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

by Robert Silverberg

  Improved lobsters? Evolved lobsters? Superlobsters of the future?

  —When am I?

  Into his dizzied broodings came the quiet disembodied internal voice of not-McCulloch, his companion:

  —Is your displacement, then, one of time rather than space?

  —I don’t know. Probably both. I’m a land creature.

  —That has no meaning.

  —I don’t live in the ocean. I breathe air.

  From the other consciousness came an expression of deep astonishment tinged with skepticism.

  —Truly? That is very hard to believe. When you are in your own body you breathe no water at all?

  —None. Not for long, or I would die.

  —But there is so little land! And no creatures live upon it. Some make short visits there. But nothing can dwell there very long. So it has always been. And so will it be, until the time of the Molting of the World.

  McCulloch considered that. Once again he found himself doubting that he was still on Earth. A world of water? Well, that could fit into his hypothesis of having journeyed forward in time, though it seemed to add a layer of implausibility upon implausibility. How many millions of years, he wondered, would it take for nearly all the Earth to have become covered with water? And he answered himself: In about as many as it would take to evolve a species of intelligent invertebrates.

  Suddenly, terribly, it all fit together. Things crystallized and clarified in his mind, and he found access to another segment of his injured and redistributed memory; and he began to comprehend what had befallen him, or, rather, what he had willingly allowed himself to undergo. With that comprehension came a swift stinging sense of total displacement and utter loss, as though he were drowning and desperately tugging at strands of seaweed in a futile attempt to pull himself back to the surface. All that was real to him, all that he was part of, everything that made sense—gone, gone, perhaps irretrievably gone, buried under the weight of uncountable millennia, vanished, drowned, forgotten, reduced to mere geology. It was unthinkable, it was unacceptable, it was impossible, and as the truth of it bore in on him he found himself choking on the frightful vastness of time past.

  But that bleak sensation lasted only a moment and was gone. In its place came excitement, delight, confusion, and a feverish throbbing curiosity about this place he had entered. He was here. That miraculous thing that they had strived so fiercely to achieve had been achieved—rather too well, perhaps, but it had been achieved, and he was launched on the greatest adventure he would ever have, that anyone would ever have. This was not the moment for submitting to grief and confusion. Out of that world, lost and all but forgotten to him, came a scrap of verse that gleamed and blazed in his soul: Only through time time is conquered.

  McCulloch reached toward the mind that was so close to his within this strange body.

  —When will it be safe for us to leave this cave? he asked.

  —It is safe any time, now. Do you wish to go outside?

  —Yes. Please.

  The creature stirred, flexed its front claws, slapped its flat tail against the floor of the cave, and in a slow ungraceful way began to clamber through the narrow opening, pausing more than once to search the waters outside for lurking enemies. McCulloch felt a quick hot burst of terror, as though he were about to enter some important meeting and had discovered too late that he was naked. Was the shell truly ready? Was he safely armored against the unknown foes outside, or would they fall upon him and tear him apart like furious shrikes? But his host did not seem to share those fears. It went plodding on and out, and in a moment more it emerged on an algae-encrusted tongue of the reef wall, a short distance below the two anemones. From each of those twin masses of rippling flesh came the same sullen pouting hungry murmurs: “Ah, come closer, why don’t you come closer?”

  “Another time,” said the lobster, sounding almost playful, and turned away from them.

  McCulloch looked outward over the landscape. Earlier, in the turmoil of his bewildering arrival and the pain and chaos of the molting prodrome, he had not had time to assemble any clear and coherent view of it. But now—despite the handicap of seeing everything with the alien perspective of the lobster’s many-faceted eyes—he was able to put together an image of the terrain.

  His view was a shortened one, because the sky was like a dark lid, through which came only enough light to create a cone-shaped arena spreading just a little way. Behind him was the face of the huge cliff, occupied by plant and animal life over virtually every square inch, and stretching upward until its higher reaches were lost in the dimness far overhead. Just a short way down from the ledge where he rested was the ocean floor, a broad expanse of gentle, undulating white sand streaked here and there with long widening gores of some darker material. Here and there bottom-growing plants arose in elegant billowy clumps, and McCulloch spotted occasional creatures moving among them over the sand that were much like lobsters and crabs, though with some differences. He saw also some starfish and snails and sea urchins that did not look at all unfamiliar. At higher levels he could make out a few swimming creatures: a couple of the squidlike animals—they were hulking-looking ropy-armed things, and he disliked them instinctively—and what seemed to be large jellyfish. But something was missing, and after a moment McCulloch realized what it was: fishes. There was a rich population of invertebrate life wherever he looked, but no fishes as far as he could see.

  Not that he could see very far. The darkness clamped down like a curtain perhaps two or three hundred yards away. But even so, it was odd that not one fish had entered his field of vision in all this time. He wished he knew more about marine biology. Were there zones on Earth where no sea animals more complex than lobsters and crabs existed? Perhaps, but he doubted it.

  Two disturbing new hypotheses blossomed in his mind. One was that he had landed in some remote future era where nothing out of his own time survived except low-phylum sea creatures. The other was that he had not traveled to the future at all, but had arrived by mischance in some primordial geological epoch in which vertebrate life had not yet evolved. That seemed unlikely to him, though. This place did not have a prehistoric feel to him. He saw no trilobites; surely there ought to be trilobites everywhere about, and not these oversize lobsters, which he did not remember at all from his childhood visits to the natural history museum’s prehistory displays.

  But if this was truly the future—and the future belonged to the lobsters and squids—

  That was hard to accept. Only invertebrates? What could invertebrates accomplish, what kind of civilization could lobsters build, with their hard unsupple bodies and great clumsy claws? Concepts, half remembered or less than that, rushed through his mind: the Taj Mahal, the Gutenberg Bible, the Sistine Chapel, the Madonna of the Rocks, the great window at Chartres. Could lobsters create those? Could squids? What a poor place this world must be, McCulloch thought sadly, how gray, how narrow, how tightly bounded by the ocean above and the endless sandy floor.

  —Tell me, he said to his host. Are there any fishes in this sea?

  The response was what he was coming to recognize as a sigh.

  —Fishes? That is another word without meaning.

  —A form of marine life, with an internal bony structure—

  —With its shell inside?

  —That’s one way of putting it, said McCulloch.

  —There are no such creatures. Such creatures have never existed. There is no room for the shell within the soft parts of the body. I can barely comprehend such an arrangement: surely there is no need for it!

  —It can be useful, I assure you. In the former world it was quite common.

  —The world of human beings?

  —Yes. My world, McCulloch said.

  —Anything might have been possible in a former world, human McCulloch. Perhaps indeed before the world’s last Molting shells were worn inside. And perhaps after the next one they will be worn there again. But in the world I know, human McCulloch, it is not
the practice.

  —Ah, McCulloch said. Then I am even farther from home than I thought.

  —Yes, said his host. I think you are very far from home indeed. Does that cause you sorrow?

  —Among other things.

  —If it causes you sorrow, I grieve for your grief, because we are companions now.

  —You are very kind, said McCulloch to his host.

  The lobster asked McCulloch if he was ready to begin their journey; and when McCulloch indicated that he was, his host serenely kicked itself free of the ledge with a single powerful stroke of its tail. For an instant it hung suspended; then it glided toward the sandy bottom as gracefully as though it were floating through air. When it landed, it was with all its many legs poised delicately en pointe, and it stood that way, motionless, a long moment.

  Then it suddenly set out with great haste over the ocean floor, running so light-footedly that it scarcely raised a puff of sand wherever it touched down. More than once it ran right across some bottom-grubbing creature, some slug or scallop, without appearing to disturb it at all. McCulloch thought the lobster was capering in sheer exuberance, after its long internment in the cave; but some growing sense of awareness of his companion’s mind told him after a time that this was no casual frolic, that the lobster was not in fact dancing but fleeing.

  —Is there an enemy? McCulloch asked.

  —Yes. Above.

  The lobster’s antennae stabbed upward at a sharp angle, and McCulloch, seeing through the other’s eyes, perceived now a large looming cylindrical shape swimming in slow circles near the upper border of their range of vision. It might have been a shark, or even a whale. McCulloch felt deceived and betrayed; for the lobster had told this was an invertebrate world, and surely that creature above him—

  —No, said the lobster, without slowing its manic sprint. That animal has no shell of the sort you described within its body. It is only a bag of flesh. But it is very dangerous.

  —How will we escape it?

  —We will not escape it.

  The lobster sounded calm, but whether it was the calm of fatalism or mere expressionlessness, McCulloch could not say: the lobster had been calm even in the first moments of McCulloch’s arrival in its mind, which must surely have been alarming and even terrifying to it.

  It had begun to move now in ever-widening circles. This seemed not so much an evasive tactic as a ritualistic one, now, a dance indeed. A farewell to life? The swimming creature had descended until it was only a few lobster lengths above them, and McCulloch had a clear view of it. No, not a fish or a shark or any type of vertebrate at all, he realized, but an animal of a kind wholly unfamiliar to him, a kind of enormous wormlike thing whose meaty yellow body was reinforced externally by some sort of chitinous struts running its entire length. Fleshy vanelike fins rippled along its sides, but their purpose seemed to be more one of guidance than propulsion, for it appeared to move by guzzling in great quantities of water and expelling them through an anal siphon. Its mouth was vast, with a row of dim little green eyes ringing the scarlet lips. When the creature yawned, it revealed itself to be toothless, but capable of swallowing the lobster easily at a gulp.

  Looking upward into that yawning mouth, McCulloch had a sudden image of himself elsewhere, spread-eagled under an inverted pyramid of shining machinery as the countdown reached its final moments, as the technicians made ready to—

  —to hurl him—

  —to hurl him forward in time—

  Yes. An experiment. Definitely an experiment. He could remember it now. Bleier, Caldwell, Rodrigues, Mortenson. And all the others. Gathered around him, faces tight, forced smiles. The lights. The colors. The bizarre coils of equipment. And the volunteer. The volunteer. First human subject to be sent forward in time. The various rabbits and mice of the previous experiments, though they had apparently survived the round trip unharmed, had not been capable of delivering much of a report on their adventures. “I’m smarter than any rabbit,” McCulloch had said. “Send me. I’ll tell you what it’s like up there.” The volunteer. All that was coming back to him in great swatches now, as he crouched here within the mind of something much like a lobster, waiting for a vast yawning predator to pounce. The project, the controversies, his coworkers, the debate over risking a human mind under the machine, the drawing of lots. McCulloch had not been the only volunteer. He was just the lucky one. “Here you go, Jim-boy. A hundred years down the time line.”

  Or fifty, or eighty, or a hundred and twenty. They didn’t have really precise trajectory control. They thought he might go as much as a hundred twenty years. But beyond much doubt they had overshot by a few hundred million. Was that within the permissible parameters of error?

  He wondered what would happen to him if his host here were to perish. Would he die also? Would he find himself instantly transferred to some other being of this epoch? Or would he simply be hurled back instead to his own time? He was not ready to go back. He had just begun to observe, to understand, to explore—

  McCulloch’s host had halted its running now, and stood quite still in what was obviously a defensive mode, body cocked and upreared, claws extended, with the huge crusher claw erect and the long narrow cutting claw opening and closing in a steady rhythm. It was a threatening pose, but the swimming thing did not appear to be greatly troubled by it. Did the lobster mean to let itself be swallowed, and then to carve an exit for itself with those awesome weapons, before the alimentary juices could go to work on its armor?

  “You choose your prey foolishly,” said McCulloch’s host to its enemy.

  The swimming creature made a reply that was unintelligible to McCulloch: vague blurry words, the clotted outspew of a feeble intelligence. It continued its unhurried downward spiral.

  “You are warned,” said the lobster. “You are not selecting your victim wisely.”

  Again came a muddled response, sluggish and incoherent, the speech of an entity for whom verbal communication was a heavy, all-but-impossible effort.

  Its enormous mouth gaped. Its fins rippled fiercely as it siphoned itself downward the last few yards to engulf the lobster. McCulloch prepared himself for transition to some new and even more unimaginable state when his host met its death. But suddenly the ocean floor was swarming with lobsters. They must have been arriving from all sides—summoned by his host’s frantic dance, McCulloch wondered?—while McCulloch, intent on the descent of the swimmer, had not noticed. Ten, twenty, possibly fifty of them arrayed themselves now beside McCulloch’s host, and as the swimmer, tail on high, mouth wide, lowered itself like some gigantic suction hose toward them, the lobsters coolly and implacably seized its lips in their claws. Caught and helpless, it began at once to thrash, and from the pores through which it spoke came bleating incoherent cries of dismay and torment.

  There was no mercy for it. It had been warned. It dangled tail upward while the pack of lobsters methodically devoured it from below, pausing occasionally to strip away and discard the rigid rods of chitin that formed its superstructure. Swiftly they reduced it to a faintly visible cloud of shreds oscillating in the water, and then small scavenging creatures came to fall upon those, and there was nothing at all left but the scattered rods of chitin on the sand.

  The entire episode had taken only a few moments: the coming of the predator, the dance of McCulloch’s host, the arrival of the other lobsters, the destruction of the enemy. Now the lobsters were gathered in a sort of convocation about McCulloch’s host, wordlessly manifesting a commonality of spirit, a warmth of fellowship after feasting, that seemed quite comprehensible to McCulloch. For a short while they had been uninhibited savage carnivores consuming convenient meat; now once again they were courteous, refined, cultured—Japanese gentlemen, Oxford dons, gentle Benedictine monks.

  McCulloch studied them closely. They were definitely more like lobsters than like any other creature he had ever seen, very much like lobsters, and yet there were differences. They were larger. How much larger, he could not tell,
for he had no real way of judging distance and size in this undersea world; but he supposed they must be at least three feet long, and he doubted that lobsters of his time, even the biggest, were anything like that in length. Their bodies were wider than those of lobsters, and their heads were larger. The two largest claws looked like those of the lobsters he remembered, but the ones just behind them seemed more elaborate, as if adapted for more delicate procedures than mere rending of food and stuffing it into the mouth. There was an odd little hump, almost a dome, midway down the lobster’s back—the center of the expanded nervous system, perhaps.

  The lobsters clustered solemnly about McCulloch’s host, and each lightly tapped its claws against those of the adjoining lobster in a sort of handshake, a process that seemed to take quite some time. McCulloch became aware also that a conversation was under way. What they were talking about, he realized, was him.

  “It is not painful to have a McCulloch within one,” his host was explaining. “It came upon me at molting time, and that gave me a moment of difficulty, molting being what it is. But it was only a moment. After that my only concern was for the McCulloch’s comfort.”

  “And it is comfortable now?”

  “It is becoming more comfortable.”

  “When will you show it to us?”

  “Ah, that cannot be done. It has no real existence, and therefore I cannot bring it forth.”

  “What is it, then? A wanderer? A revenant?”

  “A revenant, yes. So I think. And a wanderer. It says it is a human being.”

  “And what is that? Is a human being a kind of McCulloch?”

  “I think a McCulloch is a kind of human being.”

  “Which is a revenant.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “This is an Omen!”

  “Where is its world?”

  “Its world is lost to it.”

  “Yes, definitely an Omen.”

  “It lived on dry land.”

  “It breathed air.”

  “It wore its shell within its body.”