Trips - 1962–73 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Four

by Robert Silverberg

  The JAL rocket enters the final phase of its landward plunge. Papua waits, sleek, vitrescent. The world has a glassy sheen again. He lets his spirit drift happily back to the gleaming starship making its swift way across the whirling constellations.

  He found himself in the starship’s busy lower-deck lounge, having a drink with his traveling companion, Pitkin, the Yale economist. Why Pitkin, that coarse, florid little man? With all of real and imaginary humanity to choose from, why had his unconscious elected to make him share this fantasy with such a boor?

  “Look,” Pitkin said, winking and leering. “There’s your girlfriend.”

  The entry-iris had opened and the Antarean not-male had come in.

  “Quit it,” Schwartz snapped. “You know there’s no such thing going on.”

  “Haven’t you been chasing her for days?”

  “She’s not a ‘her’,” Schwartz said.

  Pitkin guffawed. “Such precision! Such scholarship! She’s not a her, he says!” He gave Schwartz a broad nudge. “To you she’s a she, friend, and don’t try to kid me.”

  Schwartz had to admit there was some justice to Pitkin’s vulgar innuendos. He did find the Antarean—a slim yellow-eyed ebony-skinned upright humanoid, sinuous and glossy, with tapering elongated limbs and a seal’s fluid grace—powerfully attractive. Nor could he help thinking of the Antarean as feminine. That attitude was hopelessly culture-bound and species-bound, he knew; in fact the alien had cautioned him that terrestrial sexual distinctions were irrelevant in the Antares system, that if Schwartz insisted on thinking of “her” in genders, “she” could be considered only the negative of male, with no implication of biological femaleness.

  He said patiently, “I’ve told you. The Antarean’s neither male nor female as we understand those concepts. If we happen to perceive the Antarean as feminine, that’s the result of our own cultural conditioning. If you want to believe that my interest in this being is sexual, go ahead, but I assure you that it’s purely professional.”

  “Sure. You’re only studying her.”

  “In a sense I am. And she’s studying me. On her native world she has the status-frame of ‘watcher-of-life,’ which seems to translate into the Antarean equivalent of an anthropologist.”

  “How lovely for you both. She’s your first alien and you’re her first Jew.”

  “Stop calling her her,” Schwartz hissed.

  “But you’ve been doing it!”

  Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with 500 alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”

  “Next trip travel with your grandmother instead.”

  “Go away,” Schwartz said. “Stop lousing up my fantasies. Go peddle your dismal science somewhere else. You see those Delta Aurigans over there? Climb into their bottle and tell them all about the Gross Global Product.” Schwartz smiled at the Antarean, who had purchased a drink, something that glittered an iridescent blue, and was approaching them. “Go on,” Schwartz murmured.

  “Don’t worry,” Pitkin said. “I wouldn’t want to crowd you.” He vanished into the motley crowd.

  The Antarean said, “The Capellans are dancing, Schwartz.”

  “I’d like to see that. Too damned noisy in here anyway.” Schwartz stared into the alien’s vertical-slitted citreous eyes. Cat’s eyes, he thought. Panther’s eyes. The Antarean’s gaze was focused, as usual, on Schwartz’ mouth: other worlds, other customs. He felt a strange, unsettling tremor of desire. Desire for what, though? It was a sensation of pure need, nonspecific, certainly nonsexual. “I think I’ll take a look. Will you come with me?”

  The Papua rocket has landed. Schwartz, leaning across the narrow table in the skyport’s lounge, says to the stewardess in a low, intense tone, “My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—playing chess.”

  “How awful,” Dawn whispers gently.

  “You can see why. You go all over the world, you see a thousand skyports a year. Everything the same everywhere. The same clothes, the same slang, the same magazines, the same styles of architecture and decor.”

  “Yes.”

  “International homogeneity. Worldwide uniformity. Can you understand what it’s like to be an anthropologist in a world where there are no primitives left, Dawn? Here we sit on the island of Papua—you know, headhunters, animism, body-paint, the drums at sunset, the bone through the nose—and look at the Papuans in their business robes all around us. Listen to them exchanging stock-market tips, talking baseball, recommending restaurants in Paris and barbers in Johannesburg. It’s no different anywhere else. In a single century we’ve transformed the planet into one huge sophisticated plastic western industrial state. The TV relay satellites, the two-hour intercontinental rockets, the breakdown of religious exclusivism and genetic taboo, have mongrelized every culture, don’t you see? You visit the Zuni and they have plastic African masks on the wall. You visit the Bushmen and they have Japanese-made Hopi-motif ashtrays. It’s all just so much interior decoration, and underneath the carefully selected primitive motifs there’s the same universal pseudo-American sensibility, whether you’re in the Kalahari or the Amazon rain-forest. Do you comprehend what’s happened, Dawn?”

  “It’s such a terrible loss,” she says sadly. She is trying very hard to be sympathetic, but he senses she is waiting for him to finish his sermon and invite her to share his hotel room. He will invite her; but there is no stopping him once he has launched into his one great theme.

  “Cultural diversity is gone from the world,” he says. “Religion is dead, true poetry is dead, inventiveness is dead, individuality is dead. Poetry. Listen to this.” In a high monotone he chants:

  In beauty I walk

  With beauty before me I walk

  With beauty behind me I walk

  With beauty above and about me I walk

  It is finished in beauty

  It is finished in beauty

  He has begun to perspire heavily. His chanting has created an odd sphere of silence in his immediate vicinity; heads are turning, eyes are squinting. “Navaho,” he says. “The Night Way, a nine-day chant, a vision, a spell. Where are the Navaho now? Go to Arizona and they’ll chant for you, yes, for a price; but they don’t know what the words mean, and chances are the singers are only one-fourth Navaho, or one-eighth, or maybe just Hopi hired to dress in Navaho costumes, because the real Navaho, if any are left, are off in Mexico City hired to be Aztecs. So much is gone. Listen.” He chants again, more piercingly even than before:

  The animal runs, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.

  It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

  The bird flies, it passes, it dies. And it is—

  “JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE IS NOW UNLOADING ON CONCOURSE FOUR,” a mighty mechanical voice cries.

  —the great cold.

  It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

  “JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE—”

  The fish flees, it passes, it dies. And—

  “People are staring,” Dawn says uncomfortably.

  “—ON CONCOURSE FOUR.”

  “Let them stare. Do them some good. That’s a Pygmy chant, from Gabon, in equatorial Africa. Pygmies? There are no more Pygmies. Everybody’s two meters tall. And what do we sing? Listen. Listen.” He gestures fiercely at the cloud of tiny golden loudspeakers floating near the ceiling. A mush of music comes from them: the current popular favorite. Savagely he mouths words: “Star…far…here…near. Playing in every skyport right now, all over the world.” She smiles thinly. Her hand reaches toward his, covers it, presses against the knuckles. He is dizzy. The crowd, the eyes, the music, the drink. The plastic. Everything s
hines. Porcelain. Porcelain. The planet vitrifies. “Tom?” she asks uneasily. “Is anything the matter?” He laughs, blinks, coughs, shivers. He hears her calling for help, and then he feels his soul swooping outward, toward the galactic blackness.

  With the Antarean not-male beside him, Schwartz peered through the viewport, staring in awe and fascination at the seductive vision of the Capellans coiling and recoiling outside the ship. Not all the passengers on this voyage had cozy staterooms like his. The Capellans were too big to come on board; and in any case they preferred never to let themselves be enclosed inside metal walls. They traveled just alongside the starship, basking like slippery whales in the piquant radiations of space. So long as they kept within twenty meters of the hull they would be inside the effective field of the Rabinowitz Drive, which swept ship and contents and associated fellow travelers toward Rigel, or the Lesser Magellanic, or was it one of the Pleiades toward which they were bound at a cool nine lights?

  He watched the Capellans moving beyond the shadow of the ship in tracks of shining white. Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, they coiled and swam, and every track was a flash of golden fire. “They have a dangerous beauty,” Schwartz whispered. “Do you hear them calling? I do.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say, ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me!’”

  “Go to them, then,” said the Antarean simply. “Step through the hatch.”

  “And perish?”

  “And enter into your next transition. Poor Schwartz! Do you love your present body so?”

  “My present body isn’t so bad. Do you think I’m likely to get another one some day?”

  “No?”

  “No,” Schwartz said. “This one is all I get. Isn’t it that way with you?”

  “At the Time of Openings I receive my next housing. That will be fifty years from now. What you see is the fifth form I have been given to wear.”

  “Will the next be as beautiful as this?”

  “All forms are beautiful,” the Antarean said. “You find me attractive?”

  “Of course.”

  A slitted wink. A bobbing nod toward the viewport. “As attractive as those?”

  Schwartz laughed. “Yes. In a different way.”

  Coquettishly the Antarean said, “If I were out there, you would walk through the hatch into space?”

  “I might. If they gave me a spacesuit and taught me how to use it.”

  “But not otherwise? Suppose I were out there right now. I could live in space five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I am there and I say, ‘Come to me, Schwartz, come to me!’ What do you do?”

  “I don’t think I’m all that much self-destructive.”

  “To die for love, though! To make a transition for the sake of beauty.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  The Antarean pointed toward the undulating Capellans. “If they asked you, you would go.”

  “They are asking me,” he said.

  “And you refuse the invitation?”

  “So far. So far.”

  The Antarean laughed an Antarean laugh, a thick silvery snort. “Our voyage will last many weeks more. One of these days, I think, you will go to them.”

  “You were unconscious at least five minutes,” Dawn says. “You gave everyone a scare. Are you sure you ought to go through with tonight’s lecture?”

  Nodding, Schwartz says, “I’ll be all right. I’m a little tired, is all. Too many time-zones this week.” They stand on the terrace of his hotel room. Night is coming on, already, here in late afternoon; it is midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, though the fragrance of tropic blossoms perfumes the air. The first few stars have appeared. He has never really known which star is which. That bright one, he thinks, could be Rigel, and that one Sirius, and perhaps this is Deneb over there. And this? Can this be red Antares, in the heart of the Scorpion, or is it only Mars? Because of his collapse at the skyport he has been able to beg off the customary faculty reception and the formal dinner; pleading the need for rest, he has arranged to have a simple snack at his hotel room, à deux. In two hours they will come for him and take him to the University to speak. Dawn watches him closely. Perhaps she is worried about his health, perhaps she is only waiting for him to make his move toward her. There’s time for all that later, he figures. He would rather talk now. Warming up for the audience he seizes his earlier thread:

  “For a long time I didn’t understand what had taken place. I grew up insular, cut off from reality, a New York boy, bright mind and a library card. I read all the anthropological classics, Patterns of Culture and Coming of Age in Samoa and Life of a South African Tribe and the rest, and I dreamed of field trips, collecting myths and grammars and folkways and artifacts and all that, until when I was twenty-five I finally got out into the field and started to discover I had gone into a dead science. We have only one worldwide culture now, with local variants but no basic divergences: there’s nothing primitive left on Earth, and there are no other planets. Not inhabited ones. I can’t go to Mars or Venus or Saturn and study the natives. What natives? And we can’t reach the stars. All I have to work with is Earth. I was thirty years old when the whole thing clicked together for me and I knew I had wasted my life.”

  She says, “But surely there was something for you to study on Earth.”

  “One culture, rootless and homogeneous. That’s work for a sociologist, not for me. I’m a romantic, I’m an exotic, I want strangeness, difference. Look, we can never have any real perspective on our own time and lives. The sociologists try to attain it, but all they get is a mound of raw indigestible data. Insight comes later—two, five, ten generations later. But one way we’ve always been able to learn about ourselves is by studying alien cultures, studying them completely, and defining ourselves by measuring what they are that we aren’t. The cultures have to be isolated, though. The anthropologist himself corrupts that isolation in the Heisenberg sense when he comes around with his camera and scanners and starts asking questions; but we can compensate more or less, for the inevitable damage a lone observer causes. We can’t compensate when our whole culture collides with another and absorbs and obliterates it. Which we technological-mechanical people now have done everywhere. One day I woke up and saw there were no alien cultures left. Hah! Crushing revelation! Schwartz’ occupation is gone!”

  “What did you do?”

  “For years I was in an absolute funk. I taught, I studied, I went through the motions, knowing it was all meaningless. All I was doing was looking at records of vanished cultures left by earlier observers and trying to cudgel new meanings. Secondary sources, stale findings: I was an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence. Paleontology. Dinosaurs are interesting, but what do they tell you about the contemporary world and the meaning of its patterns? Dry bones, Dawn, dry bones. Despair. And then a clue. I had this Nigerian student, this Ibo—well, basically an Ibo, but she’s got some Israeli in her and I think Chinese—and we grew very close, she was as close to me as anybody in my own sixness, and I told her my troubles. I’m going to give it all up, I said, because it isn’t what I expected it to be. She laughed at me and said, What right do you have to be upset because the world doesn’t live up to your expectations? Reshape your life, Tom: you can’t reshape the world. I said, But how? And she said, Look inward, find the primitive in yourself, see what made you what you are, what made today’s culture what it is, see how these alien streams have flowed together. Nothing’s been lost here, only merged. Which made me think. Which gave me a new way of looking at things. Which sent me on an inward quest. It took me three years to grasp the patterns, to come to an understanding of what our planet has become, and only after I accepted the planet—”

  It seems to him that he has been talking forever. Talking. Talking. But he can no longer hear his own voice. There is only a distant buzz.

  “After I accepted—”

  A distant buzz.

  “What was I saying?” he asks.

  �
��After you accepted the planet—”

  “After I accepted the planet,” he says, “that I could begin—” Buzz. Buzz. “That I could begin to accept myself.”

  He was drawn toward the Spicans too, not so much for themselves—they were oblique, elliptical characters, self-contained and self-satisfied, hard to approach—as for the apparently psychedelic drug they took in some sacramental way before the beginning of each of their interminable ritual dances. Each time he had watched them take the drug, they had seemingly made a point of extending it toward him, as if inviting him, as if tempting him, before popping it into their mouths. He felt baited; he felt pulled.

  There were three Spicans on board, slender creatures two and a half meters long, with flexible cylindrical bodies and small stubby limbs. Their skins were reptilian, dry and smooth, deep green with yellow bands; but their eyes were weirdly human, large liquid brown eyes, sad Levantine eyes, the eyes of unfortunate medieval travelers transformed by enchantment into serpents. Schwartz had spoken with them several times. They understood English well enough—all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth—but the construction of their vocal organs was such that they had no way of speaking it, and they relied instead on small translating machines hung around their necks that converted their soft whispered hisses into amber words pulsing across a screen.

  Cautiously, the third or fourth time he spoke with them, he expressed polite interest in their drug. They told him it enabled them to make contact with the central forces of the universe. He replied that there were such drugs on Earth, too, and that he used them frequently, that they gave him great insight into the workings of the cosmos. They showed some curiosity, perhaps even intense curiosity; reading their eyes was difficult and the tone of their voices gave no clues. He took his elegant leather-bound drug-case from his pouch and showed them what he had: learitonin, psilocerebrin, siddharthin, and acid-57. He described the effects of each and suggested an exchange, any of his for an equivalent dose of the shriveled orange fungoid they nibbled. They conferred. Yes, they said, we will do this. But not now. Not until the proper moment. Schwartz knew better than to ask them when that would be. He thanked them and put his drugs away.