To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One

by Robert Silverberg

  So I sat among my betters at Milford, listening to them speak of the agonies of their art; and I, for whom writing was at that time no agony at all, merely an exercise in discipline and concentration, felt abashed and ultimately very troubled. I resolved, not to give up writing potboilers (for as long as my landlord insisted on charging rent for my Manhattan apartment I saw no harm in turning out stories that would help me to pay it) but to reach for greater intensity in the stories that I took more seriously, my “real” science fiction. And after my return to New York, I tried my best to keep that resolution, at least for a while. “The Man with Talent,” as the first version of this story was called, was written early in October, 1956, a few weeks after Milford—an attempt to grapple with the Milford experience in metaphorical form. Bob Lowndes paid me $75 for it—a premium rate then, believe it or not—and published it in the Winter, 1957 issue of Future Science Fiction. A decade later, James Blish, one of the prime movers of the Milford meeting and a man famous for his harsh chastisement of poorly done science fiction, used it in an anthology about the future of art called New Dreams This Morning, an event which gave me such pleasure that I revised the story especially for the book and changed its title slightly. It is the revised version that I use here.

  ——————

  There was a scrap of a clipping that Emil Vilar carried about with him, a review of his first and only volume of poetry. Now, on this new world, he drew it out and read it for the ten-thousandth time. It was yellow with age, and the print was blurred, but that hardly mattered; the words were graven deep in Emil Vilar’s memory.

  We welcome Emil Vilar both for his technical gifts and his breadth of understanding. He speaks with the authentic poetic voice. His book, certainly the most promising debut volume in many years, perhaps heralds the arrival of a major poet. Yet it must be doubted that Mr. Vilar will have the opportunity to fulfil this promise, working as he must in a world where such art as his is doomed to be stillborn. With the audience for poetry of any quality already nearly extinct, how can an Emil Vilar sustain and develop his talent?

  Vilar had reddened with shame when the review appeared. He had known, inwardly, that it was the truth, that he had the stuff of a major poet within him, but he neither dared to take that resonant label upon himself nor welcomed another’s saying it. But it had not mattered much. With or without the burden of that reputation, he had failed to find his following. It was not an age of poetry but of verse: the occasional ode, the snappy quatrain, the glorified limerick. The craft of poetry was nearly dead, the poet’s function distorted. Practical matters, the immediately useful thing—they had triumphed on Earth. It was no century for the artist. A crowded, harried world could not afford such luxuries.

  He had tried. For twenty years after, he had continued to write and to try. And finally he had admitted the truth of what the anonymous reviewer had said—and he had left Earth forever.

  He looked up from the clipping at the landscape of his new world. He had selected it at random, from the thick volume of catalogued worlds in the library. Which world it was did not matter to him. All that mattered was that it was not Earth.

  “Rigel Seven,” he said aloud. The words were strange in his mouth, and he savored the interplay of the not-quite-assonant vowels of the two mild trochees that named his new home.

  He was faintly disappointed, now that he was here, that he had picked a Terraformed planet. His motives had been clear enough at the start: He wanted a world as much like and as far from Earth as possible, where he could work in peace, unknown and undisturbed—where people would not plague him with their well-meant misinterpretations of his work, sting him with accusations of ivory-towerism or artistic irresponsibility, or call him any of the other names they had called him because he insisted on writing his poetry for himself and himself alone.

  Earth didn’t understand. Earth wanted him to be a rhymer, not a poet—and so Emil Vilar had quietly removed himself from the Terran scene. He had chosen a Terraformed planet as his new home. But as he looked at the gently sloping green hills and the familiar-seeming puffs of white fleece in the soft blue sky, he realized he had made one of his rare mistakes. How much richer his imagination would have been, he thought sadly, had he selected an Alienform world—one which had not yet been converted into a carbon copy of the mother planet. Here he had the same sky and the same clouds as on Earth; only the Sun was different, a hard, distant dot of incalculably ferocious intensity.

  Well, he was here, and here he would stay. Carefully he folded his clipping and slid it into his wallet. Rigel Seven was as good a place as any, and any would be better than Earth.

  The robot in the Earthside routing office had told him, with a smirk on its mirrored face, that he was the first emigrant to Rigel Seven in over five hundred years. That had been all right, too.

  The planet had been settled eight hundred years earlier by sixteen wealthy Terran families, who had purchased it jointly as a private estate. The conditions of the sale, of course, had been that the planet remained open to all comers for emigration, but that was a safe risk. The sky was full of stars, and each had its cluster of worlds; who would cross five hundred light-years to settle on Rigel Seven, when Sirius and Vega and Procyon and the Centauri stars beckoned just a few light-years from Earth?

  Who but Emil Vilar, fleeing quietly from the world that would never understand him?

  He had saved, in his fifty years, some five thousand dollars. That had nearly covered the transit fee. The rest had been supplied by his friends.

  There had been six of them, men with faith in Emil Vilar. They had fought his going, but when they saw he was determined to go, they helped him. They contributed the needed thousand to see him through the journey, and they established a trust fund that would provide a monthly remittance for him for the rest of his life.

  He took a deep breath. Rigel Seven was Terraformed, but they had left out the stink of Earth’s air and the filth of her cities. The air was fresh and clear here. He smiled at the sight of his shadow, stretched mightily ahead of him over the grass.

  For the first time in his memory, he felt happy.

  The Rigel Seven spaceport was at the edge of a broad field that swept up the side of the hill in the distance like a green carpet. Farther back, on the hill, Vilar could see the shimmering paleness of a domed house. Someone was coming down the brown, winding path that led from the hill to the field.

  He hefted his small suitcase and started to walk forward rapidly. The man met him in the middle of the field. He was tall and bronzed, shirtless, with long, rippling muscles lying flat and firm on his arms and chest. Vilar felt suddenly ashamed of his own dumpy body.

  “You’re the emigrant, aren’t you?”

  “I am Emil Vilar. The ship has just left me here.”

  “I know,” the tall man said, grinning affably. “We saw it come down. It was quite a novelty for us. We don’t get much traffic here, you know.”

  “I can imagine,” Vilar said quietly. “Well, I shan’t bother you much. I keep to myself most of the time.”

  “We have a place all ready for you. My name’s Carpenter, by the way—Melbourne Hadley Carpenter. Come, I’ll show you to your shack, and then you can come visit us later. We’ll tell you how things work here.”

  “Work? But—I do not plan to participate in any communal activ—”

  He paused, frowning, and shook his head gently. This was no time to spout a declaration of principles. “Never mind,” he said. “Show me where I stay.”

  Carpenter led him back up the path to the foot of the hill, where there was a small shack looking upward at the great domed house.

  “This is ideal,” said Vilar. It was just what he had envisioned when he had made arrangements to live here.

  “See you later,” Carpenter told him, waved cheerily, and left. Vilar put a hand on the door-opener, broke the photonic circuit, and stepped in.

  One bookcase, one bed, one closet, one dresser.

 
Ideal.

  Vilar unpacked his single suitcase rapidly. It had been no struggle for him to break away from his Earthly possessions; he had been able to bring everything he owned and still make the fifty-pound mass limit of the subspace liner with ease.

  First came the books, just eight of them. There was the slim blue-bound copy of Poems, by Emil Vilar (London, 2743, 61 pp.). After that, Pound’s Cantos, the complete hundred and forty. Next came the King James Bible, Swann’s Way, the complete Yeats, Davis’s On Historical Analysis (both volumes in one), the plays of Cyril Tourneur, and the Greek Anthology. These were all Vilar had kept from a lifetime of reading, and he had added the most recent—the single volume of Proust—sixteen years before. Now he considered his library closed.

  His meagre wardrobe followed, and he arrayed it in the closet and dresser with customary methodical precision. After that his linens and other household goods. Next the thin file envelope containing his poetic output since the 2743 volume. It was all unpublished, and the world had seen little of it.

  Those works which had somehow passed muster and been shown to a few friends—those poems Vilar now regarded as tainted, though he kept them. Each seemed stained by the muddleheaded criticism it had inspired.

  “A wonderful thing, Emil—but isn’t it a shade too long?”

  “Marvelous imagery, Emil. But when you bring in Dido, I think you’re reaching too far for effect—”

  “Splendid, but—”

  “Magnificent, but—”

  “Why all these tensions, Vilar? Why not relax the texture a trifle? If you had only—”

  “Am I being too blunt in saying that I feel your work lately has been tending towards a dead end, a geometrical stasis that can only damage your standing? The failure of sensibility—”

  He had listened patiently to each of them, digested their often conflicting critical views with dignity, and, finally, turned his back on the lot of them. They were chatterers. They made knowing noises, but what they really wanted to tell him was that his lines did not jingle enough. Retreating to Rigel Seven was the easiest solution. There had been no other way. Had he remained on Earth, he would have spent the rest of his days unchangingly, plagued by the cultists, the center of a tiny, well-meaning circle of admirers who longed to share his gift, though they had no notion of the anguish they brought to its possessor. Better to be ignored, as he was by most of the world, than to have such a claque. So he had gone away.

  He continued unpacking. He drew out two reams of paper: all he would need for the rest of his life. His pen. His notebook. He looked around. Everything was as it should be. The room was complete.

  Vilar sat down at his desk and reached for a book. His hand lingered momentarily over his own little volume, quivered a bit, and moved on. He drew forth Yeats, then reconsidered and put him back. Fugitive lines from Eliot, whom he had long since memorized and so had not needed to bring with him, flickered through his mind:

  …Gull against the wind,

  in the windy straits

  Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,

  White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

  And an old man driven by the Trades

  To a sleepy corner.

  Tenants of the house,

  Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

  He worked, for most of the night, on a free fantasy based on the opening lines of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Towards dawn, he rose, tore up the sheet, and blotted what he had written from his mind. He went outside on his tiny porch to watch the strange sun creep above the horizon of Rigel Seven. At this distance, bloated Rigel looked far smaller than Sol—but the savage blaze of its hot blue-white light betrayed the alien star’s true power.

  Shortly after sunrise, Melbourne Hadley Carpenter returned.

  “Have a good night?”

  Vilar, rumpled-looking and red-eyed, nodded. “Excellent.”

  “Glad to hear it. Suppose you come up to the house now. My father’s waiting to meet you, and so are all the others.”

  Vilar frowned suspiciously. “Why do they want to meet me?”

  “Oh, just curiosity, I guess. You’re the only one here who’s not one of the Families, you know.”

  “I know,” Vilar said, relieved. “You’re sure you’ve never heard of me then?”

  Carpenter shrugged. “How would we ever hear of you? We’re completely out of touch with things, you know.”

  “True.” One major worry was thereby avoided—he would be a complete stranger here, as he had hoped. A fresh start would be possible. The old man’s brain was not dry; here in this sleepy corner, he could scale the greatest heights without attracting the clumsy attention that was so fatal to artistic endeavor.

  He followed the tall young man up the hill and into the domed house. The lines of the building were clear and simple; in his amateur’s way, Vilar approved of the architecture wholeheartedly. It had none of the falseness of Earth’s current pseudo-archaism.

  In the spacious central hall, an immense table had been set, and at least fifty people sat around it. A tall man looking much like Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, but much older, with iron-grey hair and faintly stooping shoulders, rose from his seat at the head of the table.

  “You’re Emil Vilar,” he said ringingly. “We’re very happy to see you. I’m Theodore Hadley Carpenter, and this is my family.”

  Awed, Vilar nodded hesitantly. With a sweeping gesture of his hand, Theodore Hadley Carpenter indicated six almost identical younger men sitting to his right.

  “My sons,” he said.

  Farther down the table were still younger men—this was the generation of Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, Vilar decided. “My grandsons,” the patriarch said, confirming this.

  “You have a very fine family, Mr. Carpenter,” Vilar said.

  “One of the best, sir,” Carpenter replied blandly. “Will you join us now for breakfast? We can talk afterwards.”

  Vilar had no objections, and took a vacant seat at the table. Breakfast proceeded—served, he noted, by pretty young girls who were probably Carpenter’s granddaughters. There were no outsiders on this planet, no servants, no one who was not part of a Family.

  Except me, he thought with wry amusement. Always the outsider.

  Breakfast had been as efficiently Terraformed as the planet itself. Bacon and eggs, warm rolls, coffee—why, it was ludicrous to travel—what was it, five hundred and forty-five light years, untold trillions of miles?—and have warm rolls and coffee for breakfast. But people tend to cling, Vilar thought. What was the entire Terraforming project but a mighty whimper, a galaxy-shaking yawp of puny defiance (barbaric yawp, his well-stocked mind footnoted automatically)? Man was progressively carving the worlds of space into the image of Earth, and eating rolls for breakfast.

  Vilar considered the thought. Later, he knew, it would emerge concealed in the webwork of one of his poems, and still later he would see it there, and destroy the poem as a silly timebound polemic.

  He sat back in his chair when he had finished eating. The table was cleared. Then, to his astonishment, old Carpenter clapped his hands and one of his look-alike sons fetched a musical instrument. It was stringed, the strings stretched tight over a graven sounding board. A dulcimer, Vilar thought in wonderment as the patriarch began to play, striking the strings with two carved ivory sticks.

  The melody was a strange and complex one; the poet, who had a sound but far from detailed knowledge of musical theory, listened carefully. The short piece ended plaintively in the minor, coming to an abrupt halt with three descending thirds.

  “My own composition,” the old man said, in the silence that followed. “It’s sometimes hard to get used to our music at first, but—”

  “I thought it was fine,” Vilar said shortly. He was anxious to finish this meal and return to work, and hoped there would be no further talk of performing.

  He rose from his chair.

  “Leaving so soon?” the old man asked. “Why, we haven’t even talke
d.”

  “Talked? About what?”

  Carpenter knotted his fingers together. “About your contribution to our group, of course. We can’t happily let you stay with us and eat our food if you’re not going to offer us anything, stranger. Come now—what do you do?”

  “I’m a poet,” Vilar said uneasily.

  The old man chuckled. “A poet? Indeed, yes—but what do you do?”

  “I don’t understand you. If you mean what is my trade, I have none. I’m merely a poet.”

  “Grandfather means can you do anything else,” whispered one of the younger Carpenters near him. “Of course, you’re a poet—who ever said you wouldn’t be?”

  Vilar shook his head. “Nothing but a poet.” It sounded like an indictment, self-spoken.

  “We had hoped you were a medical man, or a bookbinder, or perhaps a blacksmith. Coming from Earth, as you were—who would have expected a poet? Why, we have poets aplenty here! Of all things for Earth to give us!”

  Emil Vilar moistened his lips and fidgeted nervously. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said weakly, turning up the palms of his hands. “Terribly sorry.”

  The joke was on them, he thought later that morning. No wonder they had been so anxious to have him come. To them, Earth meant something rugged and harsh, strange and jagged. They had hoped to have the smooth rhythm of their life disrupted by the man from Earth.

  Yes, the joke’s on them, he decided. Instead of a blacksmith, they got Earth’s last poet, her one and only poet. And Rigel Seven had plenty of those.