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

by Robert Silverberg

  “In layman’s terms, I’m crazy.”

  “If you want to use layman’s terms,” Judith said, “you’re suffering from delusions of an extraordinarily vivid kind.”

  Hilgard nodded. “Among those delusions, you should know, is that you and I were lovers for the past four years.”

  She smiled. “I’m not at all surprised. You’ve been carrying on a lovely little flirtation with me from the moment we met.”

  “Have we ever been to bed together?”

  “Of course not, Ted.”

  “Have I ever seen you naked?”

  “Not unless you’ve been spying on me.”

  He wondered how much this Judith differed from his. Risking it, he said, “Then how do I know you have a small surgical scar on your left breast?”

  Shrugging, she said, “I had a little benign tumor removed years ago. Celia might have mentioned that to you.”

  “And I’d know which breast?”

  “You might.”

  “I can tell you six or seven other things about your body that only somebody who’s plenty familiar with it would know. I can tell you what your favorite lovemaking position is, and why. I can imitate the sound you make at your climax.”

  “Oh? Can you?”

  “Listen,” he said, and did his best to duplicate that strange whining passionate cry he had heard so many times. Judith’s playful, challenging smile disappeared. Her lips grew taut and her eyes narrowed and splotches of color came to her cheeks. She glanced away from him.

  Hilgard said, “I didn’t have a tape recorder under your bed. I haven’t been discussing your sexual idiosyncrasies with Ron. I wouldn’t even know Ron if I tripped over him in the street. And I’m not reading your mind. How do I know all these things, then?”

  She was silent. She moved papers about randomly on her desk. Her hands appeared to be shaking.

  “Maybe you’re the one with dissociative reactions,” he said. “You’ve forgotten all about our affair.”

  “You know that’s nonsense.”

  “You’re right. Because the Judith Rose I’ve been to bed with is at Rockefeller University. But I’ve been to bed with a Judith Rose who’s very much like you. Do you doubt that now?”

  She made no reply. She was staring at him in an astounded way, and there seemed to be something else in her look, a volatility, an excitement, that led him to think he had somehow reached across the barrier of his lost world to touch her, this Judith, to arouse her and kindle in her some simulacrum of the love and passion that he knew they had had in another existence. A sudden wild fantasy erupted in him: getting free of Celia, getting Judith free of Ron, and reconstructing in this unfamiliar world the relationship that had been taken from him. But the idea faded as quickly as it had come. It was foolishness; it was nonsense; it was an impossibility.

  She said finally, “Describe what you think happened to you?”

  He told her in all the detail he could muster: the vertigo, the feeling of passing through a gateway, the gradual discovery of the wrongness of everything. “I want to believe this is all just a mental illness and that six lithium pills will make everything be right again. But I don’t think that’s how it is. I think what happened to me may be a lot wilder than a mere schizoid break. But I don’t want to believe that. I want to think it’s just a dissociative reaction.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you do.”

  “What do you think it is, Judith?”

  “My opinion doesn’t matter, does it? What matters is proof.”

  “Proof?”

  She said, “What were you carrying on you when you experienced your moment of vertigo?”

  “My camera.” He thought. “And my wallet.”

  “Which had credit cards, driver’s license, all that stuff?”

  “Yes,” he said, beginning to understand. He felt a stab of fear, cold, intense. Pulling his wallet out, he said, “I haven’t even thought of looking at the things in my pocket. But here—here—” He drew forth his driver’s license. It had the Third Avenue address. He took out his Diner’s Club card. Judith laid her own next to it. The cards were of different designs. He produced a twenty-dollar bill. She peered at the signatures on it and shook her head. Hilgard closed his eyes an instant and had a flashing vision of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the great heavy snouts of the serpents, the massive stone steps. Judith’s face was dark and grim, and Hilgard knew she had forced him to confront the final proof, and he had a sense of a mighty gate swinging shut forever behind him. He was not the victim of any psychosis. He had actually made the crossing, and it was irrevocable. His other life was gone—it was dead. Bitterly he said, “I forged all this stuff, right? While I was down in Mexico City I had it all printed up, counterfeit money, a fake driver’s license, to make the hoax look really convincing. Right? Right?” He remembered something else, and went burrowing for it in his wallet, and found it after a frantic search: Judith’s own business card, with Department of Neurobiology, Rockefeller University on it in shining engraved letters. The card was old and worn and creased. She looked at it as though he had put a basilisk in her hand. When she stared at him again, it was with a sad and tender look of pity.

  At length she said, “Ted, I’ll give you all the help I can.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Making the adaptation. Learning your role here. Celia and I, between us, ought to be able to fill you in on who you’re supposed to be. It’s the only thing I can imagine doing now. You’re right that lithium won’t fix anything.”

  “No,” Hilgard said. “Don’t involve Celia.”

  “We have to.”

  “No,” he said. “She thinks I’m her husband and that I’m suffering from an unfortunate dissociative reaction, or whatever you call it. If she comes to realize I’m the complete stranger I’ve been insisting I am, I’m lost. She’ll throw me out and try to find ways of getting him back. And I have no way to function in this world except in the identity of Theodore Hilgard.”

  “You are Theodore Hilgard.”

  “Yes, and I intend to go on being him. Doing marketing research and living with Celia and signing my name to checks. You’ll help me adapt, yes. You’ll have a couple of sessions of therapy with me every week, and you’ll tell me where I went to college and what the names of my friends are and who the presidents have been in this world, if they have presidents here. So far as everyone else will know, you’re helping me recover from a mysterious mental fog. You won’t tell a soul that I don’t belong here. And sooner or later I will belong here. All right, Judith? You see, I’ve got no choice. There’s no way for me to get back across the barrier. I’ve managed to prove to one other human being that I’m not crazy, and now I’ve got to put that behind me and start living the life I’ve been handed. Will you help me?”

  “One condition,” she said.

  “Which is?”

  “You’re in love with me. I see that, and I don’t blame you, because I know you can’t help thinking I’m your Judith. I’m not. I’m Ron’s. Go on flirting with me, go on having fantasies about me, but don’t give me any moves, ever. All right? Because you might open up in me something that I don’t want opened, do you understand? We remain friends. Co-conspirators, even. That’s all. Is that agreed?”

  Hilgard looked at her unhappily. It was a long while before he could bring himself to say it.

  “Agreed,” he told her at last.

  Celia said, “Judith phoned while you were on the way back. She talked to me for twenty minutes. Oh, Ted—my poor Ted—”

  “I’m going to be okay. It’ll take time.”

  “She says these amnesias, these detailed delusions, are extraordinarily rare. You’re going to be a textbook case.”

  “Wonderful. I’m going to need a lot of help from you, Celia.”

  “Whatever I can do.”

  “I’m a blank. I don’t know who our friends are, I don’t know how to practice my profession, I don’t even know who you are. Everything’s wip
ed out. I’ll have to rebuild it all. Judith will do as much as she can, but the real burden, day by day, hour by hour, is going to fall on you.”

  “I’m prepared for that.”

  “Then we’ll start all over—from scratch. We’ll make a go of it. Tonight we’ll eat at one of our special restaurants—you’ll have to tell me which our special restaurants are—and we’ll have the best wine in the house, or maybe a bottle or two of champagne, and then we’ll come back here—we’ll be like newlyweds, Celia, it’ll be like a wedding night. All right?”

  “Of course,” she said softly.

  “And then tomorrow the hard work begins. Fitting me back into the real world.”

  “Everything will come back, Ted. Don’t worry. And I’ll give you all the help you need. I love you, Ted. No matter what’s happened to you, that hasn’t changed. I love you.”

  He nodded. He took her hands in his. Falteringly, guiltily, with a thick tongue and a numbed heart he forced himself to get the words out, the words that were his only salvation now, the words that gave him his one foothold on the shores of an unknown continent. “And I love you, Celia,” he told the absolute stranger who was his wife.

  BASILEUS

  Writing instructors often tell novice writers that they’ll do their best work when they’re writing about subjects they know very well, or when they’re expressing some strongly held conviction. It’s not bad advice, but it doesn’t necessarily hold true for experienced professionals. Here’s a case in point.

  “Basileus” is about a computer nerd who can call up real angels on his computer. It’s full of convincing-sounding stuff about hardware, software, programming, and such. It brims with incidental detail about the special qualities of particular angels.

  I don’t believe in the existence of angels.

  And I had never used a computer at the time, back in October of 1982, when I wrote the story.

  You see what tricky characters professional writers of fiction are? Someone—was it L. Sprague de Camp?—once referred to us as people who earn their livings by telling lies. Exactly so. In my personal life I happen to be—trust me—more than usually scrupulous about telling the truth. But when I sit down to write a story, I’m willing to tell you any damn thing at all, and I’m capable of making you believe it, because for the time that I’m writing the story I believe it myself. Trust me. The best liars are those who speak out of the absolute conviction that what they’re saying is so.

  In the case of “Basileus” I needed a story idea and I had, for the moment, run absolutely dry. It was September, 1982, a warm and golden month, and I was exhausted after having spent the previous six months writing an immense historical novel, Lord of Darkness. In those days I did my writing on a typewriter—a manual typewriter, none of those exotic electric jobs for me—and Lord of Darkness was something like 800 pages long in manuscript. I had typed the entire thing twice over, plus perhaps 400 pages of incidental revisions along the way, which came out to more than two thousand pages of typing, blam blam blam all summer long. Now the job was done and I just wanted to sit back thinking about something other than writing stories, or perhaps not think of anything whatever.

  But Don Myrus, one of the editors of Omni magazine, had conceived the idea of doing a special Robert Silverberg issue. Harlan Ellison would write an article about me, two of my earlier stories would be reprinted, and I would contribute a brand-new piece to top everything off. It was too flattering an offer to refuse. But where was I going to get that brand-new story? I was wiped out. I had reached that point, so dreadfully familiar to any author who has just finished a major project, where I felt convinced that I’d never have a story idea again.

  But Don Myrus wasn’t going to believe that. I had to come up with something for him. And it had to be done right away.

  One tactic that I’ve sometimes used when stuck for an idea is to grab two unrelated concepts at random, jam them together, and see if they strike any sparks. I tried it. I picked up the day’s newspaper and glanced quickly at two different pages.

  The most interesting words that rose to my eye were “computers” and “angels.”

  All right. I had my story then and there. Geek uses his computer to talk to angels.

  Corny? No. Nothing’s corny if handled the right way. Trust me.

  The antidote for corniness is verisimilitude. I had to write about angels as though I had spent my whole life conversing with them and knew them all by their first names. But I stockpile oddball reference books for just such moments, and among them was a copy of Gustav Davidson’s Dictionary of Angels. (Due credit is given in the story.) I began to leaf through it. Very quickly I read on past Gabriel and Michael and Raphael into the more esoteric ones like Israfel, who will blow the trumpet to get the Day of Judgment under way, and Anaphaxeton, who will summon the entire universe before the court. Once I had found them, I knew that I had the dramatic situation around which to build my plot. The Day of Judgment! Of course, I saw right away that I’d have to invent a few angels of my own to make things work out, but that was no problem; inventing things like angels is what I’m paid to do, and I’m probably at least as good at it as some of the people who had invented the ones who fill the pages of Gustav Davidson’s immense dictionary.

  What about the computer stuff, though? Me, with my manual typewriter?

  Well, writing the thousands of pages of Lord of Darkness had finally cured me of the folly of using a typewriter. I had decided, that exhausted September, that my next book would be written on a computer. No more grim typing out of enormous final drafts would I do. From now on, just push the button and let the electrons do the work. So I had a few conversations with that all-knowing computer expert Jerry Pournelle, and he not only explained the whole business to me but sent me a twenty-page letter, telling me what to look for when I went computer-shopping. I studied that with great diligence, and then began wandering into showrooms. Almost at once I found myself deep in the arcana of the trade as it existed in 1982: CPUs, Winchester disks, data bases, algorithms, bytes. Overnight I became capable of creating a sentence like “He has dedicated one of his function keys to its text, so that a single keystroke suffices to load it.” I still didn’t really know how to operate a computer—you pick that up only by sitting down in front of one and turning it on—but I quickly had all the jargon down pat, and even some sense of what it meant.

  You see how the trick is done? A knack for instant expertise is what you need.

  And so I wrote “Basileus.” Tired as I was, I managed the job in four or five days. I was happy with the result, and so was Don Myrus. When he phoned to accept it he expressed his awe, as a computer layman, for my obvious familiarity with such high-tech devices. “Well,” I said casually, “living so close to Silicon Valley, it’s hard not to pick up the lingo.” What I didn’t tell him was that I knew hardly any more about computers than he did, and I was going to use Omni’s check for the story to pay for the printer for my very first computer system, which I had just purchased the day before. “Basileus” was, in fact, the last work of fiction I would ever write on a typewriter. A few weeks later, as you will find out when you get to the story after this one, I was a full-fledged computer user at last, embroiled in the intricacies of my giant-lobster story, “Homefaring,” and praying each hour that the damned machine would do what I wanted it to do.

  You know to whom I was praying, of course. Israfel. Anaphaxeton. Basileus.

  ——————

  In the shimmering lemon-yellow October light, Cunningham touches the keys of his terminal and summons angels. An instant to load the program, an instant to bring the file up, and there they are, ready to spout from the screen at his command: Apollyon, Anauel, Uriel, and all the rest. Uriel is the angel of thunder and terror; Apollyon is the Destroyer, the angel of the bottomless pit; Anauel is the Angel of bankers and commission brokers. Cunningham is fascinated by the multifarious duties and tasks, both exalted and humble, that are assigned to the angels.
“Every visible thing in the world is put under the charge of an angel,” said St. Augustine in The Eight Questions.

  Cunningham has 1,114 angels in his computer now. He adds a few more each night, though he knows that he has a long way to go before he has them all. In the fourteenth century the number of angels was reckoned by the Kabbalists, with some precision, at 301,655,722. Albertus Magnus had earlier calculated that each choir of angels held 6,666 legions, and each legion 6,666 angels; even without knowing the number of choirs, one can see that that produces rather a higher total. And in the Talmud, Rabbi Jochanan proposed that new angels are born “with every utterance that goes forth from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He.”

  If Rabbi Jochanan is correct, the number of angels is infinite. Cunningham’s personal computer, though it has extraordinary add-on memory capacity and is capable, if he chooses, of tapping into the huge mainframe machines of the Defense Department, has no very practical way of handling an infinity. But he is doing his best. To have 1,114 angels on line already, after only eight months of part-time programming, is no small achievement.

  One of his favorites of the moment is Harahel, the angel of archives, libraries, and rare cabinets. Cunningham has designated Harahel also the angel of computers: it seems appropriate. He invokes Harahel often, to discuss the evolving niceties of data processing with him. But he has many other favorites, and his tastes run somewhat to the sinister: Azrael, the angel of death, for example, and Arioch, the angel of vengeance, and Zebuleon, one of the nine angels who will govern at the end of the world. It is Cunningham’s job, from eight to four every working day, to devise programs for the interception of incoming Soviet nuclear warheads, and that, perhaps, has inclined him toward the more apocalyptic members of the angelic host.