore at Malibu and set about the conquest of Los Angeles by terrorizing the surfers, might work well enough in a cheap Hollywood sci-fi epic, but it wouldn’t have stood much chance of delighting a sophisticated science-fiction reader like Scithers. Nor did it have a lot of appeal for me as a writer. Therefore, following the advice of the brilliant, cantankerous editor Horace Gold, one of my early mentors, I searched for my story idea by turning the obvious upside down. Lobsters are pretty nasty things, after all. They’re tough, surly, dangerous, and ugly—surely the ugliest food objects ever to be prized by mankind. A creature so disagreeable in so many ways must have some redeeming feature. (Other than the flavor of its meat, that is.) And so, instead of depicting them as the savage and hideous-looking critters they really are, what about putting them through a few hundred million years of evolution and turning them into wise and thoughtful civilized beings—the dominant lifeform, in fact, of a vastly altered Earth?

  A challenging task, yes. And made even more challenging for me, back there in the otherwise sunny and pleasant November of 1982, by the fact that I had just made the great leap from computer to typewriter, as I’ve described in the introduction to th
e story immediately preceding this one. “Homefaring” marked my initiation into the world of floppy disks and soft hyphens, of backup copies and automatic pagination. It’s all second nature to me now, of course, but in 1982 I found myself timidly stumbling around in a brave and very strange new world. Each day’s work was an adventure in terror for me. My words appeared in white letters on a black screen, frighteningly impermanent: one electronic sneeze, I thought, and a whole day’s brilliant prose could vanish like a time traveler who has just defenestrated his own grandfather. The mere making of backups didn’t lull my fears: how could I be sure that the act of backing up itself wouldn’t erase what I had just written? Pushing the button marked “Save”—did that really save anything? Switching the computer off at the end of my working day was like a leap into the abyss. Would the story be there the next morning when I turned the machine on again? Warily, I printed out each day’s work when it was done, before backing up, saving, or otherwise jiggling with it electronically. I wanted to see it safely onto paper first.

  Sometimes when I put a particularly difficult scene together—for example, the three-page scene at the midpoint of the story, beginning with the line, “The lobsters were singing as they marched”—I would stop right then and there and print it out before proceeding, aware that if the computer somehow were to destroy it I would never be able to reconstruct it at that level of accomplishment. (It’s an axiom among writers that material written to replace inadvertently destroyed copy can’t possibly equal the lost passage—which gets better and better in one’s memory all the time.)

  Somehow, in fear and trembling, I tiptoed my way through the entire 88-page manuscript of “Homefaring” without any major disasters. The computer made it marvelously easy to revise the story as I went along; instead of typing out an 88-page first draft, then covering it with handwritten alterations and grimly typing the whole thing out again to make it fit to show an editor, I brought every paragraph up to final-draft status with painless little maneuvers of the cursor. When I realized that I had chosen a confusing name for a minor character, I ordered the computer to correct my error, and sat back in wonder as “Eitel” became “Bleier” throughout the story without my having to do a thing. And then at the end came the wondrous moment when I pushed the button marked “Print”—computers had such buttons, in those pre-Microsoft days—and page after page of immaculate typed copy began to come forth while I occupied myself with other and less dreary tasks.