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

by Robert Silverberg

  She said, “‘This is more serious, Dale. I’m terribly fond of Nort. I love you as much as ever, but he’s shown me other aspects of life, things I never dreamed of, and I’m not talking about sex. I mean spiritual concepts, human potentialities, the—”

  “All right,” said Finch. “I won’t try to compete. I won’t shoot him and I won’t punch him and I won’t do anything else uncivilized. Why don’t the two of you get the hell off to A.D. 2215 and carry on the rest of your affair there, okay? Go have a flying fuck in the century after next and let me alone. Okay? Okay? The two of you. Let—me—”

  Nort disappeared. So did Jennifer.

  “Alone,” Finch finished weakly. “Jennifer? Jennifer? Where are you? Hey, I wasn’t serious! Jennifer! Goddamn it, what kind of sadistic stunt is this? Where are you?”

  The cruelty of their game astounded him. He waited for them to pop back into the room as Nort had done with the newspaper, but they did not, and as the minutes went by he began to suspect that they were not going to. Numb with disbelief, he prowled the house, searching closets for them. Suddenly horror-struck, he rushed to Jason’s room, then to Samantha’s, but the children were still there, Jason asleep, Samantha awake and troubled by the shouting she had heard. He picked her up and held her a long moment, and tears came to him. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Go back to sleep.” He returned to the bedroom and sat there until dawn, waiting for Jennifer.

  In the morning he phoned the office to say that severe family problems had forced him to return from Pittsburgh suddenly and that he needed an indefinite leave of absence, with or without pay. His supervisor was wholly understanding, not at all skeptical, as if Finch’s voice communicated precisely how stunned and bewildered he was. He managed to deliver the children to school, and then spent the morning by the telephone, hoping to hear from Jennifer. But no word came from her all day. In late afternoon he called his parents to say that Jennifer had gone off somewhere without warning and could they please come early for their holiday visit, because he wasn’t sure he could handle all this domestic stuff alone. They arrived the next day and asked blessedly few questions. In their generation, he thought, it must have been the usual thing for marriages to break up without warning.

  Jennifer did not come back. He felt like someone who had been given a single wish and had used it stupidly: now she was off in the inconceivable future with Nort. Was that possible? Was this not all some kind of bizarre dream? Apparently not, for on Christmas Eve a note from Jennifer materialized inexplicably on the livingroom table, dated 14 Oct 2215 and wishing him happy holidays and assuring him of her love and telling him not to expect her back. “Sometimes you simply have to follow your destiny,” she concluded. “I had only a fraction of a second to make my decision and I made it, and maybe I’ll regret it, but I did what I had to do. I miss you, darling. And you know how much I miss Samantha and Jason.” Next to the note was a little package, with a tag marked Merry Christmas from Nort. It contained a tiny crystal ball that when held close to his eye showed him what looked like an Antarctic landscape, gales howling and placid penguins wandering around on an ice floe. He put it down, and when he picked it up a second time it displayed the Pyramids, with a long line of tourists milling about. Finch flung it against the wall and it cracked in half and turned cloudy. He wished he had not done that.

  Getting through the holidays was even more of an ordeal than usual, but his parents were an immense help, and his friends, once they discovered that Jennifer was gone, came magnificently to his aid. He was scarcely alone the whole week, and he suspected that it would not have been hard for him to find company for the night, either, but of course that was out of the question. The children were perplexed by Jennifer’s disappearance, but after some disorientation they appeared to adapt, which Finch found more than a little chilling. He hired a housekeeper early in January and, feeling like a sleepwalker, went back to work. Because of the change in his family circumstances, the company took him off the outlying routes, so that he would not have to spend nights away from home.

  Some time in early spring he started genuinely to believe that Jennifer had skipped away into the future with her lover. Notes from her arrived now and then, always friendly, with regards for the children and reminders about oiling the furnace and taking the cars in for tune-ups. She said she was having a wonderful time but missed him terribly. There was never any mention of coming back. From time to time, also, little gifts appeared—gadgets, toys, knicknacks of the future. Perhaps they were meant for Jason, but Finch kept them himself, hoarding them in his closet and examining them at night with awe. He had always loved gadgets—computers, remote-control devices, wrist videos, and such—but these seemed more like miracles than gadgets to him, and he ceased to doubt that Nort was what he said he was. Finch hoped another of the crystal balls would turn up, but it never did. He did get something that appeared to tune in the music of the spheres, and another that could be programmed to give him the dreams he wanted, and one that displayed abstract color-fields of a serene unearthly kind.

  When summer came, he drifted with surprising ease into a romance with Estelle, the company’s PR consultant, and that carried him into late autumn. Gently she extricated herself from the relationship then, but he had learned how to meet and win women once again, and he ran through a lively bachelorhood in the months that followed. The first anniversary of Jennifer’s disappearance passed. The notes from her and the gifts from Nort came less frequently and then not at all. He was quite competent at running a family without a wife by now, but he had never lost that old sense of himself as an innately married man, as half of a couple, and so, admitting that Jennifer was never coming back, he filed for divorce and won an uncontested decree. That was the strangest part thus far, the knowledge that he was no longer married to Jennifer. He looked for a new wife in his diligent, serious-minded way and, within six months, found one. Her name was Sharon and she was warm-hearted and lovely and rather like Jennifer, though her interests ran more to drama and poetry than to music and painting. She had had an unhappy marriage just after college and had a boy of four, Joshua, very bright. Joshua got along wonderfully with Jason and Samantha, they accepted Sharon readily as their new mother—Jennifer was only a hazy memory to them now—and everything seemed to have worked out for the best. Sometimes Finch called Sharon “Jennifer” when they made love, but she was very understanding about that. Sometimes, too, he woke up drenched with sweat, wondering where he had misplaced his one true wife, his sundered half; but whenever that happened, Sharon held him until he regained his grasp on reality. He moved up nicely in the firm, which was expanding at a remarkable rate, and stayed trim and agile all through his forties. Samantha and Jason turned out well, too: Jason went to Cal Tech, joined a West Coast company, and invented an information-encapsulating device that made him a stock-option millionaire by the time he was twenty-two. Samantha grew tall and radiant and even more beautiful, pursued her interest in French, and achieved splendid translations of Rabelais and Ronsard and married the French ambassador. Finch saw less and less of his children once they were grown, of course, but they always came home for a family reunion at Christmas. They were with him that afternoon twenty-three years after Jennifer’s disappearance when Jennifer reappeared.

  Finch did not know who she was, at first. She quite suddenly was there in the living room, a handsome, slender, full-breasted young woman of about thirty, with golden hair in tight waves against her scalp, who wore a clinging garment of metallic mesh. She blinked and looked about and gasped as she saw Finch, who was in his mid-fifties and reasonably youthful-looking for his age.

  “Dale?” she said doubtfully.

  He let his drink clatter to the floor. “No,” he said. “It isn’t possible. Christ, what are you doing here?”

  “I had to come back. Oh, Dale, it’s the wrong year, isn’t it? I wanted to see the children again!”

  “There they are,” he said stonily. “Take a look.”

&n
bsp; “Where—which—”

  Jason was there and Samantha, and also Joshua and some of their friends; and obviously Jennifer did not recognize her own. Finch pointed. The stocky broad-shouldered young man with the earnest myopic gaze was Jason. The long-legged, awesomely beautiful woman was Samantha. Jennifer’s glossy poise seemed to shatter. She was trembling and close to tears. “I wanted to see the children,” she whispered. “They were so small—he was six, she was seven—oh, Dale, I’ve set the timer wrong! I’ve made a mess of it, haven’t I?”

  Samantha, quick as always, was the only other one who understood. She went toward her mother and stared at her as though Jennifer were an intruder from some other planet. Finch had heard that Samantha often used her beauty as a weapon, but he had never before seen it. Jennifer appeared to shrivel before the sleek, dazzling woman she had helped to create. In a low husky voice Samantha said, “You don’t belong here now, you know. This is a happy time for us, and we don’t need you and we don’t want you. Will you go away?”

  “Wait,” Finch muttered.

  Too late. Jennifer, reddening, dismayed, nodded and said to Samantha, “I’m terribly sorry. I’m sorry for everything.” She ran from the room. Finch raced after her, out to the hall, but of course she had disappeared. White-faced, Finch returned to the party. He looked toward Sharon, who was both smiling and frowning. He had never told her or anyone else exactly what had become of his first wife.

  “Who was that?” Sharon asked amiably. “Some girlfriend of yours, Dale?” There was nothing like jealousy in her voice. She was only mildly curious.

  “No—no, nothing like that—”

  “I wonder how she got in here. Like coming out of thin air, almost. Strange. Why did she dash away like that?”

  “She didn’t belong here,” Finch said hoarsely. He poured himself another drink. “She was in the wrong time, the wrong place.” He glanced at his daughter, who was flushed with triumph. What power she had, what force! All the same, he was starting to regret that Samantha had driven her off so quickly. With a wobbly hand he raised his glass. “Merry Christmas, everybody! Merry, merry, merry Christmas!”

  For a few years after that he found himself wondering, as the holiday season approached, whether Jennifer would make another appearance, like some ghost of marriages past coming round again. Had she tired of Nort and Nort’s century? Did she yearn for all she had abandoned? Though there was no longer any room in Finch’s life for her, he held no grudge after all this time; he was almost eager to go off and talk with her a little, to find out who she had become, this woman who had once been part of him. But she never again returned. Perhaps she spent her holidays with Millard Fillmore now, he thought. Or singing carols by the blazing Yule log at the fireside of great-great-great-grandpa Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Not Our Brother

  In the autumn of 1981 short stories were emanating from me with a swiftness that I had not experienced in several decades. No sooner was “Jennifer’s Lover” out of the way than I embarked on “Not Our Brother,” a story that grew out of my fascination with Mexico and Mexican dance masks, which I had begun to collect. It was not science fiction but horrific fantasy, and I thought Playboy might like it; but Alice Turner replied on November 25, “I hate to do this, but I’m turning it down. It is very similar in both structure and content to ‘Via Dolorosa,’ and I think it had the same problems. I won’t go into detail unless you want it, for I know you will easily sell the story elsewhere, but what it comes down to is that I don’t love this the way I love ‘Gianni’ and ‘Conglomeroid.’ So I’m going to wait for the next one. The way you’re going, I expect to see it in a week or two.”

  I thought that the resemblances between “Not Our Brother” and “Via Dolorosa” were fairly superficial ones. Perhaps they ran deeper than that, though, because when I sent it to Ted Klein of Twilight Zone Magazine, who had published “Via Dolorosa” and “How They Pass the Time in Pelpel,” he commented that it seemed “awfully similar to both of them in theme and other elements.” Well, all three were stories about Americans experiencing strange events in Third World countries, I suppose. Despite his qualms Ted accepted the story gladly and Twilight Zone published it in the July, 1982 issue.

  ——————

  Halperin came into San Simón Zuluaga in late October, a couple of days before the fiesta of the local patron saint, when the men of the town would dance in masks. He wanted to see that. This part of Mexico was famous for its masks, grotesque and terrifying ones portraying devils and monsters and fiends. Halperin had been collecting them for three years. But masks on a wall are one thing, and masks on dancers in the town plaza quite another.

  San Simón was a mountain town about halfway between Acapulco and Taxco. “Tourists don’t go there,” Guzmán López had told him. “The road is terrible and the only hotel is a Cucaracha Hilton—five rooms, straw mattresses.” Guzmán ran a gallery in Acapulco where Halperin had bought a great many masks. He was a suave, cosmopolitan man from Mexico City, with smooth dark skin and a bald head that gleamed as if it had been polished. “But they still do the Bat Dance there, the Lord of the Animals Dance. It is the only place left that performs it. This is from San Simón Zuluaga,” said Guzmán, and pointed to an intricate and astonishing mask in purple and yellow depicting a bat with outspread leathery wings that was at the same time somehow also a human skull and a jaguar. Halperin would have paid ten thousand pesos for it, but Guzmán was not interested in selling. “Go to San Simón,” he said. “You’ll see others like this.”

  “For sale?”

  Guzman laughed and crossed himself. “Don’t suggest it. In Rome, would you make an offer for the Pope’s robes? These masks are sacred.”

  “I want one. How did you get this one?”

  “Sometimes favors are done. But not for strangers. Perhaps I’ll be able to work something out for you.”

  “You’ll be there, then?”

  “I go every year for the Bat Dance,” said Guzmán. “It’s important to me. To touch the real Mexico, the old Mexico. I am too much a Spaniard, not enough an Aztec; so I go back and drink from the source. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Halperin said. “Yes.”

  “You want to see the true Mexico?”

  “Do they still slice out hearts with an obsidian dagger?”

  Guzmán said, chuckling, “If they do, they don’t tell me about it. But they know the old gods there. You should go. You would learn much. You might even experience interesting dangers.”

  “Danger doesn’t interest me a whole lot,” said Halperin.

  “Mexico interests you. If you wish to swallow Mexico, you must swallow some danger with it, like the salt with the tequila. If you want sunlight, you must have a little darkness. You should go to San Simón.” Guzmán’s eyes sparkled. “No one will harm you. They are very polite there. Stay away from demons and you will be fine. You should go.”

  Halperin arranged to keep his hotel room in Acapulco and rented a car with four-wheel drive. He invited Guzmán to ride with him, but the dealer was leaving for San Simón that afternoon, with stops en route to pick up artifacts at Chacalapa and Hueycantenango. Halperin could not go that soon. “I will reserve a room for you at the hotel,” Guzmán promised, and drew a precise road map for him.

  The road was rugged and winding and barely paved, and turned into a chaotic dirt-and-gravel track beyond Chichihualco. The last four kilometers were studded with boulders like the bed of a mountain stream. Halperin drove most of the way in first gear, gripping the wheel desperately, taking every jolt and jounce in his spine and kidneys. To come out of the pink-and-manicured Disneyland of plush Acapulco into this primitive wilderness was to make a journey five hundred years back in time. But the air up here was fresh and cool and clean, and the jungle was lush from recent rains, and now and then Halperin saw a mysterious little town half-buried in the heavy greenery: dogs barked, naked children ran out and waved, leathery old Nahua folk peered gravely at hi
m and called incomprehensible greetings. Once he heard a tremendous thump against his undercarriage and was sure he had ripped out his oil pan on a rock, but when he peered below everything seemed to be intact. Two kilometers later, he veered into a giant rut and thought he had cracked an axle, but he had not. He hunched down over the wheel, aching, tense, and imagined that splendid bat mask, or its twin, spotlighted against a stark white wall in his study. Would Guzmán be able to get him one? Probably. His talk of the difficulties involved was just a way of hyping the price. But even if Halperin came back empty-handed from San Simón, it would be reward enough simply to have witnessed the dance, that bizarre, alien rite of a lost pagan civilization. There was more to collecting Mexican masks, he knew, than simply acquiring objects for the wall.

  In late afternoon he entered the town just as he was beginning to think he had misread Guzmán’s map. To his surprise it was quite imposing, the largest village he had seen since turning off the main highway—a great bare plaza ringed by stone benches, marketplace on one side, vast heavy-walled old church on the other, giant gnarled trees, chickens, dogs, children about everywhere, and houses of crumbling adobe spreading up the slope of a gray flat-faced mountain to the right and down into the dense darkness of a barranca thick with ferns and elephant-ears to the left. For the last hundred meters into town an impenetrable living palisade of cactus lined the road on both sides, unbranched spiny green columns that had been planted one flush against the next. Bougainvillea in many shades of red and purple and orange cascaded like gaudy draperies over walls and rooftops.

  Halperin saw a few old Volkswagens and an ancient ramshackle bus parked on the far side of the plaza and pulled his car up beside them. Everyone stared at him as he got out. Well, why not? He was big news here, maybe the first stranger in six months. But the pressure of those scores of dark amphibian eyes unnerved him. These people were all Indians, Nahuas, untouched in any important way not only by the twentieth century but by the nineteenth, the eighteenth, all the centuries back to Moctezuma. They had nice Christian names like Santiago and Francisco and Jesús, and they went obligingly to the iglesia for mass whenever they thought they should, and they knew about cars and transistor radios and Coca-Cola. But all that was on the surface. They were still Aztecs at heart, Halperin thought. Time-travelers. As alien as Martians.