Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  He says, “Shall we begin with a tour of the site?”

  “You may show me later. We must have our talk first,” says Selim Bey.

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  The slender little man gestures from the shoreline to the top of the hill. “You have not found, I take it, any additional Neolithic artifacts here, is that correct?”

  “Not as yet, no. I’ve only recently begun trenching along the original find site—the proto-Hittite wall up there needed a careful excavation first, you see—and although the work thus far hasn’t been especially rewarding, there’s every reason to expect that—”

  “No,” says Selim Bey. “There is no reason to expect anything.”

  “Sorry. I don’t follow what you’re saying.”

  Selim Bey shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His gaze rests on Halvorsen’s left cheekbone. His prominent Adam’s apple moves up and down like an adolescent’s. He seems about to burst into tears.

  He says, after a little while, “I must tell you that the previous superintendent of excavations, Hikmet Bey, did not in fact resign. Hikmet Bey was dismissed.”

  “Ah?”

  “There were many reasons for this,” says Selim Bey quietly, digging the tip of his boot into the sand as an embarrassed child might do. “His behavior toward his superiors on certain occasions—his failure to file certain reports in a timely way—his excessive drinking—even his handling, I am sorry to say, of his official financial responsibilities. It is a very unfortunate story and I regret to be telling you of such deplorable things. He needs help, that man. We must all hope that he finds it.”

  “Of course,” says Halvorsen piously. “The poor man.” He has to choke back laughter. The fat old tyrant, unseated at last! Caught with his hand in the till, no doubt. Pocketing the fees that the tourists pay to get into the museum at Bodrum and pissing the money away on raki and little boys.

  “The reason I tell you this,” Selim Bey says, “is that examination of Hikmet Bey’s records, such as they were, brought forth certain revelations that it is necessary to share with you, Dr. Halvorsen. They concern the Neolithic artifacts that were found at this site after the great storms of some winters ago.”

  “Yes?” Halvorsen says. He feels some pressure in his chest.

  “A small clay bull’s head, a double-axe amulet, a female figurine, all in the Çatal Hüyük style.”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “I deeply regret to say, Dr. Halvorsen, that it appears that these were authentic Çatal Hüyük artifacts, which Hikmet Bey obtained at their proper site many hundreds of kilometers from here through illegitimate channels and planted on this hill so that they would be discovered here by a shepherd boy and eventually brought to your attention.”

  Halvorsen makes a husky sound, not quite a word.

  Selim Bey rushes onward. “Hikmet Bey knew of your theories, of course. He thought it would be a proud thing for Turkey if they could be proven to be sound. He is correct about that. And so he sought to entice you to return to our land and carry out researches in his area of supervision. But the method that he used to attract your attention was very wrong. I am extremely sorry to inform you of this, and on behalf of my government I wish to offer our profound apologies for this unfortunate if well-meaning deception, for which no justification can possibly be found that can in any way negate the tremendous injury that has been done to you. Again, my deepest apologies, Dr. Halvorsen.”

  The young man takes half a step back, as if he expects Halvorsen to strike him. But Halvorsen simply stares. He is without words. His mouth opens and closes.

  A hoax. A plant. His head is swimming.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” he says finally, unable for the moment to remember how to say “Excuse me” in Turkish. He lurches forward, sending Selim Bey skittering out of his way like a frightened gazelle, and stumbles like a wounded ox down the path that leads to the tent colony along the beach. He moves at a terrible speed, heedless of his injured leg, virtually unaware that he has legs at all: he might have been moving on wheels.

  “Dr. Halvorsen? Dr. Halvorsen?” voices call from behind him.

  He enters his tent.

  I am extremely sorry to inform…I wish to offer our profound apologies…no justification can possibly be found…the tremendous injury that has been done to you…

  Right. Right. Right.

  The raki provides a kind of quick palliative. He takes a deep pull straight from the bottle, exhales, takes another, takes one more. Good.

  Then he kicks off his boots and stretches out on his cot, facing upward. The day’s work is well along, out there on the dig, but he can’t bring himself to return to it. There is no way that he can face the others, now, after what he has just learned.

  The impact of Selim Bey’s words is still sinking in. But there is no escaping the fact of his destruction. His theory is empty; he has wasted his time and expended the last of his professional capital on a foolish quest spurred by fraudulent clues.

  As the lunch hour nears and Halvorsen still has not emerged from his tent, Feld and Martin Altman and Jane Sparmann come to him to see if he is all right. Even without knowing what it is that Selim Bey has told him, they evidently have guessed that it was highly upsetting news of some sort.

  He tries to bluff it through. “There were some little questions about our permit application,” he tells them. “Trivial stuff, nothing to worry about. The usual bureaucratic nonsense.”

  “If we can help in any way, sir—”

  “No need. No need at all.”

  Halvorsen realizes, from the way they are looking at him, that they don’t believe a word he has said. They must be able to see the outward manifestations of the shock wave that has coursed through his body, the visible signs of his inner demolition. They can have no doubt now that he has heard something shattering from this morning’s visitor and that he is struggling to conceal it from them. There is a look of deep concern on their faces, but also, so it seems to him, sympathy verging on pity.

  That is more than he can bear. He will not let them patronize him. Feld makes one more stammering offer of assistance, and Halvorsen replies brusquely that it is not necessary, that everything is all right, that he can handle the problem himself. His tone is so blunt that they are startled, and even a little angered, maybe, at this rejection of their solicitude. But he has left them no choice but to go. Jane Sparmann is the last to leave, hovering at the door of his tent an extra moment, searching for the right words but unable to articulate them. Then she too withdraws.

  So, then. He is alone with his anguish. And the central issue remains. His occupation is gone. He has made himself something pitiable in the eyes of his colleagues, and that is intolerable.

  Contemplating his options now in the face of this disaster, he sees that he really has none at all. Except one, and that is an even greater foolishness than the one that has brought him to this sorry shipwreck on the Turkish shore.

  Nevertheless Halvorsen voices it, more out of rage than conviction.

  He stares at the roof of the tent. “All right,” he says savagely. “It’s daytime here, now, but maybe you can hear me anyway. Are you there? Are you listening? I call your bluff. The offer is accepted. You can take over my life back here, and I’ll take over yours. Come and get me, if you can. Get me right now.”

  Nothing happens. Of course not, Halvorsen thinks. What madness.

  He remains motionless, listening to the wind. He hears voices outside, but no words, only faint, indistinct sounds. Perhaps that’s the wind too. He feels the faintest of tremors in the tips of his fingers, and perhaps the twitch of a muscle in his cheek, and a certain mild and quickly passing queasiness in the pit of his stomach. That is the raki, he thinks.

  “Well?” he says. “No deal, eh? No, I didn’t really think there would be. You were just a fucking hallucination, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

  What else could it have been? he wonders. What else but an old man’s lunatic fantasi
es? Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season, nothing more. It was shameful to have made the attempt, even in bitter jest. And now he must get up and go back outside, and formally accept the apologies that Selim Bey has come here to deliver, and explain to the others what has happened, and then go on to pick up the pieces of his life somehow, after all. Yes. Yes. Somehow. He will have to be strong in the face of the humiliation that will be his, but there is no choice. Up, then.

  He rises to go outside.

  But he discovers as he sets about the process of rising from the cot that he is no longer lying on it, nor is he in his tent, and that in fact he has been utterly changed: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. His aging, aching body is gone, and he is a gleaming metallic sphere that moves in a wondrously frictionless way, as if by magic; and when he emerges into the open air from the airless vaulted place in which he has awakened, he enters into a realm of mighty silence, and it is the apocalyptic glories of the Fifth Mandala that he sees under the thin yellow light of evening, the immense tumbled many-layered ruins of the great City of Cities, Costa Stambool, at the end of time.

  DEATH DO US PART

  My book for 1993-94 was the relatively short novel The Mountains of Majipoor, which I finished so early in the rainy season that there was time to do a short story or two afterward before I shut the fiction factory down for its traditional spring recess. So I wrote this one in February, 1994, tacking a couple of new twists on the old notion of the quasi-immortal who falls in love with someone of normal lifespan. Ellen Datlow bought it for Omni, but it never saw print there, because Omni’s owner, some months later, decided to transfer his magazine to the mysterious on-line world of the Internet. I was tardy in exploring that world myself, and back there in the 1990’s anything “published” there might just as well have been published on Mars, so far as I was concerned. The on-line version of Omni did indeed make the story available to its cyberspace following, finally, in December of 1996, though I never saw it there. (It was 1998 before I finally got myself wired up.) Technically that’s its first publication. But in my own reactionary way I still consider print media as the only real place of publication for fiction, and to my outmoded way of thinking “Death Do Us Part” made its publishing debut in the August, 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. As a concession to the realities of the twenty-first century I’ve given the Omni use of the story priority in the copyright acknowledgments at the front of this book, though.

  ——————

  It was her first, his seventh. She was thirty-two, he was three hundred and sixty-three: the good old April/September number. They honeymooned in Venice, Nairobi, the Malaysia Pleasure Dome, and one of the posh L-5 resorts, a shimmering glassy sphere with round-the-clock sunlight and waterfalls that tumbled like cascades of diamonds, and then they came home to his lovely sky-house suspended on tremulous guy-wires a thousand meters above the Pacific to begin the everyday part of their life together.

  Her friends couldn’t get over it. “He’s ten times your age!” they would exclaim. “How could you possibly want anybody that old?” Marilisa admitted that marrying Leo was more of a lark for her than anything else. An impulsive thing; a sudden impetuous leap. Marriages weren’t forever, after all—just thirty or forty years and then you moved along. But Leo was sweet and kind and actually quite sexy. And he had wanted her so much. He genuinely did seem to love her. Why should his age be an issue? He didn’t appear to be any older than thirty-five or so. These days you could look as young as you liked. Leo did his Process faithfully and punctually, twice each decade, and it kept him as dashing and vigorous as a boy.

  There were little drawbacks, of course. Once upon a time, long, long ago, he had been a friend of Marilisa’s great-grandmother: they might even have been lovers. She wasn’t going to ask. Such things sometimes happened and you simply had to work your way around them. And then also he had an ex-wife on the scene, Number Three, Katrin, two hundred and forty-seven years old and not looking a day over thirty. She was constantly hovering about. Leo still had warm feelings for her. “A wonderfully dear woman, a good and loyal friend,” he would say. “When you get to know her you’ll be as fond of her as I am.” That one was hard, all right. What was almost as bad, he had children three times Marilisa’s age and more. One of them—the next-to-youngest, Fyodor—had an insufferable and presumptuous way of winking and sniggering at her, that hundred-year-old son of a bitch. “I want you to meet our father’s newest toy,” Fyodor said of her, once, when yet another of Leo’s centenarian sons, previously unsuspected by Marilisa, turned up. “We get to play with her when he’s tired of her.” Someday Marilisa was going to pay him back for that.

  Still and all, she had no serious complaints. Leo was an ideal first husband: wise, warm, loving, attentive, generous. She felt nothing but the greatest tenderness for him. And then too he was so immeasurably experienced in the ways of the world. If being married to him was a little like being married to Abraham Lincoln or Augustus Caesar, well, so be it: they had been great men, and so was Leo. He was endlessly fascinating. He was like seven husbands rolled into one. She had no regrets, none at all, not really.

  In the spring of ’87 they go to Capri for their first anniversary. Their hotel is a reconstructed Roman villa on the southern slope of Monte Tiberio: alabaster walls frescoed in black and red, a brilliantly colored mosaic of sea-creatures in the marble bathtub, a broad travertine terrace that looks out over the sea. They stand together in the darkness, staring at the awesome sparkle of the stars. A crescent moon slashes across the night. His arm is around her; her head rests against his breast. Though she is a tall woman, Marilisa is barely heart-high to him.

  “Tomorrow at sunrise,” he says, “we’ll see the Blue Grotto. And then in the afternoon we’ll hike down below here to the Cave of the Mater Magna. I always get a shiver when I’m there. Thinking about the ancient islanders who worshipped their goddess under that cliff, somewhere back in the Pleistocene. Their rites and rituals, the offerings they made to her.”

  “Is that when you first came here?” she asks, keeping it light and sly. “Somewhere back in the Pleistocene?”

  “A little later than that, really. The Renaissance, I think it was. Leonardo and I traveled down together from Florence—”

  “You and Leonardo, you were just like that.”

  “Like that, yes. But not like that, if you take my meaning.”

  “And Cosimo de’ Medici. Another one from the good old days. Cosimo gave such great parties, right?”

  “That was Lorenzo,” he says. “Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo’s grandson. Much more fun than the old man. You would have adored him.”

  “I almost think you’re serious when you talk like that.”

  “I’m always serious. Even when I’m not.” His arm tightens around her. He leans forward and down, and buries a kiss in her thick dark hair. “I love you,” he whispers.

  “I love you,” she says. “You’re the best first husband a girl could want.”

  “You’re the finest last wife a man could ever desire.”

  The words skewer her. Last wife? Is he expecting to die in the next ten or twenty or thirty years? He is old—ancient—but nobody has any idea yet where the limits of Process lie. Five hundred years? A thousand? Who can say? No one able to afford the treatments has died a natural death yet, in the four hundred years since Process was invented. Why, then, does he speak so knowingly of her as his last wife? He may live long enough to have seven, ten, fifty wives after her.

  Marilisa is silent a long while.

  Then she asks him, quietly, uncertainly, “I don’t understand why you said that.”

  “Said what?”

  “The thing about my being your last wife.”

  He hesitates just a moment. “But why would I ever want another, now that I have you?”

  “Am I so utterly perfect?”

  “I love you.”

  “You loved Tedesca and Thane and Iavilda too,” she says. “And
Miaule and Katrin.” She is counting on her fingers in the darkness. One wife missing from the list. “And—Syantha. See, I know all their names. You must have loved them but the marriages ended anyway. They have to end. No matter how much you love a person, you can’t keep a marriage going forever.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do. Everybody knows it.”

  “I would like this marriage never to end,” he tells her. “I’d like it to go on and on and on. To continue to the end of time. Is that all right? Is such a sentiment permissible, do you think?”

  “What a romantic you are, Leo!”

  “What else can I be but romantic, tonight? This place; the spring night; the moon, the stars, the sea; the fragrance of the flowers in the air. Our anniversary. I love you. Nothing will ever end for us. Nothing.”

  “Can that really be so?” she asks.

  “Of course. Forever and ever, as it is this moment.”

  She thinks from time to time of the men she will marry after she and Leo have gone their separate ways. For she knows that she will. Perhaps she’ll stay with Leo for ten years, perhaps for fifty; but ultimately, despite all his assurances to the contrary, one or the other of them will want to move on. No one stays married forever. Fifteen, twenty years, that’s the usual. Sixty or seventy, tops.

  She’ll marry a great athlete next, she decides. And then a philosopher; and then a political leader; and then stay single for a few decades, just to clear her palate, so to speak, an intermezzo in her life, and when she wearies of that she’ll find someone entirely different, a simple rugged man who likes to hunt, to work in the fields with his hands, and then a yachtsman with whom she’ll sail the world, and then maybe when she’s about three hundred she’ll marry a boy, an innocent of eighteen or nineteen who hasn’t even had his first Prep yet, and then—then—

  A childish game. It always brings her to tears, eventually. The unknown husbands that wait for her in the misty future are vague, chilly phantoms, fantasies, frightening, inimical. They are like swords that will inevitably fall between her and Leo, and she hates them for that.