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

by Robert Silverberg

  Toward evening he drew from his locker a dinner that he had been saving for some special occasion, Madagozar oysters and filet of vandaleur and newly ripened peeperpods. There were two bottles of golden-red Palinurus wine left: he opened one of them. He drank and ate until he started to nod off at the table; then he lurched to his cradle, programmed himself for ten hours sleep, about twice what he normally needed at his age, and closed his eyes.

  When he woke, it was well along into Dimday morning, with the double sun not yet visible but already throwing pink light across the crest of the eastern hills. Morrissey, skipping breakfast altogether, went into town and ransacked the commissary. He filled a freezercase with provisions enough to last him for three months, since he had no idea what to expect by way of supplies elsewhere on Medea. At the landing strip where commuters from Enrique and Pellucidar once had parked their flitters after flying in for the weekend, he checked out his own, an ’83 model with sharply raked lines and a sophisticated moire-pattern skin, now somewhat pitted and rusted from neglect. The powerpak still indicated a full charge—ninety-year half-life; he wasn’t surprised—but just to be on the safe side, he borrowed an auxiliary pak from an adjoining flitter and keyed it in as a reserve. He hadn’t flown in years, but that didn’t worry him much: the flitter responded to voice-actuated commands, and Morrissey doubted that he’d have to do any manual overriding.

  Everything was ready by midafternoon, he slipped into the pilot’s seat and told the flitter, “Give me a systems checkout for extended flight.”

  Lights went on and off on the control panels. It was an impressive display of technological choreography, although Morrissey had forgotten what the displays signified. He called for verbal confirmation, and the flitter told him in a no-nonsense contralto that it was ready for takeoff.

  “Your course,” Morrissey said, “is due west for fifty kilometers at an altitude of five hundred meters, then north-northeast as far as Jane’s Town, east to Hawkman Farms, and southwest back to Argoview Dunes. Then, without landing, head due north by the shortest route to Port Kato. Got it?”

  Morrissey waited for takeoff. Nothing happened.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Awaiting tower clearance,” the flitter responded.

  “Consider all clearance programs revoked.”

  Still nothing happened. Morrissey wondered how to key in a program override. But the flitter evidently could find no reason to call Morrissey’s bluff, and after a moment takeoff lights glowed all over the cabin, and a low humming came from aft. Smoothly the little vehicle retracted its windjacks, gliding into flight position, and spun upward into the moist, heavy, turbulent air.

  Morrissey had chosen to begin his journey with a ceremonial circumnavigation of the immediate area, ostensibly to be sure that his flitter still could fly after all these years, but he suspected also that he wanted to show himself aloft to the fuxes of the district, to let them know that at least one human vehicle still traversed the skies. The flitter seemed all right. Within minutes he was at the beach, flying directly over his own cabin—it was the only one whose garden had not been overrun by jungle scrub—and then out over the dark, tide-driven ocean. Up north then to the big port of Jane’s Town, where tourist cruisers lay rusting in the crescent harbor, and inland a little way to a derelict farming settlement, where the tops of mighty gattabangus trees, heavily laden with succulent scarlet fruit, were barely visible above swarming stranglervines. And then back, over sandy, scrubby hills, to the Dunes. Everything below was desolate and dismal. He saw a good many fuxes, long columns of them in some places, mainly six-legged females and some four-legged ones, with males leading the way. Oddly, they all seemed to be marching inland, toward the dry Hotlands, as if some sort of migration were under way. Perhaps so. To a fux the interior was holier than the coast, and the holiest place of all was the great jagged central peak that the colonists called Mount Olympus, directly under Argo, where the air was hot enough to make water boil and where only the most specialized of living creatures could survive. Fuxes would die in that blazing, terrible highland desert almost as quickly as humans, but maybe, Morrissey thought, they wanted to get as close as possible to the holy mountain as the time of the earthquake approached. The coming round of the earthquake cycle was the central event of fux cosmology, after all: a millennial time, a time of wonders.

  He counted fifty separate bands of migrating fuxes. He wondered whether his friend Dinoov was among them. Suddenly he realized how strong was his need to find Dinoov waiting at Argoview Dunes when he returned from his journey around Medea.

  The circuit of the district took less than an hour. When the Dunes came in view again, the flitter performed a dainty pirouette over the town and shot off northward along the coast.

  The route Morrissey had in mind would take him up the west coast as far as Arca, across the Hotlands to Northcape, and down the other coast to tropical Madagozar before crossing back to the Dunes. Thus he would neatly touch base wherever mankind might have left an imprint on Medea.

  Medea was divided into two huge hemispheres separated by the watery girdle of the Ring Ocean. But Farside was a glaciated wasteland that never left Argo’s warmth, and no permanent settlements had ever been founded there, only research camps, and in the last four hundred years very few of those. The original purpose of the Medea colony had been scientific study, the painstaking exploration of a wholly alien environment. But of course, as time goes on, original purposes have a way of being forgotten. Even on the warm continent human occupation had been limited to twin arcs along the coasts from the tropics through the high temperate latitudes and timid incursions a few hundred kilometers inland. The high desert was uninhabitable, and few humans found the bordering Hotlands hospitable, although the balloons and even some tribes of fuxes seemed to like the climate there. The only other places where humans had planted themselves was the Ring Ocean itself, where some floating raft cities had been constructed in the kelp-choked equatorial water. But during the ten centuries of Medea the widely scattered human enclaves had sent out amoeboid extensions until they were nearly continuous for thousands of kilometers.

  Now, Morrissey saw that now the iron band of urban sprawl was cut again and again by intrusions of dense underbrush. Great patches of orange and yellow foliage already had begun to smother highways, airports, commercial plazas, residential suburbs.

  What the jungle had begun, he thought, the earthquake would finish.

  On the third day Morrissey saw Hansonia Island ahead of him, a dark orange slash against the breast of the sea, and soon the flitter was making its approach to the airstrip at Port Kato on the big island’s eastern shore. Morrissey tried to make radio contact but got only static and silence. He decided to land anyway.

  Hansonia had never had much of a human population. It had been set aside from the beginning as an ecological study laboratory, because its population of strange life forms had developed in isolation from the mainland for thousands of years, and somehow it had kept its special status even in Medea’s boom years.

  A few groundcars were parked at the airstrip. Morrissey found one that still held a charge, and ten minutes later he was in Port Kato.

  The place stank of red mildew. The buildings, wicker huts with thatched roofs, were falling apart. Angular trees of a species Morrissey did not recognize sprouted everywhere, in the streets, on rooftops, in the crowns of other trees. A cool, hard-edged wind was blowing out of Farside. Two fuxes, four-legged females herding some young six-leggers, wandered out of a tumbledown warehouse and stared at him in what surely was astonishment. Their pelts were so blue they seemed black—the island species, different from mainlanders.

  “You come back?” one asked. Local accent, too.

  “Just for a visit. Are there any humans here?”

  “You,” said the other fux. He thought they laughed at him amusing. “Ground shake soon. You know?”

  “I know,” he said.

  They nuzzled their young and wan
dered away.

  For three hours Morrissey explored Port Kato, holding himself aloof from emotion, not letting the decay get to him. It looked as if the place had been abandoned for at least fifty years. More likely only five or six, though.

  Late in the day he entered a small house where the town met the forest and found a functioning persona cube setup.

  The cubes were clever things. You could record yourself in an hour or so: facial gestures, motion habits, voice, speech patterns. Scanners identified certain broad patterns of mental response and coded those into the cube, too. What the cube playback provided was a plausible imitation of a human being, the best possible memento of a loved one or friend or mentor, an electronic phantom programmed to absorb data and modify its own program, so that it could engage in conversation, ask questions, pretend to be the person who had been cubed. A soul in a box, a cunning device.

  Morrissey jacked the cube into its receptor slot. The screen displayed a thin-lipped man with a high forehead and a lean, agile body. “My name is Leopold Brannum,” he said at once. “My specialty is xenogenetics. What year is this?”

  “It’s Ninety-seven, autumn,” Morrissey answered. “Ten weeks and a bit before the earthquake.”

  “And who are you?”

  “Nobody particular. I just happen to be visiting Port Kato, and I felt like talking to someone.”

  “So talk,” Brannum said. “What’s going on in Port Kato?”

  “Nothing. It’s pretty damned quiet here. The place is empty.”

  “The whole town’s been evacuated?”

  “The whole planet, for all I know. Just me and the fuxes and the balloons still around. When did you leave, Brannum?”

  “Summer of Ninety-two,” said the man in the cube.

  “I don’t see why everyone ran away so early. There wasn’t any chance the earthquake would come before the predicted time.”

  “I didn’t run away,” Brannum said coldly. “I left Port Kato to continue my research by other means.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I went to join the balloons,” Brannum said.

  Morrissey caught his breath. The words touched his soul with wintry bleakness.

  “My wife did that,” he said after a moment. “Perhaps you know her now. Nadia Dutoit. She was from Chong, originally—”

  The face on the screen smiled sourly. “You don’t seem to realize,” Brannum said, “that I’m only a recording.”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  “I don’t know where your wife is now. I don’t even know where I am now. I can only tell you that wherever we are, it’s in a place of great peace, of utter harmony.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Morrissey remembered the terrible day when Nadia told him that she could no longer resist the spiritual communion of the aerial creatures, that she was going off to seek entry into the collective mind of the Ahya. All through the history of Medea some colonists had done that. No one had ever seen any of them again. Their souls, people said, were absorbed, and their bodies lay buried somewhere beneath the dry ice of Farside. Toward the end the frequency of such defections had doubled and doubled and doubled again, thousands of colonists every month giving themselves up to whatever mystic engulfment the balloons offered. To Morrissey it was a form of suicide; to Nadia, to Brannum, to all those other hordes, it had been the path to eternal bliss. Who was to say? Better to undertake the uncertain journey into the great mind of the Ahya, perhaps, than to set out in panicky flight for the alien and unforgiving world that was Earth. “I hope you’ve found what you were looking for,” Morrissey said. “I hope she has.”

  He unjacked the cube and left quickly.

  He flew northward over the fog-streaked sea. Below him were the floating cities of the tropical waters, that marvelous tapestry of rafts and barges. That must be Port Backside down there, he decided—a sprawling, intricate tangle of foliage under which lay the crumbling splendors of one of Medea’s greatest cities. Kelp choked the waterways. There was no sign of human life down there, and he did not land.

  Pellucidar, on the mainland, was empty also. Morrissey spent four days there, visiting the undersea gardens, treating himself to a concert in the famous Hall of Columns, watching the suns set from the top of Crystal Pyramid. That last evening dense drifts of balloons, hundreds of them, flew oceanward above him. He imagined he heard them calling to him in soft sighing whispers, saying, I am Nadia. Come to me. There’s still time. Give yourself up to us, dear love. I am Nadia.

  Was it only imagination? The Ahya were seductive. They had called to Nadia, and ultimately Nadia had gone to them. Brannum had gone. Thousands had gone. Now he felt the pull himself, and it was real. For an instant it was tempting. Instead of perishing in the quake, life eternal—of a sort. Who knew what the balloons really offered? A merging, a loss of self, a transcendental bliss. Or was it only delusion, folly? Had the seekers found nothing but a quick death in the icy wastes? Come to me. Come to me. Either way, he thought, it meant peace.

  I am Nadia. Come to me.

  He stared a long while at the bobbing, shimmering globes overhead, and the whispers grew to a roar in his mind.

  Then he shook his head. Union with the cosmic entity was not for him. He had sought no escape from Medea up till now, and now he would have none. He was himself and nothing but himself, and when he went out of the world, he would still be only himself. And then, only then, the balloons could have his soul.

  It was nine weeks and a day before the earthquake when Morrissey reached sweltering Enrique, right on the equator. Enrique was celebrated for its Hotel Luxe, of legendary opulence. He took possession of its grandest suite, and no one was there to tell him no. The air conditioning still worked, the bar was well stocked, the hotel grounds still were manicured daily by fux gardeners who did not seem to know that their employers had gone away. Obliging servomechanisms provided Morrissey with meals of supreme elegance that would each have cost him a month’s earnings in the old days. As he wandered through the silent grounds, he thought how wonderful it would have been to come here with Nadia and Danielle and Paul. But it was meaningless now, to be alone in all this luxury.

  Was he alone, though? On his first night, and again the next, he heard laughter in the darkness, borne on the dense sweet-scented air. Fuxes did not laugh. The balloons did not laugh.

  On the morning of the third day, as he stood on his nineteenth-floor veranda, he saw movements in the shrubbery at the rim of the lawn. Five, seven, a dozen male fuxes, grim two-legged engines of lust, prowling through the bushes. And then a human form! Pale flesh, bare legs, long, unkempt hair! She streaked through the underbrush, giggling, pursued by fuxes.

  “Hello!” Morrissey called. “Hey! I’m up here!”

  He hurried downstairs and spent all day searching the hotel grounds. Occasionally he caught glimpses of frenzied naked figures, leaping and cavorting far away. He cried out to them, but they gave no sign of hearing him.

  In the hotel office Morrissey found the manager’s cube and turned it on. She was a dark-haired young woman, a little wild-eyed. “Hey, is it earthquake time yet?”

  “Not quite yet.”

  “I want to be around for that. I want to see this stinking hotel crumble.”

  “Where have you gone?” Morrissey asked.

  She snickered. “Where else? Into the bush. Off to hunt fuxes. And to be hunted.” Her face was flushed. “The old recombinant genes are still pretty hot, you know? Me for the fuxes and the fuxes for me. Get yourself a little action, why don’t you? Whoever you are.”

  Morrissey supposed he ought to be shocked. But he couldn’t summon much indignation. He had already heard rumors of things like this. In the final years before the cataclysm, he knew, several sorts of migration had been going on. Some colonists opted for the exodus to Earth, and some for the surrender to the Ahya soul collective, and others chose the simple reversion to the life of the beast. Why not? Every Medean, by now, was a mongrel. The underlying Earth stock
was tinged with alien genes. The colonists looked human enough, but they were in fact mixed with balloon or fux or both. Without the early recombinant manipulations the colony could never have survived, for human life and native Medean organisms were incompatible, and only by genetic splicing had a race been brought forth that could overcome that natural biological enmity. So now, with doom-time coming near, how many colonists had simply kicked off their clothes and slipped away into the jungles to run with their cousins the fuxes? And was that any worse, he wondered, than climbing in panic aboard a ship bound for Earth, or giving up one’s individuality to merge with the balloons? What did it matter which route to escape was chosen? But Morrissey wanted no escape. Least of all into the jungles, off to the fuxes.

  He flew on northward. In Catamount he heard the cube of the city’s mayor tell him, “They’ve all cleared out, and I’m going next Dimday. There’s nothing left here.” In Yellowleaf a cubed biologist spoke of genetic drift, the reversion of the alien genes. In Sandy’s Mishigos, Morrissey could find no cubes at all, but eighteen or twenty skeletons lay chaotically on the broad central plaza. Mass immolation? Mass murder, in the final hours of the city’s disintegration? He gathered the bones and buried them in the moist, spongy ochre soil. It took him all day. Then he went on, up the coast as far as Arca, through city after city.

  Wherever he stopped, it was the same story: no humans left, only balloons and fuxes, most of the balloons heading out to sea and most of the fuxes migrating inland. He jacked in cubes wherever he found them, but the cube people had little news to tell him. They were clearing out, they said: one way or another they were giving up on Medea. Why stick around to the end? Why wait for the big shudder? Going home, going to the balloons, going to the bush—clearing out, clearing out, clearing out.