To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Two

by Robert Silverberg

  “My husband,” the plump woman says. “Where’s my husband?”

  —shunt

  The changer is growing weary of this. They have had him in five bodies, now. How many more times will they shove him about? Ten? Twenty? Sixteen thousand? He knows that he can free himself from this wheel of transformations at any time. Merely raise the right hand, claim a body as one’s own. They’d never know. Walk right out of the hospital, threatening to sue everybody in sight; they scare easily and won’t interfere. Pick your body. Be anyone who appeals to you. Pick fast, though, because if you wait too long they’ll hit the right combination and twitch you back into the body you started from. Tired, defeated, old, do you want that?

  Here’s your chance, changer. Steal another man’s body. Another woman’s if that’s your kick. You could have walked out of here as that dyke from Texas. Or that diver. That ballplayer. That hard young market sharpie. Or the President. Or this new one, now—take your pick, changer.

  What do you want to be? Essence precedes existence. They offer you your choice of bodies. Why go back to your own? Why pick up a stale identity, full of old griefs?

  The changer considers the morality of such a deed.

  The chances are good of getting away with it. Others in this mess are probably doing the same thing; it’s musical chairs with souls, and if eight or nine take the wrong bodies, they’ll never get it untangled. Of course, if I switch, someone else switches and gets stuck with my body. Aging. Decrepit. Who wants to be a used-up stockbroker? On the other hand, the changer realizes, there are consolations. The body he wishes to abandon is wealthy, and that wealth would go to the body’s claimant. Maybe someone thought of that already, and grabbed my identity. Maybe that’s why I’m being shunted so often into these others. The shunt-room people can’t find the right one.

  The changer asks himself what his desires are.

  To be young again? To play Faust? No. Not really. He wants to rest. He wants peace. There is no peace for him in returning to his proper self. Too many ghosts await him there. The changer’s needs are special.

  The changer examines this latest body into which he has been shunted.

  Quite young. Male. Undergraduate, mind stuffed full of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Kierkegaard. Wealthy family. Curling red hair; sleek limbs; thoughts of willing girls, holidays in Hawaii, final exams, next fall’s clothing styles. Adonis on a lark, getting himself changed as a respite from the academic pace? But no: the changer probes more deeply and finds a flaw, a fatal one. There is anguish beneath the young man’s self-satisfaction, and rightly so, for this body is defective, it is gravely marred. The changer is surprised and saddened, and then feels joy and relief, for this body fills his very need and more. He sees for himself the hope of peace with honor, a speedier exit, a good deed. It is a far, far better thing. He will volunteer.

  His right hand rises. His eyes open.

  “This is the one,” he announces. “I’m home again!” His conscience is clear.

  Once the young man was restored to his body, the doctors asked him if he still wished to undergo the change he had contracted for. He was entitled to this one final adventure, which they all knew would have to be his last changing, since the destruction of the young man’s white corpuscles was nearly complete. No, he said, he had had enough excitement during the mixup in the shunt room, and craved no further changes. His doctors agreed he was wise, for his body might not be able to stand the strain of another shunt; and they took him back to the terminal ward. Death came two weeks later, peacefully, very peacefully.

  SUNDANCE

  One reason Ed Ferman waited two years to use “Ishmael in Love” in Fantasy and Science Fiction was that I was now sending him stories at a rapid clip, and he kept moving them into print ahead of “Ishmael.” This was one of them, dating from September, 1968. I was still living in rented quarters—in exile, as I thought of it then—but I had begun to adapt by now to the changed circumstances that the fire had brought, and I was working at something like the old pace. I was working at a new level of complexity, too—sure of myself and my technique, willing now to push the boundaries of the short-story form in any direction that seemed worth exploring. Stretching my technical skills was something that had concerned me as far back as 1955 and “The Songs of Summer”—but I had been a novice writer then, still a college undergraduate, and now I was in my thirties and approaching the height of my creative powers. So I did “Sundance” by way of producing a masterpiece in the original sense of the word—that is, a piece of work which is intended to demonstrate to a craftsman’s peers that he has ended his apprenticeship and has fully mastered the intricacies of his trade.

  Apparently I told Ed Ferman something about the story’s nature while I was working on it, and he must have reacted with some degree of apprehensiveness, because the letter I sent him on October 22, 1968 that accompanied the submitted manuscript says, “I quite understand your hesitation to commit yourself in advance to a story when you’ve been warned it’s experimental; but it’s not all that experimental….I felt that the only way I could properly convey the turmoil in the protagonist’s mind, the gradual dissolution of his hold on reality, was through the constant changing of persons and tenses; but as I read it through I think everything remains clear despite the frequent derailments of the reader.” And I added, “I don’t mean to say that I intend to disappear into the deep end of experimentalism. I don’t regard myself as a member of any ‘school’ of s-f, and don’t value obscurity for its own sake. Each story is a technical challenge unique unto itself, and I have to go where the spirit moves me. Sometimes it moves me to a relatively conventional strong-narrative item like ‘Fangs of the Trees,’ and sometimes to a relatively avant-garde item like this present ‘Sundance’; I’m just after the best way of telling my story, in each case.”

  Ferman responded on Nov 19 with: “You should do more of this sort of thing. ‘Sundance’ is by far the best of the three I’ve seen recently. It not only works; it works beautifully. The ending—with the trapdoor image and that last line—is perfectly consistent, and just fine.” He had only one suggestion: that I simplify the story’s structure a little, perhaps by eliminating the occasional use of second-person narrative. But I wasn’t about to do that. I replied with an explanation of why the story kept switching about between first person narrative, second person, third person present tense, and third person past tense. Each mode had its particular narrative significance in conveying the various reality-levels of the story, I told him: the first-person material was the protagonist’s interior monolog, progressively more incoherent and untrustworthy; the second-person passages provided objective description of his actions, showing his breakdown from the outside, but not so far outside as third person would be—and so forth. Ferman was convinced, and ran the story as is.

  And it became something of a classic almost immediately after Ed ran it in his June, 1969 issue. Though it was certainly a kind of circus stunt, it was a stunt that worked, and it attracted widespread attention, including a place on the ballot for the Nebula award the following year. (But I had “Passengers” on the same ballot, and had no wish to compete with myself. Shrewdly if somewhat cynically, I calculated that the more accessible “Passengers” had a better chance of winning the award, and had “Sundance” removed from the ballot. And that was how I came to win a Nebula with my second-best story of 1969.) “Sundance” has since been reprinted dozens of times, both in science-fiction anthologies and in textbooks of literature. Here it is once more.

  ~

  Today you liquidated about 50,000 Eaters in Sector A, and now you are spending an uneasy night. You and Herndon flew east at dawn, with the green-gold sunrise at your backs, and sprayed the neural pellets over a thousand hectares along the Forked River. You flew on into the prairie beyond the river, where the Eaters have already been wiped out, and had lunch sprawled on that thick, soft carpet of grass where the first settlement is expected to rise. Herndon picked some juiceflowers,
and you enjoyed half an hour of mild hallucinations. Then, as you headed toward the copter to begin an afternoon of further pellet spraying, he said suddenly, “Tom, how would you feel about this if it turned out that the Eaters weren’t just animal pests? That they were people, say, with a language and rites and a history and all?”

  You thought of how it had been for your own people.

  “They aren’t,” you said.

  “Suppose they were. Suppose the Eaters—”

  “They aren’t. Drop it.”

  Herndon has this streak of cruelty in him that leads him to ask such questions. He goes for the vulnerabilities; it amuses him. All night now his casual remark has echoed in your mind. Suppose the Eaters…suppose the Eaters…suppose…suppose…

  You sleep for a while, and dream, and in your dreams you swim through rivers of blood.

  Foolishness. A feverish fantasy. You know how important it is to exterminate the Eaters fast, before the settlers get here. They’re just animals, and not even harmless animals at that; ecology-wreckers is what they are, devourers of oxygen-liberating plants, and they have to go. A few have been saved for zoological study. The rest must be destroyed. Ritual extirpation of undesirable beings, the old, old story. But let’s not complicate our job with moral qualms, you tell yourself. Let’s not dream of rivers of blood.

  The Eaters don’t even have blood, none that could flow in rivers, anyway. What they have is, well, a kind of lymph that permeates every tissue and transmits nourishment along the interfaces. Waste products go out the same way, osmotically. In terms of process, it’s structurally analogous to your own kind of circulatory system, except there’s no network of blood vessels hooked to a master pump. The life-stuff just oozes through their bodies as though they were amoebas or sponges or some other low-phylum form. Yet they’re definitely high-phylum in nervous system, digestive setup, limb-and-organ template, etc. Odd, you think. The thing about aliens is that they’re alien, you tell yourself, not for the first time.

  The beauty of their biology for you and your companions is that it lets you exterminate them so neatly.

  You fly over the grazing grounds and drop the neural pellets. The Eaters find and ingest them. Within an hour the poison has reached all sectors of the body. Life ceases; a rapid breakdown of cellular matter follows, the Eater literally falling apart molecule by molecule the instant that nutrition is cut off; the lymph-like stuff works like acid; a universal lysis occurs; flesh and even the bones, which are cartilaginous, dissolve. In two hours, a puddle on the ground. In four, nothing at all left. Considering how many millions of Eaters you’ve scheduled for extermination here, it’s sweet of the bodies to be self-disposing. Otherwise what a charnel house this world would become!

  Suppose the Eaters…

  Damn Herndon. You almost feel like getting a memory-editing in the morning. Scrape his stupid speculations out of your head. If you dared. If you dared.

  In the morning he does not dare. Memory-editing frightens him; he will try to shake free of his newfound guilt without it. The Eaters, he explains to himself, are mindless herbivores, the unfortunate victims of human expansionism, but not really deserving of passionate defense. Their extermination is not tragic; it’s just too bad. If Earthmen are to have this world, the Eaters must relinquish it. There’s a difference, he tells himself, between the elimination of the Plains Indians from the American prairie in the nineteenth century and the destruction of the bison on that same prairie. One feels a little wistful about the slaughter of the thundering herds; one regrets the butchering of millions of the noble brown woolly beasts, yes. But one feels outrage, not mere wistful regret, at what was done to the Sioux. There’s a difference. Reserve your passions for the proper cause.

  He walks from his bubble at the edge of the camp toward the center of things. The flagstone path is moist and glistening. The morning fog has not yet lifted, and every tree is bowed, the long, notched leaves heavy with droplets of water. He pauses, crouching, to observe a spider-analog spinning its asymmetrical web. As he watches, a small amphibian, delicately shaded turquoise, glides as inconspicuously as possible over the mossy ground. Not inconspicuously enough; he gently lifts the little creature and puts it on the back of his hand. The gills flutter in anguish, and the amphibian’s sides quiver. Slowly, cunningly, its color changes until it matches the coppery tone of the hand. The camouflage is excellent. He lowers his hand and the amphibian scurries into a puddle. He walks on.

  He is forty years old, shorter than most of the other members of the expedition, with wide shoulders, a heavy chest, dark glossy hair, a blunt, spreading nose. He is a biologist. This is his third career, for he has failed as an anthropologist and as a developer of real estate. His name is Tom Two Ribbons. He has been married twice but has had no children. His great-grandfather died of alcoholism; his grandfather was addicted to hallucinogens; his father had compulsively visited cheap memory-editing parlors. Tom Two Ribbons is conscious that he is failing a family tradition, but he has not found his own mode of self-destruction.

  In the main building he discovers Herndon, Julia, Ellen, Schwartz, Chang, Michaelson, and Nichols. They are eating breakfast; the others are already at work. Ellen rises and comes to him and kisses him. Her short soft yellow hair tickles his cheeks. “I love you,” she whispers. She has spent the night in Michaelson’s bubble. “I love you,” he tells her, and draws a quick vertical line of affection between her small pale breasts. He winks at Michaelson, who nods, touches the tops of two fingers to his lips, and blows them a kiss. We are all good friends here, Tom Two Ribbons thinks.

  “Who drops pellets today?” he asks.

  “Mike and Chang,” says Julia. “Sector C.”

  Schwartz says, “Eleven more days and we ought to have the whole peninsula clear. Then we can move inland.”

  “If our pellet supply holds up,” Chang points out.

  Herndon says, “Did you sleep well, Tom?”

  “No,” says Tom. He sits down and taps out his breakfast requisition. In the west, the fog is beginning to burn off the mountains. Something throbs in the back of his neck. He has been on this world nine weeks now, and in that time it has undergone its only change of season, shading from dry weather to foggy. The mists will remain for many months. Before the plains parch again, the Eaters will be gone and the settlers will begin to arrive. His food slides down the chute and he seizes it. Ellen sits beside him. She is a little more than half his age; this is her first voyage; she is their keeper of records, but she is also skilled at editing. “You look troubled,” Ellen tells him. “Can I help you?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “I hate it when you get gloomy.”

  “˚It’s a racial trait,” says Tom Two Ribbons.

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “The truth is that maybe my personality reconstruct is wearing thin. The trauma level was so close to the surface. I’m just a walking veneer, you know.”

  Ellen laughs prettily. She wears only a sprayon half-wrap. Her skin looks damp; she and Michaelson have had a swim at dawn. Tom Two Ribbons is thinking of asking her to marry him, when this job is over. He has not been married since the collapse of the real estate business. The therapist suggested divorce as part of the reconstruct. He sometimes wonders where Terry has gone and whom she lives with now. Ellen says, “You seem pretty stable to me, Tom.”

  “Thank you,” he says. She is young. She does not know.

  “If it’s just a passing gloom I can edit it out in one quick snip.”

  “Thank you,” he says. “No.”

  “I forgot. You don’t like editing.”

  “My father—”

  “Yes?”

  “In fifty years he pared himself down to a thread,” Tom Two Ribbons says. “He had his ancestors edited away, his whole heritage, his religion, his wife, his sons, finally his name. Then he sat and smiled all day. Thank you, no editing.”

  “Where are you working today?” Ellen asks.

 
“In the compound, running tests.”

  “Want company? I’m off all morning.”

  “Thank you, no,” he says, too quickly. She looks hurt. He tries to remedy his unintended cruelty by touching her arm lightly and saying, “Maybe this afternoon, all right? I need to commune a while. Yes?”

  “Yes,” she says, and smiles, and shapes a kiss with her lips.

  After breakfast he goes to the compound. It covers a thousand hectares east of the base; they have bordered it with neutral-field projectors at intervals of eighty meters, and this is a sufficient fence to keep the captive population of two hundred Eaters from straying. When all the others have been exterminated, this study group will remain. At the southwest corner of the compound stands a lab bubble from which the experiments are run: metabolic, psychological, physiological, ecological. A stream crosses the compound diagonally. There is a low ridge of grassy hills at its eastern edge. Five distinct copses of tightly clustered knifeblade trees are separated by patches of dense savanna. Sheltered beneath the glass are the oxygen-plants, almost completely hidden except for the photosynthetic spikes that jut to heights of three or four meters at regular intervals, and the lemon-colored respiratory bodies, chest high, that make the grassland sweet and dizzying with exhaled gases. Through the fields move the Eaters in a straggling herd, nibbling delicately at the respiratory bodies.

  Tom Two Ribbons spies the herd beside the stream and goes toward it. He stumbles over an oxygen-plant hidden in the grass but deftly recovers his balance and, seizing the puckered orifice of the respiratory body, inhales deeply. His despair lifts. He approaches the Eaters. They are spherical, bulky, slow-moving creatures, covered by masses of coarse orange fur. Saucer-like eyes protrude above narrow rubbery lips. Their legs are thin and scaly, like a chicken’s, and their arms are short and held close to their bodies. They regard him with bland lack of curiosity. “Good morning, brothers!” is the way he greets them this time, and he wonders why.