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

by Robert Silverberg

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I believe it gave you pleasure,” he said.

  “Yes. Yes. It did give me pleasure. But you didn’t desire me, then?”

  His tongue flickered in what she thought might be the equivalent of a puzzled frown.

  “No,” he said. “You are human. How can I feel desire for a human? You are so different from me, Thesme. On Majipoor my kind are called aliens, but to me you are the alien, is that not so?”

  “I suppose. Yes.”

  “But I was very fond of you. I wished your happiness. In that sense I had desire for you. Do you understand? And I will always be your friend. I hope you will come to visit us, and share in the bounty of our farm. Will you do that, Thesme?”

  “I—yes, yes, I will.”

  “Good. I will go now. But first—”

  Gravely, with immense dignity, he drew her to him and enfolded her in his powerful arms. Once again she felt the strange smooth rigidity of his alien skin; once again the little scarlet tongue fluttered across her eyelids in a forked kiss. He embraced her for a long moment.

  When he released her he said, “I am extremely fond of you, Thesme I can never forget you.”

  “Nor I you.”

  She stood in the doorway, watching until he disappeared from sight beyond the pond. A sense of ease and peace and warmth had come over her spirit. She doubted that she ever would visit Vismaan and Turnome and their litter of little lizards, hut that was all right: Vismaan would understand. Everything was all right. Thesme began to gather her possessions and stuff them into her pack. It was still only mid-morning, time enough to make the journey to Narabal.

  She reached the city just after the afternoon showers. It was over a year since she had left it, and a good many months since her last visit; and she was surprised by the changes she saw now. There was a boomtown bustle to the place, new buildings going up everywhere, ships in the Channel, the streets full of traffic. And the town seemed to have been invaded by aliens—hundreds of Ghayrogs, and other kinds too, the warty ones that she supposed were Hjorts, and enormous double-shouldered Skandars, a whole circus of strange beings going about their business and taken absolutely for granted by the human citizens. Thesme found her way with some difficulty to her mother’s house. Two of her sisters were there, and her brother Dalkhan. They stared at her in amazement and what seemed like fear.

  “I’m back,” she said. “I know I look like a wild animal, but I just need my hair trimmed and a new tunic and I’ll be human again.”

  She went to live with Ruskelorn Yulvan a few weeks later, and at the end of the year they were married. For a time she thought of confessing to him that she and her Ghayrog guest had been lovers, but she was afraid to do it, and eventually it seemed unimportant to bring it up at all. She did, finally, ten or twelve years later, when they had dined on roast bilantoon at one of the fine new restaurants in the Ghayrog quarter of town, and she had had much too much of the strong golden wine of the north, and the pressure of old associations was too powerful to resist. When she had finished telling him the story she said, “Did you suspect any of that?” And he said, “I knew it right away, when I saw you with him in the street. But why should it have mattered?”

  At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party

  Another easy and pleasant effort. After spending the summer of 1981 writing most of the stories that became my book Majipoor Chronicles, it seemed like time to try another one for Alice Turner of Playboy, and in early October I wrote “At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party” in a single sitting—the first time in many years that I had written a complete short story in one swift burst. Alice liked it. She did want some minor revisions at the beginning and the end, and in each case she was right, as she usually was when she requested revisions from me. (“Cut the first line,” she said, and I did. The final paragraph needed fixing, and I fixed it.) The check came by return mail and Playboy published the story in the August, 1982 issue, the second of my many appearances in that magazine.

  ——————

  I am contemporary. I am conglomeroid. I am post-causal, contra-linear, pepto-modern. To be anything else is to be dead, nezpah? Is to be a fossil. A sense of infinite potential and a stance of infinite readiness: that’s the right philosophy for our recombinant era. Alert to all possibilities, holding oneself always in an existentially pliant posture.

  So when quasi-cousin Spinifex called and said, “Come to my fetus-party tonight,” I accepted unhesitatingly. Spinifex lives in Wongamoola on the slopes of the Dandenongs, looking across into Melbourne. I happened to be in Gondar on my way to Lalibela when his call came. “Mortissa and I have a new embryo,” said Spinifex. “We want everyone to help us engineer it. There’ll be a contest for the best design. The whole crowd’s coming, and some new people.” Some new people. Could I resist? It’s not such a big deal to go from Ethiopia to Australia for a fetus-party. Two hours, with transfers. I was on the pop-chute in half a flick. Pop to Addis, pop to Delhi, pop to Singapore, pop to Melbourne, pop pop pop pop and I was there. Some new people. Irresistible. That was the night I met Domitilla.

  Spinifex and Mortissa live in a great golden egg on jeweled stilts, with oscillator windows and three captive rainbows moored overhead. In his current Shaping, Spinifex is aquatic, a big jolly blue dolphinoid with spangled red flukes, and spends most of his time in his moat. Mortissa’s latest Shaping is more traditionally conglomeroid, no single identifiable style, a bit of tapir and a bit of giraffe and some very high-precision machine-tooled laminations, altogether elegant. I blew kisses to them both.

  About thirty guests had already arrived. I knew most of them. There was Hapshash in his ten-year-old Shaping, the carpeted look, last word in splendor then. Negresca still in her tortoise-cum-chinchilla, and Holy Mary looking sublime in the gilded tubular body that becomes her so well. There is a tendency among the ultra-elite to keep the same Shaping longer and longer, with Hapshash the outstanding example of that. At first I thought it was a sign of the recent economic dreariness, but lately I was coming to understand it as a significant underground trend: out of fashion is height of fashion. That sort of thing requires one to stay really aware. When Melanoleum came slithering up to me, she asked me at once how I liked her new Shaping. She looked exactly as she had the last time, a year ago at the big potlatch in Joburg—tendrils, iridescence, lateral oculars, high-spectrum pulse-nodes. For an instant I was baffled, and I came close to telling her I had already seen this Shaping, and then I caught on, comprehending that she had just had herself Shaped exactly like her last Shaping, which carried Hapshash’s gambit to the next level of subtlety, and I hugged her with all my arms and said, “It’s brilliant, love, it’s devastating!”

  “I knew you’d pick up,” she said. “Have you seen the fetus?”

  “I just got here.”

  “Up there. In the globe.”

  “Ah. Beautiful!”

  They had rigged a crystalline sphere in a gravity-candle’s beam, so that it hovered twenty feet above the cocktail altar, and in it the new fetus solemnly swam in a phosphorescent green fluid. It was, I suppose, eleven or twelve weeks old, a little alien-looking fish with a big furrowed forehead, altogether weird but completely normal, a standard human fetus with no genetic reprogramming at all. Prenatal engineering is too terribly tacky for people like Mortissa and Spinifex, naturally. Let the standard folk do that, going to the cheapjack helixers to get their offsprings’ clubfeet and sloping chins and bandy legs cleaned up ahead of time, so that they can look just like everybody else when they come squirting out of the womb. That’s not our way.

  Melanoleum said, “The design contest starts in half an hour. Do you have a good one ready?”

  “I expect to. What’s the prize?”

  “A month with anyone at the party,” she said. “Do you know Domitilla?”

  I had heard of her, naturally—last season’s hot debutante, making the party circuit from San Francisco to the Seychelles. But I had been going the other
way last season. Suddenly she was at my elbow, a dazzling child in a blaze of cold blue fire. It was her only garment, and under that chilly radiance I saw a slim furry form, five small breasts, sleek muscular thighs, vertebrae elongated to form the underpinning for a webbed sail down her back—an inspired conglomeroid of wolverine and dinosaur. My hearts thundered and my lymph congealed. She noted instantly the power she had over me, and her fiery cloak flared to double volume, a dazzling nimbus that briefly enfolded me and dizzied me with the scent of ozone. She was no more than nineteen, and I was ninety-three, existentially pliant, ready to be overwhelmed. I congratulated her on her ingenuity.

  “My fifth Shaping,” she said. “I’ll be getting a new one soon, I think.”

  “Your fifth?” I considered Hapshash and Negresca and Holy Mary, trendily clinging to their old bodies. “So quickly? Don’t. This one is extraordinary.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why it’s time for a new one. Oh, look, the fetus is trying to get born!”

  Indeed the little pseudo-fish that my quasi-cousins had conceived was making violent but futile efforts to escape its gleaming tank. We applauded. The servants took that as their signal to come among us with hors d’oeuvres: five standard humans, big and stupid and docile, bearing glittering food-fabrics on platinum trays. We did our dainty best; the trays were bare in no time and back came the standards with a second round, caviars of at least a dozen creatures and sweetmeats and tiny cocktail-globules to rub on our tongues and all the rest. And then Spinifex heaved himself out of the moat with a great jovial flapping of flippers that splashed everyone, and a beveled screen descended and hovered in midair and it was time for the contest. Domitilla was still at my side.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said in a voice like shaggy wine. “I thought I’d meet you at the moon-party. Why weren’t you there?”

  “I never go there,” I said.

  “Oh. Of course. Do you know who’s going to win the contest?”

  “Is it rigged?”

  “Aren’t they all?” she asked. “I know who.” She laughed.

  Mortissa was on the podium under merciless spotlights that her new Shaping reflected flawlessly. She explained the contest. We were to draw lots and each in turn seize the control-stick and project on the screen our image of what the new child should look like. Judging would be automatic: the design that elicited the greatest amazement would win, and the winner was entitled to choose as companion for a month any of the rest of us. There were two provisos: Spinifex and Mortissa would not be bound to use the winning design if they deemed it life-threatening in any way, and none of the designs could be used by the contestants for future Shapings of their own. The lots were drawn and we took our turns: Hapshash, Melanoleum, Mandragora, Peachbloom, Hannibal—

  The designs ranged from brilliant to merely clever. Hapshash proposed a sort of jeweled amoeba; Peachbloom conjured up a hybrid Spinifex-Mortissa, half dolphin, half machine; Melanoleum’s concept was out of the Greek myths, Medusa hair and Poseidon tail; my onetime para-wife Nullamar invented a geometrical shape, rigid and complex, that gave us all headaches; and my own contribution, entirely improvised, involved two slender tapering shells that parted to reveal a delicate and sinuous being, virtually translucent. I was surprised at my own inspiration and felt instant regret for having thrown away something so beautiful that I might well have worn myself someday. It caused a stir and I suspected I would win, and I knew who I would choose as my prize. What, I wondered, did Domitilla have as her entry? I glanced toward her and smiled, and she returned the smile with an airy rippling of her flaming cloak.

  The contest went on and on. Hungering for victory, I grew tense, apprehensive, gloomy, despondent. Candelabra’s design was spectacular, and Mingimang’s was fascinatingly perplexing, and Vishnu’s was awesomely cunning. Some, indeed, seemed almost beyond the capacity, of contemporary genetic engineering to accomplish. I saw no hope of winning, and my month with Domitilla seemed in jeopardy. Her own turn came last. She took the podium, grasped the stick, closed her eyes, sent her thought-projection to the screen with an intensity of effort that turned her fiery mantle bright yellow and sent it arching out to expose her blue-black furry nakedness.

  On the screen a standard human form appeared.

  Not quite standard, for it was hermaphrodite, round rosy-nippled breasts above and male genitals below. Yet it was the old basic body other than that, the traditional pre-Shaping shape, used now only by the unfortunate billions of the serving classes. I gasped, and I was not alone. It’s no easy thing to amaze a group so worldly as we, but we were transfixed with amazement, dumbstruck by Domitilla’s bizarre notion. Was she mocking us? Was she merely naive? Or was she so far beyond our level of sophistication that we couldn’t comprehend her motives? Trays clattered to the ground, drinks were spilled, we coughed and wheezed and muttered. The meters that were judging the contest whirled and flashed. No doubt of the winner: Domitilla had plainly provoked the most intense surprise, and that was the criterion. The party was at the edge of scandal. But Mortissa was equal to the moment.

  “The winner, of course, is Domitilla,” she said calmly. “We salute her for the audacity of her design. But my husband and I regard it as hazardous to the life of our child to give it the standard form for its first Shaping because of the possibility of misunderstanding by its playmates, and so we invoke our right to choose another entry, and we select that of our quasi-cousin Sandalphon, so remarkable for its combination of subtlety and strength.”

  “Well done!” Melanoleum called, and I did not know whether she was cheering Mortissa for her astuteness or Domitilla for her boldness or me for the beauty of my design. “Well done!” cried Vishnu, and Candelabra and Hannibal took it up, and the tensions of the party dissolved into a kind of forced jubilation that swiftly became the real thing.

  “The prize!” someone shouted. “Who’s the prize?”

  Spinifex thumped his huge fins. “The prize! The prize!”

  Mortissa beckoned to Domitilla. She stepped forward, small and fragile-looking but not in the least vulnerable, and said in a clear, cool voice, “I choose Sandalphon.”

  We left the party within the hour and popped to San Francisco, where Domitilla lived alone in a spherical pod of a house suspended by spider-cables a mile above the bay.

  I had my wish. And yet she frightened me, and I don’t frighten easily.

  Her fiery mantle engulfed me. She was nineteen, I was ninety-three, and she ruled me. In that frosty blue radiance I was helpless. Five Shapings, and only nineteen? Her eyes were narrow and cat-yellow, and there were worlds of strangeness in them that made me feel like a mud-flecked peasant. “The famous Sandalphon,” she whispered. “Would you have picked me if you had won? Yes, I know you would. It was all over your face. How long have you had this Shaping?”

  “Four years.”

  “Time for a new one.”

  I started to say that Hapshash and the other leaders of our set were traveling in the other direction, that the fashionable thing was to keep one’s old Shaping; but that seemed idiocy to me now as I lay in her arms with her dense harsh fur rubbing my scales. She was the new thing, the terrifying, inexorable voice of the dawning day, and what did our modes matter to her? We made love, my worlds of experience against her tigerish youthful vitality, and there, at least, I think I matched her stroke for stroke. Afterward she showed me holograms of her first four Shapings. One by one her earlier selves stepped from the projector and pirouetted before me: the form her parents had given her that she had kept for nine years, and then the second Shaping that one always tends to cling to through puberty, and the two of her adolescence. They were true conglomeroid Shapes, a blending of images out of all the biological spectrum, a bit of butterfly and a bit of squid, a tinge of reptile and a hint of insect, the usual genetic fantasia that our kind adores, but a common thread bound them all, and her current Shape as well. That was the compactness of her body, the taut narrowness of her slender
frame, powerful but minimal, like some agile little carnivore, mink or mongoose or marten. When we redesign ourselves, we can be any size we like, whale-mighty or cat-small, within certain basic limitations imposed by the need to house a human-sized brain in the frame that the gene-splicers build for us; but Domitilla had opted always to construct her fantasies on the splendid little armature with which she had come into the world. That too was ominous. It spoke of a persistence, a self-sufficiency, that is not common.

  “Which of them do you like best?” she asked, when I had seen them all.

  I stroked her strong smooth thighs, “This one. How tight your fur lies against your skin! How beautiful the sail is on your back! You’ve brought out your deepest self.”

  “How would you know my deepest self after two hours?”

  “Don’t underestimate me.” I touched my lips to hers. “Part hunting-cat, part dinosaur—the metaphor’s perfect.”

  “Let’s make love again. Then we’ll pop to Jerusalem.”

  “All right.”

  “And then Tibet.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And Baltimore.”

  “Baltimore?”

  “Why not?” she said. “Hold me tighter. Yes. Yes.”

  “Do I get only a month with you?”

  “Thirty days. Those were the terms of the contest.”

  “Do you always abide by terms?”

  “Always,” she said.

  We popped to Jerusalem at dawn, and then to Tibet, and then, yes, to Baltimore. And many more places in the thirty days. She was trying to exhaust me, thinking that nineteen has some superiority over ninety-three, but there, at least, she had misjudged things; at each Shaping we are renewed, you know. I loved her beyond measure, though she terrified me. What did I fear? What does anyone fear most? That in a vulnerable moment someone will say, “I understand what a fraud you are: I have seen all your facades fall away: I know the truth about you.” I would not say such a thing to Melanoleum, nor Nullamar to me, nor any of us to any of us, but yet I felt Domitilla wouldn’t hesitate to flay me down to the core beneath the Shapings if that suited her whim, and I lived in dread of that, and I always will.