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

by Robert Silverberg

  “When I was a child, yes. But in time I internalized it so well that it happens of its own accord. Which is terrifying, because it can come over me anywhere, anytime, like a fit. Did you think there were no drawbacks to this? Did you think it was a lifelong picnic, roving space and time? I’ve had two or three uncontrolled departures a year since I was twenty. It’s been my luck that I haven’t fallen down unconscious in the street, or anything like that. Though there have been some great embarrassments.”

  “How have your explained them?”

  “With lies,” he said. “You are the first to whom I’ve told the truth about myself.”

  “Should I believe that?”

  “You are the first,” he said, with intense conviction. “And that because my time is almost over and I need at last to share my story with someone. Eh? Is that plausible? Do you still think I’ve fabricated it all?”

  Indeed, I had no idea. To treat his story as lies or fantasy was easy enough to do; but for all his shiftiness of expression there was an odd ring of truth, even to his most enormous whoppers. And the wealth of information, the outpouring of circumstantial detail—I suppose a solitary life spent over history books could have explained that, but nevertheless, nevertheless—

  And if it was true? What good had it all been? He had written nothing: no anecdotes of his adventures, no revisionist historical essays, no setting down of the philosophical insights that must have grown out of his exploration of thirty thousand years of human history. He had lived a strange and fitful and fragmentary life, flickering in and out of what we call the reality of the everyday world as though he were going to the movies—and bizarre movies they were: a week in Byzantium and a month in old Sumer and an hour among the Pharaohs. A life spent alone, a loveless life by the sound of it, a weird zigzagging chaos of a life such as has been granted no other human being—

  If it was true.

  And if not? Se non è vero, è ben trovato. I listened enraptured. I continued to probe for details of the mechanics of it. His journeys took him anywhere on earth? Anywhere, he said. Once he had arrived in a wasteland of glaciers that he believed, from the strangeness of the constellations, to have been Antarctica, though it might have been any icy land at a time when the stars were in other places in the sky. Happily that voyage had lasted less than an hour, or he would have perished. But there seemed no limits—he might turn up on any continent, he said, and at any time. Or almost any time, for I queried him about dinosaurs and the era of the trilobites and the chance that he might find himself some day plunged into the primordial planetary soup of creation, but no, he had never gone back further than the Pleistocene, so far as he could tell, and he did not know why. I wondered also how he had seen so many of the great figures of history—Caesar and Cleopatra and Lincoln and Dante and the rest—when we who live only in today rarely encounter presidents and kings and movie stars in the course of our comings and goings, but he had an answer to that too, saying that the world had been much smaller in earlier times, cities being deemed great if they had fifty or a hundred thousand people, and the mighty were far more accessible, going out into the marketplace and letting themselves be seen; besides, he had made it his business to seek them out, for what is the point of finding oneself miraculously transported to imperial Rome and coming away without at least a squint at Augustus or Caligula?

  So I listened to it all and was caught up in it, and though I will not say that I ever came to believe the literal truth of his claims, I also did not quite disbelieve, and through his rambling discourses I felt the past return to life in an astonishing way. I made time for his visits, cleared all other priorities out of the way when he called to tell me he was coming, and beyond doubt grew almost dependent on his tales, as though they were a drug, some potent hallucinogen that carried me off into gaudy realms of antiquity.

  And in what proved to be his last conversation with me he said, “I could show you how it’s done.”

  The simple words hung between us in the air like dancing swords.

  I gaped at him and made no reply.

  He said, “It would take perhaps three months of training. For me it was easy, natural, no challenge, but of course I was a child and I had no barriers to overcome. You, with your skepticism, your sophistication, your aloofness—it would be hard for you to master the technique, but I could show you and train you, and eventually you would succeed. Would you like that?”

  I thought of watching Caesar’s chariot rolling down the Via Flaminia. I thought of clinking canisters with Chaucer in some tavern just outside Canterbury. I thought of penetrating the caves of Lascaux to stare at the freshly painted bulls.

  And then I thought of my quiet orderly life, and how it would be to fall into a narcoleptic trance at unpredictable moments and swing off into the darkness of space and time, and land perhaps in the middle of some hideous massacre, or in a season of plague, or in a desolate land where no human foot had ever walked. I thought of pain and discomfort and risk, and possible sudden death, and the disruption of patterns of habit, and I looked into his eyes and saw the strangeness there, a strangeness that I did not want to share, and in simple cowardice I said, “I think I would rather not.”

  A flicker of something like disappointment passed across his features. But then he smiled and stood up and said, “I’m not surprised. But thank you for hearing me out. You were more open-minded than I expected.”

  He took my hand briefly in his. Then he was gone, and I never saw him again. A few weeks later, I learned of his death, and I heard his soft voice saying, “I could show you how it’s done,” and a great sadness came over me, for although I knew he was a fraud I knew also that there was a chance that he was not, and if so I had foreclosed the possibility of infinite wonders for myself. How sad to have refused, I told myself, how pale and gray a thing to have done, how contemptible, really. Yes: contemptible, to have refused him out of hand, without even attempting it, without offering him that final bit of credence. For several days I was deeply depressed; and then I went on to other things, as one does, and put him from my mind.

  A few weeks after his death one of the big midtown banks called me. They mentioned his name and said they were executors of his estate, and told me that he had left something for me, an envelope to be opened only after his death. If I could satisfactorily identify myself the envelope would be shipped to my bank. So I went through the routine, sending a letter to my bank, which authenticated the signature and forwarded it to his bank, and in time my bank informed me that a parcel had come, and I went down to claim it. It was a fairly bulky manila envelope. I had the sudden wild notion that it contained some irrefutable proof of his voyages in time, something like a photograph of Jesus on the Cross or a personal letter to my friend from William the Conqueror, but of course that was impossible; he had made it clear that nothing traveled in time except his intangible essence: no possessions, no artifacts. Yet my hand shook as I opened the envelope.

  It contained a thick manuscript and a covering note that explained that he had decided, after all, to share with me the secrets of his technique. Without his guidance it might take me much longer to learn the knack, a year or more of diligent application, perhaps, but if I persevered, if I genuinely sought to achieve—

  A wondrous dizziness came over me, as though I hung over an infinite abyss by the frailest of fraying threads and was being asked to choose between drab safety and the splendor of the unknown plunge. I felt the temptation.

  And for the second time I refused the cup.

  I did not read the manuscript. I was too timid for that. Nor did I destroy it, though the idea crossed my mind; but I was too cowardly even for that, I must admit, for I had no wish to bear the responsibility for having cast into oblivion so potent a secret, if potent it really was. I put the sheaf of pages—over which he must have labored with intense dedication, writing being so painfully difficult a thing for him—back into their envelope and sealed it again and put it in my vault, deep down below
the bankbooks and the insurance policies and the stock certificates and the other symbols of the barricades I have thrown about myself to make my life secure.

  Perhaps the manuscript, like everything else he told me, is mere fantastic nonsense. Perhaps not.

  Some day, when life grows too drab for me, when the pleasures of the predictable and safe begin to pall, I will take that envelope from the vault and study its lessons, and if nothing then happens, so be it. But if I feel the power beginning to come to life in me, if I find myself once again swaying above that abyss with the choices within my reach, I hope I will find the courage to sever the thread, to loose all ties and restraints, to say farewell to order and routine, and to send myself soaring into that great uncharted infinite gulf of time.

  GIANNI

  In the introduction to “A Thousand Paces on the Via Dolorosa” I told how my first attempt to sell a short story to Playboy had resulted not in a sale but in a fascinating correspondence with Alice K. Turner, Playboy’s fiction editor. Since she had suggested we meet for dinner while she was visiting the San Francisco area in the spring of 1981, I wanted to offer a new story to her before she arrived. So I wrote “Gianni” that February, and a few weeks later came a three-page letter from Alice, which began by telling me that we were booked for dinner at the famous Chez Panisse restaurant, and went on to an extensive discussion of the revisions she wanted on “Gianni,” which she was going to publish. She simply wanted a few small revisions, and she was so confident that I’d do them to her satisfaction that she enclosed a check in payment for the story—quite a large check.

  Her letter raised a number of interesting points. Some I agreed with, some I didn’t; and I made notations in the margin indicating my reaction to the various changes she wanted. “Yes,” I said to one, and “maybe” to another, and “no” to several. But there was one request that seemed absolutely impossible for me to comply with. “Gianni” was a first-person story, narrated by Dave Leavis, the scientist in charge of the time-travel experiment. Alice wanted me to switch the story around so that a different character—Sam Hoaglund, the publicity agent—would be the narrator. I didn’t see how that was possible. How could I rewrite a first-person story so that it now would be told by a different narrator, short of completely reconstructing the whole story? I had envisioned it all along as Leavis’ story to tell. I couldn’t imagine rethinking it so that it would be told by Hoaglund. But it appeared from her letter that Alice would insist on the change. If she did, it would kill the sale. So when I met her for dinner that night at Chez Panisse, I had Playboy’s nice, big check in my coat pocket, ready to hand back to her at the end of our discussion.

  Eventually the conversation came around to “Gianni.” I mentioned that I had a little problem with changing the narrator. And then Alice produced one of the biggest editorial surprises I have ever experienced in my long writing career.

  She had anticipated my resistance to that particular change. So she had brought a copy of the story with her that she had marked in pencil to show me how easy it would be to do. She handed it to me now, and I leafed through it in amazement. She had done the impossible. With a few small strokes she had transferred the narrative center from Leavis to Hoagland—a technical stunt that astonished me, and I have been a close and careful student of the technical side of writing fiction for many decades.

  So I said nothing about the check in my coat pocket, and I agreed to do the revisions, and I went home and started making them. On April 7, 1981, I sent it back to her, having made the viewpoint switch and having also accepted some (not all) of her other suggestions for changing the story. Playboy published it in the February, 1982 issue.

  That was the start of a long and wonderful editor-author relationship that would see me write fifteen or twenty more stories for Playboy and become embroiled in some marvelous arguments with Alice about most of those stories before she was satisfied with them. Many years later, when we were looking back at the “Gianni” event, I told her that I had come to dinner that night prepared to give her back the check if she had insisted on having her way about the viewpoint switch—but hadn’t done it, because she had been able to convince me that the switch was possible.

  “What would you have done,” I asked, “if I had returned the check?”

  “I would have published the story the way you wrote it, with Leavis as the narrator,” she replied, and we both had a good laugh.

  Since then, whenever I have had an opportunity to bring “Gianni” back into print in some anthology or a collection of my own short stories, I have used the Leavis-narrator version. When Alice reprinted the story herself in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction, she used the version published in the magazine, with Hoaglund as the narrator. Which version of the story is the more effective one? I have no idea.

  ——————

  “But why not Mozart?” Hoaglund said, shaking his head. “Schubert, even? Or you could have brought back Bix Beiderbecke, for Christ’s sake, if you wanted to resurrect a great musician.”

  “Beiderbecke was jazz,” I said. “I’m not interested in jazz. Nobody’s interested in jazz except you.”

  “And people are still interested in Pergolesi in the year 2008?”

  “I am.”

  “Mozart would have been better publicity. You’ll need more funding sooner or later. You tell the world you’ve got Mozart sitting in the back room cranking out a new opera, you can write your own ticket. But what good is Pergolesi? Pergolesi’s totally forgotten.”

  “Only by the proletariat, Sam. Besides, why give Mozart a second chance? Maybe he died young, but it wasn’t all that young, and he did his work, a ton of work. Gianni died at twenty-six, you know. He might have been greater than Mozart if he’d had another dozen years.”

  “Johnny?”

  “Gianni. Giovanni Battista. Pergolesi. He calls himself Gianni. Come meet him.”

  “Mozart, Dave. You should have done Mozart.”

  “Stop being an idiot,” I said. “When you’ve met him, you’ll know I did the right thing. Mozart would have been a pain in the neck, anyway. The stories I’ve heard about Mozart’s private life would uncurl your wig. Come on with me.”

  I led him down the long hallway from the office past the hardware room and the timescoop cage to the airlock separating us from the semidetached motel unit out back where Gianni had been living since we scooped him. We halted in the airlock to be sprayed. Sam frowned and I explained, “Infectious microorganisms have mutated a lot since the eighteenth century. Until we’ve got his resistance levels higher, we’re keeping him in a pretty sterile environment. When we first brought him back, he was vulnerable to anything—a case of the sniffles would have killed him, most likely. Plus he was a dying man when we got him, one lung lousy with TB and the other one going.”

  “Hey,” Hoaglund said.

  I laughed. “You won’t catch anything from him. It’s in remission now, Sam. We didn’t bring him back at colossal expense just to watch him die.”

  The lock opened and we stepped into the monitoring vestibule, glittering like a movie set with bank upon bank of telemetering instruments. The day nurse, Claudia, was checking diagnostic readouts. “He’s expecting you, Dr. Leavis,” she said. “He’s very frisky this morning.”

  “Frisky?”

  “Playful. You know.”

  Yes. Tacked to the door of Gianni’s room was a card that hadn’t been there yesterday, flamboyantly lettered in gaudy, free-flowing baroque script:

  GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI

  Jesi, January 3 1710

  — Pozzuoli, March 17 1736

  Los Angeles, Dec. 20 2007

  —

  Genuis At Work!!!!

  Per Piacere, Knock Before You enter!

  “He speaks English?” Hoaglund asked.

  “Now he does,” I said. “We gave him tapesleep the first week. He picks things up fast, anyway.” I grinned. “Genius at work, eh? Or genuis. That’s the sort of sign I would have
expected Mozart to put up.”

  “They’re all alike, these talents,” Hoaglund said.

  I knocked.

  “Chi va là?” Gianni called.

  “Dave Leavis.”

  “Avanti, dottore illustrissimo!”

  “I thought you said he speaks English,” Hoaglund murmured.

  “He’s frisky today, Claudia said, remember?”

  We went in. As usual he had the blinds tightly drawn, shutting out the brilliant January sunlight, the yellow blaze of acacia blossoms just outside the window, the enormous scarlet bougainvillea, the sweeping hilltop vista of the valley and the mountains beyond. Maybe scenery didn’t interest him—or, more likely, he preferred to keep his room a tightly sealed little cell, an island out of time. He had had to absorb a lot of psychic trauma in the past few weeks: it must give you a hell of a case of jet-lag to jump 271 years into the future.

  But he looked lively, almost impish—a small man, graceful, delicate, with sharp, busy eyes, quick, elegant gestures, a brisk, confident manner. How much he had changed in just a few weeks! When we fished him out of the eighteenth century, he was a woeful sight, face lined and haggard, hair already gray at twenty-six, body gaunt, bowed, quivering. He looked like what he was, a shattered consumptive a couple of weeks from the grave. His hair was still gray, but he had gained ten pounds; the veils were gone from his eyes; there was color in his cheeks.

  I said, “Gianni, I want you to meet Sam Hoaglund. He’s going to handle publicity and promotion for our project. Capisce? He will make you known to the world and give you a new audience for your music.”

  He flashed a brilliant smile. “Bene. Listen to this.”

  The room was an electronic jungle, festooned with gadgetry: a synthesizer, a telescreen, a megabuck audio library, five sorts of data terminals and all manner of other things perfectly suited to your basic eighteenth-century Italian drawing room. Gianni loved it all and was mastering the equipment with astonishing, even frightening, ease. He swung around to the synthesizer, jacked it into harpsichord mode and touched the keyboard. From the cloud of floating minispeakers came the opening theme of a sonata, lovely, lyrical, to my ear unmistakably Pergolesian in its melodiousness, and yet somehow weird. For all its beauty there was a strained, awkward, suspended aspect to it, like a ballet performed by dancers in galoshes. The longer he played, the more uncomfortable I felt. Finally he turned to us and said, “You like it?”