Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four

by Robert Silverberg

  “You mean —”

  “Tonight,” he said huskily, “the universe irrevocably enters the penumbra of the null point!”

  The day Armstrong and Aldrin stepped out onto the surface of the moon —it was Sunday, July 20, 1969, remember? —I stayed home, planning to watch the whole thing on television. But it happened that I met an interesting woman at Leon and Helene’s party the night before, and she came home with me. Her name is gone from my mind, if I ever knew it, but I remember how she looked: long soft golden hair, heart-shaped face with prominent ruddy cheeks, gentle gray-blue eyes, plump breasts, slender legs. I remember, too, how she wandered around my apartment, studying the crowded shelves of old paperbacks and magazines. “You’re really into sci-fi, aren’t you?” she said at last. And laughed and said, “I guess this must be your big weekend, then! Wow, the moon!” But it was all a big joke to her, that men should be cavorting around up there when there was still so much work left to do on earth. We had a shower and I made lunch and we settled down in front of the set to wait for the men to come out of their module, and —very easily, without a sense of transition —we found ourselves starting to screw, and it went on and on, one of those impossible impersonal mechanical screws in which body grinds against body for centuries, no feeling, no excitement, and as I rocked rhythmically on top of her, unable either to come or to quit, I heard Walter Cronkite telling the world that the module hatch was opening. I wanted to break free of her so I could watch, but she clawed at my back. With a distinct effort I pulled myself up on my elbows, pivoted the upper part of my body so I had a view of the screen, and waited for the ecstasy to hit me. Just as the first wavery image of an upside-down spaceman came into view on that ladder, she moaned and bucked her hips wildly and went into frenzied climax. I felt nothing. Nothing. Eventually she left, and I showered and had a snack and watched the replay of the moonwalk on the eleven o’clock news. And still I felt nothing.

  “What is the answer?” said Gertrude Stein, about to die. Alice B. Toklas remained silent. “In that case,” Miss Stein went on, “what is the question?”

  Extract from History of the Imperium, Koeckert and Hallis, third edition (revised):

  The galactic empire was organized 190 standard universal centuries ago by the joint, simultaneous, and unanimous resolution of the governing bodies of eleven hundred worlds. By the present day the hegemony of the empire has spread to thirteen galactic sectors and embraces many thousands of planets, all of which entered the empire willingly and gladly. To remain outside the empire is to confess civic insanity, for the Imperium is unquestionably regarded throughout the cosmos as the most wholly sane construct ever created by the sentient mind. The decision-making processes of the Imperium are invariably determined by recourse to the Hermosillo Equations, which provide unambiguous and incontrovertibly rational guidance in any question of public policy. Thus the many worlds of the empire form a single coherent unit, as perfectly interrelated socially, politically, and economically as its component worlds are interrelated by the workings of the universal laws of gravitation.

  Perhaps I spend too much time on other planets and in remote galaxies. It’s an embarrassing addiction, this science fiction. (Horrible jingle! It jangles in my brain like an idiot’s singsong chant.) Look at my bookshelves: hundreds of well-worn paperbacks, arranged alphabetically by authors, Aschenbach-Barger-Capwell-De Soto-Friedrich, all the greats of the genre out to Waldman and Zenger. The collection of magazines, every issue of everything back to the summer of 1953, a complete run of Nova, most issues of Deep Space, a thick file of Tomorrow. I suppose some of those magazines are quite rare now, though I’ve never looked closely into the feverish world of the s-f collector. I simply accumulate the publications I buy at the newsstand, never throwing any of them away. How could I part with them? Slices of my past, those magazines, those books. I can give dates to changes in my spirit, alterations in my consciousness, merely by picking up old magazines and reflecting on the associations they evoke. The issue showing the ropy-armed purple monster: it went on sale the month I discovered sex. This issue, cover painting of exploding spaceships: I read it my first month in college, by way of relief from Aquinas and Plato. Mileposts, landmarks, waterlines. An embarrassing addiction. My friends are good-humored about it. They think science fiction is a literature for children —God knows, they may be right —and they indulge my fancy for it in an affectionate way, giving me some fat anthology for Christmas, leaving a stack of current magazines on my desk while I’m out to lunch. But they wonder about me. Sometimes I wonder too. At the age of thirty-four should I still be able to react with such boyish enthusiasm to, say, Capwell’s Solar League novels or Waldman’s “Mindleech” series? What is there about the present that drives me so obsessively toward the future? The gray and vacant present, the tantalizing, inaccessible future.

  His eyes were glittering with irrepressible excitement as he handed her the gleaming yellow dome that was the thought-transference helmet. “Put it on,” he said tenderly.

  “I’m afraid, Riik.”

  “Don’t be. What’s there to fear?”

  “Myself. The real me. I’ll be wide open, Riik. I fear what you may see in me, what it may do to you, to us.”

  “Is it so ugly inside you?” he asked.

  “Sometimes I think so.”

  “Sometimes everybody thinks that about himself, Juun. It’s the old neurotic self-hatred welling up, the garbage that we can’t escape until we’re totally sane. You’ll find that kind of stuff in me, too, once we have the helmets on. Ignore it. It isn’t real. It isn’t going to be a determining factor in our lives.”

  “Do you love me, Riik?”

  “The helmet will answer that better than I can.”

  “All right. All right.” She smiled nervously. Then with exaggerated care she lifted the helmet, put it in place, adjusted it, smoothed a vagrant golden curl back under the helmet’s rim. He nodded and donned his own.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready.”

  “Now!”

  He threw the switch. Their minds surged toward one another.

  Then —

  Oneness!

  My mind is cluttered with other men’s fantasies: robots, androids, starships, giant computers, predatory energy globes, false messiahs, real messiahs, visitors from distant worlds, time machines, gravity repellers. Punch my buttons and I offer you parables from the works of Hartzell or Marcus, appropriate philosophical gems borrowed from the collected editorial utterances of David Coughlin, or concepts dredged from my meditations on De Soto. I am a walking mass of secondhand imagination. I am the flesh-and-blood personification of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

  “At last,” cried Professor Kholgoltz triumphantly. “The machine is finished! The last solenoid is installed! Feed power, Hagley. Feed power! Now we will have the Answer we have sought for so many years!”

  He gestured to his assistant, who gradually brought the great computer throbbingly to life. A subtle, barely perceptible flow of energy pervaded the air: the neutrino flux that the master equations had redicted. In the amphitheatre adjoining the laboratory, ten thousand people sat tensely frozen. All about the world, millions more, linked by satellite relay, waited with similar intensity. The professor nodded. Another gesture, and Hagley, with a grand flourish, fed the question tape —programmed under the supervision of a corps of multispan-trained philosophers—into the gaping jaws of the input slot.

  “The meaning of life,” murmured Kholgoltz. “The solution to the ultimate riddle. In just another moment it will be in our hands.”

  An ominous rumbling sound came from the depths of the mighty thinking machine. And then —

  My recurring nightmare: A beam of dense emerald light penetrates my bedroom and lifts me with an irresistible force from my bed. I float through the window and hover high above the city. A zone of blackness engulfs me and I find myself transported to an endless onyx-walled tunnel-like hallway. I am alone. I wait, and
nothing happens, and after an interminable length of time I begin to walk forward, keeping close to the left side of the hall. I am aware now that towering cone-shaped beings with saucer-size orange eyes and rubbery bodies are gliding past me on the right, paying no attention to me. I walk for days. Finally the hallway splits: nine identical tunnels confront me. Randomly I choose the leftmost one. It is just like the last, except that the beings moving toward me now are animated purple starfish, rough-skinned, many- tentacled, a globe of pale white fire glowing at their cores. Days again. I feel no hunger, no fatigue; I just go marching on. The tunnel forks once more. Seventeen options this time. I choose the rightmost branch. No change in the texture of the tunnel —smooth as always, glossy, bright with an inexplicable inner radiance —but now the beings flowing past me are spherical, translucent, paramecioid things filled with churning misty organs. On to the next forking place. And on. And on. Fork after fork, choice after choice, nothing the same, nothing ever different. I keep walking. On. On. On. I walk forever. I never leave the tunnel.

  What’s the purpose of life, anyway? Who if anybody put us here, and why? Is the whole cosmos merely a gigantic accident? Or was there a conscious and determined Prime Cause? What about free will? Do we have any, or are we only acting out the dictates of some unimaginable, unalterable program that was stencilled into the fabric of reality a billion years ago?

  Big resonant questions. The kind an adolescent asks when he first begins to wrestle with the nature of the universe. What am I doing brooding over such stuff at my age? Who am I fooling?

  This is the place. I have reached the center of the universe, where all vortices meet, where everything is tranquil, the zone of stormlessness. I drift becalmed, moving in a shallow orbit. This is ultimate peace. This is the edge of union with the All. In my tranquillity I experience a vision of the brawling, tempestuous universe that surrounds me. In every quadrant there are wars, quarrels, conspiracies, murders, air crashes, frictional losses, dimming suns, transfers of energy, colliding planets, a multitude of entropic interchanges. But here everything is perfectly still. Here is where I wish to be.

  Yes! If only I could remain forever!

  How, though? There’s no way. Already I feel the tug of inexorable forces, and I have only just arrived. There is no everlasting peace. We constantly rocket past the miraculous center toward one zone of turbulence or another, driven always toward the periphery, driven, driven, helpless. I am drawn away from the place of peace. I spin wildly. The centrifuge of ego keeps me churning. Let me go back! Let me go! Let me lose myself in that place at the heart of the tumbling galaxies!

  Never to die. That’s part of the attraction. To live in a thousand civilizations yet to come, to see the future millennia unfold, to participate vicariously in the ultimate evolution of mankind —how to achieve all that, except through these books and magazines? That’s what they give me: life eternal and a cosmic perspective. At any rate they give it to me from one page to the next.

  The signal sped across the black bowl of night, picked up again and again by ultrawave repeater stations that kicked it to higher energy states. A thousand trembling laser nodes were converted to vapor in order to hasten the message to the galactic communications center on Manipool VI, where the emperor awaited news of the revolt. Through the data dome at last the story tumbled. Worlds aflame! Millions dead! The talismans of the Imperium trampled upon!

  “We have no choice,” said the emperor calmly. “Destroy the entire Rigel system at once.”

  The problem that arises when you try to regard science fiction as adult literature is that it’s doubly removed from our “real” concerns. Ordinary mainstream fiction, your Faulkner and Dostoevsky and Hemingway, is by definition made-up stuff —the first remove. But at least it derives directly from experience, from contemplation of the empirical world of tangible daily phenomena. And so, while we are able to accept The Possessed, say, as an abstract thing, a verbal object, a construct of nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, and while we can take it purely as a story, and aggregation of incidents and conversations and expository passages describing invented individuals and events, we can also make use of it as a guide to a certain aspect of Russian nineteenth-century sensibility and as a key to prerevolutionary radical thought. That is, it is of the nature of an historical artefact, a legacy of its own era, with real and identifiable extra literary values. Because it simulates actual people moving within a plausible and comprehensible real-world human situation, we can draw information from Dostoevsky’s book that could conceivably aid us in understanding our own lives. What about science fiction, though, dealing with unreal situations set in places that do not exist and in eras that have not yet occurred? Can we take the adventures of Captain Zap in the eightieth century as a blueprint for self-discovery? Can we accept the collision of stellar federations in the Andromeda Nebula as an interpretation of the relationship of the United States and the Soviet Union circa 1950? I suppose we can, provided we can accept a science fiction story on a rarefied metaphorical level, as a set of symbolic structures generated in some way by the author’s real-world experience. But it’s much easier to hang in there with Captain Zap on his own level, for the sheer gaudy fun of it. And that’s kiddie stuff.

  Therefore we have two possible evaluations of science fiction:

  —That it is simple-minded escape literature, lacking relevance to daily life and useful only as self-contained diversion.

  —That its value is subtle and elusive, accessible only to those capable and willing to penetrate the experimental substructure concealed by those broad metaphors of galactic empires and supernormal powers.

  I oscillate between the two attitudes. Sometimes I embrace both simultaneously. That’s a trick I learned from science fiction, incidentally: “multispan logic,” it was called in Zenger’s famous novel The Mind Plateau. It took his hero twenty years of ascetic study in the cloisters of the Brothers of Aldebaran to master the trick. I’ve accomplished it in twenty years of reading Nova and Deep Space and Solar Quarterly. Yes: multispan logic. Yes. The art of embracing contradictory theses. Maybe “dynamic schizophrenia” would be a more expressive term, I don’t know.

  Is this the center? Am I there? I doubt it. Will I know it when I reach it, or will I deny it as I frequently do, will I say, What else is there, where else should I look?

  The alien was a repellent thing, all lines and angles, its tendrils quivering menacingly, its slit-wide eyes revealing a somber bloodshot curiosity. Mortenson was unable to focus clearly on the creature; it kept slipping off at the edges into some other plane of being, an odd rippling effect that he found morbidly disquieting. It was no more than fifty meters from him now, and advancing steadily. When it gets to within ten meters, he thought, I’m going to blast it no matter what.

  Five steps more; then an eerie metamorphosis. In place of this thing of harsh angular threat there stood a beaming, happy Golkon! The plump little creature waved its chubby tentacles and cooed a gleeful greeting!

  “I am love,” the Golkon declared. “I am the bringer of happiness! I welcome you to this world, dear friend!”

  What do I fear? I fear the future. I fear the infinite possibilities that lie ahead. They fascinate and terrify me. I never thought I would admit that, even to myself. But what other interpretation can I place on my dream? That multitude of tunnels, that infinity of strange beings, all drifting toward me as I walk on and on? The embodiment of my basic fear. Hence my compulsive reading of science fiction: I crave road signs, I want a map of the territory that I must enter. That we all must enter. Yet the maps themselves are frightening. Perhaps I should look backward instead. It would be less terrifying to read historical novels. Yet I feed on these fantasies that obsess and frighten me. I derive energy from them. If I renounced them, what would nourish me?

  The blood-collectors were out tonight, roving in thirsty packs across the blasted land. From the stone-walled safety of his cell he could hear them baying, could hear also t
he terrible cries of the victims, the old women, the straggling children. Four, five nights a week now, the fanged monsters broke loose and went marauding, and each night there were fewer humans left to hold back the tide. That was bad enough, but there was worse: his own craving. How much longer could he keep himself locked up in here? How long before he too was out there, prowling, questing for blood?

  When I went to the newsstand at lunchtime to pick up the latest issue of Tomorrow, I found the first number of a new magazine: Worlds of Wonder. That startled me. It must be nine or ten years since anybody risked bringing out a new s-f title. We have our handful of long-established standbys, most of them founded in the thirties and even the twenties, which seem to be going to go on forever; but the failure of nearly all the younger magazines in the fifties was so emphatic that I suppose I came to assume there never again would be any new titles. Yet here is Worlds of Wonder, out today. There’s nothing extraordinary about it. Except for the name it might very well be Deep Space or Solar. The format is the usual one, the size of Reader’s Digest. The cover painting, unsurprisingly, is by Greenstone. The stories are by Aschenbach, Marcus, and some lesser names. The editor is Roy Schaefer, whom I remember as a competent but unspectacular writer in the fifties and sixties. I suppose I should be pleased that I’ll have six more issues a year to keep me amused. In fact I feel vaguely threatened, as though the tunnel of my dreams has sprouted an unexpected new fork.