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

by Robert Silverberg

  She was no longer so coy about her life outside their relationship. Maitland knew now that her husband was an artist from Chicago, not very successful, a little envious of her career. She showed him some of his work, unremarkable abstract-expressionist stuff. Maitland was jealous of the fact that this man—Tim, his name was—shared her bed and enjoyed her proximity, but he realized that he had no jealousy of the marriage itself. It was all right that she was married. Maitland had no wish to live with her. He wanted to go on living with Jan, to play tennis with her and go to restaurants with her and even to make love with her; what he wanted from Laurel was just what he was getting from her, that cool amused intelligent voice in his mind, and now and then the strange ecstasy that her playful spirit was able to kindle in his loins across such great distances. That much was true. Yet also he wanted to be her lover in the old blatant obvious coarse messy way, at least once, once at least. Because he knew it was a perilous subject, he stayed away from it as long as he could, but at last it broke into the open one night in Seattle, late, after the snake had returned to its jar and the lapping waves had retreated and he lay sweaty and alone in his hotel-room bed.

  —When are we finally going to meet?

  —Please, Chris.

  —I think it’s time to discuss it. You told me a couple of times, early on, that I must never come to Phoenix. Okay. But couldn’t we get together somewhere else? Tucson, San Diego, the Grand Canyon?

  —It isn’t the place that matters.

  —What is it, then?

  —Being close. Being too close.

  —I don’t understand. We’re so close already!

  —I mean physically close, Not emotionally, not even sexually. I just mean that if we came within close range of each other we’d do bad things to each other.

  —That’s crazy, Laurel.

  —Have you ever been close to another telepath? As close as ten feet, say?

  —I don’t think so.

  —You’d know it if you had. When you and I talk, long distance, it’s just talking on the phone, right, plus pictures? We tell each other only what we it to tell each other, and nothing else gets through. It’s not like that close up.

  —Oh?

  —There’s a kind of radiation, an aura. We broadcast all sorts of stuff automatically. All that foul stinking nasty cesspool stuff that’s at the bottom of everybody’s mind, the crazy prehistoric garbage that’s in us. It comes swarming out like a shriek.

  —How do you know that?

  —I’ve experienced it.

  —Oh. Boston, years ago?

  —Yes. Yes. I told you, I did this once before.

  —But he was crazy, you said.

  —In a way. But the craziness isn’t what brought the other stuff up. I felt it another time, too, and she wasn’t crazy. Its unavoidable.

  —I want to see you.

  —Don’t you think I want to see you, too, Chris? You think I think snake and ocean’s really good enough? But we can’t risk it. Suppose we met, and the garbage got out, and we hated each other ever afterward?

  —We could control it.

  —Maybe. Maybe not.

  —Or else we could make allowances for it. Bring ourselves to understand that this stuff, whatever it is that you say is there, is normal, just the gunk of the mind, nothing personal, nothing that we ought to take seriously.

  —I’m scared. Let’s not try.

  He let the issue drop. When it came up again, four months later, it was Laurel who revived it. She had been thinking about his idea of controlling the sinister emanation, throttling it back, shielding one another. Possibly it could be done. The temptation to meet him in the flesh, she said, was overwhelming. Perhaps they could get together and suppress all telepathic contact, meet just like ordinary humans having a little illicit rendezvous, keep their minds rigidly walled off, and that way at last consummate the intimacy that had joined their to souls for a year and a half.

  —I’d love to, Laurel.

  —But promise me this. Swear it to me. When we do get together, if we can’t hold back the bad stuff, if we feel it coming out, that we go away from each other instantly. That we don’t negotiate, we don’t try to work it out, we don’t look for angles—we just split, fast, if either of us says we have to. Swear?

  —I swear.

  He flew to Denver and spent a fidgety hour and a half having cocktails in the lounge at the Brown Palace. Her flight from Phoenix was supposed to have landed only half an hour after his, and he wondered if she had backed out at the last minute. He got up to call the airport when he saw her come in, unmistakably her, taller than he expected, a big handsome woman in black jeans and a sheepskin wrap. There were flecks of melting snow in her hair.

  He sensed an aura.

  It wasn’t loathsome, it wasn’t hideous, but it was there, a kind of dull whining grinding thing as of improperly oiled machinery in use three blocks away. Even as he detected it, he felt it diminish until it was barely perceptible. He struggled to rein in whatever output he might be giving off himself.

  She saw him and came straight toward him, smiling nervously, cheeks rigid, eyes worried.

  “Chris.”

  He took her hand in his. “You’re cold, Laurel.”

  “It’s snowing. That’s why I’m late. I haven’t seen snow in years.”

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “No. Yes. Yes, please. Scotch on the rocks.”

  “Are you picking up anything bad?”

  “No,” she said. “Not really. There was just a little twinge, when I walked in—a kind of squeak in my mind.”

  “I felt it, too. But then it faded.”

  “I’m fighting to keep it damped down. I want this to work.”

  “So do I. We mustn’t use the power at all today.”

  “We don’t need to. The old snake can have the day off. Are you scared?”

  “A little.”

  “Me, too.” She gulped her drink. “Oh, Chris.”

  “Is it hard work, keeping the power damped down?”

  “Yes. It really is.”

  “For me, too. But we have to.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Do you have a room yet?”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s go upstairs, then.”

  Like any unfaithful husband having his first rendezvous with a new lover he walked stiffly and somberly through the lobby, convinced that everyone was staring at them. That was ridiculous, he knew. They were more truly married, in their way, than anybody else in Denver. But yet—but yet—

  They were silent in the elevator. As they approached their floor the aura of her burst forth again, briefly, a fast sour vibration in his bones, and then it was gone altogether, shut off as though by a switch. He worked at holding his down, too. She smiled at him. He winked. “To the left,” he said. They went into the room. Heavy snowflakes splashed against the window; the wide bed was turned down. She was trembling. “Come on,” he said. “I love you. You know that. Everything’s all right.”

  They kissed and undressed. Her body was lean, athletic, with small high breasts, a flat belly, a dark appendectomy scar. He drew her toward the bed. It seemed strange, almost perverse, to be doing things in this antiquated fleshly way, no snake, no ocean, no meeting of minds. He was afraid for a moment that in the excitement of their coupling they would lose control of their mental barriers and let their inner selves come flooding out, fierce, intense, a contact too powerful to handle at such short range. But there was no loss of control. He kept the power locked behind the walls of his skull; she did the same; there were only the tiniest leakages of current. But there was no excitement, either, in their lovemaking.

  He ran his hands over her breasts and trapped her nipples between his fingers, and gently parted her thighs with his knee, and pressed himself against her as though he had not been with a woman in a year, but the excitement seemed to be all in his head, not in his nerve endings. Even when she ran her lips down his chest and belly and teased him
for a moment and then took him fiercely and suddenly in her mouth, it was the idea that they were finally doing this, rather than what they were actually doing, that resonated with him. They sighed a little and moaned a little and finally he slipped into her, admiring the tightness of her and the rhythms of her hips and all that, but nevertheless it was as though this had happened between them a thousand times before: he moved, she moved, they did all the standard things and traveled along to the standard result. Not enough was real between them, that was the trouble. He knew her better than he had ever known anyone, and yet in some ways he knew her not at all, and that was what had spoiled things. That, and holding so much in check. He wished he could look into her mind now. But that was forbidden, and probably unwise, too; he guessed that she was annoyed with him for having insisted on this foolish and foredoomed meeting, that she held him responsible for having spoiled things between them, and he did not want to see those thoughts in her mind.

  When it was over they whispered to each other and stroked each other and gave each other little nibbling kisses, and he pretended it had been marvelous, but his real impulse was to pull away and light a cigarette and stare out the window at the snow, and he wasn’t even a smoker. It was simply the way he felt. It bad been only a mechanical thing, only a hotel-room screw, not remotely anything like snake and ocean: a joining of flesh of the sort that a pair of rabbits might have accomplished, or a pair of apes, without content, without fire, without joy. He and she knew an ever so much better way of doing it.

  He took care to hide his disappointment.

  “I’m so glad I came here, Chris,” she said, smiling, kissing him, taking care to hide her disappointment, too, he guessed. He knew that if he entered her mind he would find it bleak and ashen. But of course he could not do that. “I wish I could stay the night,” she said. “My plane’s at nine. We could have dinner downstairs, though.”

  “Is it a terrible strain, keeping the power back?”

  “It isn’t easy.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “I’m so glad we did this, Chris.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. Yes. Of course.”

  They had an early dinner. The snow had stopped by the time he saw her to her cab. So: you fly up to Denver for a couple of hours of lust and steak, you fly back home, and that’s that. He had a brandy is the lounge and went to his room. For a long while he lay staring at the ceiling, sure that she would come to him with the ocean, and make amends for the unsatisfactory thing they had done that afternoon. She did not. He wondered if he ought to send her the snake as she dozed on her plane, and did not want to. He felt timid about any sort of contact with her now. It had all been a terrible mistake, he knew. Not because of that emanation from the dirty depths of the psyche that she had so feared, but only because it had been so anticlimactic, so meaningless. He waited for a sending from her, some bright little flash out of Arizona. She must surely be home now. Nothing came. He went on waiting, not daring to reach toward her, and finally he fell asleep.

  Jan said nothing to him about the Denver trip. He was moody and strange, but she let him be. When the silence out of Phoenix continued into the next day and the next he grew even more grim, and skulked about wrapped in black isolation. Gradually it occurred to him that he was not going to hear from Laurel again, that they had broken something in that hotel room in Denver and that it was irreparable, and, oddly, the knowledge of that gave him some ease: if he did not expect to hear from her, he did not have to lament her silence. A week, two, three, and nothing. So it was over. That hollow little grunting hour had ruined it.

  Somehow he picked up the rhythms of his life: work, home, wife, kids, friends, tennis, dinner. He did an extensive analysis of southwestern electric utilities that brought him a commendation from on high, and he felt only a mild twinge of anguish while doing his discussion of the prospects for Arizona Public Service as reflected in the municipal growth of the city of Phoenix. He missed the little tickle in his mind immensely, but he was encapsulating it, containing it, and after a fashion he was healing.

  One day a month and a half later he found himself idly scanning the mindnoise band again, as he had not done for a long while, just to see who else was out there. He picked up the loony babble out of Fort Lauderdale and the epicene static from Manitoba, and then he encountered someone new, a bright dear signal as intense as Laurel’s, and for a dazzled instant a sudden fantasy of a new relationship blossomed in him, but then he heard the nonsense syllables, the slow, firm, strong-willed stream of gibberish. There were no replacements for Laurel.

  In Chicago, where he had been sent to do a survey of natural-gas companies, he began talking to a youngish woman at the Art Institute, and by easy stages some chatter about Monet and Sisley turned into a dinner invitation and a night in his hotel room. That was all right. Certainly it was simpler and easier and less depressing than Denver. But it was a bore, it was empty and foolish, and he regretted it deeply by breakfast time, even while he was taking down her number and promising to call the next time he was in the Midwest. Maitland saw the post-Laurel pattern of his life closing about him now: the Christmas bonus, the trip to Hawaii with Jan, braces for the kids, the new house five years from now, the occasional quickie romance in far-off hotel rooms. That was all right. That was the original bargain he had made, long ago, entering adult life: not much ecstasy, not much grief.

  On the long flight home that day he thought without rancor or distress about his year and a half with Laurel, and told himself that the important thing was not that it had ended but that it had happened at all. He felt peaceful and accepting, and was almost tempted to reach out toward Laurel and thank her for her love, and wish her well. But he was afraid—afraid that if he touched her mind in any way she would pull away, timid, fearful of contact in the wake of that inexplicably sundering day in Denver. She was close by now, he knew, for the captain had just told them that they were passing over the Grand Canyon. Maitland did not lean to the window, as everyone else was doing, to look down. He sat back, eyes closed, tired, calm.

  And felt warmth, heard the lapping of surf, saw in the center of his mind the vast ocean in which Laurel had so many times engulfed him. Really? Was it happening? He let himself slide into it. A little flustered, he hid himself behind a facade of newspapers, the Tribune, the Wall Street Journal. His face grew flushed. His breathing became rougher. Ah. Ah. It was happening, yes, she had reached to him, she had made the gesture at last. Tears of gratitude and relief came to him, and he let her sweep him off to a sharp and pounding fulfillment five miles above Arizona.

  —Hello, Chris.

  —Laurel.

  —Did you mind? I felt you near me, and I couldn’t hold back any more. I know you don’t want to hear from me, but—

  —What gave you that idea?

  —I thought—it seemed to me—

  —No. I thought you were the one who wanted to break it up.

  —I? I missed you so much, Chris. But I was sure you’d pull away.

  —So was I, about you.

  —Silly.

  —Laurel. Laurel. I’m so glad you took the chance, then.

  —So am I.

  —Let me have the snake, Chris.

  —Yes. Yes,

  He stepped out into the tawny sun-baked hills with the heavy porcelain jar and tipped it, and let the snake glide toward her. It was all right after all. They had made mistakes, but they were the mistakes of too much love, and they had survived them. It was going to be all right: snake and ocean, ocean and snake, now and always.

  The Changeling

  Mysterious Mexico, again. It is a country I have visited many times: its mixture of tropical sunlight and eerie pre-Columbian darkness is endlessly fascinating to me. I went there in March of 1982 to wander around amidst the ancient stone monuments of Tenochtitlan and Oaxaca and to revel in the multitude of weird succulent plants. Soon after my return, George Scithers of Amazing Stories asked me for a new short story, and wh
en I told him what such slick magazines as Playboy and Omni were currently paying me, he unhesitatingly offered me a price matching theirs. (It was a heady time for some of us, then!) A few days later the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whom I had known very well, died. With my head full of the strangeness of Mexico, I sat down and wrote a story which, while not at all done in the Philip K. Dick style, played with reality somewhat in the fashion that Dick had made his specialty, and I dedicated it to him. Scithers ran it in his November, 1982 issue.

  ——————

  In Memoriam: PKD

  Just as the startling facade of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl came into view on the far side of the small pyramid, Hilgard felt a sudden touch of vertigo and swayed for a moment, as though a little earthquake had rippled through the Teotihuacan archeological zone. He leaned against a railing until the worst of the queasiness and confusion had passed. The heat? The altitude? Last night’s fiery dinner exacting its price? Down here in Mexico a tourist learned to expect that some kind of internal upset could strike at any time.

  But the discomfort vanished as quickly as it had come, and Hilgard looked up in awe, at the great stone staircase of the temple. The jutting heads of the feathered serpents burst like the snouts of dinosaurs from the massive blocks. Traces of the original frescoes, perhaps fifteen hundred years old, glinted here and there. Hilgard took eight or nine photos. But he was too hot and dusty and weary to explore the wondrous building with any real vigor, and he still felt a little shaky from that dizzy spell a moment ago. The pressure of time was on him also: he had promised to meet his driver at two o’clock at the main parking lot for the return trip to Mexico City. It was nearly two now, and the parking area was at least a mile to the north, along the searing, shadeless thoroughfare known as the Avenue of the Dead. He wished now that he had started his tour here at the awesome Quetzalcoatl Temple instead of consuming his morning’s energy scrambling around on the two huge pyramids at the other end.

  Too late to do anything about that. Hilgard trudged quickly toward the parking lot, pausing only to buy a tepid beer from a vendor midway along the path. By quarter past two he was in the lot, sweaty and puffing. There was no sign of his driver and the battered black cab. Still at lunch, probably, Hilgard thought, relieved at not having to feel guilty about his own tardiness but annoyed by yet another example of Mexican punctuality. Well, now he had time to get a few more shots of the Pyramid of the Sun while he waited, and maybe—