To The Dark Star

by Silverberg, Robert

  The darkness deepened and the creatures of myth jostled and tumbled on the stage, and overflowed on to the plain. They mingled with one another, old enemies exchanging gossip, old friends clasping hands, members of the same pantheon embracing or looking warily upon their rivals. They mixed with us, too, the heroes selecting women, the monsters trying to seem less monstrous, the gods shopping for worshippers.

  Perhaps we had enough. But Leor would not stop. This was his time of glory.

  Out of the machine came Roland and Oliver, Rustum and Sohrab, Cain and Abel, Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Jonathan and David. Out of the machine came St. George, St. Vitus, St. Nicholas, St. Christopher, St. Valentine, St. Jude. Out of the machine came the Furies, the Harpies, the Pleiades, the Fates, the Norns. Leor was a romantic, and he knew no moderation.

  All who came forth wore the aura of humanity.

  But wonders pall. The Earthfolk of the middle twelves were easily distracted and easily bored. The cornucopia of miracles was far from exhausted, but on the fringes of the audience I saw people taking to the sky and heading for home. We who were close to Leor had to remain, of course, though we were surfeited by these fantasies and baffled by their abundance.

  An old white-bearded man wrapped in a heavy aura left the machine. He carried a slender metal tube. “This is Galileo,” said Leor.

  “Who is he?” the Procurator of Pluto asked me, for Leor, growing weary, had ceased to describe his conjured ghosts.

  I had to request the information from an output in the Hall of Man. “A latter-day god of science,” I told the Procurator, “who is credited with discovering the stars. Believed to have been a historical personage before his deification, which occurred after his martyrdom by religious conservatives.”

  Now that the mood was on him, Leor summoned more of these gods of science, Newton and Einstein and Hippocrates and Copernicus and Oppenheimer and Freud. We had met some of them before, in the days when we were bringing real people out of lost time, but now they had new guises, for they had passed through the mythmakers’ hands. They bore emblems of their special functions, symbols of knowledge and power, and they went among us offering to heal, to teach, to explain. They were nothing like the real Newton and Einstein and Freud we had seen. They stood three times the height of men, and lightnings played around their brows.

  Then came a tall, bearded man with a bloodied head. “Abraham Lincoln,” said Leor.

  “The ancient god of emancipation,” I told the Procurator, after some research.

  Then came a handsome young man with a dazzling smile and also a bloodied head. “John Kennedy,” said Leor.

  “The ancient god of youth and springtime,” I told the Procurator. “A symbol of the change of seasons, of the defeat of summer by winter.”

  “That was Osiris,” said the Procurator. “Why are there two?”

  “There are many more,” I said. “Baldur, Tammuz, Mithra, Attis.”

  “Why did they need so many?” he asked.

  Leor said, “Now I will stop.”

  The gods and heroes were among us. A season of revelry began.

  Medea went off with Jason, and Agamemnon was reconciled with Clytemnestra, and Theseus and the Minotaur took up lodgings together. Others preferred the company of men. I spoke a while with John Kennedy, the last of the myths to come from the machine. Like Adam, the first, he was troubled at being here.

  “I was no myth,” he insisted. “I lived. I was real. I entered primaries and made speeches.”

  “You became a myth,” I said. “You lived and died and in your dying you were transfigured.”

  He chuckled. “Into Osiris? Into Baldur?”

  “It seems appropriate.”

  “To you, maybe. They stopped believing in Baldur a thousand years before I was born.”

  “To me,” I said, “you and Osiris and Baldur are contemporaries. To me and all the people here. You are of the ancient world. You are thousands of years removed from us.”

  “And I’m the last myth you let out of the machine?”

  “You are.”

  “Why? Did men stop making myths after the twentieth century?”

  “You would have to ask Leor. But I think you are right: your time was the end of the age of myth-making. After your time we could no longer believe such things as myths. We did not need myths. When we passed out of the era of troubles we entered a kind of paradise where every one of us lived a myth of his own, and then why should we have to raise some men to great heights among us?”

  He looked at me strangely. “Do you really believe that? That you live in paradise? That men have become gods?”

  “Spend some time in our world,” I said, “and see for yourself.”

  He went out into the world, but what his conclusions were I never knew, for I did not speak to him again. Often I encountered roving gods and heroes, though. They were everywhere. They quarreled and looted and ran amok, some of them, but we were not very upset by that, since it was how we expected archetypes out of the dawn to act. And some were gentle. I had a brief love affair with Persephone. I listened, enchanted, to the singing of Orpheus. Krishna danced for me.

  Dionysus revived the lost art of making liquors, and taught us to drink and be drunk.

  Loki made magics of flame for us.

  Taliesin crooned incomprehensible, wondrous ballads to us.

  Achilles hurled his javelin for us.

  It was a season of wonder, but the wonder ebbed. The mythfolk began to bore us. There were too many of them, and they were too loud, too active, too demanding. They wanted us to love them, listen to them. Bow to them, write poems about them. They asked questions—some of them anyway—that pried into the inner workings of our world, and embarrassed us, for we scarcely knew the answers. They grew vicious and schemed against each other, sometimes causing perils for us.

  Leor had provided us with a splendid diversion. But we all agreed it was time for the myths to go home. We had had them with us for fifty years, and that was quite enough.

  We rounded them up, and started to put them back into the machine.

  The heroes were the easiest to catch, for all their strength. We hired Loki to trick them into returning to the Hall of Man. “Mighty tasks await you there,” he told them, and they hurried thence to show their valor. Loki led them into the machine and scurried out, and Leor sent them away, Herakles, Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Cuchulainn, and the rest of that energetic breed.

  After that many of the demonic ones came. They said they were as bored with us as we were with them and went back into the machine of their free will. Thus departed Kali, Legba, Set, and many more.

  Some we had to trap and take by force. Odysseus disguised himself as Breel, the secretary to Chairman Peng, and would have fooled us forever if the real Breel, returning from holiday in Jupiter, had not exposed the hoax. And then Odysseus struggled. Loki gave us problems. Oedipus launched blazing curses when we came for him. Daedalus clung touchingly to Leor and begged, “Let me stay, brother! Let me stay!” and had to be thrust within.

  Year after year the task of finding and capturing them continued, and one day we knew we had them all. The last to go was Cassandra, who had been living alone in a distant island, clad in rags.

  “Why did you send for us?” she asked. “And, having sent, why do you ship us away?”

  “The game is over,” I said to her. “We will turn now to other sports.”

  “You should have kept us,” Cassandra said. “People who have no myths of their own would do well to borrow those of others, and not just as sport. Who will comfort your souls in the dark times ahead? Who will guide your spirits when the suffering begins? Who will explain the woe that will befall you? Woe! Woe!”

  “The woes of Earth,” I said gently, “lie in Earth’s past. We need no myths.”

  Cassandra smiled and stepped into the machine. And was gone.

  And then the age of fire and turmoil opened, for when the myths went home the invaders c
ame, bursting from the sky. And our towers toppled and our moons fell. And the cold-eyed strangers went among us, doing as they wished with us.

  And those of us who survived cried out to the old gods, the vanished heroes.

  “Loki, come!”

  “Achilles, defend us!”

  “Shiva, release us!”

  “Herakles! Thor! Gawain!”

  But the gods are silent, and the heroes do not come. The machine that glittered in the Hall of Man is broken. Leor, its maker, is gone from this world. Jackals run through our gardens, and our masters stride in our streets, and we are made slaves. And we are alone beneath the frightful sky. And we are alone.

  THE PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY

  We have reached the autumn of 1969, a time when it was starting to seem certain that the day of the science-fiction magazine was ending. Just a handful of the magazines for which I had written in the early days of my career a decade and a half earlier still survived after the distribution cataclysm of 1958 and the general attrition of the years immediately afterward, and those that were still with us were looking very unhealthy. As I mentioned in the introduction to “A Happy Day in 2381,” the center of gravity of the science-fiction-short-story field was now the steadily expanding group of original-fiction anthologies. Damon Knight had started his Orbit series in 1966, and my New Dimensions would follow a couple of years later, along with Terry Carr’s Universe, Harry Harrison’s Nova, Samuel R. Delany’s Quark, and a whole host of one-shot collections such as Harrison’s In the Year 2000 and Anthony Cheetham’s Science Against Man. I did stories for just about all of them, Quark being the only exception that comes to mind.

  One of the best of the new series was Infinity, published in paperback form by the same company that fifteen years earlier had brought out Larry Shaw’s fine magazine Infinity Science Fiction. The editor this time was the long-time s-f reader and writer Bob Hoskins, who now was employed at the paperback company that had risen out of the ashes of the old Infinity and its companion magazines. He asked me to be a regular contributor, and as things turned out I could not have been more regular than I was: there were five issues of the new Infinity and I had stories in all five of them. This was the first, written in August of 1969 and published in Infinity One late in 1970.

  ~

  He was the only man aboard the ship, one man inside a sleek shining cylinder heading away from Bradley’s World at ten thousand miles a second, and yet he was far from alone. He had wife, father, daughter, son for company, and plenty of others, Ovid and Hemingway and Plato, and Shakespeare and Goethe, Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great, a stack of fancy cubes to go with the family ones. And his old friend Juan was along, too, the man who had shared his dream, his utopian fantasy, Juan who had been with him at the beginning and almost until the end. He had a dozen fellow voyagers in all. He wouldn’t be lonely, though he had three years of solitary travel ahead of him before he reached his landfall, his place of exile.

  It was the third hour of his voyage. He was growing calm, now, after the frenzy of his escape. Aboard ship he had showered, changed, rested. The sweat and grime of that wild dash through the safety tunnel were gone, now, though he wouldn’t quickly shake from his mind the smell of that passageway, like rotting teeth, nor the memory of his terrifying fumbling with the security gate’s copper arms as the junta’s storm-troopers trotted toward him. But the gate had opened, and the ship had been there, and he had escaped, and he was safe. And he was safe.

  I’ll try some cubes, he thought.

  The receptor slots in the control room held six cubes at once. He picked six at random, slipped them into place, actuated the evoker. Then he went into the ship’s garden. There were screens and speakers all over the ship.

  The air was moist and sweet in the garden. A plump, toga-clad man, clean-shaven, big-nosed, blossomed on one screen and said, “What a lovely garden! How I adore plants! You must have a gift for making things grow.”

  “Everything grows by itself. You’re—”

  “Publius Ovidius Naso.”

  “Thomas Voigtland. Former President of the Citizens’ Council on Bradley’s World. Now president-in-exile, I guess. A coup d’etat by the military.”

  “My sympathies. Tragic, tragic!”

  “I was lucky to escape alive. I may never be able to return. They’ve probably got a price on my head.”

  “I know how terrible it is to be sundered from your homeland. Were you able to bring your wife?”

  “I’m over here,” Lydia said. “Tom? Tom, introduce me to Mr. Naso.”

  “I didn’t have time to bring her,” Voigtland said. “But at least I took a cube of her with me.”

  Lydia was three screens down from Ovid, just above a clump of glistening ferns. She looked glorious, her auburn hair a little too deep in tone but otherwise quite a convincing replica. He had cubed her two years before; her face showed none of the lines that the recent troubles had engraved on it. Voigtland said to her, “Not Mr. Naso, dear. Ovid. The poet Ovid.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry. How did you happen to choose him?”

  “Because he’s charming and civilized. And he understands what exile is like.”

  Ovid said softly, “Ten years by the Black Sea. Smelly barbarians my only companions. Yet one learns to adapt. My wife remained in Rome to manage my property and to intercede for me—”

  “And mine remains on Bradley’s World,” said Voigtland. “Along with—along with—”

  Lydia said, “What’s this about exile, Tom? What happened?”

  He began to explain about McAllister and the junta. He hadn’t told her, back when he was having her cubed, why he wanted a cube of her. He had seen the coup coming. She hadn’t.

  As he spoke, a screen brightened between Ovid and Lydia and the seamed, leathery face of old Juan appeared. They had redrafted the constitution of Bradley’s World together, twenty years earlier.

  “It happened, then,” Juan said instantly. “Well, we both knew it would. Did they kill very many?”

  “I don’t know. I got out fast once they started to—” He faltered. “It was a perfectly executed coup. You’re still there. I suppose you’re organizing the underground resistance by now. And I—And I—”

  Needles of fire sprouted in his brain.

  And I ran away, he said silently.

  The other screens were alive now. On the fourth, someone with white robes, gentle eyes, dark curling hair. Voigtland guessed him to be Plato. On the fifth, Shakespeare, instantly recognizable, for the cube-makers had modeled him after the First Folio portrait: high forehead, long hair, pursed quizzical lips. On the sixth, a fierce, demonic-looking little man. Attila the Hun? They were all talking, activating themselves at random, introducing themselves to one another and to him. Their voices danced along the top of his skull. He could not follow their words. Restless, he moved among the plants, touching their leaves, inhaling the perfume of their flowers.

  Out of the chaos came Lydia’s voice.

  “Where are you heading now, Tom?”

  “Rigel XIX. I’ll wait out the revolution there. It was my only option once hell broke loose. Get in the ship and—”

  “It’s so far,” she said. “You’re traveling alone?”

  “I have you, don’t I? And Mark and Lynx, and Juan, and Dad, and all these others.”

  “Cubes, that’s all.”

  “Cubes will have to do,” Voigtland said. Suddenly the fragrance of the garden seemed to be choking him. He went out, into the viewing salon next door, where the black splendor of space glistened through a wide port. Screens were mounted opposite the window. Juan and Attila seemed to be getting along marvelously well; Plato and Ovid were bickering; Shakespeare brooded silently; Lydia, looking worried, stared out of her screen at him. He studied the sweep of the stars.

  “Which is our world?” Lydia asked.

  “This,” he said.

  “So small. So far away.”

  “I’ve only been traveling a fe
w hours. It’ll get smaller.”

  He hadn’t had time to take anyone with him. The members of his family had been scattered all over the planet when the alarm came, not one of them within five hours of home—Lydia and Lynx holidaying in the South Polar Sea, Mark archaeologizing on the Westerland Plateau. The integrator net told him it was a Contingency C situation: get offplanet within ninety minutes, or get ready to die. The forces of the junta had reached the capital and were on their way to pick him up. The escape ship had been ready, gathering dust in its buried vault. He hadn’t been able to reach Juan. He hadn’t been able to reach anybody. He used up sixty of his ninety minutes trying to get in touch with people, and then, with stunner shells already hissing overhead, he had gone into the ship and taken off. Alone.

  But he had the cubes.

  Cunning things. A whole personality encapsulated in a shimmering plastic box a couple of centimeters high. Over the past few years, as the likelihood of Contingency C had grown steadily greater, Voigtland had cubed everyone who was really close to him and stored the cubes aboard the escape ship, just in case.

  It took an hour to get yourself cubed; and at the end of it, they had your soul in the box, your motion habits, your speech patterns, your way of thinking, your entire package of standard reactions. Plug your cube into a receptor slot and you came to life on the screen, smiling as you would smile, moving as you would move, sounding as you would sound, saying things you would say. Of course, the thing on the screen was unreal, a computer-actuated mockup, but it was programmed to respond to conversation, to absorb new data and change its outlook in the light of what it learned, to generate questions without the need of previous inputs; in short, to behave as a real person would.

  The cube-makers also could supply a cube of anyone who had ever lived, or, for that matter, any character of fiction. Why not? It wasn’t necessary to draw a cube’s program from a living subject. How hard was it to tabulate and synthesize a collection of responses, typical phrases, and attitudes, feed them into a cube, and call what came out Plato or Shakespeare or Attila? Naturally a custom-made synthesized cube of some historical figure ran high, because of the man-hours of research and programming involved, and a cube of someone’s own departed great-aunt was even more costly, since there wasn’t much chance that it could be used as a manufacturer’s prototype for further sales. But there was a wide array of standard-model historicals in the catalog when he was stocking his getaway ship; Voigtland had chosen eight of them.