The Palace at Midnight - 1980–82 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  He stayed at Arca a few days and turned inland, across the bleak desert that sloped upward toward Mount Olympus. It was seven weeks and a day until the quake. For the first thousand kilometers or so he still could see encampments of migrating fuxes below him, slowly making their way into the Hotlands. Why, he wondered, had they permitted their world to be taken from them? They could have fought back. In the beginning they could have wiped us out in a month of guerrilla warfare. Instead they let us come in, let us make them into pets and slaves and flunkies while we paved the most fertile zones of their planet, and whatever they thought about us they kept to themselves. We never even knew their own name for Medea, Morrissey thought. That was how little of themselves they shared with us. But they tolerated us here. Why?

  The land below him was furnace hot, a badland streaked with red and yellow and orange, and now there were no foxes in sight. The first jagged foothills of the Olympus scarp knobbed the desert. He saw the mountain itself rising like a black fang toward the heavy, low-hanging, sky-filling mass of Argo. Morrissey dared not approach that mountain. It was holy and deadly. Its terrible thermal updrafts could send his flitter spinning to ground like a swatted fly, and he was not quite ready to die.

  He swung northward again and journeyed up the barren and forlorn heart of the continent toward the polar region. The Ring Ocean came into view, coiling like a world-swallowing serpent beyond the polar shores, and he kicked the flitter higher, almost to its maximum safety level, to give himself a peek at Farside, where white rivers of carbon dioxide flowed through the atmosphere and lakes of cold gas flooded the valleys. It seemed like six thousand years ago that he had led a party of geologists into that forbidding land. How earnest they had all been then! Measuring fault lines and seeking to discover the effects the quake would have over there. As if such things mattered. Why had he bothered? The quest for pure knowledge, yes. How futile that quest seemed to him now. Of course he had been much younger then. An aeon ago. Almost in another life. Morrissey had planned to fly into Farside on this trip, to bid formal farewell to the scientist he had been, but he changed his mind. There was no need. Some farewells had already been made.

  He curved down out of the polar regions as far south as Northcape on the eastern coast, circled the wondrous red-glinting sweep of the High Cascades, and landed on the airstrip at Chong. It was six weeks and two days to the earthquake. In these high latitudes the twin suns were faint and feeble even though the day was a Sunday. The monster Argo itself, far to the south, appeared shrunken. He had forgotten the look of the northern sky while spending ten years in the tropics. And yet had he not lived thirty years in Chong? It seemed like only a moment ago now, as all time collapsed into this instant of now.

  Morrissey found Chong painful, too many old associations, too many cues to memory. Yet he kept himself there until he had seen it all, the restaurant where he and Nadia had invited Danielle and Paul to join their marriage, the house on Vladimir Street where they had lived, the geophysics lab, the skiing lode just beyond the Cascades. All the footprints of his life.

  The city and its environs were utterly deserted. For day after day Morrissey wandered, reliving the time when he was young and Medea still lived. How exciting it had all been then! The quake was coming someday—everybody knew the day, down to the hour—but nobody cared except cranks and neurotics, for the others were too busy living. And then suddenly everyone cared, and everything changed.

  Morrissey played no cubes in Chong. The city itself, gleaming, a vast palisade of silver thermal roofs, was one great cube for him, crying out the tale of his years.

  When he could take it no longer, he started his southward curve around the east coast. There were four weeks and a day to go.

  His first stop was Meditation Island, the jumping-off point for those who went to visit Virgil Oddum’s fantastic and ever-evolving ice sculptures out on Farside. Four newlyweds had come here, a billion years ago, and had gone, laughing and embracing, off in icecrawlers to see the one miracle of art Medea had produced. Morrissey found the cabin where they all had stayed. It had faded and its roof was askew. He had thought of spending the night on Meditation Island, but he left after an hour.

  Now the land grew lush again as he passed into the upper tropics. Again he saw balloons by the score letting themselves be wafted toward the ocean, and again there were bands of fuxes journeying inland, driven by he knew not what sense of ritual obligation as the quake neared.

  Three weeks, two days, five hours, plus or minus.

  He flew low over the fuxes. Some were mating. That astounded him—that persistence of lust in the face of calamity. Was it merely the irresistible biological drive that kept the fuxes coupling? What chance did the newly engendered young have to survive? Would their mothers not be better off with empty wombs when the quake came? They all knew what was going to happen, and yet they mated. It made no sense to Morrissey.

  And then he thought he understood. The sight of those coupling fuxes gave him an insight into the Medean natives that explained it all, for the first time. Their patience, their calmness, their tolerance of all that had befallen them since their world had become Medea. Of course they would mate as the catastrophe drew near! They had been waiting for the earthquake all along, and for them it was no catastrophe. It was a holy moment—a purification—so he realized. He wished he could discuss this with Dinoov. It was a temptation to return at once to Argoview Dunes and seek out the old fux and test on him the theory that just had sprung to life in him. But not yet. Port Medea, first.

  The east coast had been settled before the other, and the density of development here was intense. The first two colonies—Touchdown City and Medeatown—had long ago coalesced into the urban smear that radiated outward from the third town, Port Medea. When he was still far to the north, Morrissey could see the gigantic peninsula on which Port Medea and its suburbs sprawled. The tropic heat rose in visible waves from it, buffeting his little flitter as he made his way toward that awesome, hideous concrete expanse.

  Dinoov had been correct. There were starships waiting at Port Medea—four of them, a waste of money beyond imagination. Why had they not been used in the exodus? Had they been set aside for emigrants who had decided instead to run with the rutting fuxes or give their souls to the balloons? He would never know. He entered one of the ships and said, “Operations directory.”

  “At your service,” a bodiless voice replied.

  “Give me a report on ship status. Are you prepared for a voyage to Earth?”

  “Fueled and ready.”

  “And the coldsleep equipment?”

  “Everything operational.”

  Morrissey weighed his moves. So easy, he thought, to lie down and go to sleep and let the ship take him to Earth. So easy, so automatic, so useless.

  Then he said, “How long do you need to reach departure level?”

  “One hundred sixty minutes from moment of command.”

  “Good. The command is given. Get yourself ticking and take off. Your destination is Earth, and the message I give you is this: Medea says goodbye. I thought you might have some use for this ship. Sincerely, Daniel F. Morrissey. Dated Earthquake minus two weeks one day seven hours.”

  “Acknowledged. Departure-level procedures initiated.”

  “Have a good flight,” Morrissey told the ship.

  He entered the second ship and gave it the same command. He did the same in the third. He paused before entering the last one, wondering whether there were other colonists who even now were desperately racing toward Port Medea to get aboard one of these ships before the end came. To hell with them, Morrissey thought. They should have made up their minds sooner. He told the fourth ship to go home to Earth.

  On his way back from the port to the city he saw the four bright spears of light rise skyward, a few minutes apart. Each hovered a moment, outlined against Argo’s colossal bulk, and shot swiftly into the aurora-dappled heavens. In sixty-one years they would descend onto a baffled Earth
with their cargo of no one. Another great mystery of space to delight the tale-tellers, he thought. The Voyage of the Empty Ships.

  With a curious sense of accomplishment he left Port Medea and headed down the coast to the sleek resort of Madagozar, where the elite of Medea had amused themselves in tropic luxury. Morrissey had always thought the place absurd. But it was still intact, still purring with automatic precision. He treated himself to a lavish holiday there. He raided the wine cellars of the best hotels, breakfasted on tubs of chilled spikelegs caviar, dozed in the warm sun, bathed in the juice of gilliwog flowers, and thought about absolutely nothing at all.

  The day before the earthquake he flew back to Argoview dunes.

  “So you chose not to go home after all,” Dinoov said.

  Morrissey shook his head. “Earth was never my home. Medea was my home. I went home to Medea. And then I came back to this place because it was my last home. It pleases me that you’re still here, Dinoov.”

  “Where would I have gone?” the fux asked.

  “The rest of your people are migrating inland. I think it’s to be nearer the holy mountain when the end comes. Is that right?”

  “That is right.”

  “Why have you stayed, then?”

  “This is my home, too. I have so little time left that it matters not very much to me where I am when the ground shakes. But tell me, friend Morrissey, was your journey worth the taking?”

  “It was.”

  “What did you see? What did you learn?”

  “I saw Medea, all of it,” Morrissey said. “I never realized how much of your world we took. By the end we covered all the land that was worth covering, didn’t we? And you people never said a word. You stood by and let it happen.”

  The fux was silent.

  Morrissey said, “I understand now. You were waiting for the earthquake all along, weren’t you? You knew it was coming long before we bothered to figure it out. How many times has it happened since fuxes first evolved on Medea? Every seventy-one hundred sixty years the fuxes move to high ground and the balloons drift to Farside and the ground shakes and everything falls apart. And then the survivors reappear, with new life already in the wombs, and build again. So you knew, when we came here, when we built our towns everywhere and turned them into cities, when we rounded you up and made you work for us, when we mixed our genes with yours and changed the microbes in the air so we’d be more comfortable here, that what we were doing wouldn’t last forever, right? That was your secret knowledge, your hidden consolation, that this, too, would pass. Eh, Dinoov? And now it has passed. We’re gone, and the happy young fuxes are mating. I’m the only one of my kind left, except for a few naked crazies in the bush.”

  There was a glint in the fux’s eyes. Amusement? Contempt? Compassion? Who could read a fux’s eyes?

  “All along,” Morrissey said, “you were all just waiting for the earthquake. Right? The earthquake that would make everything whole again. Well, now it’s almost upon us. And I’m going to stand here alongside you and wait for the earthquake, too. It’s my contribution to interspecies harmony. I’ll be the human sacrifice. I’ll be the one who atones for all that we did here. How does that sound, Dinoov?”

  “I wish,” the fux said slowly, “that you had boarded one of those ships and gone back to Earth. Your death will give me no pleasure.”

  Morrissey nodded. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He went into his cabin.

  The cubes of Nadia and Paul and Danielle sat beside the screen. Not for years had he played them, but he jacked them into the slots now, and on the screen appeared the three people he had most loved in all the universe. They smiled at him, and Danielle offered a soft greeting, and Paul winked, and Nadia blew a kiss. Morrissey said, “It’s almost over now. Today’s earthquake day. I just wanted to say goodbye, that’s all. I just wanted to tell you that I love you and I’ll be with you soon.”

  “Dan—” Nadia said.

  “No. You don’t have to say anything. I know you aren’t really there, anyway. I just wanted to see you all again. I’m very happy right now.”

  He took the cubes from their slots. The screen went dark. Gathering up the cubes, he carried them outside and carefully buried them in the soft, moist soil of his garden. The fux watched him incuriously.

  “Dinoov?” Morrissey called. “One last question.”

  “Yes, my friend?”

  “All the years we lived on Medea, we were never able to learn the name by which you people called your own world. We kept trying to find out, but all we were told was that it was taboo, and even when we coaxed a fux into telling us the name, the next fux would tell us an entirely different name. So we never knew. I ask you a special favor now, here at the end. Tell me what you call your world. Please. I need to know.”

  The old fux said, “We call it Sanoon.”

  “Sanoon? Truly?”

  “Truly,” said the fux.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Why, it means the world,” said Dinoov. “What else?”

  The earthquake was thirty minutes away—plus or minus a little. During the past hour the white suns had disappeared behind Argo. Morrissey had not noticed that. But now he heard a low rumbling roar, and then he felt a strange trembling in the ground, as if something mighty were stirring beneath his feet and would burst shortly into wakefulness. Not far from shore terrible waves rose and crashed.

  Calmly Morrissey said, “This is it, I think.”

  Overhead, a dozen gleaming balloons soared and bobbed in a dance that looked much like a dance of triumph.

  There was thunder in the air and a writhing in the heart of the world. In another moment the full force of the quake would be upon them, and the crust of the planet would quiver and the awful tremors would rip the land apart and the sea would rise up and cover the coast. Morrissey began to weep, and not out of fear. He managed a smile. “The cycle’s complete, Dinoov. Out of Medea’s ruins Sanoon will rise. The place is yours again at last.”

  THE REGULARS

  In the spring of 1980 George Scithers, the founding editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, phoned me to say that he was putting together an anthology of science fiction stories that took place in bars, saloons, and taverns—a remarkably common sub-species of science fiction, which reached its apotheosis in the first of the Star Wars movies with the Mos Eisley cantina scene. Scithers assumed that there must surely be a story of that kind among the hundreds and hundreds of stories I had written over the years.

  Probably there was. But I couldn’t remember one off hand, and, since I suddenly had begun writing stories again, I made Scithers an offer. “Suppose I write a new one for you? You can publish it in Asimov’s and then reprint it in your anthology.”

  He thought that was a fine idea. So I sat down one June morning and wrote “The Regulars,” a story firmly set in the classic barroom-science-fiction tradition of Henry Kuttner’s “Don’t Look Now” and the Gavagan’s Bar series of Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp. Scithers published it a few months later in the issue of Asimov’s that bore the date of May 11, 1981, and eventually included it in his anthology, Tales From The Spaceport Bar.

  Very likely I did write two or three stories of that sort in my early days, but I still haven’t been able to locate them. No matter now: I had some fun writing this one.

  ——————

  It was the proverbial night not fit for man nor beast, black and grim and howling, with the rain coming on in sidewise sheets. But in Charley Sullivan’s place everything was as cozy as an old boot, the lights dim, the heat turned up, the neon beer signs sputtering pleasantly, Charley behind the bar filling them beyond the Plimsoll line, and all the regulars in their regular places. What a comfort a tavern like Charley Sullivan’s can be on a night that’s black and grim and howling!

  “It was a night like this,” said the Pope to Karl Marx, “that you changed your mind about blowing up the stock exchange, as I recall. Eh?”

&nb
sp; Karl Marx nodded moodily. “It was the beginning of the end for me as a true revolutionary, it was.” He isn’t Irish, but in Charley Sullivan’s everybody picks up the rhythm of it soon enough. “When you get too fond of your comforts to be willing to go out into a foul gale to attack the enemies of the proletariat, it’s the end of your vocation, sure enough.” He sighed and peered into his glass. It held nothing but suds, and he sighed again.

  “Can I buy you another?” asked the Pope. “In memory of your vocation.”

  “You may indeed,” said Karl Marx.

  The Pope looked around. “And who else is needy? My turn to set them up!”

  The Leading Man tapped the rim of his glass. So did Ms. Bewley and Mors Longa. I smiled and shook my head, and The Ingenue passed also, but Toulouse-Lautrec, down at the end of the bar, looked away from the television set long enough to give the signal. Charley efficiently handed out the refills—beer for the apostle of the class struggle, Jack Daniels for Mors Longa, Valpolicella for the Pope, Scotch-and-water for The Leading Man, white wine for Ms. Bewley, Perrier with slice of lemon for Toulouse-Lautrec, since he had had the cognac the last time and claimed to be tapering off. And for me, Myers on the rocks. Charley never needs to ask. Of course, he knows us all very well.

  “Cheers,” said The Leading Man, and we drank up, and then an angel passed by, and the long silence ended only when a nasty rumble of thunder went through the place at about 6.3 on the Richter scale.

  “Nasty night,” The Ingenue said. “Imagine trying to elope in a downpour like this! I can see it now, Harry and myself at the boathouse, and the car—”