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

by Robert Silverberg

  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 to computer from typewriter, as I’ve described in the introduction to the 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.

  The story appeared in the November, 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, though its actual first publication was as a slender limited-edition volume published in July of that year by Phantasia Press. The readers liked it and it was a finalist in that year’s Nebula Award voting—perhaps might even have won, if it had been published in a magazine less obscure than dear old Amazing, which at that stage of its long existence had only a handful of readers. That same year the veteran connoisseur of science fiction, Donald A. Wollheim, chose it for his annual World’s Best SF anthology, an honor that particularly pleased me. I had deliberately intended “Homefaring” as a sleek and modern version of the sort of imagination-stirring tale of wonder that Wollheim had cherished in the s-f magazines of the 1930’s, and his choice of the story for his book confirmed my feeling of working within a great tradition.

  ——————

  McCulloch was beginning to molt. The sensation, inescapable and unarguable, horrified him—it felt exactly as though his body was going to split apart, which it was—and yet it was also completely familiar, expected, welcome. Wave after wave of keen and dizzying pain swept through him. Burrowing down deep in the sandy bed, he waved his great claws about, lashed his flat tail against the pure white sand, scratched frantically with quick worried gestures of his eight walking-legs.

  He was frightened. He was calm. He had no idea what was about to happen to him. He had done this a hundred times before.

  The molting prodrome had overwhelming power. It blotted from his mind all questions, and, after a moment, all fear. A white line of heat ran down his back—no, down the top of his carapace—from a point just back of his head to the first flaring segments of his tail-fan. He imagined that all the sun’s force, concentrated through some giant glass lens, was being inscribed in a single track along his shell. And his soft inner body was straining, squirming, expanding, filling the carapace to overflowing. But still that rigid shell contained him, refusing to yield to the pressure. To McCulloch it was much like being inside a wet-suit that was suddenly five times too small.

  —What is the sun? What is glass? What is a lens? What is a wet-suit?

  The questions swarmed suddenly upward in his mind like little busy many-legged creatures springing out of the sand. But he had no time for providing answers. The molting prodrome was developing with astounding swiftness, carrying him along. The strain was becoming intolerable. In another moment he would surely burst. He was writhing in short angular convulsions. Within his claws, his tissues now were shrinking, shriveling, drawing back within the ferocious shell-hulls, but the rest of him was continuing inexorably to grow larger.

  He had to escape from this shell, or it would kill him. He had to expel himself somehow from this impossibly constricting container. Digging his front claws and most of his legs into the sand, he heaved, twisted, stretched, pushed. He thought of himself as being pregnant with himself, struggling fiercely to deliver himself of himself.

  Ah. The carapace suddenly began to split.

  The crack was only a small one, high up near his shoulders—shoulders?—but the imprisoned substance of him surged swiftly toward it, widening and lengthening it, and in another moment the hard horny covering was cracked from end to end. Ah. Ah. That felt so good, that release from constraint! Yet McCulloch still had to free himself. Delicately he drew himself backward, withdrawing leg after leg from its covering in a precise, almost fussy way, as though he were pulling his arms from the sleeves of some incredibly ancient and frail garment.

  Until he had his huge main claws free, though, he knew he could not extricate himself from the sundered shell. And freeing the claws took extreme care. The front limbs still were shrinking, and the limy joints of the shell seemed to be dissolving and softening, but nevertheless he had to pull each claw through a passage much narrower than itself. It was easy to see how a hasty move might break a limb off altogether.

  He centered his attention on the task. It was a little like telling his wrists to make themselves small, so he could slide them out of handcuffs.

  —Wrists? Handcuffs? What are those?

  McCulloch paid no attention to that baffling inner voice. Easy, easy, there—ah—yes, there, like that! One claw was free. Then the other, slowly, carefully. Done. Both of them retracted. The rest was simple: some shrugging and wiggling, exhausting but not really challenging, and he succeeded in extending the breach in the carapace until he could crawl backward out of it. Then he lay on the sand beside it, weary, drained, naked, soft, terribly vulnerable. He wanted only to return to the sleep out of which he had emerged into this nightmare of shell-splitting.

  But some force within him would not let him slacken off. A moment to rest, only a moment. He looked to his left, toward the discarded shell. Vision was difficult—there were peculiar, incomprehensible refraction effects that broke every image into thousands of tiny fragments—but despite that, and despite the dimness of the light, he was able to see that the shell, golden-hued with broad arrow-shaped red markings, was something like a lobster’s, yet even more intricate, even more bizarre. McCulloch did not understand why he had been inhabiting a lobster’s shell. Obviously because he was a lobster; but he was not a lobster. That was so, was it not? Yet he was underwater. He lay on fine white sand, at a depth so great he could not mak
e out any hint of sunlight overhead. The water was warm, gentle, rich with tiny tasty creatures and with a swirling welter of sensory data that swept across his receptors in bewildering abundance.

  He sought to learn more. But there was no further time for resting and thinking now. He was unprotected. Any passing enemy could destroy him while he was like this. Up, up, seek a hiding-place: that was the requirement of the moment.

  First, though, he paused to devour his old shell. That too seemed to be the requirement of the moment; so he fell upon it with determination, seizing it with his clumsy-looking but curiously versatile front claws, drawing it toward his busy, efficient mandibles. When that was accomplished—no doubt to recycle the lime it contained, which he needed for the growth of his new shell—he forced himself up and began a slow scuttle, somehow knowing that the direction he had taken was the right one.

  Soon came the vibrations of something large and solid against his sensors—a wall, a stone mass rising before him—and then, as he continued, he made out with his foggy vision the sloping flank of a dark broad cliff rising vertically from the ocean floor. Festoons of thick, swaying red and yellow water plants clung to it, and a dense stippling of rubbery-looking finger-shaped sponges, and a crawling, gaping, slithering host of crabs and mollusks and worms, which vastly stirred McCulloch’s appetite. But this was not a time to pause to eat, lest he be eaten. Two enormous green anemones yawned nearby, ruffling their voluptuous membranes seductively, hopefully. A dark shape passed overhead, huge, tubular, tentacular, menacing. Ignoring the thronging populations of the rock, McCulloch picked his way over and around them until he came to the small cave, the McCulloch-sized cave, that was his goal.

  Gingerly he backed through its narrow mouth, knowing there would be no room for turning around once he was inside. He filled the opening nicely, with a little space left over. Taking up a position just within the entrance, he blocked the cave-mouth with his claws. No enemy could enter now. Naked though he was, he would be safe during his vulnerable period.

  For the first time since his agonizing awakening, McCulloch had a chance to halt: rest, regroup, consider.

  It seemed a wise idea to be monitoring the waters just outside the cave even while he was resting, though. He extended his antennae a short distance into the swarming waters, and felt at once the impact, again, of a myriad sensory inputs, all the astounding complexity of the reef-world. Most of the creatures that moved slowly about on the face of the reef were simple ones, but McCulloch could feel, also, the sharp pulsations of intelligence coming from several points not far away: the anemones, so it seemed, and that enormous squid-like thing hovering overhead. Not intelligence of a kind that he understood, but that did not trouble him: for the moment, understanding could wait, while he dealt with the task of recovery from the exhausting struggles of his molting. Keeping the antennae moving steadily in slow sweeping circles of surveillance, he began systematically to shut down the rest of his nervous system, until he had attained the rest state that he knew—how?—was optimum for the rebuilding of his shell. Already his soft new carapace was beginning to grow rigid as it absorbed water, swelled, filtered out and utilized the lime. But he would have to sit quietly a long while before he was fully armored once more.

  He rested. He waited. He did not think at all.

  After a time his repose was broken by that inner voice, the one that had been trying to question him during the wildest moments of his molting. It spoke without sound, from a point somewhere within the core of his torpid consciousness.

  —Are you awake?

  —I am now, McCulloch answered irritably.

  —I need definitions. You are a mystery to me. What is a McCulloch?

  —A man.

  —That does not help.

  —A male human being.

  —That also has no meaning.

  —Look, I’m tired. Can we discuss these things some other time?

  —This is a good time. While we rest, while we replenish ourself.

  —Ourselves, McCulloch corrected.

  —Ourself is more accurate.

  —But there are two of us.

  —Are there? Where is the other?

  McCulloch faltered. He had no perspective on his situation, none that made any sense.

  —One inside the other, I think. Two of us in the same body. But definitely two of us. McCulloch and not-McCulloch.

  —I concede the point. There are two of us. You are within me. Who are you?

  —McCulloch.

  —So you have said. But what does that mean?

  —I don’t know.

  The voice left him alone again. He felt its presence nearby, as a kind of warm node somewhere along his spine, or whatever was the equivalent of his spine, since did not think invertebrates had spines. And it was fairly clear to him that he was an invertebrate.

  He had become, it seemed, a lobster, or, at any rate, something lobster-like. Implied in that was transition: he had become. He had once been something else. Blurred, tantalizing memories of the something else that he once had been danced in his consciousness. He remembered hair, fingers, fingernails, flesh. Clothing: a kind of removable exoskeleton. Eyelids, ears, lips: shadowy concepts all, names without substance, but there was a certain elusive reality to them, a volatile, tricky plausibility. Each time he tried to apply one of those concepts to himself—“fingers,” “hair,” “man,” “McCulloch”—it slid away, it would not stick. Yet all the same those terms had some sort of relevance to him.

  The harder he pushed to isolate that relevance, though, the harder it was to maintain his focus on any part of that soup of half-glimpsed notions in which his mind seemed to be swimming. The thing to do, McCulloch decided, was to go slow, try not to force understanding, wait for comprehension to seep back into his mind. Obviously he had had a bad shock, some major trauma, a total disorientation. It might be days before he achieved any sort of useful integration.

  A gentle voice from outside his cave said, “I hope that your Growing has gone well.”

  Not a voice. He remembered voice: vibration of the air against the eardrums. No air here, maybe no eardrums. This was a stream of minute chemical messengers spurting through the mouth of the little cave and rebounding off the thousands of sensory filaments on his legs, tentacles, antennae, carapace, and tail. But the effect was one of words having been spoken. And it was distinctly different from that other voice, the internal one, that had been questioning him so assiduously a little while ago.

  “It goes extremely well,” McCulloch replied: or was it the other inhabitant of his body that had framed the answer? “I grow. I heal. I stiffen. Soon I will come forth.”

  “We feared for you.” The presence outside the cave emanated concern, warmth, intelligence. Kinship. “In the first moments of your Growing, a strangeness came from you.”

  “Strangeness is within me. I am invaded.”

  “Invaded? By what?”

  “A McCulloch. It is a man, which is a human being.”

  “Ah. A great strangeness indeed. Do you need help?”

  McCulloch answered, “No. I will accommodate to it.”

  And he knew that it was the other within himself who was making these answers, though the boundary between their identities was so indistinct that he had a definite sense of being the one who shaped these words. But how could that be? He had no idea how one shaped words by sending squirts of body fluid into the all-surrounding ocean-fluid. That was not his language. His language was—

  —words—

  —English words—

  He trembled in sudden understanding. His antennae thrashed wildly, his many legs jerked and quivered. Images churned in his suddenly boiling mind: bright lights, elaborate equipment, faces, walls, ceilings. People moving about him, speaking in low tones, occasionally addressing words to him, English words—

  —Is English what all McCullochs speak?

  —Yes.

  —So English is human-language?

  —Ye
s. But not the only one, said McCulloch. I speak English, and also German and a little—French. But other humans speak other languages.

  —Very interesting. Why do you have so many languages?

  —Because—because—we are different from one another, we live in different countries, we have different cultures—

  —This is without meaning again. There are many creatures, but only one language, which all speak with greater or lesser skill, according to their destinies.

  McCulloch pondered that. After a time he replied:

  —Lobster is what you are. Long body, claws and antennae in front, many legs, flat tail in back. Different from, say, a clam. Clams have shell on top, shell on bottom, soft flesh in between, hinge connecting. You are not like that. You have lobster body. So you are lobster.

  Now there was silence from the other.

  Then—after a long pause—

  —Very well. I accept the term. I am lobster. You are human. They are clams.

  —What do you call yourselves in your own language?

  Silence.

  —What’s your own name for yourself? Your individual self, the way my individual name is McCulloch and my species name is human being?

  Silence.

  —Where am I, anyway?

  Silence, still, so prolonged and utter that McCulloch wondered if the other being had withdrawn itself from his consciousness entirely. Perhaps days went by in this unending silence, perhaps weeks: he had no way of measuring the passing of time. He realized that such units as days or weeks were without meaning now. One moment succeeded the next, but they did not aggregate into anything continuous.