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

by Robert Silverberg

  Since the anthology was now complete except for my story and Harlan’s, and Harlan had already sketched out the one he was planning to write, the difficult job of writing the final piece, the one that summed everything up, fell to me. But I did have the advantage, denied to all of the other contributors, of being able to read the whole manuscript (except for the unwritten Ellison story) before I started. And so “Waiting for the Earthquake,” which I wrote with relatively little difficulty in February, 1980, became an unusual technical stunt in which I made at least one reference to a scene or event from each of the other stories, regardless of the inconsistencies that had developed among those stories. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed how careful I had been to touch every base.

  The contributors to Medea were permitted to publish their stories elsewhere before the appearance of the anthology. I sold mine to Robert Sheckley of Omni. It was used, not in the magazine itself, but in a companion publication called The Best of Omni Science Fiction, in 1981.

  Harlan, meanwhile, was continuing to have problems with his Medea story. He had a title for it and most of a plot, but he was as thoroughly unable to write it as I had been with mine, years before. In the end he came up from Los Angeles to my home near San Francisco and I held him prisoner here for several days, not letting him out of his room except for meals, while he wrote and revised his story, “With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole.” After a gestation period of something like nine years, Medea was at last finished. The book, which is one of the greatest of all science-fiction anthologies, finally appeared in 1985.

  ——————

  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?”

  “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 if 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 sarabands 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! The earthquake’s been canceled!

  He savored the fantasy. And then he let go of it and allowed its bright glow to fade.

  He said to the fux, “There are 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? 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, was still a world of sudden perils. The unconquered places had gone unconquered for good reason. 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 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 beginning 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 tunneled 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 two 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 double-flare 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, 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 appear 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 softheadedness 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 Medea’s neighboring moons Jason and Theseus and Orpheus 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 seventy-one hundred sixty 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 it 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 think I don’t 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,” Dinoov interjected.

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

  “Only in years. Our lives move faster than yours do, 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.”

  “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 whiptrees and dangletwines and flamestripes and the rest, and he no longer was able to check their growth. For some minutes he clawed at the sticky stoloniferous killers, baleful orange against the tawny sand, that suddenly were sprouting near 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.”

  Morrissey spent the next day, Darkday, quietly—planning his trip, packing, reading, wandering along the beachfront in the twilight’s red glimmer. There was no sign all day of Dinoov or indeed of any of the local fuxes, although in midafternoon a hundred or more balloons drifted past 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.