To The Dark Star

by Silverberg, Robert

  “You once loved me,” Beryl said. “Then we were both silly. Love me again. Help me get back on my feet. I need your strength.”

  “Of course I’ll help you,” Cassiday said.

  He left her apartment and purchased three cubes of triline. Returning, he activated one of them and pressed it into Beryl’s hand. The green-and-milky eyes roiled in terror.

  “No,” she whimpered.

  The pain flooding from her shattered soul was exquisite in its intensity. Cassiday accepted the full flood of it. Then she clenched her fist, and the drug entered her metabolism, and she grew peaceful once more.

  Observe the next one:

  with a friend.

  The annunciator said, “Mr. Cassiday is here.”

  “Let him enter,” replied Mirabel Gunryk Cassiday Milman Reed.

  The door-sphincter irised open and Cassiday stepped through, into onyx and marble splendor. Beams of auburn palisander formed a polished wooden framework on which Mirabel lay, and it was obvious that she reveled in the sensation of hard wood against plump flesh. A cascade of crystal-colored hair tumbled to her shoulders. She had been Cassiday’s for sixteen months in 2346 and she had been a slender, timid girl then, but now he could barely detect the outlines of that girl in this pampered mound.

  “You’ve married well,” he observed.

  “Third time lucky,” Mirabel said. “Sit down? Drink? Shall I adjust the environment?”

  “It’s fine.” He remained standing. “You always wanted a mansion, Mirabel. My most intellectual wife, you were, but you had this love of comfort. You’re comfortable now.”

  “Very.”

  “Happy?”

  “I’m comfortable,” Mirabel said. “I don’t read much any more, but I’m comfortable.”

  Cassiday noticed what seemed to be a blanket crumpled in her lap—purple with golden threads, soft, idle, clinging close. It had several eyes. Mirabel kept her hands spread over it.

  “From Ganymede?” he asked. “A pet?”

  “Yes. My husband bought it for me last year. It’s very precious to me.”

  “Very precious to anybody. I understand they’re expensive.”

  “But lovable,” said Mirabel. “Almost human. Quite devoted. I suppose you’ll think I’m silly, but it’s the most important thing in my life now. More than my husband, even. I love it, you see. I’m accustomed to having others love me, but there aren’t many things that I’ve been able to love.”

  “May I see it?” Cassiday said mildly.

  “Be careful.”

  “Certainly.” He gathered up the Ganymedean creature. Its texture was extraordinary, the softest he had ever encountered. Something fluttered apprehensively within the flat body of the animal. Cassiday detected a parallel wariness coming from Mirabel as he handled her pet. He stroked the creature. It throbbed appreciatively. Bands of iridescence shimmered as it contracted in his hands.

  She said, “What are you doing now, Dick? Still working for the spaceline?”

  He ignored the question. “Tell me the line from Shakespeare, Mirabel. About flies. The flies and wanton boys.”

  Furrows sprouted in her pale brow. “It’s from Lear,” she said. “Wait. Yes. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

  “That’s the one,” Cassiday said. His big hands knotted quickly about the blanketlike being from Ganymede. It turned a dull gray, and reedy fibers popped from its ruptured surface. Cassiday dropped it to the floor. The surge of horror and pain and loss that welled from Mirabel nearly stunned him, but he accepted it and transmitted it.

  “Flies,” he explained. “Wanton boys. My sport, Mirabel. I’m a god now, did you know that?” His voice was calm and cheerful. “Goodbye. Thank you.”

  One more awaits the visit:

  Swelling with new life.

  Lureen Holstein Cassiday, who was thirty-one years old, dark-haired, large-eyed, and seven months pregnant, was the only one of his wives who had not remarried. Her room in New York was small and austere. She had been a plump girl when she had been Cassiday’s two-month wife five years ago, and she was even more plump now, but how much of the access of new meat was the result of the pregnancy Cassiday did not know.

  “Will you marry now?” he asked.

  Smiling, she shook her head. “I’ve got money, and I value my independence. I wouldn’t let myself get into another deal like the one we had. Not with anyone.”

  “And the baby? You’ll have it?”

  She nodded savagely. “I worked hard to get it! You think it’s easy? Two years of inseminations! A fortune in fees! Machines poking around in me—all the fertility boosters—oh no, you’ve got the picture wrong. This isn’t an unwanted baby. This is a baby I sweated to have.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Cassiday. “I visited Mirabel and Beryl, too, and they each had their babies, too. Of sorts. Mirabel had a little beast from Ganymede. Beryl had a triline addiction that she was very proud of shaking. And you’ve had a baby put in you, without any help from a man. All three of you seeking something. Interesting.”

  “Are you all right, Dick?’

  “Fine.”

  “Your voice is so flat. You’re just unrolling a lot of words. It’s a little frightening.”

  “Mmm. Yes. Do you know the kind thing I did for Beryl? I bought her some triline cubes. And I took Mirabel’s pet and wrung its—well, not its neck. I did it very calmly. I was never a passionate man.”

  “I think you’ve gone crazy, Dick.”

  “I feel your fear. You think I’m going to do something to your baby. Fear is of no interest, Lureen. But sorrow—yes, that’s worth analyzing. Desolation. I want to study it. I want to help them study it. I think it’s what they want to know about. Don’t run from me, Lureen. I don’t want to hurt you, not that way.”

  She was small-bodied and not very strong, and unwieldy in her pregnancy. Cassiday seized her gently by both wrists and drew her toward him. Already he could feel the new emotions coming from her, the self-pity behind the terror, and he had not even done anything to her.

  How did you abort a fetus two months from term?

  A swift kick in the belly might do it. Too crude, too crude. Yet Cassiday had not come armed with abortifacients, a handy ergot pill, a quick-acting spasmic inducer. So he brought his knee up sharply, deploring the crudity of it. Lureen sagged. He kicked her a second time. He remained completely tranquil as he did it, for it would be wrong to take joy in violence. A third kick seemed desirable. Then he released her.

  She was still conscious, but she was writhing. Cassiday made himself receptive to the outflow. The child, he realized, was not yet dead within her. Perhaps it might not die at all. But it would certainly be crippled in some way. What he drained from Lureen was the awareness that she might bring forth a defective. The fetus would have to be destroyed. She would have to begin again. It was all quite sad.

  “Why?” she muttered, “…why?”

  Among the watchers:

  the equivalent of dismay.

  Somehow it had not developed as the golden ones had anticipated. Even they could miscalculate, it appeared, and they found that a rewarding insight. Still, something had to be done about Cassiday.

  They had given him powers. He could detect and transmit to them the raw emotions of others. That was useful to them, for from the data they could perhaps construct an understanding of human beings. But in rendering him a switching center for the emotions of others they had unavoidably been forced to blank out his own. And that was distorting the data.

  He was too destructive now, in his joyless way. That had to be corrected. For now he partook too deeply of the nature of the golden ones themselves. They might have their sport with Cassiday, for he owed them a life. But he might not have his sport with others.

  They reached down the line of communication to him and gave him his instructions.

  “No,” Cassiday said. “You’re done with me now. There’s no need for me t
o come back.”

  “`Further adjustments are necessary.”

  “I disagree.”

  “You will not disagree for long.”

  Still disagreeing, Cassiday took ship for Mars, unable to stand aside from their command. On Mars he chartered a vessel that regularly made the Saturn run and persuaded it to come in by way of Iapetus. The golden ones took possession of him once he was within their immediate reach.

  “What will you do to me?” Cassiday asked.

  “Reverse the flow. You will no longer be sensitive to others. You will report to us on your own emotions. We will restore your conscience, Cassiday.”

  He protested. It was useless.

  Within the glowing sphere of golden light they made their adjustments on him. They entered him and altered him and turned his perceptions inward, so that he might feed on his own misery like a vulture tearing at its entrails. That would be informative. Cassiday objected until he no longer had the power to object, and when his awareness returned it was too late to object.

  “No„“ he murmured. In the yellow gleam he saw the faces of Beryl and Mirabel and Lureen. “You shouldn’t have done this to me. You’re torturing me…like you would a fly…”

  There was no response. They sent him away, back to Earth. They returned him to the travertine towers and the rumbling slidewalks, to the house of pleasure on 485th Street, to the islands of light that blazed in the sky, to the eleven billion people. They turned him loose to go among them, and suffer, and report on his sufferings. And a time would come when they would release him, but not yet.

  Here is Cassiday:

  nailed to his cross.

  HALFWAY HOUSE

  Yet another of the many stories I wrote for Fred Pohl’s magazines—this one in January, 1966, at a time when my interest in writing science fiction, dormant through the first half of the decade, was (mainly as a result of the opportunity Fred had extended) awakening swiftly. Fred had shown my “Blue Fire” novellas to Betty Ballantine of Ballantine Books, his own publishers, and Betty had offered me a contract to put them into volume form—the beginning of one of the happiest publishing relationships of my life. Then I had gone to see Larry Ashmead of Doubleday and offered him a novel-length expansion of my 1954 story “Hopper,” which became The Time Hoppers—my first adult s-f novel to be published in hard covers. I seemed to be getting drawn back in.

  The companion magazine to Fred Pohl’s Galaxy was called If, which under the editorship of Horace Gold had been very much a second-string operation, a kind of stepsister magazine. It still felt and looked second-string to me, and I suspect Fred Pohl thought of it that way too; but he began putting stories into If that Horace might have run in Galaxy, and suddenly, to everybody’s surprise, If began winning Hugo awards as the best s-f magazine (an honor that had eluded the superb Galaxy for most of its existence.) It carried off the trophy three years in a row, 1966, 1967, 1968—and, though I had felt mildly miffed at the beginning when a story I had intended for Galaxy wound up in If, it rapidly ceased to matter to me. “Halfway House” was one of those—published in If for November, 1966. It shows, I think, the growing technical security I was beginning to display in those middle years of the 1960’s, just before the big and startling (to me as well as to everyone else) explosion of my abilities that occurred later in that decade.

  ~

  Afterward, Alfieri realized that you must give a life to gain a life. Now, he was too interested simply in staying alive to think much about profundities.

  He was l’uomo dal fuoco in bocca, the man with fire in his mouth. Cancer clawed at his throat. The vocoder gave him speech; but the raging fire soon would burn through to the core of him, and there would be no more Franco Alfieri. That was hard to accept. So he came to the Fold for aid.

  He had the money. That was what it took, in part, to enter that gateway of worlds: money, plenty of it. Those who ran the Fold did not do it for sweet charity’s sake. The power drain alone was three million kilowatts every time the Fold was opened. You could power a good-sized city on a load like that. But Alfieri was willing to pay what it cost. The money would shortly be of no use to him whatever, unless the beings on the far side of the Fold gave his life back to him.

  “You stand on that bedplate,” a technician told him. “Put your feet along the red triangular areas. Grasp the rail—so. Then wait.”

  Alfieri obeyed. He was no longer in the habit of taking such brusque orders, but he forgave the man for his rudeness. To the technician, Alfieri was so much wealthy meat, already going maggotty. Alfieri positioned his feet and looked down at the mirror-bright polish of his pointed black shoes. He grasped the furry yellow skin of the rail. He waited for the power surge.

  He knew what would happen. Alfieri had been an engineer in Milan, twenty years back, when the European power grid was just coming in. He understood the workings of the Fold as well as—well, as well as anyone else who was not a mathematician. Alfieri had left engineering to found an industrial empire that sprawled from the Alps to the blue Mediterranean, but he had kept up with technology. He was proud of that. He could walk into any factory, go straight to a workbench, display a rare knowledge of any man’s labor. Unlike most top executives, his knowledge was deep as well as broad.

  Alfieri knew, then, that when the power surge came, it would momentarily create a condition they called a singularity, found in the natural universe only in the immediate vicinity of stars that were in their last moments of life. A collapsing star, a spent supernova, generates about itself a warp in the universe, a funnel to nowhere, the singularity. As the star shrinks, it approaches its Schwarzchild radius, the critical point when the singularity will devour it. Time runs more slowly for the dying star, as it nears the radius; its faint light shifts conspicuously toward the red; time rushes to infinity as the star is caught and swallowed by the singularity. And a man who happens to be present? He passes into the singularity also. Tidal gravitational forces of infinite strength seize him; he is stretched to the limit and simultaneously compressed, attaining zero volume and infinite density, and he is hurled—somewhere.

  They had no dying stars in this laboratory. But for a price they could simulate one. For Alfieri’s bundle of lire they would strain the universe and create a tiny opening and hurl him through the Fold, to a place where pleated universes met, to a place where incurable diseases were not necessarily incurable.

  Alfieri waited, a trim, dapper man of fifty, with thinning sandy hair slicked crosswise over the tanned dome of his skull. He wore the tweed suit he had bought in London in ‘95, and a matching gray-green tie and his small sapphire ring. He gripped the railing. He was not aware of it when the surge came, and the universe was broken open, and Franco Alfieri was catapulted through a yawning vortex into a place never dreamed of in Newton’s philosophy.

  The being called Vuor said, “This is Halfway House.”

  Alfieri looked about him. Superficially, his surroundings had not changed at all. He still stood on a glossy copper bedplate, still grasped a furry rail. The quartz walls of the chamber looked the same. But an alien being now peered in, and Alfieri knew he had been translated through the Fold.

  The alien’s face was virtually a blank: a slit of a mouth below, slits of eyes above, no visible nostrils, a flat greenish facade, altogether, sitting on a squat neck, a triangular shoulderless trunk, ropy limbs. Alfieri had become accustomed to aliens in his dealings, and the sight of Vuor did not disturb him, though he had never seen one of this sort before.

  Alfieri felt sweat churning through his pores. Tongues of flame licked at his throat. He had refused full sedation, for unless Alfieri’s mind could work properly he would not be Alfieri. But the pain was terrible.

  He said, “How soon can I get help?”

  “`What is the trouble?”

  “Cancer of the throat. You hear my voice? Artificial. The larynx is gone already. There’s a malignant beast eating me. Cut it out of me.”

  The eyeslits closed momentaril
y. Tentacles twined themselves together in a gesture that might have been sympathy, contempt, or refusal. Vuor’s reedy, rasping voice said in passable Italian, “We do not help you here, you understand. This is merely Halfway House, the screening point. We distribute you onward.”

  “I know. I know. Well, send me to a world where they can cure cancer. I don’t have much time left. I’m suffering, and I’m not ready to go. There’s still work for me to do on Earth. Capisce?”

  “What do you do, Franco Alfieri?”

  “Didn’t my dossier arrive?”

  “It did. Tell me about yourself.”

  Alfieri shrugged. His palms were growing clammy, and he let go of the rail, wishing the alien would let him sit down. “I run an engineering company,” he said. “Actually a holding company. Alfieri S.A. We do everything: power distribution, pollution control, robotics. We’re getting into planetary transformation. Our operating divisions employ hundreds of thousands of men. We’re more than just a money-making concern, though. We’re shapers of a better world. We—” He hesitated, realizing that he sounded now like one of his own public relations flunkies and realizing also that he was begging for his own life. “It’s a big, important, useful company. I founded it. I run it.”

  “And you are very rich. For this you wish us to prolong your life? You know that we all live under a sentence of death. For some sooner, others later. The surgeons beyond the Fold cannot save everyone. The number of sufferers who cry out is infinite, Alfieri. Tell me why you should be saved.”

  Wrath flamed in Alfieri. He suppressed it.

  He said, “I’m a human being with a wife and children. Not good enough reason, eh? I’m wealthy enough to pay any price to be healed. Good? No? Of course not. All right, try this: I’m a genius. Like Leonardo, like Michelangelo, like—like Einstein. You know those names? Good. I have a big genius, too. I don’t paint, I don’t compose music. I plan. I organize. I built the biggest corporation in Europe. I took companies and put them together to do things they could never have done alone.”