The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

  He felt Rickard kick him in the heel from behind. Rickard made a tiny hissing noise, and Joseph understood. Pity is not being requested here. My little brother is teaching me the proper way to handle this, he thought.

  “I like it,” his father said, very slowly. Again the twisted smile. He appeared not to have noticed Joseph’s little outburst. “The beard. A new fashion among us. Or an old one revived.” Joseph began to realize that his father’s mind must still be intact, or nearly so, even if his body was no longer under its control. “You’ve been gone such a long time, boy. You look so different, now. You must be so different, eh?”

  “I’ve been in some unusual places, Father. I’ve learned some strange things.”

  Martin nodded slowly. That seemed to be a supreme effort, that slow movement of his head. “I’ve been in some unusual places too, lately, without—ever—leaving—Keilloran—House.” He seemed to be struggling to get the words out. “And I—look—different—too,” he said. “Don’t I?”

  “You look fine, Father.”

  “No. Not true.” The dark, hooded eyes drilled into him. “Not—fine—at—all. But you are here, finally. I can rest. You will be Master now, Joseph.”

  “Yes. If that’s what you wish.”

  “It is. You must. You are ready, aren’t you?”

  “I will be,” Joseph said.

  “You are. You are.”

  He knew it was so. And knew also that he could not possibly think of abdication, not now, not after seeing what his father had become. All thought of it had fled. It had begun to fade from his mind the moment he had entered this room and looked upon his father’s face; now it was gone entirely. Now that you are back, I can rest, is what his father was saying. That wish could not be ignored or denied him. The doubts and uncertainties that had been born in Joseph during the months of his wanderings were still there; but still with him, too, was that inborn sense of his obligation to his family and to the people of House Keilloran, and now, standing before the one to whom he owed his existence, he knew that it was not in him to fling that obligation back in the face of this stricken man. Rickard had not been trained for this. He had been. He was needed. He could not say no. When his time came to be Master, though, Joseph knew he would be Master in a way that was different from his father’s.

  The hand that was holding his pressed down harder, very hard indeed, and Joseph saw that there was still plenty of strength in what remained of Martin Master Keilloran. Not enough, though, to perform the tasks that the Master of the House must perform, and which, he saw now, would—in a month, six months, whenever—devolve upon him.

  “But we need to talk, Father. When I’ve been home a little while, and when you feel up to it. There are things I need to ask you. And things I need to say.”

  “We’ll talk, yes,” his father said.

  Cailin nudged him. She signalled with a roll of her eyes that it was time for Joseph to go, that this was the limit of their damaged father’s endurance. Joseph gave her a barely perceptible nod. To Martin he said, “I have to leave, now, Father. I’ve had a long journey, and I want to rest for a while. I’ll come to you again this evening.” He squeezed the dead right hand, lifted it and kissed it and set it carefully down again, and he and Cailin and Rickard went from the room and down the hall, and into the family wing, and to the suite of rooms that had been his before his trip to Getfen, and where everything seemed to have remained completely as he had left it.

  “We’ll leave you to rest,” Cailin said. “Ring for us when you’re ready, and we can talk.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was hard, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Joseph said quietly. “Yes, it was.”

  He watched his brother and sister going down the hall, and closed the door, and was alone in his own bedroom once again. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his old bed that seemed so small, now, so boyish. As he sat there, letting the facts of his return wash over him, the bed became all the places that had been bed for him as he made his way across Manza, the rough hollows in the forest floor where he slept on bundles of dry leaves, and the stack of musty furs in the Ardardin’s village, and the hard cot, sharp as bone, in the prisoner compound, and the place under the bush where he had drifted into the hallucinations of starvation that he untroubledly believed heralded the end of his life, and the little bed in Eysar Haven that had taken on the fragrance of Thayle’s warm breasts and soft thighs, and all the rest of them as well, all flowing into one, this bed here, the little bed of his boyhood, the boyhood that now was done with and sealed.

  In the morning, Joseph thought, he would go out and walk about the estate and reacquaint himself with its land and with its people. He would pull its air deep into his lungs. He would reach down and dig his fingers into its soil. He would visit the farms and the factories and the stables. He would look at everything, and he knew that there would be much that he would be seeing as though for the first time, not just because he had been away so long but because he would be seeing it all through the eyes of a different person, one who had been to far-off places and seen far-off things. But all that was for the next day, and for the days to come. For the moment he just wanted to lie here atop his own bed in his own room and think back through all that had befallen him.

  I’ve had a long journey, and I want to rest for a while.

  A long journey, yes, a journey which had begun in thunder that had brought no rain, but only endless thunder. And now it was over, and he was home, and some new sort of journey was just beginning. He was not who he had been before, and he was not certain of exactly what he had become, and he was not at all sure who he was going to be. He was full of questions, and some of those questions might never have answers, though he wanted to think he would go on asking them, over and over, nevertheless. Well, time would tell, or maybe not. He was home, at any rate. He had come by the longest possible route, a journey that had taken him deep into the interior of himself and brought him out in some strange new place. He knew that it would take time for him to discover the nature of that place. But there was no hurry about any of that. And at least he was home. Home. Home.

  Speculative Fictions: An Interview with Robert Silverberg

  By David Horwich

  Editor’s note: Speculative Fiction — herein abbreviated as “SF” — includes several types of genre literature, including science fiction and fantasy. Robert Silverberg, whose career spans half a century, is one of the foremost writers within this über-genre. This interview was originally published in a slightly different form in Strange Horizons, www.strangehorizons.com, December 11, 2000.

  Interviewer: You’ve had an impressively prolific career as a writer. How do you maintain a high level of creativity and productivity? Do you have particularly disciplined working habits?

  Robert Silverberg: Absolutely. When I’m working, it’s Monday to Friday, week in and week out, at my desk at 8:30 and finished at noon, never any deviation. I work flat out all that time, no phone calls, no distractions. This is my schedule from November to April; I rarely work at all between April and November, but when I do, in some special instance, I maintain the same steady daily schedule until the job is done. Until 1971 I worked a longer day — nine to noon, one to three — and my output was accordingly greater, but after that year I saw no need to push myself quite that hard. But even now, when I’m relatively inactive as a writer compared with my furious pace of decades ago, I feel no alternative but to keep to the steady schedule while I’m working: I simply know no other comfortable way to work.

  Interviewer: Have you ever run into writer’s block?

  Robert Silverberg: There are plenty of days when I’d rather not go to the office and write. I write anyway, on such days. Once I get started, the reluctance usually disappears.

  In 1974, after years of prolonged overwork, I found that I simply didn’t want to write any more at all. How much of this was due to changing reader tastes (the tilt toward comic-booky stuff like Perry Rhodan),
how much to simple fatigue, how much to various upheavals that were going on in my non-writing life, I can’t say. I hesitate to call it a writer’s block, because I define such blocks as the inability to write when the writer genuinely wants to write, and I simply didn’t want to write anymore. After four and a half years, however, I felt I wanted to return to work and I sat down on November 1, 1978 and started Lord Valentine’s Castle without any difficulty at all, and continued on for the six months needed to write the book as though there had been no intermission at all.

  I feel less and less like writing these days, but I don’t think of that as writer’s block, either — just as a desire to make life easier for myself as I get into my senior years. Whenever it seems easier on me to write than not to write I always have the option of writing something, which I’ll be doing in a couple of weeks when I start a new novel, The Longest Way Home.

  Interviewer: You’ve written in a variety of genres — what draws you to speculative fiction?

  Robert Silverberg: It lit me up as a small boy and I’ve wanted ever since to contribute important work to the genre that meant so much to me as I was growing up. It’s more than light entertainment in my mind; it seems to me the thing I was put here to create, and though I have indeed done an inordinate lot of writing in many genres, I’ve always felt I was dabbling, rather than really pursuing a career goal, when working at anything that wasn’t speculative fiction.

  One exception was the archaeological writing I did [e.g., Akhnaten: The Rebel Pharaoh, 1964]. Archaeology seeming to me the reverse side of the coin from SF — exploration into the mysterious past instead of the unknowable future. And I’ve crossbred a lot of my archaeological work with my SF [e.g., The Gate of Worlds, an alternative-history novel, published in 1967 and set in the 1980s, in which the civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas are among the dominant world powers].

  Interviewer: Which writers have had the greatest influence on you?

  Robert Silverberg: Within SF, Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Henry Kuttner, C.M. Kornbluth, Robert Heinlein. Plus others, but those are the obvious names. Outside SF, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene come first to mind.

  Interviewer: How does the process of collaboration compare to writing solo?

  Robert Silverberg: I really haven’t collaborated that much. When I was just starting out I did a multitude of stories with Randall Garrett, who was living next door to me. His skills complemented mine. He was good at plotting and had an extensive scientific education, but couldn’t stay sober long enough to get much work finished. I had greater insight into character and command of style, and better writing discipline, but lacked his scientific knowledge. We worked together for a couple of years, 1955-57, and then never again. My subsequent work has been virtually all solo except for a couple of stories I wrote with Harlan Ellison as a lark, and the three Asimov-Silverberg novels, in which I did nearly all of the writing because of the deteriorating state of Isaac’s health. I don’t particularly like collaborating and am not likely to do any again.

  Interviewer: The Majipoor Cycle represents a different direction in your work — an ongoing series that explores one enormous world, in contrast to the tightly constructed novels and stories that characterize much of your speculative fiction. Did you plan to write a continuing series, or did it grow in the telling?

  Robert Silverberg: Originally I intended to write only Lord Valentine’s Castle, though I was aware that I had ended it with the question of Shapeshifter unrest unresolved. A year or two later I began writing the stories that made up Majipoor Chronicles to deal with various bits of Majipoor history that I thought were worth exploring, because it bothered me that there had been no occasion to deal with them in the original novel, and then, finally, I decided to do the actual sequel to Castle, Valentine Pontifex, to handle in a realistic way the questions I had raised in the first book.

  As the series became popular I felt the temptation to return to Majipoor, and, since there was material in one of the Chronicles stories that seemed to call out for examination in detail, I conceived the idea of the second trilogy, which in fact takes place a thousand years before Castle.

  Interviewer: The story of Gilgamesh appears in a number of your works. What special significance does this tale have for you?

  Robert Silverberg: It’s the oldest known story we have, and it deals with the most profound of issues — the reality of death — as well as the question of the responsibilities of kings. These are matters I’ve often wrestled with and the figure of Gilgamesh neatly encapsulates them in metaphorical mode.

  Interviewer: The novella Gilgamesh in the Outback is an ironic version of this story, with the action taking place in the afterlife and the responsibilities of kings being essentially irrelevant. What were you trying to convey with this twist? Incidentally, did the portrayal of Robert E. Howard in this novella create any controversy?

  Robert Silverberg: No special agenda. I was simply registering a different take on the Gilgamesh material. I don’t recall any controversy over my Howard portrait. The fans, who might be the most likely to take offense at any slight to their hero, awarded me a Hugo for the story [in 1987, his third of four].

  Interviewer: Many of your works have mortality and spirituality as central themes. What brings you back to these themes?

  Robert Silverberg: I’m going to die one of these days, and I don’t like the idea at all. One of the things that drew me to science fiction as a young reader was my hope that through it I’d get some sort of glimpse, however imaginary, of the future that I knew I would not live to see. In my own writing I keep dealing with the problem of the finite life span again and again. As for spiritual matters, well, I am painfully aware of the ultimate solitude in which we all live, and I have searched for some sense of connectivity with a universal entity, while at the same time I am utterly unable to connect with any sort of conventional religious faith. The gulf between those two problems has been a fertile ground for fictional exploration for me.

  Interviewer: Can you talk a little bit about the role of erotic or sexual themes in your work?

  Robert Silverberg: There was a strong erotic component to my SF from 1966 or so on, but only because it seemed appropriate to the kind of fiction I wanted to write that I include sex among the functions of living beings. At the time what I was writing seemed quite daring in relation to traditional SF, though everybody caught up to me later on.

  Interviewer: To take a specific example, The World Inside imagines a society in which casual extramarital sex is a fundamental social custom. Are such depictions of different cultural values meant to serve as critiques of our contemporary standards?

  Robert Silverberg: It’s not a conscious thing on my part. I have no intention of trying to remedy society’s ills through writing science fiction. In most of my writing I’m simply trying to explore the narrative consequences of my own premises: if this, then that. It isn’t as though I’m trying to peddle a message; I’m just following down a line of reasoning. And in particular trying to examine varying cultural values just to see where the examination will lead.

  Interviewer: How do you view your erotica in the context of your work? Does it have any relation to your speculative fiction, or is it something separate? Has having written in this genre, even pseudonymously, ever caused you any difficulty?

  Robert Silverberg: The other erotica I did, the Don Elliott books, etc., was undertaken at a time when I was saddled with a huge debt, at the age of twenty-six, for a splendid house that I had bought. There would have been no way to pay the house off by writing science fiction in that long-ago era, when $2500 was a lot to earn from a novel that might take months to write, so I turned out a slew of quick sex novels. I never concealed the fact that I was doing them; it made no difference at all to me whether people knew or not. It was just a job. And it was, incidentally, a job that I did very well. I think they were outstanding erotic novels.

  Interviewer: You’ve had a wide range of experience
in SF, as a writer, anthologist, and as past president of the SFWA [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America]. What are your thoughts on the current state of speculative fiction?

  Robert Silverberg: It seems to me to be in great trouble these days — the challenging, speculative kind of SF that I grew up thinking was the real stuff appears to be wholly swamped by the debased mass-culture product now favored by publishers and all too many readers. But I am no longer a close observer of the field, having drawn back in horror some years ago, and my opinion may be incorrect. I certainly hope so.

  Interviewer: What sort of “debased mass-culture product” do you have in mind, and why do you think it’s become predominant? Is the amount of unimaginative or derivative writing in SF today proportionally greater than it was in the past?

  Robert Silverberg: I think there’s a lot of terribly written material being published today, and neither writers nor editors nor readers seem aware of that. Thus the premium on literary accomplishment, which carried such writers as Bradbury and Sturgeon and Leiber to fame, has been devalued. If no one can tell junk from gold these days, gold is worth no more than junk. But we’ve always had bad writing, and it hasn’t mattered in the case of really powerful storytellers — van Vogt, say. What really bothers me is the eagerness of people to buy huge quantities of books patched together out of dumb or recycled ideas, or out of stale concepts translated from mediocre Hollywood products that have lowest-common-denominator audience goals.

  Interviewer: What can you tell us about any upcoming projects?

  Robert Silverberg: I’m going to be starting a relatively short book, called The Longest Way Home, in a couple of weeks. It’s the story of an adolescent boy who finds himself stranded on the wrong side of his planet when a civil war breaks out, but it’ll be anything but a juvenile novel. Next year I plan to assemble my various Roma Eterna stories into a book, adding a good deal of new material. No plans beyond that as yet. I’m in my mid-sixties now, have been writing professionally for forty-five years, wouldn’t mind a holiday lasting the next few decades, but somehow I doubt that I’ll allow myself that luxury. Nevertheless I’ve been reducing my writing schedule gradually over the past five years and expect to hold to that slower pace from here on out.