The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark

by Robert Silverberg

  Entrada is torrid and moist, a humid sweltering hothouse of a place so much the antithesis of Zima that my body rebels immediately against the shift from one world to the other. Coming forth into it, I feel the heat rolling toward me like an implacable wall of water. It sweeps up and over me and smashes me to my knees. I am sick and numb with displacement and dislocation. It seems impossible for me to draw a breath. The thick, shimmering, golden-green atmosphere here is almost liquid; it crams itself into my throat, it squeezes my lungs in an agonizing grip. Through blurring eyes I see a tight green web of jungle foliage rising before me, a jumbled vista of corrugated-tin shacks, a patch of sky the color of shallow sea-water, and, high above, a merciless, throbbing, weirdly elongated sun shaped like no sun I have ever imagined. Then I sway and fall forward and see nothing more.

  I lie suspended in delirium a long while. It is a pleasing restful time, like being in the womb. I am becalmed in a great stillness, lulled by soft voices and sweet music. But gradually consciousness begins to break through. I swim upward toward the light that glows somewhere above me, and my eyes open, and I see a serene friendly face, and a voice says, “It’s nothing to worry about. Everyone who comes here the way you did has a touch of it, the first time. At your age I suppose it’s worse than usual.”

  Dazedly I realize that I am in mid-conversation.

  “A touch of what?” I ask.

  The other, who is a slender gray-eyed woman of middle years wearing a sort of Indian sari, smiles and says, “Of the Falling. It’s a lambda effect. But I’m sorry. We’ve been talking for a while, and I thought you were awake. Evidently you weren’t.”

  “I am now,” I tell her. “But I don’t think I’ve been for very long.”

  Nodding, she says, “Let’s start over. You’re in Traveler’s Hospice. The humidity got you, and the heat, and the lightness of the gravity. You’re all right now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you can stand?”

  “I can try,” I say.

  She helps me up. I feel so giddy that I expect to float away. Carefully she guides me toward the window of my room. Outside I see a veranda and a close-cropped lawn. Just beyond, a dark curtain of dense bush closes everything off. The intense light makes everything seem very near; it is as if I could put my hand out the window and thrust it into the heart of that exuberant jungle.

  “So bright—the sun—” I whisper.

  In fact there are two whitish suns in the sky, so close to each other that their photospheres overlap and each is distended by the other’s gravitational pull, making them nearly oval in shape. Together they seem to form a single egg-shaped mass, though even the one quick dazzled glance I can allow myself tells me that this is really a binary system, discrete bundles of energy forever locked together.

  Awed and amazed, I touch my fingertips to my cheek in wonder, and feel a thick coarse beard there that I had not had before.

  The woman says, “Two suns, actually. Their centers are only about a million and a half kilometers apart, and they revolve around each other every seven and a half hours. We’re the fourth planet out, but we’re as far from them as Neptune is from the Sun.”

  But I have lost interest for the moment in astronomical matters. I rub my face, exploring its strange new shagginess. The beard covers my cheeks, my jaws, much of my throat.

  “How long have I been unconscious?” I ask.

  “About three weeks.”

  “Your weeks or Earth weeks?”

  “We use Earth weeks here.”

  “And that was just a light case? Does everybody who gets the Falling spend three weeks being delirious?”

  “Sometimes much more. Sometimes they never come out of it.”

  I stare at her. “And it’s just the heat, the humidity, the lightness of the gravity? They can knock you down the moment you step out of the transmitter and put you under for weeks? I would think it should take something like a stroke to do that.”

  “It is something like a stroke,” she says. “Did you think that traveling between stars is like stepping across the street? You come from a low-lambda world to a high-lambda one without doing your adaptation drills and of course the change is going to knock you flat right away. What did you expect?”

  High-lambda? Low-lambda?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.

  “Didn’t they tell you on Zima about the adaptation drills before they shipped you here?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Or about lambda differentials?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  Her face grows very solemn. “Pigs, that’s all they are. They should have prepared you for the jump. But I guess they didn’t care whether you lived or died.”

  I think of Marfa Ivanovna, wishing me luck as she reached for the switch. I think of that strange sad look in her eyes. I think of the voivode Ilya Alexandrovich, who might have had me shot but decided instead to offer me a free trip off his world, a one-way trip. There is much that I am only now beginning to understand, I see, about this empire that Earth is building in what we call the Dark. We are building it in the dark, yes, in more ways than one.

  “No,” I say. “I guess they didn’t care.”

  They are friendlier on Entrada, no question of that. Interstellar trade is important here and visitors from other worlds are far more common than they are on wintry Zima. Apparently I am free to live at the hospice as long as I wish. The weeks of my stay have stretched now into months, and no one suggests that it is time for me to be moving along.

  I had not expected to stay here so long. But gathering the information I need has been a slow business, with many a maddening detour and delay.

  At least I experience no further lambda problems. Lambda, they tell me, is a planetary force that became known only when Velde jumps between solar systems began. There are high-lambda worlds and low-lambda worlds, and anyone going from one kind to the other without proper preparation is apt to undergo severe stress. It is all news to me. I wonder if the Order on Earth is aware at all of these difficulties. But perhaps they feel that matters which may arise during journeys between worlds of the Dark are of no concern to us of the mother world.

  They have taken me through the adaptation drills here at the hospice somehow while I was still unconscious, and I am more or less capable now of handling Entradan conditions. The perpetual steambath heat, which no amount of air conditioning seems really to mitigate, is hard to cope with, and the odd combination of heavy atmosphere and light gravity puts me at risk of nausea with every breath, though after a time I get the knack of pulling shallow nips of air. There are allergens borne on every breeze, too, pollen of a thousand kinds and some free-floating alkaloids, against which I need daily medication. My face turns red under the force of the double sun, and the skin of my cheeks gets strangely soft, which makes my new beard an annoyance. I rid myself of it. My hair acquires an unfamiliar silver sheen, not displeasing, but unexpected. All this considered, though, I can manage here.

  Entrada has a dozen major settlements and several hundred thousand people. It is a big world, metal-poor and light, on which a dozen small continents and some intricate archipelagoes float in huge warm seas. The whole planet is tropical, even at the poles: distant though it is from its suns, it would probably be inhospitable to human life if it were very much closer. The soil of Entrada has the lunatic fertility that we associate with the tropics, and agriculture is the prime occupation here. The people, drawn from many regions of Earth, are attractive and outgoing, with an appealingly easy manner.

  It appears that they have not drifted as far from Darklaw here as the Zimans have.

  Certainly the Order is respected. There are chapels everywhere and the people use them. Whenever I enter one there is a little stir of excitement, for it is generally known that I was Lord Magistrate of the Senders during my time on Earth, and that makes me a celebrity, or a curiosity, or both. Many of the Entradans are Earthborn themselves—emigra
tion to this world was still going on as recently as eight or ten years ago—and the sight of my medallion inspires respect and even awe in them. I do not wear my robe of office, not in this heat. Probably I will never wear it again, no matter what climate I find myself in when I leave here. Someone else is Lord Magistrate of the House of Senders now, after all. But the medallion alone is enough to win me a distinction here that I surely never had on Zima.

  I think, though, that they pick and choose among the tenets of Darklaw to their own satisfaction on Entrada, obeying those which suit them and casting aside anything that seems too constricting. I am not sure of this, but it seems likely. To discuss such matters with anyone I have come to know here is, of course, impossible. The people I have managed to get to know so far, at the hospice, at the chapel house in town, at the tavern where I have begun to take my meals, are pleasant and sociable. But they become uneasy, even evasive, whenever I speak of any aspect of Earth’s migration into space. Let me mention the Order, or the Master, or anything at all concerning the Mission, and they begin to moisten their lips and look uncomfortable. Clearly things are happening out here, things never envisioned by the founders of the Order, and they are unwilling to talk about them with anyone who himself wears the high medallion.

  It is a measure of the changes that have come over me since I began this journey that I am neither surprised nor dismayed by this.

  Why should we have believed that we could prescribe a single code of law that would meet the needs of hundreds of widely varying worlds? Of course they would modify our teachings to fit their own evolving cultures, and some would probably depart entirely from that which we had created for them. It was only to be expected. Many things have become clear to me on this journey that I did not see before, that, indeed, I did not so much as pause to consider. But much else remains mysterious.

  I am at the busy waterfront esplanade, leaning over the rail, staring out toward Volcano Isle, a dim gray peak far out to sea. It is mid-morning, before the full heat of noon has descended. I have been here long enough so that I think of this as the cool time of the day.

  “Your grace?” a voice calls. “Lord Magistrate?”

  No one calls me those things here.

  I glance down to my left. A dark-haired man in worn seaman’s clothes and a braided captain’s hat is looking up at me out of a rowboat just below the sea-wall. He is smiling and waving. I have no idea who he is, but he plainly wants to talk with me, and anything that helps me break the barrier that stands between me and real knowledge of this place is to be encouraged.

  He points to the far end of the harbor, where there is a ramp leading from the little beach to the esplanade, and tells me in pantomime that he means to tie up his boat and go ashore. I wait for him at the head of the ramp, and after a few moments he comes trudging up to greet me. He is perhaps fifty years old, trim and sun-bronzed, with a lean weatherbeaten face.

  “You don’t remember me,” he says.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You personally interviewed me and approved my application to emigrate, eighteen years ago. Sandys. Lloyd Sandys.” He smiles hopefully, as though his name alone will open the floodgates of my memory.

  When I was Lord Magistrate I reviewed five hundred emigrant dossiers a week, and interviewed ten or fifteen applicants a day myself, and forgot each one the moment I approved or rejected them. But for this man the interview with the Lord Magistrate of the Senders was the most significant moment of his life.

  “Sorry,” I say. “So many names, so many faces—”

  “I would have recognized you even if I hadn’t already heard you were here. After all these years, you’ve hardly changed at all, your grace.” He grins. “So now you’ve come to settle on Entrada yourself?”

  “Only a short visit.”

  “Ah.” He is visibly disappointed. “You ought to think of staying. It’s a wonderful place, if you don’t mind a little heat. I haven’t regretted coming here for a minute.”

  He takes me to a seaside tavern where he is obviously well known, and orders lunch for both of us: skewers of small corkscrew-shaped creatures that look and taste a little like squid, and a flask of a strange but likable emerald-colored wine with a heavy, musky, spicy flavor. He tells me that he has four sturdy sons and four strapping daughters, and that he and his wife run a harbor ferry, short hops to the surrounding islands of this archipelago, which is Entrada’s main population center. There still are traces of Melbourne in his accent. He seems very happy. “You’ll let me take you on a tour, won’t you?” he asks. “We’ve got some very beautiful islands out there, and you can’t get to see them by Velde jumps.”

  I protest that I don’t want to take him away from his work, but he shrugs that off. Work can always wait, he says. There’s no hurry, on a world where anyone can dip his net in the sea and come up with a good meal. We have another flask of wine. He seems open, genial, trustworthy. Over cheese and fruit he asks me why I’ve come here.

  I hesitate.

  “A fact-finding mission,” I say.

  “Ah. Is that really so? Can I be of any help, d’ye think?”

  It is several more winy lunches, and a little boat-trip to some nearby islands fragrant with masses of intoxicating purple blooms, before I am willing to begin taking Sandys into my confidence. I tell him that the Order has sent me into the Dark to study and report on the ways of life that are evolving on the new worlds. He seems untroubled by that, though Ilya Alexandrovich might have had me shot for such an admission.

  Later, I tell him about the apparent deviations from the planned scope of the Mission that are the immediate reason for my journey.

  “You mean, going out beyond the hundred-light-year zone?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s pretty amazing, that anyone would go there.”

  “We have indications that it’s happening.”

  “Really,” he says.

  “And on Zima,” I continue, “I picked up a story that somebody here on Entrada has been preaching ventures into the far Dark. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”

  His only overt reaction is a light frown, quickly erased. Perhaps he has nothing to tell me. Or else we have reached the point, perhaps, beyond which he is unwilling to speak.

  But some hours later he revives the topic himself. We are on our way back to harbor, sunburned and a little tipsy from an outing to one of the prettiest of the local islands, when he suddenly says, “I remember hearing something about that preacher you mentioned before.”

  I wait, not saying anything.

  “My wife told me about him. There was somebody going around talking about far voyages, she said.” New color comes to his face, a deep red beneath the bronze. “I must have forgotten about it when we were talking before.” In fact he must know that I think him disingenuous for withholding this from me all afternoon. But I make no attempt to call him on that. We are still testing each other.

  I ask him if he can get more information for me, and he promises to discuss it with his wife. Then he is absent for a week, making a circuit of the outer rim of the archipelago to deliver freight. When he returns, finally, he brings with him an unusual golden brandy from one of the remote islands as a gift for me, but my cautious attempt to revive our earlier conversation runs into a familiar sort of Entradan evasiveness. It is almost as though he doesn’t know what I’m referring to.

  At length I say bluntly, “Have you had a chance to talk to your wife about that preacher?”

  He looks troubled. “In fact, it slipped my mind.”

  “Ah.”

  “Tonight, maybe—”

  “I understand that the man’s name is Oesterreich,” I say.

  His eyes go wide.

  “You know that, do you?”

  “Help me, will you, Sandys? I’m the one who sent you to this place, remember? Your whole life here wouldn’t exist but for me.”

  “That’s true. That’s very true.”

  “Who�
��s Oesterreich?”

  “I never knew him. I never had any dealings with him.”

  “Tell me what you know about him.”

  “A crazy man, he was.”

  “Was?”

  “He’s not here any more.”

  I uncork the bottle of rare brandy, pour a little for myself, a more generous shot for Sandys.

  “Where’d he go?” I ask.

  He sips, reflectively. After a time he says, “I don’t know, your grace. That’s God’s own truth. I haven’t seen or heard of him in a couple of years. He chartered one of the other captains here, a man named Feraud, to take him to one of the islands, and that’s the last I know.”

  “Which island?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think Feraud remembers?”

  “I could ask him,” Sandys says.

  “Yes. Ask him. Would you do that?”

  “I could ask him, yes,” he says.

  So it goes, slowly. Sandys confers with his friend Feraud, who hesitates and evades, or so Sandys tells me; but eventually Feraud finds it in him to recall that he had taken Oesterreich to Volcano Isle, three hours’ journey to the west. Sandys admits to me, now that he is too deep in to hold back, that he himself actually heard Oesterreich speak several times, that Oesterreich claimed to be in possession of some secret way of reaching worlds immensely remote from the settled part of the Dark.

  “And do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know. He seemed crazy to me.”

  “Crazy how?”

  “The look in his eye. The things he said. That it’s our destiny to reach the rim of the universe. That the Order holds us back out of its own timidity. That we must follow the Goddess Avatar, who beckons us onward to—”

  “Who?”

  His face flushes bright crimson. “The Goddess Avatar. I don’t know what she is, your grace. Honestly. It’s some cult he’s running, some new religion he’s made up. I told you he’s crazy. I’ve never believed any of this.”