The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  ——————

  It was eleven weeks and two days and three hours—plus or minus a little—until the earthquake that was going to devastate the planet and suddenly Morrissey found himself doubting that the earthquake was going to happen at all. The strange notion stopped him in his tracks. He was out strolling the shore of the Ring Ocean, half a dozen kilometers from his cabin, when the idea came to him. He turned to his companion, an old fux called Dinoov who was just entering his postsexual phase, and said in a peculiar tone, “What if the ground doesn’t shake, you know?”

  “But it will,” the aborigine said calmly. “What if the predictions are wrong?”

  The fux was a small elegant blue-furred creature, sleek and compact, with the cool all-accepting demeanor that comes from having passed safely through all the storms and metamorphoses of a fux’s reproductive odyssey. It raised itself on its hind legs, the only pair that remained to it now, and said, “You should cover your head when you walk in the sunlight at flare time, friend Morrissey. The brightness damages the soul.”

  “You think I’m crazy, Dinoov?”

  “I think you are under great stress.”

  Morrissey nodded vaguely. He looked away and stared westward across the shining blood-hued ocean, narrowing his eyes as though trying to see the frosty crystalline shores of Farside beyond the curve of the horizon. Perhaps half a kilometer out to sea he detected glistening patches of bright green on the surface of the water—the spawning bloom of the balloons. High above those dazzling streaks a dozen or so brilliant iridescent gasbag-creatures hovered, going through the early sarabandes of their mating dance. The quake would not matter at all to the balloons. When the surface of Medea heaved and buckled and crumpled, they would be drifting far overhead, dreaming their transcendental dreams and paying no attention.

  But maybe there will be no quake, Morrissey told himself.

  He played with the thought. He had waited all his life for the vast apocalyptic event that was supposed to put an end to the thousand-year-long human occupation of Medea, and now, very close to earthquake time, he found a savage perverse pleasure in denying the truth of what he knew to be coming. No earthquake! No earthquake! Life will go on and on and on! The thought gave him a chilling prickling feeling. There was an odd sensation in the soles of his feet, as if he were standing with both his feet off the ground.

  Morrissey imagined himself sending out a joyful message to all those who had fled the doomed world: Come back, all is well, it didn’t happen! Come live on Medea again! And he saw the fleet of great gleaming ships swinging around, heading back, moving like mighty dolphins across the void, shimmering like needles in, the purple sky, dropping down by the hundred to unload the vanished settlers at Chong and Enrique and Pellucidar and Port Medea and Madagozar. Swarms of people rushing forth, tears, hugs, raucous laughter, old friends reunited, the cities coming alive again! Morrissey trembled. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms tight around himself. The fantasy had almost hallucinatory power. It made him giddy, and his skin, bleached and leathery from a lifetime under the ultraviolet flares of the twin suns, grew hot and moist. Come home, come home, come home! The earthquake’s been canceled!

  He savored that. And then he let go of it and allowed the bright glow of it to fade from his mind.

  He said to the fux, “There’s eleven weeks left. And then everything on Medea is going to be destroyed. Why are you so calm, Dinoov?”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “Do you?”

  “I love this place,” Morrissey said. “I can’t bear to see it all smashed apart.”

  “Then why didn’t you go home to Earth with the others?”

  “Home? Home? This is my home. I have Medean genes in my body. My people have lived here for a thousand years. My great-grandparents were born on Medea and so were their great-grandparents.”

  “The others could say the same thing. Yet when earthquake time drew near, they went home. Why have you stayed?”

  Morrissey, towering over the slender little being, was silent a moment. Then he laughed harshly and said, “I didn’t evacuate for the same reason that you don’t give a damn that a killer quake is coming. We’re both done for anyway, right? I don’t know anything about Earth. It’s not my world. I’m too old to start over there. And you? You’re on your last legs, aren’t you? Both your wombs are gone, your male itch is gone, you’re in that nice quiet burned-out place, eh, Dinoov?” Morrissey chuckled. “We deserve each other. Waiting for the end together, two old hulks.”

  The fux studied Morrissey with glinting, unfathomable, mischievous eyes. Then he pointed downwind, toward a headland maybe three hundred meters away, a sandy rise thickly furred with bladdermoss and scrubby yellow-leaved anglepod bushes. Right at the tip of the cape, outlined sharply against the glowing sky, were a couple of fuxes. One was female, six-legged, yet to bear her first litter. Behind her, gripping her haunches and readying himself to mount, was a bipedal male, and even at this distance Morrissey could see his frantic, almost desperate movements.

  “What are they doing?” Dinoov asked.

  Morrissey shrugged. “Mating.”

  “Yes. And when will she drop her young?”

  “In fifteen weeks.”

  “Are they burned out?” the fux asked. “Are they done for? Why do they make young if destruction is coming?”

  “Because they can’t help—”

  Dinoov silenced Morrissey with an upraised hand. “I meant the question not to be answered. Not yet, not until you understand things better. Yes? Please?”

  “I don’t—”

  “—understand. Exactly.” The fux smiled a fuxy smile. “This walk has tired you. Come now: I’ll go with you to your cabin.”

  They scrambled briskly up the path from the long crescent of pale blue sand that was the beach to the top of the bluff, and then walked more slowly down the road, past the abandoned holiday cabins toward Morrissey’s place. Once this had been Argoview Dunes, a bustling shoreside community, but that was long ago. Morrissey in these latter days would have preferred to live in some wilder terrain where the hand of man had not weighed so heavily on the natural landscape, but he dared not risk it. Medea, even after ten centuries of colonization, still was a world of sudden perils. The unconquered places had gone unconquered for good reason; and, living on alone since the evacuation, he needed to keep close to some settlement, with its stores of food and materiel. He could not afford the luxury of the picturesque.

  In any case the wilderness was rapidly reclaiming its own now that most of the intruders had departed. In the early days this steamy low-latitude tropical coast had been infested with all manner of monstrous beasts. Some had been driven off by methodical campaigns of extermination and others, repelled by the effluvia of the human settlements, had simply disappeared. But they were starting to return. A few weeks ago Morrissey had seen a scuttlefish come ashore, a gigantic black-scaled tubular thing, hauling itself onto land by desperate heaves of its awesome curved flippers and actually digging its fangs into the sand, biting the shore to pull itself onward. They were supposed to be extinct. By a fantastic effort the thing had dug itself into the beach, burying all twenty meters of its body in the azure sand, and a couple of hours later hundreds of young ones that had tunnelled out of the mighty carcass began to emerge, slender beasts no longer than Morrissey’s arm that went writhing with demonic energy down the dunes and into the rough surf. So this was becoming a sea of monsters again. Morrissey had no objections. Swimming was no longer one of his recreations.

  He had lived by himself beside the Ring Ocean for ten years in a little low-roofed cabin of the old Arcan wing-structure design that so beautifully resisted the diabolical Medean winds. In the days of his marriage, when he had been a geophysicist mapping the fault lines, he and Nadia and Paul and Danielle had had a house on the outskirts of Chong on Northcape within view of the High Cascades, and had come here only in winter; but Nadia had gone
to sing cosmic harmonies with the serene and noble and incomprehensible balloons, and Danielle had been caught in the Hotlands at doubleflare time and had not returned, and Paul, tough old indestructible Paul, had panicked over the thought that the earthquake was only a decade away, and between Darkday and Dimday of Christmas week had packed up and boarded an Earthbound ship. All that had happened within the space of four months, and afterward Morrissey found he had lost his fondness for the chilly air of Northcape. So he had come down to Argoview Dunes to wait out the final years in the comfort of the humid tropics, and now he was the only one left in the shoreside community. He had brought persona-cubes of Paul and Nadia and Danielle with him, but playing them turned out to be too painful, and it was a long time since he had talked with anyone but Dinoov. For all he knew, he was the only one left on Medea. Except, of course, the fuxes and the balloons. And the scuttlefish and the rock demons and the wingfingers and the not-turtles and all of those.

  Morrissey and Dinoov stood silently for a time outside the cabin, watching the sunset begin. Through a darkening sky mottled with the green and yellow folds and streaks of Medea’s perpetual aurora, the twin suns Phrixus and Helle—mere orange red daubs of feeble light—drifted toward the horizon. In a few hours they would be gone, off to cast their bleak glow over the dry-ice wastelands of Farside. There could never be real darkness on the inhabited side of Medea, though, for the oppressive great sullen bulk of Argo, the huge red-hot gas-giant planet whose moon Medea was, lay just a million kilometers away. Medea, locked in Argo’s grip, kept the same face turned toward her enormous primary all the time. From Argo came the warmth that made life possible on Medea, and also a perpetual dull reddish illumination.

  The stars were beginning to come out as the twin suns set.

  “See there,” Dinoov said. “Argo has nearly eaten the white fires.”

  The fux had chosen deliberately archaic terms, folk-astronomy; but Morrissey understood what he meant. Phrixus and Helle were not the only suns in Medea’s sky. The two orange-red dwarf stars, moving as a binary unit, were themselves subject to a pair of magnificent blue-white stars, Castor A and B. Though the blue-white stars were a thousand times as far from Medea as the orange-red ones were, they were plainly visible by day and by night, casting a brilliant icy glare. But now they were moving into eclipse behind great Argo, and soon—eleven weeks, two days, one hour, plus or minus a little—they would disappear entirely.

  And how, then, could there not be an earthquake?

  Morrissey was angry with himself for the pathetic soft-headedness of his fantasy of an hour ago. No earthquake? A last-minute miracle? The calculations in error? Sure. Sure. If wishes were horses, beggars might ride. The earthquake was inevitable. A day would come when the configuration of the heavens was exactly thus, Phrixus and Helle positioned here, and Castor A and B there, and there and there, and Argo as ever exerting its inexorable pull above the Hotlands, and when the celestial vectors were properly aligned, the gravitational stresses would send a terrible shudder through the crust of Medea.

  This happened every 7,160 years. And the time was at hand.

  Centuries ago, when the persistence of certain apocalyptic themes in fux folklore had finally led the astronomers of the Medea colony to run a few belated calculations of these matters, no one had really cared. Hearing that the world will come to an end in five or six hundred years is much like hearing that you yourself are going to die in another fifty or sixty: it makes no practical difference in the conduct of everyday life. Later, of course, as the seismic tickdown moved along, people began to think about it more seriously, and beyond doubt it had been a depressive factor in the Medean economy for the past century or so. Nevertheless, Morrissey’s generation was the first that had confronted the dimensions of the impending calamity in any realistic way. And in one manner or another the thousand-year-old colony had melted away in little more than a decade.

  “How quiet everything is,” Morrissey said. He glanced at the fux. “Do you think I’m the only one left, Dinoov?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Don’t play those games with me. Your people have ways of circulating information that we were only just beginning to suspect. You know.”

  The fux said gravely, “The world is large. There were many human cities. Probably some others of your kind are still living here, but I have no certain knowledge. You may well be the last one.”

  “I suppose. Someone had to be.”

  “Does at give you satisfaction, knowing you are last?”

  “Because it means I have more endurance, or because I think it’s good that the colony has broken up?”

  “Either,” said the fux.

  “I don’t feel a thing,” Morrissey said. “Either way. I’m the last, if I’m the last, because I didn’t want to leave. That’s all. This is my home and here I stay. I don’t feel proud or brave or noble for having stayed. I wish there wasn’t going to be an earthquake, but I can’t do anything about that, and by now I don’t think I even care.”

  “Really?” Dinoov asked. “That’s not how it seemed a little while ago.”

  Morrissey smiled. “Nothing lasts. We pretend we build for the ages, but time moves and everything fades and art becomes artifacts and sand becomes sandstone, and what of it? Once there was a world here and we turned it into a colony. And now the colonists are gone and soon the colony will be gone and this will be a world again as our rubble blows away. And what of it?”

  “You sound very old,” said the fux.

  “I am very old. Older even than you.”

  “Only in years. Our lives move faster than yours, but in my few years I have been through all the stages of my life, and the end would soon be coming for me even if the ground were not going to shake. But you still have time left.”

  Morrissey shrugged.

  The fux said, “I know that there are starships standing fueled and ready at Port Medea. Ready to go, at the push of a button.”

  “Are you sure? Ships ready to go?”

  “Many of them. They were not needed. The Ahya have seen them and told us.”

  “The balloons? What were they doing at Port Medea?”

  “Who understands the Ahya? They wander where they please. But they have seen the ships, friend Morrissey. You could still save yourself.”

  “Sure,” Morrissey said. “I take a flitter thousands of kilometers across Medea, and I singlehandedly give a starship the checkdown for a voyage of fifty light-years, and then I put myself into coldsleep and I go home all alone and wake up on an alien planet where my remote ancestors happened to have been born. What for?”

  “You will die, I think, when the ground shakes.”

  “I will die, I think, even if it doesn’t.”

  “Sooner or later. But this way, later.”

  “If I had wanted to leave Medea,” Morrissey said, “I would have gone with the others. It’s too late now.”

  “No,” said the fux. “There are ships at Port Medea. Go to Port Medea, my friend.”

  Morrissey was silent. In the dimming light he knelt and tugged at tough little hummocks of stickweed that were beginning to invade his garden. Once he had landscaped this place with exotic shrubs from all over Medea, everything beautiful that was capable of surviving the humidity and the rainfall of the Wetlands, but now as the end drew near, the native plants of the coast were closing in, smothering his lovely whiptrees and dangletwines and flamestripes and the rest, and he no longer was able to hold them back. For minutes he clawed at the sticky stoloniferous killers, baleful orange against the tawny sand, that suddenly were sprouting by his doorway.

  Then he said, “I think I will take a trip, Dinoov.”

  The fux looked startled. “You’ll go to Port Medea?”

  “There, yes, and other places. It’s years since I’ve left the Dunes. I’m going to make a farewell tour of the whole planet.” He was amazed himself at what he was saying. “I’m the last one here, right? And this is almost the las
t chance, right? And it ought to be done, right? Saying goodbye to Medea. Somebody has to make the rounds, somebody has to turn off the lights. Right? Right. Right. Right. And I’m the one.”

  “Will you take the starship home?”

  “That’s not part of my plan. I’ll be back here, Dinoov. You can count on that. You’ll see me again, just before the end. I promise you that.”

  “I wish you would go home,” said the fux, “and save yourself.”

  “I will go home,” Morrissey answered. “To save myself. In eleven weeks. Plus or minus a little.”

  Morrissey spent the next day, Darkday, quietly—planning his trip, packing, reading, wandering along the beach front in the red twilight glimmer. There was no sign all day of Dinoov or indeed of any of the local fuxes, although in mid-afternoon a hundred or more balloons drifted by in tight formation, heading out to sea. In the darkness their shimmering colors were muted, but still they were a noble sight, huge taut globes trailing long coiling ropy organs. As they passed overhead Morrissey saluted them and said quietly, “A safe flight to you, cousins.” But of course the balloons took no notice of him.

  Toward evening he drew from his locker a dinner that he had been saving for some special occasion, Madagozar oysters and filet of vandaleur and newly ripened peeperpods. There were two bottles of golden red Palinurus wine left and he opened one of them. He drank and ate until he started to nod off at the table; then he lurched to his cradle, programmed himself for ten hours’ sleep, about twice what he normally needed at his age, and closed his eyes.

  When he woke it was well along into Dimday morning, with the double sun not yet visible but already throwing pink light across the crest of the eastern hills. Morrissey, skipping breakfast altogether, went into town and ransacked the commissary. He filled a freezercase with provisions enough to last him for three months, since he had no idea what to expect by way of supplies elsewhere on Medea. At the landing strip where commuters from Enrique and Pellucidar once had parked their flitters after flying in for the weekend, he checked out his own, an ’83 model with sharply raked lines and a sophisticated moire-pattern skin, now somewhat pitted and rusted by neglect. The powerpak still indicated a full charge-ninety-year half-life; he wasn’t surprised—but just to be on the safe side he borrowed an auxiliary pak from an adjoining flitter and keyed it in as a reserve. He hadn’t flown in years, but that didn’t worry him much: the flitter responded to voice-actuated commands, and Morrissey doubted that he’d have to do any manual overriding.