Majipoor Chronicles

by Robert Silverberg

  VII

  Crime and Punishment

  THAT ONE TAKES HIM back to the beginning of his explorations of these archives. Thesme and the Ghayrog all over again, another forest romance, the love of human and non-human. Yet the similarities are all on the surface, for these were very different people in very different circumstances. Hissune comes away from the tale with what he thinks is a reasonably good understanding of the soul-painter Therion Nismile—some of whose works, he learns, are still on display in the galleries of Lord Valentine’s Castle—but the Metamorph is a mystery to him still, as great a mystery perhaps as she had been to Nismile. He checks the index for recordings of Metamorph souls, but is unsurprised to find that there are none. Do the Shapeshifters refuse to record, or is the apparatus incapable of picking up the emanations of their minds, or are they merely banned from the archives? Hissune does not know and he is unable to find out. In time, he tells himself, all things will be answered. Meanwhile there is much more to discover. The operations of the King of Dreams, for instance—he needs to learn much more about those. For a thousand years the descendants of the Barjazids have had the task of lashing the sleeping minds of criminals; Hissune wonders how it is done. He prowls the archives, and before long fortune delivers up to him the soul of an outlaw, disguised drearily as a tradesman of the city of Stee—

  The murder was amazingly easy to commit. Little Gleim was standing by the open window of the little upstairs room of the tavern in Vugel where he and Haligome had agreed to meet. Haligome was near the couch. The discussion was not going well. Haligome asked Gleim once more to reconsider.

  Gleim shrugged and said, “You’re wasting your time and mine. I don’t see where you have any case at all.”

  At that moment it seemed to Haligome that Gleim and Gleim alone stood between him and the tranquillity of life that he felt he deserved, that Gleim was his enemy, his nemesis, his persecutor. Calmly Haligome walked toward him, so calmly that Gleim evidently was not in the least alarmed, and with a sudden smooth motion he pushed Gleim over the windowsill.

  Gleim looked amazed. He hung as if suspended in mid-air for a surprisingly long moment; then he dropped toward the swiftly flowing river just outside the tavern, hit the water with scarcely a splash, and was carried away rapidly toward the distant foothills of Castle Mount. In an instant he was lost to view.

  Haligome looked at his hands as though they had just sprouted on his wrists. He could not believe they had done what they had done. Again he saw himself walking toward Gleim; again he saw Gleim standing bewildered on air; again he saw Gleim vanish into the dark river. Probably Gleim was already dead. If not, then within another minute or two. They would find him sooner or later, Haligome knew, washed up on some rocky shore down by Canzilaine or Perimor, and somehow they would identify him as a merchant of Gimkandale, missing the past week or ten days. But would there be any reason for them to suspect he had been murdered? Murder was an uncommon crime. He could have fallen. He could have jumped. Even if they managed to prove—the Divine only knew how—that Gleim had gone unwillingly to his death, how could they demonstrate that he had been pushed from the window of a tavern in Vugel by Sigmar Haligome of the city of Stee? They could not, Haligome told himself. But that did not change the essential truth of the situation, which was that Gleim had been murdered and Haligome was his murderer.

  His murderer? That new label astonished Haligome. He had not come here to kill Gleim, only to negotiate with him. But the negotiations had been sour from the start. Gleim, a small, fastidious man, refused entirely to admit liability over a matter of defective equipment, and said that it must have been Haligome’s inspectors who were at fault. He refused to pay a thing, or even to show much sympathy for Haligome’s awkward financial plight. At that final bland refusal Gleim appeared to swell until he filled all the horizon, and all of him was loathsome, and Haligome wished only to be rid of him, whatever the cost. If he had stopped to think about his act and its consequences he would not, of course, have pushed Gleim out the window, for Haligome was not in any way a murderous man. But he had not stopped to think, and now Gleim was dead and Haligome’s life had undergone a grotesque redefinition: he had transformed himself in a moment from Haligome the jobber of precision instruments to Haligome the murderer. How sudden! How strange! How terrifying!

  And now?

  Trembling, sweating, dry-throated, Haligome closed the window and dropped down on the couch. He had no idea of what he was supposed to do next. Report himself to the imperial proctors? Confess, surrender, and enter prison, or wherever it was that criminals were sent? He had no preparation for any of this. He had read old stories of crimes and punishments, ancient myths and fables, but so far as he knew murder was an extinct crime and the mechanisms for its detection and expiation had long ago rusted away. He felt prehistoric; he felt primeval. There was that famous story of a sea-captain of the remote past who had pushed a crazed crewman overboard during an ill-fated expedition across the Great Sea, after that crewman had killed someone else. Such tales had always seemed wild and implausible to Haligome. But now, effortlessly, unthinkingly, he had made himself a legendary figure, a monster, a taker of human life. He knew that nothing would ever again be the same for him.

  One thing to do was to get away from the tavern. If someone had seen Gleim fall—not likely, for the tavern stood flush against the riverbank; Gleim had gone out a back window and had been swallowed up at once by the rushing flow—there was no point in standing around here waiting for investigators to arrive. Quickly he packed his one small suitcase, checked to see that nothing of Gleim’s was in the room, and went downstairs. There was a Hjort at the desk. Haligome produced a few crowns and said, “I’d like to settle my account.”

  He resisted the impulse to chatter. This was not the moment to make clever remarks that might imprint him on the Hjort’s memory. Pay your bill and clear out fast, he thought. Was the Hjort aware that the visitor from Stee had entertained a guest in his room? Well, the Hjort would quickly enough forget that, and the visitor from Stee as well, if Haligome gave him no reason to remember. The clerk totalled the figures; Haligome handed over some coins; to the Hjort’s mechanical “Please come again” Haligome made an equally mechanical reply, and then he was out on the street, walking briskly away from the river. A strong sweet breeze was blowing downslope. The sunlight was bright and warm. It was years since Haligome had last been in Vugel, and at another time he might well have taken a few hours to tour its famous jeweled plaza, its celebrated soul-painting murals, and the other local wonders, but this was not the moment for tourism. He hurried to the transit terminal and bought a one-way ticket back to Stee.

  Fear, uncertainty, guilt, and shame rode with him on the journey around the flank of Castle Mount from city to city.

  The familiar sprawling outskirts of gigantic Stee brought him some repose. To be home meant to be safe. With each new day of his entry into Stee he felt more comfort. There was the mighty river for which the city was named, tumbling in astonishing velocity down the Mount. There were the smooth shining facades of the Riverwall Buildings, forty stories high and miles in length. There was Kinniken Bridge; there was Thimin Tower; there was the Field of Great Bones. Home! The enormous vitality and power of Stee, throbbing all about him as he made his way from the central terminal to his suburban district, comforted him greatly. Surely here in what had become the greatest city of Majipoor—vastly expanded, thanks to the beneficence of its native son who was now the Coronal Lord Kinniken—Haligome was safe from the dark consequences, whatever they might be, of the lunatic deed he had committed in Vugel.

  He embraced his wife, his two young daughters, his sturdy son. They could readily see his fatigue and tension, it appeared, for they treated him with a kind of exaggerated delicacy, as though he had become newly fragile on his journey. They brought him wine, a pipe, slippers; they bustled round, radiating love and good will; they asked him nothing about how his trip had gone, but regaled him instead with l
ocal gossip. Not until dinner did he say at last, “I think Gleim and I worked everything out. There’s reason to be hopeful.”

  He nearly believed it himself.

  Was there any way the murder could be laid to him, if he simply kept quiet about it? He doubted that there could have been witnesses. It would not be hard for the authorities to discover that he and Gleim had agreed to meet in Vugel—neutral ground—to discuss their business disagreements, but what did that prove? “Yes, I saw him in some tavern near the river,” Haligome could say. “We had lunch and drank a lot of wine and came to an understanding, and then I went away. He looked pretty wobbly when I left, I must say.” And poor Gleim, flushed and staggering with a bellyful of the strong wine of Muldemar, must have leaned too far out the window afterward, perhaps for a view of some elegant lord and lady sailing past on the river—no, no, no, let them do all the speculating, Haligome told himself. “We met for lunch and reached a settlement, and then I went away,” and nothing more than that. And who could prove it had been otherwise?

  He returned to his office the next day and went about his business as though nothing unusual had happened in Vugel. He could not allow himself the luxury of brooding over his crime. Things were precarious: he was close to bankrupt, his credit overextended, his plausibility with his prime accounts sadly diminished. All that was Gleim’s doing. Once you ship shoddy goods, though, you go on suffering for it for a long time, no matter how blameless you may be. Having had no satisfaction from Gleim—and not likely to get any, now—Haligome’s only recourse was to strive with intense dedication to rebuild the confidence of those whom he supplied with precision instruments, while at the same time struggling to hold off his creditors until matters returned to equilibrium.

  Keeping Gleim out of his mind was difficult. Over the next few days his name kept coming up, and Haligome had to work hard to conceal his reactions. Everyone in the trade seemed to understand that Gleim had taken Haligome for a fool, and everyone was trying to seem sympathetic. That in itself was encouraging. But to have every conversation somehow wander around to Gleim—Gleim’s iniquities, Gleim’s vindictiveness, Gleim’s tightfistedness—threw Haligome constantly off balance. The name was like a trigger. “Gleim!” and he would go rigid. “Gleim!” and muscles would throb in his cheeks. “Gleim!” and he would thrust his hands out of sight behind him, as if they bore the imprint of the dead man’s aura. He imagined himself saying to some client, in a moment of sheer weariness, “I killed him, you know. I pushed him out a window when I was in Vugel.” How easily the words would flow from his lips, if only he relaxed his control!

  He thought of making a pilgrimage to the Isle to cleanse his soul. Later, perhaps: not now, for now he had to devote every waking moment to his business affairs, or his firm would collapse and his family would fall into poverty. He thought also of confessing and coming quickly to some understanding with the authorities that would allow him to atone for the crime without disrupting his commercial activities. A fine, maybe—though how could he afford a fine now? And would they let him off so lightly? In the end he did nothing at all except to try to shove the murder out of his consciousness, and for a week or ten days that actually seemed to work. And then the dreams began.

  The first one came on Starday night in the second week of summer, and Haligome knew instantly that it was a sending of a dark and painful kind. He was in his third sleep, the deepest of the night just before the mind’s ascent into dawn, and he found himself crossing a field of gleaming and slippery yellow teeth that churned and writhed beneath his feet. The air was foul, swamp air of a discouraging grayish hue, and ropy strands of some raw meaty substance dangled from the sky, brushing against his cheeks and arms and leaving sticky tracks that burned and throbbed. There was a ringing in his ears: the harsh tense silence of a malign sending, that makes it seem as though the world has been drawn far too tight on its drawstrings, and beyond that a distant jeering laughter. An intolerably bright light seared the sky. He was traversing a mouthplant, he realized—one of those hideous carnivorous floral monsters of far-off Zimroel, that he once had seen exhibited in a show of curios at the Kinniken Pavilion. But those were only three or four yards in diameter, and this was the size of a goodly suburb, and he was trapped in its diabolical core, running as fast as he could to keep from slipping down into those mercilessly grinding teeth.

  So this is how it will be, he thought, floating above his dream and bleakly surveying it. This is the first sending, and the King of Dreams will torment me hereafter.

  There was no hiding from it. The teeth had eyes, and the eyes were the eyes of Gleim, and Haligome was scrambling and sliding and sweating, and now he pitched forward and tumbled against a bank of the remorseless teeth and they nipped his hand, and when he was able to get to his feet again he saw that the bloody hand was no longer his own familiar one, but had been transformed into the small pale hand of Gleim, fitting badly on his wrist. Again Haligome fell, and again the teeth nipped at him, and again came an unwelcome metamorphosis, and again, and again, and he ran onward, sobbing and moaning, half Gleim, half Haligome, until he broke from his sleep and discovered himself sitting up, trembling, sweatsoaked, clutching his astounded wife’s thigh as though it were a lifeline.

  “Don’t,” she murmured. “You’re hurting me. What is it? What is it?”

  “Dream—very bad—”

  “A sending?” she asked. “Yes, it must have been. I can smell the odor of it in your sweat. Oh, Sigmar, what was it?”

  He shuddered. “Something I ate. The sea-dragon meat—it was too dry, too old—”

  He left the bed unsteadily and poured a little wine, which calmed him. His wife stroked him and bathed his feverish forehead and held him until he relaxed a little, but he feared going back to sleep, and lay awake until dawn, staring into the gray darkness. The King of Dreams! So this was to be his punishment. Bleakly he considered things. He had always believed that the King of Dreams was only a fable to keep children in line. Yes, yes, they said that he lived in Suvrael, that the title was the hereditary holding of the Barjazid family, that the King and his minions scanned the night air for the guilts of sleepers, and found the souls of the unworthy and tormented them, but was it so? Haligome had never known anyone to have a sending from the King of Dreams. He thought he might once have had one from the Lady, but he was not sure of that, and in any case that was different. The Lady offered only the most general kind of visions. The King of Dreams was said to inflict real pain; but could the King of Dreams really monitor the entire teeming planet, with its billions of citizens, not all of them virtuous?

  Possibly it was only indigestion, Haligome told himself.

  When the next night and the next passed calmly, he allowed himself to believe that the dream had been no more than a random anomaly. The King might only be a fable after all. But on Twoday came another unmistakable sending.

  The same silent ringing sound. The same fierce glaring light illuminating the landscape of sleep. Images of Gleim; laughter; echoes; swellings and contractions of the fabric of the cosmos; a wrenching giddiness blasting his spirit with terrible vertigo. Haligome whimpered. He buried his face against the pillow and fought for breath. He dared not awaken, for if he surfaced he would inevitably reveal his distress to his wife, and she would suggest that he take his dreams to a speaker, and he could not do that. Any speaker worth her fee would know at once that she was joining her soul with the soul of a criminal, and what would happen to him then? So he suffered his nightmare until the force of it was spent, and only then he awakened, to lie limp and quivering until the coming of the day.

  That was Twoday’s nightmare. Fourday’s was worse: Haligome soared and dropped and was impaled on the ultimate summit of Castle Mount, spear-sharp and cold as ice, and lay there for hours while gihorna-birds with the face of Gleim ripped at his belly and bombarded his dripping wounds with blazing droppings. Fiveday he slept reasonably well, though he was tense, on guard for dreams; Starday too brought no
sendings; Sunday found him swimming through oceans of clotted blood while his teeth loosened and his fingers turned to strips of ragged dough; Moonday and Twoday brought milder horrors, but horrors all the same; on Seaday morning his wife said, “These dreams of yours will not relent. Sigmar, what have you done?”

  “Done? I’ve done nothing!”

  “I feel the sendings surging through you night after night.”

  He shrugged. “Some mistake has been made by the Powers that govern us. It must happen occasionally: dreams meant for some child-molester of Pendiwane are delivered to a jobber of precision instruments in Stee. Sooner or later they’ll see the error and leave me alone.”

  “And if they don’t?” She gave him a penetrating glance. “And if the dreams are meant for you?”

  He wondered if she knew the truth. She was aware that he had gone to Vugel to confer with Gleim; possibly, though it was hard to imagine how, she had learned that Gleim had never returned to his home in Gimkandale; her husband now was receiving sendings of the King of Dreams; she could draw her own conclusions all too readily. Could it be? And if so, what would she do? Denounce her own husband? Though she loved him, she might well do that, for if she let herself harbor a murderer she might bring the vengeance of the King upon her own sleep as well.

  He said, “If the dreams continue, I will ask the officials of the Pontifex to intercede on my behalf.”

  Of course he could not do that. He tried instead to grapple with the dreams and repress them, so that he would arouse no suspicion in the woman who slept by his side. In his pre-sleep meditations he instructed himself to be calm, to accept what images might come, to regard them only as fantasies of a disordered soul, and not as realities with which he needed to cope. And yet when he found himself floating over a red sea of fire, dipping now and then ankle-deep, he could not keep from screaming; and when needles grew outward from his flesh and burst through his skin so that he looked like a manculain, that untouchable spiny beast of the torrid south-lands, he whimpered and begged for mercy in his sleep; and when he strolled through the immaculate gardens of Lord Havilbove by Tolingar Barrier and the flawless shrubs became mocking toothy hairy things of sinister ugliness, he wept and broke into torrents of sweat that made the mattress reek. His wife asked no more questions, but she eyed him uneasily and seemed constantly on the verge of demanding how long he intended to tolerate these intrusions on his spirit.