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

by Robert Silverberg

  “Jesus,” he said, “it’s raining worse than ever. What a stinking night! I’m not going out into that!”

  “No,” I said. “Not fit for man nor beast.”

  “You don’t mind if I stay here until it slackens off some, then?”

  “Mind? Mind?” I laughed. “This is a public house, my friend. You’ve got as much right as anyone. Here. Sit down. Make yourself to home.”

  “Plenty of Bushmill’s left in the bottle, lad,” said Charley Sullivan.

  “I’m a little low on cash,” Ishmael muttered.

  Mors Longa said, “That’s all right. Money’s not the only coin of the realm around here. We can use some stories we haven’t heard before. Let’s hear the strangest story you can tell us, for openers, and I’ll undertake to keep you in Irish while you talk. Eh?”

  “Fair enough,” said Ishmael. He thought a moment. “All right. I have a good one for you. I have a really good one, if you don’t mind them weird. It’s about my uncle Timothy and his tiny twin brother, that he carried around under his arm all his life. Does that interest you?”

  “Most assuredly it does,” I said.

  “Seconded,” said Mors Longa. He grinned with a warmth I had not seen on his face for a long time. “Set them up,” he said to Charley Sullivan. “On me. For the house.”

  THE FAR SIDE OF THE BELL-SHAPED CURVE

  Now that I was functioning smoothly as a short-story writer again, I began to respond enthusiastically to editorial requests. Bob Sheckley of Omni, who had coaxed my first post-retirement story out of me, suggested I try another one for him. It just happened that an idea for a fairly complex time-travel story had wandered into my head, and, since time travel is one of my favorite science-fiction themes, I set about immediately sketching it out.

  It turned out to be the most ambitious story I had done in ten years or so, involving not only a very tricky plot but also a lot of historical and geographical research. (Sarajevo, where the story opens, would be all over the front pages of the newspapers a decade later, but this was 1980, remember, and the only thing anyone knew about Sarajevo then was that it was the place where the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, touching off the First World War.)

  So I worked hard and long, with much revising along the way (a big deal, in those pre-computer days), and on August 16, 1980 I mailed it to Sheckley with a note that said, “Somehow I finished the story despite such distractions as the death of my cat and a visit from my mother and a lot of other headaches, some of which I’ll tell you about as we sit sobbing into our drinks at the Boston convention and some of which I hope to have forgotten by then.”

  Though I was now writing regularly again—this was my fourth short story in eight months—I had not yet returned to full creative confidence, and, though I thought “Bell-Shaped Curve” was a fine story, I wasn’t completely sure that Sheckley would agree. When we met two weeks later in Boston, though, he told me at once that he was going to publish it. But he hoped I’d take a second look at it and clean up some logical flaws.

  “Sure,” I said. “Just give me a list of them.”

  But Bob Sheckley, sweet man that he was, was not that sort of editor. He didn’t have any list of the story’s logical flaws—he simply felt sure there must be some. I was on my own. So after the Boston trip I went back to the story, giving it a very rigorous reading indeed, and, sure enough, there were places where the time-travel logic didn’t make sense. That came as no surprise to me, because time-travel logic never does make sense, but I did see some ways of concealing, if not removing, the illogicalities. I revised the story and sent it back to him on September 23, telling him this in my accompanying letter:

  “I have reworked ‘Bell-Shaped Curve’ to handle most of the obvious problems, without pretending that I have made time travel into anything as plausible as the internal combustion engine. Aside from a bunch of tiny cosmetic changes, the main revision has been to eliminate the discussion between Reichenbach and Ilsabet about being wary of duplication; they now speak in much more general terms of paradox problems. But in fact they don’t understand any more about time travel than I do about what’s under the hood of my car…

  “And remember that a story that may contain logical flaws is a story that will give the readers something to exercise their wits about. That will be pleasing to them. If they can come away from the issue feeling mentally superior to Robert Silverberg and the entire editorial staff of Omni, haven’t they thereby had their two dollars’ worth of gratification?”

  Omni published the story in its March, 1982 issue. It’s been reprinted in a lot of anthologies since then. And you all know what eventually happened to Sarajevo.

  ——————

  Sarajevo was lovely on that early summer day. The air sparkled, the breeze off the mountains was strong and pungent, the whitewashed villas glittered in the morning sunlight. Reichenbach, enchanted by the beauty of the place and spurred by a sense of impending excitement, stepped buoyantly out of a dark, cobbled alley and made his way in quick, virile strides toward the river’s right embankment. It was nearly 10:30.

  A crowd of silent, sullen Bosnian burghers lined the embankment. The black-and-gold Hapsburg banners fluttered from every lamppost and balcony. In a little while the archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Emperor’s nephew and heir, would come this way with his duchess in their open-topped car. They were venturing into dangerous territory, into a province of disaffected and reluctant subjects.

  The townsfolk stirred faintly. The townsfolk muttered. Like puddings, Reichenbach thought, they awaited in a dull, dutiful way their future monarch. But he knew they must be seething inside with revolutionary fervor.

  Reichenbach looked about him for dark, taut youths with the peculiar bright-eyed look of assassins. No one nearby seemed to fit the pattern. He let his gaze wander up the hills to the dense cypress groves, the ancient wooden houses, the old Turkish mosques topped by slender, splendid minarets, and back down toward the river, to the crowd again. And—

  Who is she?

  He noticed her for the first time, no more than a dozen meters to his left, in front of the Bank of Austria-Hungary building: a tall, auburn-haired woman of striking presence and aura, who in this mob of coarse, rough folk radiated such supreme alertness and force that Reichenbach knew at once she must be of his sort. Yes! He had come here alone, certain he would find an appropriate companion, and that confidence now was affirmed.

  He began to move toward her.

  His eyes met hers, and she nodded and smiled in recognition and acknowledgment.

  “Have you just arrived?” Reichenbach asked, in German.

  She answered, in Serbian. “Three days ago.”

  Smoothly he shifted languages. “How did I fail to see you?”

  “You were looking everywhere else. I saw you at once. You came this morning?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Does it please you so far?”

  “Very much,” he said. “Such a picturesque place! Like a medieval fantasy. Time stands still here.”

  Her eyes were mischievous. “Time stands still everywhere,” she said, moving on into English.

  Reichenbach smiled. Again he matched her change of language. “I take your meaning. And I think you take mine. This charming architecture, the little river, the ethnic costumes—it’s hard to believe that a vast and hideous war is going to spring from so quaint a place.”

  “A nice irony, yes. And it’s for ironies that we make these journeys, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Vraiment.”

  They were standing quite close now. He felt a current flowing between them, a pulsating, almost tangible force.

  “Join me later for a drink?” he suggested.

  “Certainly. I am Ilsabet.”

  “Reichenbach.”

  He longed to ask her when she had come from. But of course that was taboo.

  “Look,” she said. “The Archduke and Duchess.”

 
The royal car, inching forward, had reached them. Franz Ferdinand, redfaced and tense in preposterous comic-opera uniform, waved halfheartedly to the bleakly staring crowd. Drab, plump Sophie beside him, absurdly overdressed, forced a smile. They were meaty-looking, florid people, rigid and nervous, all but clinging to each other in their nervousness.

  “Now it starts,” he said.

  “Yes. The foreplay.” She slipped her arm through his.

  Not far away a tall, young, sallow-faced man appeared as if he had sprung from the pavement—wild hyperthyroid eyes, bobbing Adam’s apple, a sure desperado—and hurled something. It landed just behind the royal car. An odd popping sound—the detonator—and then Reichenbach heard a loud bang. There was a blurt of black smoke, and the car behind the Archduke’s lurched and crumpled, dumping aides-de-camp into the street. The cortege halted abruptly. The imperial couple, unharmed, sat weirdly upright as if their survival depended on keeping their spines straight. A functionary riding with them said in a clear voice, “A bomb has gone off, Your Highness.”

  And Franz Ferdinand, calm, disgusted: “I rather expected something like that. Look after the injured, will you?”

  Ilsabet’s hand tightened on Reichenbach’s forearm as the bizarre comedy unfolded: the cars motionless, Archduke and Archduchess still in plain view, the assassin wildly vaulting a parapet and plunging into the shallow river, police pursuing, pouncing, beating him with the flats of their swords, the crowd milling in confusion. At last the damaged car was pushed to the side of the road and the remaining vehicles rapidly drove off.

  “End of Act One,” Ilsabet said, laughing.

  “And forty minutes until Act Two. That drink now?”

  “I know a sidewalk café near here.”

  Under a broad, turquoise umbrella Reichenbach had a slivovitz, Ilsabet a mug of dark beer. The stolid citizens at the surrounding tables talked more of hunting and fishing than of the bungled assassination. Reichenbach, pretending to be casual, studied Ilsabet hungrily. A cool, keen intelligence gleamed in her penetrating green eyes. Everything about her was sleek, self-possessed, sure. She was so much like him that he almost feared her, and that was a new feeling for him. What he feared most of all was that he would blunder here at the outset and lose her; but he knew deep beneath all doubts, that he would not. They were meant for each other. He liked to believe that she came from his moment and that there would be a chance to continue in realtime, when they had returned from displacement, whatever they began on this jaunt. Of course one did not speak of such things.

  Instead he said, “Where do you go next?”

  “The burning of Rome. And you?”

  “A drink with Shakespeare at the Mermaid Tavern.”

  “How splendid! I never thought of doing that.”

  He drew a deep breath and said, “We could do it together,” then hesitated, watching her expression. She did not look displeased. “After we’ve heard Nero play his concerto. Eh?”

  She seemed amused. “I like that idea.”

  He raised his glass. “Prosit.”

  “Zdravlje.”

  They snaked wrists, clinked glasses.

  For a few minutes more they talked—lightly, playfully. He studied her gestures, her sentence structure, her use of idiom, seeking in the subtlest turns of her style some clue that might tell him that they were cotemporals, but she gave him nothing: a shrewd game player, this one. At length he said, “It’s nearly time for the rest of the show.”

  Ilsabet nodded. He scattered some coins on the table, and they returned to the embankment, walked up to the Latin Bridge, turned right into Franz Joseph Street. Soon the royal motorcade, returning from a City Hall reception, came rolling along. There appeared to be some disagreement over the route: Chauffeurs and aides-de-camp engaged in a noisy dispute, and suddenly the royal car stopped. The Archduke’s chauffeur seemed to be trying to put the car into reverse. There was a clashing of gears. A gaunt boy emerged from a coffeehouse not three meters from the car, less than ten from Reichenbach and Ilsabet. He looked dazed, like a sleepwalker, as if astounded to find himself so close to the imperial heir. This is Gavrilo Princip, Reichenbach thought, the second and true assassin, but Reichenbach felt little interest in what was about to happen. The gun was out, the boy was taking aim. Reichenbach watched Ilsabet instead, more concerned with the quality of her reactions than with the deaths of two trivial people in fancy costumes. Thus he missed seeing the fatal shot through Franz Ferdinand’s pouter-pigeon chest, though he observed Ilsabet’s quick, frosty smile of satisfaction. When he glanced back at the royal car, he saw the Archduke sitting upright, stunned, tunic and lips stained red, and the boy firing at the Archduchess. There was consternation among the aides-de-camp. The car sped away. It was 11:15.

  “So,” said Ilsabet. “Now the war begins, the dynasties topple, a civilization crumbles. Did you enjoy it?”

  “Not as much as I enjoyed the way you smiled when the Archduke was shot.”

  “Silly.”

  “The slaughter of a pair of overstuffed simpletons is ultimately less important to me than your smile.”

  It was risky: too strong too soon, maybe? But it got through to her the right way, producing a faint quirking of her lips that told him she was pleased.

  “Come,” she said, taking his hand.

  Her hotel was an old, gray, stone building on the opposite bank of the river. She had an elegant balconied room on the third floor, with a river view, ornate gas chandeliers, heavy damask draperies, a capacious canopied bed. This era’s style was certainly admirable, Reichenbach thought—lavish, slow, rich. Even in a little provincial town like this everything was deluxe. He shed his tight and heavy clothing with relief. She wore her timer high, a pale, taut band just beneath her breasts. Her eyes glittered as she reached for him and drew him down beneath the canopy. At this moment at the other end of town Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were dying. Soon there would be exchanges of stiff diplomatic notes, declarations of war by Austria-Hungary against Serbia, Germany against Russia and France, Europe engulfed in flames, the battle of the Marne, Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, the flight of the Kaiser, the Armistice, the transformation of the monarchies. He had studied it all with such keen intensity, and now, having seen the celebrated assassinations that triggered everything, he was unmoved. Ilsabet had eclipsed the Great War for him.

  No matter. There would be other epochal events to savor. They had all history to wander together.

  “To Rome, now,” he said huskily.

  They rose, bathed, embraced, winked conspiratorially. They were off to a good start. Hastily they gathered their 1914 gear, waistcoats and petticoats and boots and all that, within the prescribed two-meter radius. They synchronized their timers and embraced again, naked, laughing, bodies pressed tight together, and went soaring across the centuries.

  At the halfway house outside Imperial Rome, they underwent their preparations, receiving their Roman hairstyles and clothing, their hypnocourses in Latin, their purses of denarii and sestertii, their plague inoculations, their new temporary names. He was Quintus Junius Veranius; she was Flavia Julia Lepida.

  Nero’s Rome was smaller and far less grand than he expected: the Colosseum was still in the future, there was no Arch of Titus, and even the Forum seemed sparsely built up. But the city was scarcely mean. The first day they strolled vast gardens and dense, crowded markets, stared in awe at crazy Caligula’s bridge from the Palatine to the Capitoline, went to the baths, gorged themselves at their inn on capon and truffled boar. The next day they attended the gladiatorial games and afterward made love with frantic energy in a chamber they had hired near the Campus Martius. There was a wonderful frenzy about the city that Reichenbach found intoxicating. And Ilsabet, he knew, shared his fervor: her eyes were aglow, her face gleamed. They could hardly bear to sleep, but explored the narrow winding streets from dark to dawn.

  They knew, of course, that the fire would break out in the Circus Maximus where it adjoined the Palatine and Cael
ian hills, and they took care to situate themselves safely atop the Aventine, where they had a fine view. There they watched the fierce blaze sweeping through the Circus, climbing the hills, dipping to ravage the lower ground. No one seemed to be fighting the fire; indeed Reichenbach thought he could detect subsidiary fires flaring up in the outlying districts, as if arson were the sport of the hour, and soon those fires joined with the main one. The sky rained black soot; the stifling summer air was thick and almost impossible to breathe. For the first two days the destruction had a kind of fascinating beauty, as temples and mansions and arcades melted away, the Rome of centuries being unbuilt before their eyes. But then the discomfort, the danger, the monotony, began to pall. “Shall we go?” he asked.

  “Wait,” Ilsabet replied. The conflagration seemed to have an almost sexual impact on her: she glistened with sweat, she trembled with some strange joy as the flames leaped from district to district. She could not get enough. And she clung to him in tight, feverish embrace. “Not yet,” she murmured, “not so soon. I want to see the Emperor.”

  Yes. And here was Nero now, returning to town from holiday. In grand procession he crossed the charred city, descending from his litter now and then to inspect some ruined shrine or palace. They caught a glimpse of him as he entered the Gardens of Maecenas—thick-necked, paunchy, spindle-shanked, foul of complexion. “Oh, look,” Ilsabet whispered. “He’s beautiful! But where’s the fiddle?” The Emperor carried no fiddle, but he was grotesquely garbed in some kind of theatrical costume, and his cheeks were daubed with paint. He waved and flung coins to the crowd and ascended the garden tower. For a better view, no doubt. Ilsabet pressed herself close to Reichenbach. “My throat is on fire,” she said. “My lungs are choked with ashes. Take me to London. Show me Shakespeare.”

  There was smoke in the dark Cheapside alehouse too, thick, sweet smoke curling up from sputtering logs on a dank February day. They sat in a cobwebbed corner, playing word games while waiting for the actors to arrive. She was quick and clever, just as clever as he. Reichenbach took joy in that. He loved her for her agility and strength of soul. “Not many could be carrying off this tour,” he told her. “Only special ones like us.”