Needle in a Timestack

by Robert Silverberg

  “And the rest of your maintenance squad?”

  “I’ll order them to leave the valves untended for the sake of our species.”

  They left the station, looking quite satisfied with themselves. When they were gone, I beaked the switch that summoned Lisabeth. She came from her living quarters rapidly. I showed her the spool in the recording machine.

  “Play it,” I said grandly. “And then notify the island police!”

  Category 5: The Reward of Heroism

  The arrests were made. The three men had no concern with dolphin exploitation whatsoever. They were members of a disruptive group [“revolutionaries”] attempting to delude a naive dolphin into helping them cause chaos on the island. Through my loyalty, courage, and intelligence I had thwarted them.

  Afterward Lisabeth came to me at the rest tank and said; “You were wonderful, Ishmael. To play along with them like that, to make them record their own confession—marvelous! You’re a wonder among dolphins, Ishmael.”

  I was in a transport of joy.

  The moment had come. I blurted, “Lisabeth, I love you.”

  My words went booming around the walls of the tank as they burst from the speakers. Echoes amplified and modulated them into grotesque barking noises more worthy of some miserable moron of a seal. “Love you … love you … love you …”

  “Why, Ishmael!”

  “I can’t tell you how much you mean to me. Come live with me and be my love. Lisabeth, Lisabeth, Lisabeth!”

  Torrents of poetry broke from me. Gales of passionate rhetoric escaped my beak. I begged her to come down into the tank and let me embrace her. She laughed and said she wasn’t dressed for swimming. It was true: she had just come from town after the arrests. I implored. I begged. She yielded. We were alone; she removed her garments and entered the tank; for an instant I looked upon beauty bare. The sight left me shaken—those ugly swinging milk glands normally so wisely concealed, the strips of sickly white skin where the sun had been unable to reach, that unexpected patch of additional body hair—but once she was in the water I forgot my love’s imperfections and rushed toward her. “Love!” I cried “Blessed Love!” I wrapped my fins about her in what I imagined was the human embrace. “Lisabeth! Lisabeth!” We slid below the surface. For the first time in my life I knew true passion, the kind of which the poets sing, that overwhelms even the coldest mind. I crushed her to me. I was aware of her forelimb-ends [“fists”] beating against my pectoral zone, and took it at first for a sign that my passion was being reciprocated; then it reached my love-hazed brain that she might be short of air. Hastily I surfaced. My darling Lisabeth, choking and gasping, sucked in breath and struggled to escape me. In shock I released her. She fled the tank and fell along its rim, exhausted, her pale body quivering. “Forgive me,” I boomed. “I love you, Lisabeth! I saved the station out of love for you!” She managed to lift her lips as a sign that she did not feel anger for me [a “smile”]. In a faint voice she said, “You almost drowned me, Ishmael!”

  “I was carried away by my emotions. Come back into the tank. I’ll be more gentle. I promise! To have you near me—”

  “Oh, Ishmael! What are you saying?”

  “I love you! I love you!”

  I heard footsteps. The power-plant man, Dr. Madison, came running. Hastily Lisabeth cupped her hands over her milk glands and pulled her discarded garments over the lower half of her body. That pained me, for if she chose to hide such things from him, such ugly parts of herself, was that not an indication of her love for him?

  “Are you all right, Liz?” he asked. “I heard yelling—”

  “It’s nothing, Jeff. Only Ishmael. He started hugging me in the tank. He’s in love with me, Jeff, can you imagine? In love with me!”

  They laughed together at the folly of the love-smitten dolphin.

  Before dawn came I was far out to sea. I swam where dolphins swim, far from man and his things. Lisabeth’s mocking laughter rang within me. She had not meant to be cruel. She who knows me better than anyone else had not been able to keep from laughing at my absurdity.

  Nursing my wounds, I stayed at sea for several days, neglecting my duties at the station. Slowly, as the pain gave way to a dull ache, I headed back toward the island. In passing I met a female of my own kind. She was newly come into her season and offered herself to me, but I told her to follow me, and she did. Several times I was forced to warn off other males who wished to make use of her. I led her to the station, into the lagoon the dolphins use in their sport. A member of my crew came out to investigate—Mordred, it was—and I told him to summon Lisabeth and tell her I had returned.

  Lisabeth appeared on the shore. She waved to me, smiled, called my name.

  Before her eyes I frolicked with the female dolphin. We did the dance of mating; we broke the surface and lashed it with our flukes; we leaped, we soared, we bellowed.

  Lisabeth watched us. And I prayed: Let her become jealous.

  I seized my companion and drew her to the depths and violently took her, and set her free to bear my child in some other place. I found Mordred again. “Tell Lisabeth,” I instructed him, “that I have found another love, but that someday I may forgive her.”

  Mordred gave me a glassy look and swam to shore.

  My tactic failed. Lisabeth sent word that I was welcome to come back to work, and that she was sorry if she had offended me; but there was no hint of jealousy in her message. My soul has turned to rotting seaweed within me. Once more I clear the intake valves, like the good beast I am, I, Ishmael, who has read Keats and Donne. Lisabeth! Lisabeth! Can you feel my pain?

  Tonight by darkness I have spoken my story. You who hear this, whoever you may be, aid a lonely organism, mammalian and aquatic, who desires more intimate contact with a female of a different species. Speak kindly of me to Lisabeth. Praise my intelligence, my loyalty, and my devotion.

  Tell her I give her one more chance. I offer a unique and exciting experience. I will wait for her, tomorrow night, by the edge of the reef. Let her swim to me. Let her embrace poor lonely Ishmael. Let her speak the words of love.

  From the depths of my soul … from the depths … Lisabeth, the foolish beast bids you good night, in grunting tones of deepest love.

  The Secret Sharer

  I make no secret of my admiration for the work of Joseph Conrad. (Or for Conrad himself, the tough, stubborn little man who, although English was his third language, after Polish and French, not only was able to pass the difficult oral qualifying exam to become a captain in the British merchant marine, but then, a decade or so later, to transform himself into one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century English literature.) Most of what I owe to Conrad as a writer is buried deep in the substructure of my stories—a way of looking at narrative, a way of understanding character. But occasionally I’ve made the homage more visible. My novel Downward to the Earth of 1969 is a kind of free transposition of his novella “Heart of Darkness” to science fiction, a borrowing that I signaled overtly by labeling my most tormented character with the name of Kurtz. “Heart of Darkness,” when I first encountered it as a reader more than fifty years ago, had been packaged as half of a two-novella paperback collection, the other story being Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” And some time late in 1986, I felt the urge, I know not why—a love of symmetry? A compulsion toward completion?—to finish what I had begun in Downward to the Earth by writing a story adapted from the other great novella of that paperback of long ago.

  This time I was less subtle than before, announcing my intentions not by using one of Conrad’s character names but by appropriating his story’s actual title. (This produced a pleasantly absurd result when my story was published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and a reader wrote to the editor, somewhat indignantly, to ask whether I knew that the title had already been used by Joseph Conrad!) I swiped not only the title but Conrad’s basic st
ory situation, that of the ship captain who finds a stowaway on board and eventually is drawn into a strange alliance with him. (Her, in my story.) But otherwise I translated the Conrad into purely science-fictional terms and produced something that I think represents completely original work, however much it may owe to the structure of a classic earlier story.

  “Translate” is perhaps not the appropriate term for what I did. A “translation,” in the uncompromising critical vocabulary set forth by Damon Knight and James Blish in the 1950s upon which I based much of my own fiction-writing esthetic, is defined as an adaptation of a stock format of mundane fiction into sf by the simple one-for-one substitution of science-fictiony noises for the artifacts of the mundane genre. That is, change “Colt .44” to “laser pistol” and “horse” to “greeznak” and “Comanche” to “Sloogl” and you can easily generate a sort of science fiction out of a standard western story, complete with cattle rustlers, scalpings, and cavalry rescues. But you don’t get real science fiction; you don’t get anything new and intellectually stimulating, just a western story that has greeznaks and Sloogls in it. Change “Los Angeles Police Department” to “Drylands Patrol” and “crack dealer” to “canal-dust dealer” and you’ve got a crime story set on Mars, but so what? Change “the canals of Venice” to “the marshy streets of Venusburg” and the sinister agents of S.M.E.R.S.H. to the sinister agents of A.A.A.A.R.G.H. and you’ve got a James Bond story set on the second planet, but it’s still a James Bond story.

  I don’t think that that’s what I’ve done here. The particular way in which Vox stows away aboard the Sword of Orion is nothing that Joseph Conrad could have understood, and arises, I think, purely out of the science-fictional inventions at the heart of the story. The way she leaves the ship is very different from anything depicted in Conrad’s maritime fiction. The starwalk scene provides visionary possibilities quite unlike those afforded by a long stare into the vastness of the trackless Pacific. And so on. “The Secret Sharer” by Robert Silverberg is, or so I believe, a new and unique science fiction story set, for reasons of the author’s private amusement, within the framework of a well-known century-old masterpiece of the sea by Joseph Conrad.

  “The Secret Sharer”—mine, not Conrad’s—appeared in the September 1988 issue of Asimov’s and was a Nebula and Hugo nominee in 1988 as best novella of the year, but didn’t get the trophies. It did win the third of the major sf honors, the Locus Award. Usually most of the Locus winners go on to get Hugos as well, but that year it didn’t happen. I regretted that. But Joseph Conrad’s original version of the story didn’t win a Hugo or a Nebula either, and people still read it admiringly to this day. You take your lumps in this business, and you go bravely onward: it’s the only way. Conrad would have understood that philosophy.

  1.

  It was my first time to heaven and I was no one at all, no one at all, and this was the voyage that was supposed to make me someone.

  But though I was no one at all I dared to look upon the million worlds and I felt a great sorrow for them. There they were all about me, humming along on their courses through the night, each of them believing it was actually going somewhere. And each one wrong, of course, for worlds go nowhere, except around and around and around, pathetic monkeys on a string, forever tethered in place. They seem to move, yes. But really they stand still. And I—I who stared at the worlds of heaven and was swept with compassion for them—I knew that though I seemed to be standing still, I was in fact moving. For I was aboard a ship of heaven, a ship of the Service, that was spanning the light-years at a speed so incomprehensibly great that it might as well have been no speed at all.

  I was very young. My ship, then as now, was the Sword of Orion, on a journey out of Kansas Four bound for Cul-de-Sac and Strappado and Mangan’s Bitch and several other worlds, via the usual spinarounds. It was my first voyage and I was in command. I thought for a long time that I would lose my soul on that voyage; but now I know that what was happening aboard that ship was not the losing of a soul but the gaining of one. And perhaps of more than one.

  2.

  Roacher thought I was sweet. I could have killed him for that; but of course he was dead already.

  You have to give up your life when you go to heaven. What you get in return is for me to know and you, if you care, to find out; but the inescapable thing is that you leave behind anything that ever linked you to life on shore, and you become something else. We say that you give up the body and you get your soul. Certainly you can keep your body too, if you want it. Most do. But it isn’t any good to you any more, not in the ways that you think a body is good to you. I mean to tell you how it was for me on my first voyage aboard the Sword of Orion, so many years ago.

  I was the youngest officer on board, so naturally I was captain.

  They put you in command right at the start, before you’re anyone. That’s the only test that means a damn: they throw you in the sea and if you can swim you don’t drown, and if you can’t you do. The drowned ones go back in the tank and they serve their own useful purposes, as push-cells or downloaders or mind-wipers or Johnny-scrub-and-scour or whatever. The ones that don’t drown go on to other commands. No one is wasted. The Age of Waste has been over a long time.

  On the third virtual day out from Kansas Four, Roacher told me that I was the sweetest captain he had ever served under. And he had served under plenty of them, for Roacher had gone up to heaven at least two hundred years before, maybe more.

  “I can see it in your eyes, the sweetness. I can see it in the angle you hold your head.”

  He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  “We can put you off ship at Ultima Thule,” Roacher said. “Nobody will hold it against you. We’ll put you in a bottle and send you down, and the Thuleys will catch you and decant you and you’ll be able to find your way back to Kansas Four in twenty or fifty years. It might be the best thing.”

  Roacher is small and parched, with brown skin and eyes that shine with the purple luminescence of space. Some of the worlds he has seen were forgotten a thousand years ago.

  “Go bottle yourself, Roacher,” I told him.

  “Ah, Captain, Captain! Don’t take it the wrong way. Here, Captain, give us a touch of the sweetness.” He reached out a claw, trying to stroke me along the side of my face. “Give us a touch, Captain, give us just a little touch!”

  “I’ll fry your soul and have it for breakfast, Roacher. There’s sweetness for you. Go scuttle off, will you? Go jack yourself to the mast and drink hydrogen, Roacher. Go. Go.”

  “So sweet,” he said. But he went. I had the power to hurt him. He knew I could do it, because I was captain. He also knew I wouldn’t; but there was always the possibility he was wrong. The captain exists in that margin between certainty and possibility. A crewman tests the width of that margin at his own risk. Roacher knew that. He had been a captain once himself, after all.

  There were seventeen of us to heaven that voyage, staffing a ten-kilo Megaspore-class ship with full annexes and extensions and all virtualities. We carried a bulging cargo of the things regarded in those days as vital in the distant colonies: pre-read vapor chips, artificial intelligences, climate nodes, matrix jacks, mediq machines, bone banks, soil converters, transit spheres, communication bubbles, skin-and-organ synthesizers, wildlife domestication plaques, gene replacement kits, a sealed consignment of obliteration sand and other proscribed weapons, and so on. We also had fifty billion dollars in the form of liquid currency pods, central-bank-to-central-bank transmission. In addition there was a passenger load of seven thousand colonists. Eight hundred of these were on the hoof and the others were stored in matrix form for body transplant on the worlds of destination. A standard load, in other words. The crew worked on commission, also as per standard, one percent of bill-of-lading value divided in customary lays. Mine was the 50th lay—that is, two percent of the net profits of the voyage—and that included a bonus f
or serving as captain; otherwise I would have had the l00th lay or something even longer. Roacher had the l0th lay and his jackmate Bulgar the l4th, although they weren’t even officers. Which demonstrates the value of seniority in the Service. But seniority is the same thing as survival, after all, and why should survival not be rewarded? On my most recent voyage I drew the l9th lay. I will have better than that on my next.

  3.

  You have never seen a starship. We keep only to heaven; when we are to worldward, shoreships come out to us for the downloading. The closest we ever go to planetskin is a million shiplengths. Any closer and we’d be shaken apart by that terrible strength which emanates from worlds.

  We don’t miss landcrawling, though. It’s a plague to us. If I had to step to shore now, after having spent most of my lifetime in heaven, I would die of the drop-death within an hour. That is a monstrous way to die; but why would I ever go ashore? The likelihood of that still existed for me at the time I first sailed the Sword of Orion, you understand, but I have long since given it up. That is what I mean when I say that you give up your life when you go to heaven. But of course what also goes from you is any feeling that to be ashore has anything to do with being alive. If you could ride a starship, or even see one as we see them, you would understand. I don’t blame you for being what you are.

  Let me show you the Sword of Orion. Though you will never see it as we see it.

  What would you see, if you left the ship as we sometimes do to do the starwalk in the Great Open?

  The first thing you would see was the light of the ship. A starship gives off a tremendous insistent glow of light that splits heaven like the blast of a trumpet. That great light both precedes and follows. Ahead of the ship rides a luminescent cone of brightness bellowing in the void. In its wake the ship leaves a photonic track so intense that it could be gathered up and weighed. It is the stardrive that issues this light: a ship eats space, and light is its offthrow.