I stood in the darkness, waiting for the rope. Langby was unconscious when he reached the roof. I walked past the fire watch to the dome and down to the crypt.
This morning the letter from my uncle came and with it a five-pound note.
———
December 31—Two of Dunworthy’s flunkies met me in St. John’s Wood to tell me I was late for my exams. I did not even protest. I shuffled obediently after them without even considering how unfair it was to give an exam to one of the walking dead. I had not slept in—how long? Since yesterday when I went to find Enola. I had not slept in a hundred years.
Dunworthy was in the Examination Buildings, blinking at me. One of the flunkies handed me a test paper and the other one called time. I turned the paper over and left an oily smudge from the ointment on my burns. I stared uncomprehendingly at them. I had grabbed at the incendiary when I turned Langby over, but these burns were on the backs of my hands. The answer came to me suddenly in Langby’s unyielding voice. “They’re rope burns, you fool. Don’t they teach you Nazi spies the proper way to come up a rope?”
I looked down at the test. I read, “Number of incendiaries that fell on St. Paul’s____ Number of land mines____ Number of high explosive bombs____ Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries____ land mines____ high explosive bombs____ Number of volunteers on first watch____ second watch____ Casualties____ Fatalities____” The questions made no sense. There was only a short space, long enough for the writing of a number, after any of the questions. Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries. How would I ever fit what I knew into that narrow space? Where were the questions about Enola and Langby and the cat?
I went up to Dunworthy’s desk. “St. Paul’s almost burned down last night,” I said. “What kind of questions are these?”
“You should be answering questions, Mr. Bartholomew, not asking them.”
“There aren’t any questions about the people,” I said. The outer casing of my anger began to melt.
“Of course there are,” Dunworthy said, flipping to the second page of the test. “Number of casualties, 1940. Blast, shrapnel, other.”
“Other?” I said. At any moment the roof would collapse on me in a shower of plaster dust and fury. “Other? Langby put out a fire with his own body. Enola has a cold that keeps getting worse. The cat . . .” I snatched the paper back from him and scrawled “one cat” in the narrow space next to “blast.” “Don’t you care about them at all?”
“They’re important from a statistical point of view,” he said, “but as individuals they are hardly relevant to the course of history.”
My reflexes were shot. It was amazing to me that Dunworthy’s were almost as slow. I grazed the side of his jaw and knocked his glasses off. “Of course they’re relevant!” I shouted. “They are the history, not all these bloody numbers!”
The reflexes of the flunkies were very fast. They did not let me start another swing at him before they had me by both arms and were hauling me out of the room.
“They’re back there in the past with nobody to save them. They can’t see their hands in front of their faces and there are bombs falling down on them and you tell me they aren’t important? You call that being an historian?”
The flunkies dragged me out the door and down the hall. “Langby saved St. Paul’s. How much more important can a person get? You’re no historian! You’re nothing but a—” I wanted to call him a terrible name, but the only curses I could summon up were Langby’s. “You’re nothing but a dirty Nazi spy!” I bellowed. “You’re nothing but a lazy bourgeois tart!”
They dumped me on my hands and knees outside the door and slammed it in my face. “I wouldn’t be an historian if you paid me!” I shouted, and went to see the fire watch stone.
———
I am having to write this in bits and pieces. My hands are in pretty bad shape, and Dunworthy’s boys didn’t help matters much. Kivrin comes in periodically, wearing her St. Joan look, and smears so much salve on my hands that I can’t hold a pencil.
St. Paul’s Station is not there, of course, so I got out at Holborn and walked, thinking about my last meeting with Dean Matthews on the morning after the burning of the city. This morning.
“I understand you saved Langby’s life,” he said. “I also understand that between you, you saved St. Paul’s last night.”
I showed him the letter from my uncle and he stared at it as if he could not think what it was. “Nothing stays saved forever,” he said, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to tell me Langby had died. “We shall have to keep on saving St. Paul’s until Hitler decides to bomb something else.”
The raids on London are almost over, I wanted to tell him. He’ll start bombing the countryside in a matter of weeks. Canterbury, Bath, aiming always at the cathedrals. You and St. Paul’s will both outlast the war and live to dedicate the fire watch stone.
“I am hopeful, though,” he said. “I think the worst is over.”
“Yes, sir.” I thought of the stone, its letters still readable after all this time. No, sir, the worst is not over.
I managed to keep my bearings almost to the top of Ludgate Hill. Then I lost my way completely, wandering about like a man in a graveyard. I had not remembered that the rubble looked so much like the white plaster dust Langby had tried to dig me out of. I could not find the stone anywhere. In the end I nearly fell over it, jumping back as if I had stepped on a body.
It is all that’s left. Hiroshima is supposed to have had a handful of untouched trees at ground zero. Denver the capitol steps. Neither of them says, “Remember the men and women of St. Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.” The grace of God.
Part of the stone is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time,” but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St. Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast complex structure from burning down. Which sounds to me like a course description for History Practicum 401. What a fine time to discover what historians are for when I have tossed my chance for being one out the windows as easily as they tossed the pinpoint bomb in! No, sir, the worst is not over.
There are flash burns on the stone, where legend says the Dean of St. Paul’s was kneeling when the bomb went off. Totally apocryphal, of course, since the front door is hardly an appropriate place for prayers. It is more likely the shadow of a tourist who wandered in to ask the whereabouts of the Windmill Theatre, or the imprint of a girl bringing a volunteer his muffler. Or a cat.
Nothing is saved forever, Dean Matthews, and I knew that when I walked in the west doors that first day, blinking into the gloom, but it is pretty bad nevertheless. Standing here knee-deep in rubble out of which I will not be able to dig any folding chairs or friends, knowing that Langby died thinking I was a Nazi spy, knowing that Enola came one day and I wasn’t there. It’s pretty bad.
But it is not as bad as it could be. They are both dead, and Dean Matthews too, but they died without knowing what I knew all along, what sent me to my knees in the Whispering Gallery, sick with grief and guilt: that in the end none of us saved St. Paul’s. And Langby cannot turn to me, stunned and sick at heart, and say, “Who did this? Your friends the Nazis?” And I would have to say, “No, the communists.” That would be the worst.
I have come back to the room and let Kivrin smear more salve on my hands. She wants me to get some sleep. I know I should pack and get gone. It will be humiliating to have them come and throw me out, but I do not have the strength to fight her. She looks so much like Enola.
———
January 1—I have apparently slept not only through the night, but through the morning mail drop as well.
When I woke up just now, I found Kivrin sitting on the end of the bed holding an envelope. “Your grades came,” she said.
I put my arm over my eyes. “They can be marvelously efficient when they want to, can’t they?”
“Yes,” Kivrin said.
“Well, let’s see it,” I said, sitting up. “How long do I have before they come and throw me out?”
She handed the flimsy computer envelope to me. I tore it along the perforation. “Wait,” she said. “Before you open it, I want to say something.” She put her hand gently on my burns. “You’re wrong about the history department. They’re very good.”
It was not exactly what I expected her to say. “Good is not the word I’d use to describe Dunworthy,” I said and yanked the inside slip free.
Kivrin’s look did not change, not even when I sat there with the printout on my knees where she could surely see it.
“Well,” I said.
The slip was hand-signed by the esteemed Dunworthy. I have taken a first. With honors.
———
January 2—Two things came in the mail today. One was Kivrin’s assignment. The history department thinks of everything—even to keeping her here long enough to nursemaid me, even to coming up with a prefabricated trial by fire to send their history majors through.
I think I wanted to believe that was what they had done. Enola and Langby only hired actors, the cat a clever android with its clockwork innards taken out for the final effect, not so much because I wanted to believe Dunworthy was not good at all, but because then I would not have this nagging pain at not knowing what had happened to them.
“You said your practicum was England in 1400?” I said, watching her as suspiciously as I had watched Langby.
“Thirteen forty-nine,” she said, and her face went slack with memory. “The plague year.”
“My God,” I said. “How could they do that? The plague’s a ten.”
“I have a natural immunity,” she said, and looked at her hands.
Because I could not think of anything to say, I opened the other piece of mail. It was a report on Enola. Computer-printed, facts and dates and statistics, all the numbers the history department so dearly loves, but it told me what I thought I would have to go without knowing: that she had gotten over her cold and survived the Blitz. Young Tom had been killed in the Baedaker raids on Bath, but Enola had lived until 2006, the year before they blew up St. Paul’s.
I don’t know whether I believe the report or not, but it does not matter. It is, like Langby’s reading aloud to the old man, a simple act of human kindness. They think of everything.
Not quite. They did not tell me what happened to Langby. But I find as I write this that I already know: I saved his life. It does not seem to matter that he might have died in the hospital the next day, and I find, in spite of all the hard lessons the history department has tried to teach me, I do not quite believe this one: that nothing is saved forever. It seems to me that perhaps Langby is.
———
January 3—I went to see Dunworthy today. I don’t know what I intended to say—some pompous drivel about my willingness to serve in the fire watch of history, standing guard against the falling incendiaries of the human heart, silent and saintly.
But he blinked at me nearsightedly across his desk, and it seemed to me that he was blinking at that last bright image of St. Paul’s in sunlight before it was gone forever and that he knew better than anyone that the past cannot be saved, and I said instead, “I’m sorry that I broke your glasses, sir.”
“How did you like St. Paul’s?” he said, and like my first meeting with Enola, I felt I must be somehow reading the signals all wrong, that he was not feeling loss, but something quite different.
“I loved it, sir,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “So do I.”
Dean Matthews is wrong. I have fought with memory my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul’s at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
Robert Silverberg won the Hugo Award for most promising new author in 1956, less than two years after his first professional sale. After an apprenticeship that lasted nearly ten years and yielded millions of words, Silverberg emerged in the 1960s as one of the most articulate and conscientious writers of the time. Works from this period of his career are memorable for their psychologically complex character studies, morally trenchant themes, and vivid depictions of oppressive and limiting environments that the individual must try to transcend. “To See the Invisible Man,” “Hawksbill Station,” and Thorns are futuristic studies of the individual alienated through a variety of means: social ostracism, penal exile, and exploitative victimization. Silverberg’s crowning achievement in this vein is Dying Inside, the poignant tale of a telepath alienated by his uniqueness who is further isolated by the loss of his powers and thus his only means of relating to normal humanity.
Both Nightwings and Downward to Earth present contact with alien species as potentially rejuvenating experiences with religious overtones of resurrection and redemption. The World Inside chronicles the dehumanizing potential of overpopulation on a society in which privacy and intimacy are virtually impossible.
At the dramatic core of Silverberg’s strongest stories are individuals confronted with mortality. “Born with the Dead” details the difficulties of life in a world that is shared by mortals and the revived dead. The Second Trip centers on the idea of the death of identity; a man discovers that he is a former criminal punished with obliteration of his true personality, a spark of which is reignited and threatens to overwhelm his new persona. The quest for immortality is a sounding board for ruminations on mortality in The Book of Skulls, about the pursuit of an occult sect that has supposedly found the secret of eternal life, and the impact of the quest on the individuals who seek it.
Since the late 1970s Silverberg has concentrated on the development of his Majipoor saga, an epic science fantasy series that includes the novels Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Majipoor Chronicles, and Valentine Pontifex. He has also written two fantasy novels, Gilgamesh the King and To the Land of the Living, based on Sumerian mythology. His many short fiction collections include Next Stop the Stars, To Worlds Beyond, Dimension Thirteen, Born with the Dead, and The Secret Sharer. He has written many novels and works of nonfiction for children, and edited more than seventy anthologies.
“Sailing to Byzantium” is another story that, like Joe Haldeman’s, deals with the far, far future, and it takes place in a world that Silverberg has made at once vaguely familiar through his use of history, and utterly alien by virtue of its population. A winner of the Nebula Award in 1985, it is a look at what it means to be human, now and forever.
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
ROBERT SILVERBERG
AT DAWN HE AROSE and stepped out onto the patio for his first look at Alexandria, the one city he had not yet seen. That year the five cities were Chang-an, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo, Alexandria: the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities. He and Gioia, making the long flight from Asgard in the distant north the night before, had arrived late, well after sundown, and had gone straight to bed. Now, by the gentle apricot-hued morning light, the fierce spires and battlements of Asgard seemed merely something he had dreamed.
The rumor was that Asgard’s moment was finished, anyway. In a little while he had heard they were going to tear it down and replace it, elsewhere, with Mohenjo-daro. Though there were never more than five cities, they changed constantly. He could remember a time when they had had Rome of the Caesars instead of Chang-an, and Rio de Janeiro rather than Alexandria. These people saw no point in keeping anything very long.
It was not easy for him to adjust to the sultry intensity of Alex
andria after the frozen splendors of Asgard. The wind, coming off the water, was brisk and torrid both at once. Soft turquoise wavelets lapped at the jetties. Strong presences assailed his senses: the hot heavy sky, the stinging scent of the red lowland sand borne on the breeze, the sullen swampy aroma of the nearby sea. Everything trembled and glimmered in the early light. Their hotel was beautifully situated, high on the northern slope of the huge artificial mound known as the Paneium that was sacred to the goat-footed god. From here they had a total view of the city: the wide noble boulevards, the soaring obelisks and monuments, the palace of Hadrian just below the hill, the stately and awesome Library, the temple of Poseidon, the teeming marketplace, the royal lodge that Mark Antony had built after his defeat at Actium. And of course the Lighthouse, the wondrous many-windowed Lighthouse, the seventh wonder of the world, that immense pile of marble and limestone and reddish-purple Aswan granite rising in majesty at the end of its mile-long causeway. Black smoke from the beacon-fire at its summit curled lazily into the sky. The city was awakening. Some temporaries in short white kilts appeared and began to trim the dense dark hedges that bordered the great public buildings. A few citizens wearing loose robes of vaguely Grecian style were strolling in the streets.
There were ghosts and chimeras and phantasies everywhere about. Two slim elegant centaurs, a male and a female, grazed on the hillside. A burly thick-thighed swordsman appeared on the porch of the temple of Poseidon holding a Gorgon’s severed head; he waved it in a wide arc, grinning broadly. In the street below the hotel gate three small pink sphinxes, no bigger than housecats, stretched and yawned and began to prowl the curbside. A larger one, lion-sized, watched warily from an alleyway: their mother, surely. Even at this distance he could hear her loud purring.
Shading his eyes, he peered far out past the Lighthouse and across the water. He hoped to see the dim shores of Crete or Cyprus to the north, or perhaps the great dark curve of Anatolia. Carry me toward that great Byzantium, he thought. Where all is ancient, singing at the oars. But he beheld only the endless empty sea, sun-bright and blinding though the morning was just beginning. Nothing was ever where he expected it to be. The continents did not seem to be in their proper places any longer. Gioia, taking him aloft long ago in her little flitterflitter, had shown him that. The tip of South America was canted far out into the Pacific; Africa was weirdly foreshortened; a broad tongue of ocean separated Europe and Asia. Australia did not appear to exist at all. Perhaps they had dug it up and used it for other things. There was no trace of the world he once had known. This was the fiftieth century. “The fiftieth century after what?” he had asked several times, but no one seemed to know, or else they did not care to say.
Harry Turtledove Page 30
