Tales of Majipoor

by Robert Silverberg

  Furvain even had a name for the poem, now. The Book of Changes was what he would call it, for change was its theme, the eternal seasonal flux, the ceaseless ebb and flow of events, and in counterpoint to that the steady line of the sacred destiny of Majipoor beneath. Kings arose and flourished and died, movements rose and fell, but the commonwealth went ever onward like a great river, following the path that the Divine had ordained for it, and all its changes were but stations along that path. Which was a path marked by challenge and response, the constant collision of opposing forces to produce an inevitable synthesis: the necessary triumph of Dvorn over anarchy, the necessary triumph of Stiamot over the Metamorphs, and – someday in the future – the necessary triumph of the victors over their own victory. That was the thing he must show, he knew: the pattern that emerges from the passage of time and demonstrates that everything, even the great unavoidable sin of the suppression of the Metamorphs, is part of an unswerving design, the inevitable triumph of organization over chaos.

  Whenever he was not actually working on the poem Furvain felt terrified by the immensity of the task and the insufficiency of his own qualifications for writing it. A thousand times a day he fought back the desire to walk away from it. But he could not allow that. You have to change your life, the Lady Dolitha had told him, back there on Castle Mount, what seemed like centuries ago. Yes. Her stern words had had the force of an order. He had changed his life, and his life had changed him. And so he must continue, he knew, bringing into being this great poem that he would give to the world as his atonement for all those wasted years. Kasinibon, too, goaded him mercilessly toward the same goal: no longer spying on him, never even inquiring after the poem, but forever watching him, measuring his progress by the gauntness of his features and the bleariness of his eyes, waiting, seeking, silently demanding. Against such silent pressure Furvain was helpless.

  He worked on and on, cloistered now in his rooms, rarely coming forth except for meals, toiling each day to the point of exhaustion, resting briefly, plunging back into trance. It was like a journey through some infernal region of the mind. Full of misgivings, he traveled by wandering and laborious circuits through the dark. For hours at a time he was certain that he had become separated from his guide and he had no idea of his destination, and he felt terrors of every kind, shivers and trembling, sweat and turmoil. But then a wonderful light would shine upon him, and he would be admitted into pure meadow lands, where there were voices and dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions, and the words would flow as though beyond conscious control.

  The months passed. He was entering the second year of his task, now. The pile of manuscript steadily increased. He worked in no consecutive way, but turned, rather, to whichever part of the poem made the most insistent call on his attention. The only canto that he regarded as complete was the central one, the fifth, the key Stiamot section; but he had finished much of the Melikand canto, and nearly all of the Dvorn one, and big pieces of the opening sequence dealing with the initial settlement. Some of the other sections, the less dramatic ones, were mere fragments; and of the ninth canto he had set down nothing at all. And parts of the Stiamot story, the early and late phases, were still untold. It was a chaotic way to work, but he knew no other way of doing it. Everything would be handled in due time, of that he felt sure.

  Now and again he would ask Kasinibon whether any replies had come to his requests for ransom money, and invariably was told, “No, no, no word from anyone.” It scarcely mattered. Nothing mattered, except the work at hand.

  Then, when he was no more than three stanzas into the ninth and final canto, Furvain suddenly felt as though he stood before an impassable barrier, or perhaps an infinite dark abyss: at any rate that he had come to a point in the great task beyond which he was incapable of going. There had been times in the past, many of them, when Furvain had felt that way. But this was different. Those other times what he had experienced was an unwillingness to go on, quickly enough conquered by summoning a feeling that he could not allow himself the shameful option of not continuing. What he felt now was the absolute incapacity to carry the poem any further, because he saw only blackness ahead.

  Help me, he prayed, not knowing to whom. Guide me.

  But no help came, nor any guidance. He was alone. And, alone, he had no idea how to handle the material that he had intended to use for the ninth canto. The reconciliation with the Shapeshifters – the expiation of the great unavoidable sin that humankind had committed against them on this world – the absolution, the redemption, even the amends – he had no notion whatever of how to proceed with that. For here was Majipoor, close to ten thousand years on beyond Dvorn and four thousand years beyond Stiamot, and what reconciliation, even now, had been reached with the Metamorphs? What expiation, what redemption? They were still penned up in their jungle home in Zimroel, their movements elsewhere on that continent tightly restricted, and their presence anywhere in Alhanroel forbidden entirely. The world was no closer to a solution to the problem of the Shapeshifters than it had been on the day the first settlers landed. Lord Stiamot’s solution – conquer them, lock them up forever in southern Zimroel and keep the rest of the world for ourselves – was no solution at all, only a mere brutal expedient, as Stiamot himself had recognized. Stiamot had known that it was too late to turn back from the settlement of the planet. Majipoor’s history could not be unhappened. And so, for the sake of Majipoor’s billions of human settlers, Majipoor’s millions of aborigines had had to give up their freedom.

  If Stiamot could find no answer to the problem, Furvain thought, then who am I to offer one now?

  In that case he could not write the ninth canto. And – worse – he began to think that he could not finish the earlier unfinished cantos, either. Now that he saw there was no hope of capping the edifice with its intended conclusion, all inspiration seemed to flee from him. If he tried to force his way onward now, he suspected that he would only ruin what he had already written, diluting its power with lesser material. And even if somehow he did manage to finish, he felt now in his hopelessness and despair that he could never reveal the poem to the world. No one would believe that he had written it. They would think that some sort of theft was involved, some fraud, and he would become a figure of scorn when he was unable to produce the real author. Better for there to be no poem at all than for that sort of disgrace to descend upon him in his final years, he reasoned.

  And from that perception to the decision that he must destroy the manuscript this very day was a short journey indeed.

  From the cupboards and crannies of his apartment in Kasinibon’s fortress he gathered the various copies and drafts, and stacked them atop his table. They made a goodly heap. On days when he felt too tired or too stale to carry the poem onward, he had occupied his time in making additional copies of the existing texts, in order to lessen the risk that some mischance would rob him of his work. He had kept all his discarded pages, too, the deleted stanzas, the rewritten ones. It was an immense mound of paper. Burning it all would probably take hours.

  Calmly he peeled an inch-thick mass of manuscript from the top of his stack and laid it on the hearth of his fireplace.

  He found a match. Struck it. Stared at it for a moment, still terribly calm, and then brought it toward the corner of the stack.

  “What are you doing?” Kasinibon cried, stepping swifdy into the room. Briskly the little man brought the heel of his boot down on the smouldering match and ground it out against the stone hearth.The pile of manuscript had not had time to ignite.

  “What I’m doing is burning the poem,” said Furvain quietly. “Or trying to.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Burning it,” Furvain said again.

  “You’ve gone crazy. Your mind has snapped under the pressure of the work.”

  Furvain shook his head. “No, I think I’m still sane. But I can’t go on with it, that I know. And once I came to that realization, I felt that it was best to destroy the inc
omplete poem.” In a low, unemotional tone he laid out for Kasinibon all that had passed through his mind in the last half hour.

  Kasinibon listened without interrupting him. He was silent for a long moment thereafter. Then he said, looking past Furvain’s shoulder to the window and speaking in a strained, hollow, barely audible tone, “I have a confession to make, Furvain. Your ransom money arrived a week ago. From your friend the Duke. I was afraid to tell you, because I wanted you to finish the poem first, and I knew that you never would if I let you go back to Dundilmir. But I see that that’s wrong. I have no right to hold you here any longer. Do as you please, Furvain. Go, if you like. Only – I beg you – spare what you’ve written. Let me keep a copy of it when you leave.”

  “I want to destroy it,” Furvain said.

  Kasinibon’s eyes met Furvain’s. He said, speaking more strongly now, the old whiplash voice of the bandit chieftain, “No. I forbid you. Give it to me freely, or I’ll simply confiscate it.”

  “I’m still a prisoner, then, I see,” said Furvain, smiling. “Have you really received the ransom money?”

  “I swear it.”

  Furvain nodded. It was his time for silence, now. He turned his back on Kasinibon and stared out toward the blood-red waters of the lake beyond.

  Was it really so impossible, he wondered, to finish the poem?

  Dizziness swept over him for an instant and he realized that some unexpected force was moving within him. Kasinibon’s shamefaced confession had broken things open. No longer did he feel as though he stood before that impassable barrier. Suddenly the way was open and the ninth canto was in his grasp after all.

  It did not need to contain the answer to the Shapeshifter problem. Since Stiamot’s day, forty centuries of Coronals and Pontifexes had failed to solve that problem: why should a mere poet be able to do so? But questions of governance were not his responsibility. Writing poetry was. In The Book of Changes he had given Majipoor a mirror that would show the world its past; it was not his job to provide it with its future as well. At least not in any explicit way. Let the future discover itself as its own time unfolds.

  Suppose, he thought – suppose – suppose – I end the poem with a prophecy, a cryptic vision of a tragic king of the years to come, a king who is, like Stiamot, a man of peace who must make war, and who will suffer greatly in the anguish of his kingship. Fragmentary phrases came to him: “A golden king … a crown in the dust … the holy embrace of sworn enemies …” What did they mean? He had no idea. But he didn’t need to know. He needed only to set them down. To offer the hope that in some century to come some unimaginable monarch, who could unite in himself the forces of war and peace in a way that would precisely balance the suffering and the achievement of Stiamot, would thereby put an end to the instability in the Commonwealth that was the inevitable consequence of the original sin of taking this planet from its native people. To end the poem with the idea that reconciliation is possible. Not to explain how it will be achieved: merely to say that achieving it is possible.

  In that moment Furvain knew not only that he could go on to the finish but that he must go on, that it was his duty, and that this was the only place where that could be accomplished: here, under the watchful eye of his implacable captor and guardian. He would never do it back in Dundilmir, where he would inevitably retrogress into the shallowness of his old ways.

  Turning, he gathered up a copy of the manuscript that included all that he had written thus far, and nudged it across the table to Kasinibon. “This is for you,” he said. “Keep it. Read it, if you want to. Just don’t say a word to me about it until I give you permission.”

  Kasinibon silently took the bundle from him, clutching the pages to his breast and folding his arms across them.

  Furvain said, then, “Send the ransom money back to Tanigel. Tell the Duke he paid it too soon. I’ll be staying here a little while longer. And send this with it.” He pulled one of his extra copies of the finished text of the Stiamot canto from the great mound of paper on the table. “So that he can see what his old lazy friend Furvain has been up to all this time out in the east-country, eh?” Furvain smiled. “And now, Kasinibon, please – if you’ll allow me to get back to work—”

  3

  The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn

  In the days when Simmilgord was a wiry little boy growing up in the Vale of Gloyn he was fond of going out by himself into the broad savanna where the red gattaga-grass grew. Bare little stony hillocks rose up there like miniature mountains, eighty or ninety feet high. Clambering to the top of this one or that, he would shade his eyes against the golden-green sunlight and look far outward across that wide sea of thick copper-colored stalks. It amused him to pretend that from his lofty perch he could see the entire continent of Alhanroel from coast to coast, the great city of Alaisor in the distant west, the unthinkable height of Castle Mount rising like a colossal wall in the other direction, and, somewhere beyond that, the almost unknown eastern lands stretching on and on to the far shore of the Great Sea, marvel after marvel, miracle after miracle, and when he was up there he felt it would be no difficult thing to reach out and embrace the whole world in all its wonder.

  Of course no one could actually see as far as that, or anything like it. Simply to think about such a distance made one’s head spin. Alhanroel was too big to grasp, a giant continent that one could spend an entire lifetime exploring without ever fully coming to terms with the immensity of it, and Alhanroel was just one of the three continents of which the vast world of Majipoor was comprised. Beyond its shores lay the other two continents of Zimroel and Suvrael, nearly as large, and on the far side of Zimroel began the almost mythical Great Sea that no one had ever been able to cross. Simmilgord knew all that. He was a good student; he had paid attention to his geography lessons and his history books. But still it was a glorious thing to go scrambling up to the summit of some jagged little rockpile and stare out beyond the endless mats of coppery-hued gattaga, beyond the grazing herds of stupid flat-faced klimbergeysts and the snuffling pig-like vongiforin that rooted about among them digging for tasty seeds, beyond the grove of spiky gray skipje-trees and the towering gambalangas that grazed on their tender topmost leaves, and imagine that he could take in all of Alhanroel in a single swiveling glance, the bustling seaports in the west and the lush tropical forests to the south and the great Mount with its Fifty Cities to the east, and the Castle at its summit from which the Coronal Lord Henghilain ruled the world in high majesty and splendor. He wanted to swallow it all at a single gulp, woodlands and jungles, deserts and plains, rivers and seas. Mine! Mine! This whole extraordinary world – mine! For Simmilgord there was a kind of wild soaring music in that thought: the vast symphony that was Majipoor.

  Even at the age of ten Simmilgord understood that he was never going to see any of those places. The world was too huge, and he was too insignificant, nothing but a farmer’s son whose probable destiny it was to spend his life right here in Gloyn, growing lusavender and hingamort and never getting any farther from home than one of the market towns of west-central Alhanroel, Kessilroge, maybe, or Gannamunda, or at best Marakeeba, somewhere off to the east. What a dreary prospect! Then and there, clinging to the top of that barren little mass of granite, he vowed to transcend that vision of an empty future, to make something out of his life, to rise up out of the Vale of Gloyn and make a mark in the world that would cause others to take note of him. He would become an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, a world traveler, the confidante of dukes and princes, perhaps even a figure of some prominence at the Coronal’s court. Somehow – somehow—

  *

  That romantic dream stayed with him as he grew into adolescence, though he scaled back his ambitions somewhat. He came to understand that he was better fitted by temperament to be a scholar of some sort than any kind of swashbuckling hero; but even that was far better than staying here in Gloyn and, like his father and all who had come before him for the past twenty generations, live from harvest
to harvest, consuming his life in the unending cycle of planting and growing and gathering and marketing.

  In Upper School he found himself drawn to the study of history. That was how he would encompass the magnificence that was Majipoor, by taking all its long past within himself, mastering its annals and archives, delving into the accounts of the first settlers to come here from Old Earth, the initial wonderstruck discoveries of strange beasts and natural wonders, the early encounters with the aboriginal Shapeshifters, the founding of the cities, the creation of its governmental structure, the reigns of the first Pontifexes and Coronals, the gradual spreading out from Alhanroel to the outer continents, the conquest of mighty Castle Mount, and all the rest. The romance of the world’s long history set his soul ablaze. What fascinated him in particular was that someone, one man, the Pontifex Dvorn, had been able to make a unified and cohesive realm out of all this immensity.

  What Dvorn had accomplished held a special fascination for him. It was Simmilgord’s great hope to plunge into all of that and make out of Majipoor’s unthinkable complexity a single coherent narrative, just as Dvorn, long ago, had made one world out of hundreds of independent city-states. He dreamed of earning admission to the Hall of Records within the enormous library Lord Stiamot had founded atop the Mount that coiled around the Castle’s heart from side to side like a giant serpent, or of prowling through the dusty documents stored in the nearly as capacious archive in the depths of the Labyrinth, and bringing forth out of all that chaotic data a chronicle of Majipoor’s history that would supersede anything that had ever been written.

  Simmilgord was surprised to find his father encouraging him in this dream. He had not expected that. But there were other sons to work the farm, and Simmilgord had never shown much enthusiasm for the farm chores, anyway; plainly he was meant for other things. It seemed best for him to go to the famous University at Sisivondal and work to achieve his goal. And so he did. When he was sixteen he set out down the Great Western Highway, making the long eastward trek through Hunzimar and Gannamunda and Kessilroge and Skeil into the dusty plains of central Alhanroel, coming finally to Sisivondal, the tirelessly busy mercantile center where all the main shipping routes of Alhanroel crossed.