Majipoor Chronicles

by Robert Silverberg

  “Tell your son to put that blade away,” he said. Barjazid was silent.

  Dekkeret said, “He drops the blade or I smash this thing in my hand. Which?”

  Barjazid gave the order in a low growling tone. Dinitak pitched the knife into the sand almost at Dekkeret’s feet, and Dekkeret, taking one step forward, pulled it to him and kicked it behind him. He dangled the mechanism in Barjazid’s face: a thing of gold and crystal and ivory, elaborately fashioned, with mysterious wires and connections.

  “What is this?” Dekkeret said.

  “I told you. A toy. Please—give it to me, before you break it.”

  “What is the function of this toy?”

  “It amuses me while I sleep,” said Barjazid hoarsely.

  “In what way?”

  “It enhances my dreams and makes them more interesting.” Dekkeret took a closer look at it.

  “If I put it on, will it enhance my dreams?”

  “It will only harm you, Initiate.”

  “Tell me what it does for you.”

  “That is very hard to describe,” Barjazid said.

  “Work at it. Strive to find the words. How did you become a figure in my dream, Barjazid? You had no business being in that particular dream.”

  The little man shrugged. He said uncomfortably, “Was I in your dream? How would I know what was happening in your dream? Anyone can be in anybody’s dream.”

  “I think this machine may have helped put you there. And may have helped you know what I was dreaming.”

  Barjazid responded only with glum silence.

  Dekkeret said, “Describe the workings of this machine, or I’ll grind it to scrap in my hand.”

  “Please—”

  Dekkeret’s thick strong fingers closed on one of the most fragile-looking parts of the device. Barjazid sucked in his breath; his body went taut in Dekkeret’s grip.

  “Well?” Dekkeret said.

  “Your guess is right. It—it lets me enter sleeping minds.”

  “Truly? Where did you get such a thing?”

  “My own invention. A notion that I have been perfecting over a number of years.”

  “Like the machines of the Lady of the Isle?”

  “Different. More powerful. She can only speak to minds; I can read dreams, control the shape of them, take command of a person’s sleeping mind to a great degree.”

  “And this device is entirely of your own making. Not stolen from the Isle.”

  “Mine alone,” Barjazid murmured.

  A torrent of rage surged through Dekkeret. For an instant he wanted to crush Barjazid’s machine in one quick squeeze and then to grind Barjazid himself to pulp. Remembering all of Barjazid’s half-truths and evasions and outright lies, thinking of the way Barjazid had meddled in his dreams, how he had wantonly distorted and transformed the healing rest Dekkeret so sorely needed, how he had interposed layers of fears and torments and uncertainties into that Lady-sent gift, his own true blissful rest, Dekkeret felt an almost murderous fury at having been invaded and manipulated in this fashion. His heart pounded, his throat went dry, his vision blurred. His hand tightened on Barjazid’s bent arm until the small man whimpered and mewed. Harder—harder—break it off—

  No.

  Dekkeret reached some inner peak of anger and held himself there a moment, and then let himself descend the farther slope toward tranquillity. Gradually, he regained his steadiness, caught his breath, eased the drumming in his chest. He held tight to Barjazid until he felt altogether calm. Then he released the little man and shoved him forward against the floater. Barjazid staggered and clung to the vehicle’s curving side. All color seemed to have drained from his face. Tenderly he rubbed his bruised arm, and glanced up at Dekkeret with an expression that seemed to be compounded equally of terror and pain and resentment.

  With care Dekkeret studied the curious instrument, gently rubbing the tips of his fingers over its elegant and complicated parts. Then he moved as if to put it on his own forehead.

  Barjazid gasped. “Don’t!”

  “What will happen? Will I damage it?”

  “You will. And yourself as well.”

  Dekkeret nodded. He doubted that Barjazid was bluffing, but he did not care to find out.

  After a moment he said, “There are no Shapeshifter dream-stealers hiding in this desert, is that right?”

  “That is so,” Barjazid whispered.

  “Only you, secretly experimenting on the minds of other travelers. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And causing them to die.”

  “No,” Barjazid said. “I intended no deaths. If they died, it was because they became alarmed, became confused, because they panicked and ran off into dangerous places—because they began to wander in their sleep, as you did—”

  “But they died because you had meddled in their minds.”

  “Who can be sure of that? Some died, some did not. I had no desire to have anyone perish. Remember, when you wandered away, we searched diligently for you.”

  “I had hired you to guide and protect me,” said Dekkeret. “The others were innocent strangers whom you preyed on from afar, is that not so?” Barjazid was silent.

  “You knew that people were dying as a direct result of your experiments, and you went on experimenting.”

  Barjazid shrugged.

  “How long were you doing this?”

  “Several years.”

  “And for what reason?”

  Barjazid looked toward the side. “I told you once, I would never answer a question of that sort.”

  “And if I break your machine?”

  “You will break it anyway.”

  “Not so,” Dekkeret replied. “Here. Take it.”

  “What?”

  Dekkeret extended his hand, with the dream-machine resting on his palm. “Go on. Take it. Put it away. I don’t want the thing.”

  “You’re not going to kill me?” Barjazid said in wonder.

  “Am I your judge? If I catch you using that device on me again, I’ll kill you sure enough. But otherwise, no. Killing is not my sport. I have one sin on my soul as it is. And I need you to get me back to Tolaghai, or have you forgotten that?”

  “Of course. Of course.” Barjazid looked astounded at Dekkeret’s mercy.

  Dekkeret said, “Why would I want to kill you?”

  “For entering your mind—for interfering with your dreams—”

  “Ah.”

  “For putting your life at risk on the desert.”

  “That too.”

  “And yet you aren’t eager for vengeance?”

  Dekkeret shook his head. “You took great liberties with my soul, and that angered me, but the anger is past and done with. I won’t punish you. We’ve had a transaction, you and I, and I’ve had my money’s worth from you, and this thing of yours has been of value to me.” He leaned close and said in a low, earnest voice, “I came to Suvrael full of doubt and confusion and guilt, looking to purge myself through physical suffering. That was foolishness. Physical suffering makes the body uncomfortable and strengthens the will, but it does little for the wounded spirit. You gave me something else, you and your mind-meddling toy. You tormented me in dreams and held up a mirror to my soul, and I saw myself clearly. How much of that last dream were you really able to read, Barjazid?”

  “You were in a forest—in the north—”

  “Yes.”

  “Hunting. One of your companions was injured by an animal, yes? Is that it?”

  “Go on.”

  “And you ignored her. You continued the chase. And afterward, when you went back to see about her, it was too late, and you blamed yourself for her death. I sensed the great guilt in you. I felt the power of it radiating from you.”

  “Yes,” Dekkeret said. “Guilt that I’ll bear forever. But there’s nothing that can be done for her now, is there?” An astonishing calmness had spread through him. He was not altogether sure what had happened, except that in his dream
he had confronted the events of the Khyntor forest at last, and had faced the truth of what he had done there and what he had not done, had understood, in a way that he could not define in words, that it was folly to flagellate himself for all his lifetime over a single act of carelessness and unfeeling stupidity, that the moment had come to put aside all self-accusation and get on with the business of his life. The process of forgiving himself was under way. He had come to Suvrael to be purged and somehow he had accomplished that. And he owed Barjazid thanks for that favor. To Barjazid he said, “I might have saved her, or maybe not; but my mind was elsewhere, and in my foolishness I passed her by to make my kill. But wallowing in guilt is no useful means of atonement, eh, Barjazid? The dead are dead. My services must be offered to the living. Come: turn this floater and let’s begin heading back toward Tolaghai.”

  “And what about your visit to the rangelands? What about Ghyzyn Kor?”

  “A silly mission. It no longer matters, these questions of meat shortages and trade imbalances. Those problems are already solved. Take me to Tolaghai.”

  “And then?”

  “You will come with me to Castle Mount. To demonstrate your toy before the Coronal.”

  “No!” Barjazid cried in horror. He looked genuinely frightened for the first time since Dekkeret had known him. “I beg you—”

  “Father?” said Dinitak.

  Under the midday sun the boy seemed ablaze with light. There was a wild and fiery look of pride on his face.

  “Father, go with him to Castle Mount. Let him show his masters what we have here.”

  Barjazid moistened his lips. “I fear—”

  “Fear nothing. Our time is now beginning.” Dekkeret looked from one to the other, from the suddenly timid and shrunken old man to the transfigured and glowing boy. He sensed that historic things were happening, that mighty forces were shifting out of balance and into a new configuration, and this he barely comprehended, except to know that his destinies and those of these desertfolk were tied in some way together; and the dream-reading machine that Barjazid had created was the thread that bound their lives.

  Barjazid said huskily, “What will happen to me on Castle Mount, then?”

  “I have no idea,” said Dekkeret. “Perhaps they’ll take your head and mount it atop Lord Siminave’s Tower. Or perhaps you’ll find yourself set up on high as a Power of Majipoor. Anything might happen. How would I know?” He realized that he did not care, that he was indifferent to Barjazid’s fate, that he felt no anger at all toward this seedy little tinkerer with minds, but only a kind of perverse abstract gratitude for Barjazid’s having helped rid him of his own demons. “These matters are in the Coronal’s hands. But one thing is certain, that you will go with me to the Mount, and this machine of yours with us. Come, now, turn the floater, take me to Tolaghai.”

  “It is still daytime,” Barjazid muttered. “The heart of the day rages at its highest.”

  “We’ll manage. Come: get us moving, and fast! We have a ship to catch in Tolaghai, and there’s a woman in that city I want to see again, before we set sail!”

  12

  THESE EVENTS HAPPENED in the young manhood of him who was to become the Coronal Lord Dekkeret in the Pontificate of Prestimion. And it was the boy Dinitak Barjazid who would be the first to rule in Suvrael over the minds of all the sleepers of Majipoor, with the title of King of Dreams.

  VI

  The Soul-Painter and the Shapeshifter

  IT HAS BECOME an addiction. Hissune’s mind is opening now in all directions, and the Register of Souls is the key to an infinite world of new understanding. When one dwells in the Labyrinth one develops a peculiar sense of the world as vague and unreal, mere names rather than concrete places: only the dark and hermetic Labyrinth has substance, and all else is vapor. But Hissune has journeyed by proxy to every continent now, he has tasted strange foods and seen weird landscapes, he has experienced extremes of heat and cold, and in all that he has come to acquire a comprehension of the complexity of the world that, he suspects, very few others have had. Now he goes back again and again. No longer does he have to bother with forged credentials; he is so regular a user of the archives that a nod is sufficient to get him within, and then he has all the million yesterdays of Majipoor at his disposal. Often he stays with a capsule for only a moment or two, until he has determined that it contains nothing that will move him farther along the road to knowledge. Sometimes of a morning he will call up and dismiss eight, ten, a dozen records in rapid succession. True enough, he knows, that every being’s soul contains a universe; but not all universes are equally interesting, and that which he might learn from the innermost depths of one who spent his life sweeping the streets of Piiplok or murmuring prayers in the entourage of the Lady of the Isle does not seem immediately useful to him, when he considers other possibilities. So he summons capsules and rejects them and summons again, dipping here and there into Majipoor’s past, and keeps at it until he finds himself in contact with a mind that promises real revelation. Even Coronals and Pontifexes can be bores, he has discovered. But there are always wondrous unexpected finds—a man who fell in love with a Metamorph, for example—

  It was a surfeit of perfection that drove the soul-painter Therion Nismile from the crystalline cities of Castle Mount to the dark forests of the western continent. All his life he had lived amid the wonders of the Mount, traveling through the Fifty Cities according to the demands of his career, exchanging one sort of splendor for another every few years. Dundilmir was his native city—his first canvases were scenes of the Fiery Valley, tempestuous and passionate with the ragged energies of youth—and then he dwelled some years in marvelous Canzilaine of the talking statues, and afterward in Stee the awesome, whose outskirts were three days’ journey across, and in golden Halanx at the very fringes of the Castle, and for five years at the Castle itself, where he painted at the court of the Coronal Lord Thraym. His paintings were prized for their calm elegance and their perfection of form, which mirrored the flawlessness of the Fifty Cities to the ultimate degree. But the beauty of such places numbs the soul, after a time, and paralyzes the artistic instincts. When Nismile reached his fortieth year he found himself beginning to identify perfection with stagnation; he loathed his own most famous works; his spirit began to cry out for upheaval, unpredictability, transformation.

  The moment of crisis overtook him in the gardens of Tolingar Barrier, that miraculous park on the plain between Dundilmir and Stipool. The Coronal had asked him for a suite of paintings of the gardens, to decorate a pergola under construction on the Castle’s rim. Obligingly Nismile made the long journey down the slopes of the enormous mountain, toured the forty miles of park, chose the sites where he meant to work, set up his first canvas at Kazkas Promontory, where the contours of the garden swept outward in great green symmetrical pulsating scrolls. He had loved this place when he was a boy. On all of Majipoor there was no site more serene, more orderly, for the Tolingar gardens were composed of plants bred to maintain themselves in transcendental tidiness. No gardener’s shears touched these shrubs and trees; they grew of their own accord in graceful balance, regulated their own spacing and rate of replacement, suppressed all weeds in their environs, and controlled their proportions so that the original design remained forever unbreached. When they shed their leaves or found it needful to drop an entire dead bough, enzymes within dissolved the castoff matter quickly into useful compost. Lord Havilbove, more than a hundred years ago, had been the founder of this garden; his successors Lord Kanaba and Lord Sirruth had continued and extended the program of genetic modification that governed it; and under the present Coronal Lord Thraym its plan was wholly fulifilled, so that now it would remain eternally perfect, eternally balanced. It was that perfection which Nismile had come to capture.

  He faced his blank canvas, drew breath deep down into his lungs, and readied himself for entering the trance state. In a moment his soul, leaping from his dreaming mind, would in a single instant imprin
t the unique intensity of his vision of this scene on the psychosensitive fabric. He glanced one last time at the gentle hills, the artful shrubbery, the delicately angled leaves—and a wave of rebellious fury crashed against him, and he quivered and shook and nearly fell. This immobile landscape, this static, sterile beauty, this impeccable and matchless garden, had no need of him; it was itself as unchanging as a painting, and as lifeless, frozen in its own faultless rhythms to the end of time. How ghastly! How hateful! Nismile swayed and pressed his hands to his pounding skull. He heard the soft surprised grunts of his companions, and when he opened his eyes he saw them all staring in horror and embarrassment at the blackened and bubbling canvas. “Cover it!” he cried, and turned away. Everyone was in motion at once; and in the center of the group Nismile stood statue-still. When he could speak again he said quietly, “Tell Lord Thraym I will be unable to fulfill his commission.”

  And so that day in Dundilmir he purchased what he needed and began his long journey to the lowlands, and out into the broad hot flood-plain of the Iyann River, and by riverboat interminably along the sluggish Iyann to the western port of Alaisor; and at Alaisor he boarded, after a wait of weeks, a ship bound for Numinor on the Isle of Sleep, where he tarried a month. Then he found passage on a pilgrim-ship sailing to Piliplok on the wild continent of Zimroel. Zimroel, he was sure, would not oppress him with elegance and perfection. It had only eight or nine cities, which in fact were probably little more than frontier towns. The entire interior of the continent was wilderness, into which Lord Stiamot had driven the aboriginal Metamorphs after their final defeat four thousand years ago. A man wearied of civilization might be able to restore his soul in such surroundings.

  Nismile expected Piliplok to be a mudhole, but to his surprise it turned out to be an ancient and enormous city, laid out according to a maddeningly rigid mathematical plan. It was ugly but not in any refreshing way, and he moved on by riverboat up the Zimr. He journeyed past great Ni-moya, which was famous even to inhabitants of the other continent, and did not stop there; but at a town called Verf he impulsively left the boat and set forth in a hired wagon into the forests to the south. When he had traveled so deep into the wilderness that he could see no trace of civilization, he halted and built a cabin beside a swift dark stream. It was three years since he had left Castle Mount. Through all his journey he had been alone and had spoken to others only when necessary, and he had not painted at all.