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

by Robert Silverberg

  “Yes. Yes. It’s horrible of us to have such good opinions of ourselves, isn’t it?”

  “Probably. But they’re well-earned, my dear.”

  He covered her hand with his and squeezed, and she squeezed back. Reichenbach had never known anyone like her. Deeper and deeper was she drawing him, and his delight was tempered only by the knowledge that when they returned to realtime, to that iron world beyond the terminator, where all paradoxes canceled out and the delicious freedoms of the jaunter did not apply, he must of necessity lose her. But there was no hurry about returning.

  Voices now: laughter, shouts, a company of men entering the tavern, actors, poets perhaps, Burbage maybe, Heminges, Allen, Condell, Kemp, Ben Jonson possibly, and who was that, slender, high forehead, those eyes like lamps in the dark? Who else could it be? Plainly Shagspere, Chaxper, Shackspire, however they spelled it. Surely Sweet Will here among these men calling for sack and malmsey, and behind that broad forehead Hamlet and Mercutio must be teeming, Othello, Hotspur, Prospero, Macbeth. The sight of him excited Reichenbach as Nero had excited Ilsabet. He inclined his head, hoping to hear scraps of dazzling table talk, some bit of newborn verse, some talk of a play taking form, but at this distance everything blurred. “I have to go to him,” Reichenbach muttered.

  “The regulations—”

  “Je m’en fous the regulations. I’ll be quick. People of our kind don’t need to worry about the regulations. I promise you, I’ll be quick.”

  She winked and blew him a kiss. She looked gorgeously sluttish in her low-fronted gown.

  Reichenbach felt a strange quivering in his calves as he crossed the straw-strewn floor to the far-off crowded table.

  “Master Shakespeare!” he cried.

  Heads turned. Cold eyes glared out of silent faces. Reichenbach forced himself to be bold. From his purse he took two thin, crude shilling pieces and put them in front of Shakespeare. “I would stand you a flagon or two of the best sack,” he said loudly, “in the name of good Sir John.”

  “Sir John?” said Shakespeare, blank-faced. He frowned and shook his head. “Sir John Woodcocke, d’ye mean? Sir John Holcombe? I know not your Sir John, fellow.”

  Reichenbach’s cheeks blazed. He felt like a fool.

  A burly man beside Shakespeare said, with a rough nudge, “Methinks he speaks of Falstaff, Will. Eh? You recall your Falstaff?”

  “Yes,” Reichenbach said. “In truth I mean no other.”

  “Falstaff,” Shakespeare said in a distant way. He looked displeased, uncomfortable. “I recall the name, yes. Friend, I thank you, but take back your shillings. It is bad custom for me to drink of strangers’ sack.”

  Reichenbach protested, but only fitfully, and quickly he withdrew lest the moment grow ugly: plainly these folk had no use for his wine or for him, and to be wounded in a tavern brawl here in A.D. 1604 would bring monstrous consequences in realtime. He made a courtly bow and retreated. Ilsabet, watching, wore a cat grin. He went slinking back to her, upset, bitterly aware he had bungled his cherished meeting with Shakespeare and, worse, had looked bumptious in front of her.

  “We should go,” he said. “We’re unwelcome here.”

  “Poor dear one. You look so miserable.”

  “The contempt in his eyes—”

  “No,” she said. “The man is probably bothered by strangers all the time. And you know he was with his friends in the sanctuary of his own tavern. He meant no personal rebuke.”

  “I expected him to be different—to be one of us, to reach out toward me and draw me to him, to—to—”

  “No,” said Ilsabet gently. “He has his life, his wife, his pains, his problems. Don’t confuse him with your fantasy of him. Come, now. You look so glum, my dear. Find yourself again!”

  “Somewhen else.”

  “Yes. Somewhen else.”

  Under her deft consolations the sting of his oafishness at the Mermaid Tavern eased, and his mood brightened as they went onward. Few words passed between them: a look, a smile, the merest of contacts, and they communicated. Attending the trial of Socrates, they touched fingertips lightly, secretly, and it was the deepest of communions. Afterward they made love under the clear, bright winter sky of Athens on a gray-green hillside rich with lavender and myrtle and emerged from shivering ecstasies to find themselves with an audience of mournful scruffy goats—a perfect leap of context and metaphor—and for days thereafter they made each other laugh with only the most delicate pantomimed reminder of the scene. Onward they went to see grim, limping, austere old Magellan sail off around the world with his five little ships from the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and at a whim they leaped to India, staining their skins and playing at Hindus as they viewed the expedition of Vasco da Gama come sailing into harbor at Calicut, and then it seemed proper to go on to Spain in dry hot summer to drink sour white wine and watch ruddy, freckled-faced Columbus get his pitiful little fleet out to sea.

  Of course they took other lovers from time to time. That was part of the game, too tasty a treat to forswear. In Byzantium on the eve of the Frankish conquest he passed a night with a dark-eyed, voluptuous Greek, who oiled her breasts with musky, mysterious unguents, and Ilsabet made love with a towering, garlicky Swede of the imperial guard, and when they found each other the next day, just as the Venetian armada burst into the Bosporus, they described to each other in the most flamboyant detail the strangenesses of their night’s sport—the tireless Norseman’s toneless bellowing of sagas in his hottest moments; the Byzantine’s startling, convulsive, climactic fit, almost epileptic in style and, as she had admitted playfully at dawn, mostly a counterfeit. In Cleopatra’s Egypt, while waiting for glimpses of the Queen and Antony, they diverted themselves with a dark-eyed Coptic pair, brother and sister, no more than children and blithely interchangeable in bed. At the crowning of Charlemagne she found herself a Frankish merchant, who offered her an estate along the Rhine, and he, a mysteriously elliptical, dusky woman, who claimed to be a Catalonian Moor, but who—Reichenbach suddenly realized a few days later—must almost certainly have been a jaunter like himself, playing elegant games with him.

  All this lent spice to their love and did no harm. These separate but shared adventures only enhanced the intensity of the relationship they were welding. He prayed the jaunt would never end, for Ilsabet was the perfect companion, his utter match, and so long as they sprinted together through the eons, she was his, though he knew this would end when realtime reclaimed him. Nevertheless, that moment still was far away, and he hoped before then to find some way around the inexorable rules, some scheme for locating her and continuing with her in his own true time. Small chance of that, he knew. In the world beyond the terminator there was no time jaunting; jaunting could be done only in the fluid realm of “history,” and “history” was arbitrarily defined as everything that had happened before the terminator year, 2187. The rest was realtime, rigid and immutable, and what if her realtime were fifty years ahead of his, or fifty behind? There was no bridging that by jaunting. He did not know her realtime locus, and he did not dare ask. Deep as the love between them had come to be, Reichenbach still feared offending her through some unpardonable breach of their special etiquette.

  With all the world to choose from, they sometimes took brief solo jaunts. That was Ilsabet’s idea, holidays within their holiday, so that they would not grow stale with each other. It made sense to him. Thereupon he vaulted to the Paris of the 1920’s to sip Pernod on the Boulevard St.-Germain and peer at Picasso and Hemingway and Joyce, she in epicanthic mask to old Cathay to see Kublai Khan ride in triumph through the Great Wall, he to Cape Kennedy to watch the great Apollo rocket roaring moonward, she to London for King Charles’s beheading. But these were brief adventures, and they reunited quickly, gladly, and went on hand in hand to their next together, to the fall of Troy and the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria and the assassination of Lincoln and the sack of Carthage. Always when they returned from separate exploits, they regaled each other with ex
tensive narratives of what had befallen them, the sights, the tastes, the ironies and perceptions, and of course the amorous interludes. By now Reichenbach and Ilsabet had accumulated an elaborate fabric of shared experience, a richness of joint history that gave them virtually a private language of evocative recollection, so that the slightest of cues—a goat on a hill, the taste of burned toast, the sight of a lop-eared beggar—sprang them into an intimate realm that no one else could ever penetrate: their unique place, furnished with their own things, the artifacts of love, the treasures of memory. And even that which they did separately became interwoven in that fabric, as of the telling of events as they lay in each other’s arms had transformed those events into communal possessions.

  Yet gradually Reichenbach realized that something was beginning to go wrong.

  From a solo jaunt to the Paris of 1794, where she toured the Reign of Terror, Ilsabet returned strangely evasive. She spoke in brilliant detail of the death of Robespierre and the sad despoliation of Notre Dame, but what she reported was mere journalism, with no inner meaning. He had to fish for information. Where had she lodged? Had she feared for her safety? Had she had interesting conversations with the Parisians? Shrugs, deflections. Had she taken a lover? Yes, yes, a fleeting liaison, nothing worth talking about; and then it was back to an account of the mobs, the tumbrels, the sound of the guillotine. At first Reichenbach accepted that without demur, though her vagueness violated their custom. But she remained moody and oblique while they were visiting the Crucifixion, and as they were about to depart for the Black Death, she begged off, saying she needed another day to herself and would go to Prague for the premiere of Don Giovanni. That too failed to trouble him—he was not musical—and he spent the day observing Waterloo from the hills behind Wellington’s troops. When Ilsabet rejoined him in the late spring of 1349 for the Black Death in London, though, she seemed even more preoccupied and remote, and she told him little of her night at the opera. He began to feel dismay, for they had been marvelously close, and now she was obviously voyaging on some other plane. The plague-smitten city seemed to bore her. Her only flicker of animation came toward evening, in a Southwark hostelry, when as they dined on gristly lamb, a stranger entered, a tall, gaunt, sharp-bearded man with the obvious aura of a jaunter. Reichenbach did not fail to notice the rebirth of light in Ilsabet’s eyes, and the barely perceptible inclining forward of her body as the stranger approached their table was evident to him.

  The newcomer naturally knew them for what they were and invited himself to join them. His name was Stavanger; he had been on his jaunt just a few days; he meant to see everything, everything, before his time was up. Not for many years had Reichenbach felt such jealousy. He was wise in these things, and it was not difficult to detect the current flowing from Ilsabet to Stavanger, even as he sat there between them. Now he understood why she had no casual amours to report of her jaunts to Paris and Prague. This one was far from casual and would bear no retelling.

  In the morning she said, “I still feel operatic. I’ll go to Bayreuth tonight—the premiere of Götterdämmerung.”

  Despising himself, he said, “A capital idea. I’ll accompany you.”

  She looked disconcerted. “But music bores you!”

  “A flaw in my character. Time I began to remedy it.”

  The fitful panic in Ilsabet’s eyes gave way to cool and chilling calmness. “Another time, dear love. I prize my solitude. I’ll make this little trip without you.”

  It was all plain to him. Gone now the open sharing; now there were secret rendezvous and an unwanted third player of their game. He could not bear it. He made his own arrangements and jaunted to Bayreuth in thick red wig and curling beard, and there she was, seated beside Stavanger, in the Festspielhaus as the orchestra launched into the first notes. Reichenbach did not remain for the performance.

  Stavanger now crossed their path openly and with great frequency. They met him at the siege of Constantinople, at the San Francisco Earthquake, and at a fete at Versailles. This was more than coincidence, and Reichenbach said so to Ilsabet. “I suggested he follow some of our itinerary,” she admitted. “He’s a lonely man, jaunting alone. And quite charming. But of course if you dislike him, we can simply vanish without telling him where we’re going, and he’ll never find us again.”

  A disarming tactic, Reichenbach thought. It was impossible for her to admit to him that she and Stavanger were lovers, for there was too much substance to their affair; so instead she pretended he was a pitiful, forlorn wanderer in need of company. Reichenbach was outraged. Fidelity was not part of his unspoken compact with her, and she was free to slip off to any era she chose for a tryst with Stavanger. But that she chose to conceal what was going on was deplorable, and that she was finding pretexts to drag Stavanger along on their travels, puncturing the privacy of their own rapport for the sake of a few smug stolen glances, was impermissible. Reichenbach was convinced now that Ilsabet and Stavanger were cotemporals, though he knew he had no rational basis for that idea; it simply seemed right to him, a final torment, the two of them now laying the groundwork for a realtime relationship that excluded him. Whether true or not, it was unbearable. Reichenbach was astounded by his jealous fury. Yet it was a true emotion and one he would not attempt to repress. The joy he had known with Ilsabet had been unique, and Stavanger had tainted it.

  He found himself searching for ways to dispose of his rival.

  Merely whirling Ilsabet off elsewhen would achieve nothing. She would find ways to catch up with her paramour somewhen along the line. And if Ilsabet and Stavanger were cotemporal and she and Reichenbach were not—no, no, Stavanger had to be expunged. Reichenbach, a usually stable man, had never imagined himself capable of such criminality; a bit of elitist regulation bending was all he had ever allowed himself. But he had never been faced with the loss of an Ilsabet before, either.

  In Borgia Italy Reichenbach hired a Florentine prisoner to do Stavanger in with a dram of nightshade. But the villain pocketed Reichenbach’s down payment and disappeared without a care for the florins due him on completion of the job. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ides of March Reichenbach attempted to finger Stavanger as one of Caesar’s murderers, but no one paid attention. Nor did he have luck denouncing him to the Inquisition one afternoon in 1485 in Torquemada’s Castile, though even the most perfunctory questioning would have given sufficient proof of Stavanger’s alliance with diabolical powers. Perhaps it would be necessary, Reichenbach concluded morosely, to deal with Stavanger with his own hands, repellent though that alternative was.

  Not only was it repellent, but it could be dangerous. He was without experience at serious crime, and Stavanger, cold-eyed and suave, promised to be a formidable adversary. Reichenbach needed an ally, an adviser, a collaborator. But who? While he and Ilsabet were making the circuit of the Seven Wonders, he puzzled over it, from Ephesus to Halicarnassus to Gizeh, and as they stood in the shadow of the Colossus of Rhodes, the answer came to him. There was only one person he could trust sufficiently, and that person was himself.

  To Ilsabet he said, “Do you know where I want to go next?”

  “We still have the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Statue of Zeus at—”

  “No, I’m not talking about the Seven Wonders tour. I want to return to Sarajevo.”

  “Sarajevo? Whatever for?”

  “A sentimental pilgrimage, love, to the place of our first meeting.”

  “But Sarajevo was a bore. And—”

  “We could make it exciting. Consider: our earlier selves would already be there. We would watch them meet, find each other well matched, become lovers. Here for months we’ve been touring the great events of history, when we’re neglecting a chance to witness our own personal greatest event.” He smiled wickedly. “And there are other possibilities. We could introduce ourselves to them. Hint at the joys that lie ahead of them. Perhaps even seduce them, eh? A nice kinky, quirky business that would be. And—”
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  “No,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

  “You find the idea improper? Morally offensive?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I find it dangerous.”

  “How so?”

  “We aren’t supposed to reenter a time where we’re already present. There must be a good reason for that. The rules—”

  “The rules,” he said, “are made by timid old sods who’ve never moved beyond the terminator in their lives. The rules are meant to guide us, not to control us. The rules are meant to be broken by those who are smart enough to avoid the consequences.”

  She stared somberly at him a long while. “And you are?”

  “I think I am.”

  “Yes. A shrewd man, a superior man, a member of the elite corps that lives on the far side of society’s bell-shaped curve. Eh? Doing as you please throughout life. Holding yourself above all restraints. Rich enough and lucky enough to jaunt any when you like and behave like a god.”

  “You live the same way, I believe.”

  “In general, yes. But I still won’t go with you to Sarajevo.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know what will happen to me if I do. Kinky and quirky it may be to pile into bed with our other selves, but something about the idea troubles me, and I dislike needless risk. Do you believe you understand paradox theory fully?”

  “Does anybody?”

  “Exactly. It isn’t smart to—”

  “Paradoxes are much overrated, don’t you think? We’re in the fluid zone, Ilsabet. Anything goes, this side of the terminator. If I were you, I wouldn’t worry about—”

  “I am me. I worry. If I were you, I’d worry more. Take your Sarajevo trip without me.”

  He saw she was adamant and dropped the issue. Indeed he saw it would be much simpler to make the journey alone. They went on from Rhodes to the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, where they spent four happy days, untroubled by the shadow of Stavanger; it was the finest time they had had together since Carthage. Then Ilsabet announced she felt the need for another solo musicological jaunt: to Mantua in 1607 for Monteverdi’s Orfeo. He offered no objection. The instant she was gone, he set his timer for the twenty-eighth of June, 1914, at Sarajevo, in Bosnia, 10:27 A.M.