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

by Robert Silverberg

  They both looked beautiful—fine clothes, pale skins, fluffy blonde hair. He loved the British sound of their serene voices. Helena’s gauzy blouse revealed fine collarbones, a delicate bosom. Had she been with a man, he wondered, since the unfortunate hunting mishap? Mother and daughter were heavy drinkers, and Hornkastle matched them two for one, so that things rapidly grew blurred, and he was only dimly aware of his food; he hoped he was being brilliant, suspected he was merely being boorish, and hardly cared. They were tolerating him.

  “And your mushroom research?” the mother asked. “How has that been going?”

  Painful recollection nearly sobered him. “I’ve botched it,” he said, and as they leaned toward him, eagerly, sympathetically, he poured out his miserable shabby tale of the illicit visit, the conversation with the Arab, the pathetic, inglorious retreat. “I see now that what I was looking for here,” he said, “was not just a nice little bit of folk-anthropopharmacology to write up for the Journal, but an actual mystic experience, a real communion, and as often happens when you want something too badly, you handle things clumsily, you reach too soon, you blunder—” He paused. “And now it will never happen.”

  “No,” said Claudia. “You will have what you seek.”

  He half expected her to pull a glowing red Amanita mushroom from her tiny purse.

  “Impossible now,” he said mournfully.

  “No. This is the city of divine grace, of redemption. You will have a second chance at whatever you hope to attain. I am quite sure of that.”

  He thought of Geula Ben-Horin saying, We live as though there are no second chances. But maybe for Israelis, living in a state of constant war, things were different. Geula had also said, Live in the hope of glorious redemption, and now Claudia had said the same thing. Perhaps. Perhaps. He gave the British woman a bland hopeful smile. But he was without hope.

  It was well past eleven by the time the last brandies were gone, and then, without any subtlety at all, Hornkastle asked Helena to spend the night with him, and she, smiling beatifically at her mother as though the barbaric American had just done the most wonderfully characteristic thing, as if he had performed one of his tribal dances for her, thanked him for the offer and pleasantly refused—no second chances there, not even a first one—and they left him to deal with the check.

  He sat in the restaurant until they told him it was closing. Somehow he managed to persuade his waiter to sell him a whole bottle of arrack from the bar stock, and he took it to his room, and through the night he methodically emptied it.

  By taxi the next morning he descended to the Old City, where a vast horde of pilgrims had gathered to reenact the Savior’s final thousand paces along the Via Dolorosa from the place of condemnation to the place of His interment. It looked like the crowd outside a college football game on Saturday afternoon. There were souvenir-sellers, mischievous boys, peddlers of snacks, police and soldiers, television cameramen—and also brown-robed friars, nuns of a dozen orders, priests, people costumed as Roman legionaries carrying spears, a queue of Japanese in clerical clothes with three cameras apiece.

  Hornkastle walked in a lurching, shambling way that evidently had an effect on people, for the mob parted before him wherever he went, and soon he was deep in the city’s tangled streets. Occasionally hands passed lightly over his body—pickpockets, no doubt, but that was unimportant. He saw Arabs with wide, tapering faces everywhere, bloodshot hyperthyroid eyes.

  A small boy tapped his knee and took him by the hand. Hornkastle allowed himself to be led, and found himself shortly at Yasin’s falafel stand. Hornkastle felt like cringing before the Arab, who surely knew—they all knew everything—of his numbskull journey to the village, of his half-crazed pleadings and bizarre flight. But there was no condemnation on Yasin’s face. He was grinning broadly, bowing, making Hornkastle welcome to the Holy Land, to Jerusalem, to the Via Dolorosa, to his own humble falafel stand on the morning of Christ’s Passion. Yasin handed Hornkastle a bulging sandwich.

  “I have no money,” Hornkastle muttered.

  The Arab beamed and shook his head. “My gift! Christ will rise!”

  His eyes found Hornkastle’s and lingered there a long while in what was almost a kind of communion itself. Hornkastle had no idea of what was being communicated, but it left him with a sense of warmth, of trust, of faith. Perhaps Claudia was right, that this is the city of divine grace, of second chances. He thanked Yasin and gobbled the sandwich as if he had not eaten in weeks.

  Let it begin soon, he prayed. At last: let it begin.

  The boy was still at his side. He had the village face too, triangular, but his eyes were gentler. Hornkastle realized that the boy had appointed himself his guide. All right. They ploughed together through the hordes, and eventually carne to the courtyard of the Omarieh School, where a sign proclaimed the First Station of the Cross. Pilate had sentenced Jesus here.

  The crowd was flowing up the Via Dolorosa here, slowly, ecstatically, praying in many languages, singing, chanting. Wherever Hornkastle looked he saw pilgrims tottering under immense wooden crosses, gasping and struggling and staggering. His head throbbed. He felt light-headed, giddy, weightless. He let himself be swept along, to the place where Jesus first had fallen—marked by a broken column—and then up the narrow, killingly steep Via Dolorosa through an Arab bazaar. Claudia and Helena, or two women just like them, were nearby, reading out of a guidebook. You were right, he said to them, not bothering to use words. This is the city of second chances.

  “The Fourth Station,” said the younger. “Where Jesus met his fainting mother. This church is Our Lady of the Spasm. The Fifth: Simon of Cyrene carried the Cross here. The Sixth, where Veronica wiped the face of Jesus.” It was a hard climb now. Hornkastle felt rivulets of sweat on his body.

  He was amazed how intense colors were becoming, how bright everything looked, how strange. The walls of the ancient houses seemed furry and were undulating slightly. The voices of those about him dwindled and swelled, dwindled and swelled, as though some amplifier were being turned up and down. Marching beside him was Ben-Horin, implausibly wearing a friar’s cassock. He leaned close and in his crisp, cutting way whispered into Hornkastle’s ear, “So you study the ceremony after all. Perhaps at last you learn a thing or two.” Out of a doorway came Geula Ben-Horin with some sort of Halloween costume on, stripes and splotches of green and scarlet and brilliant yellow. A succubus, perhaps. She winked at Hornkastle and shimmied her hips. “Put this in your thesis,” she murmured, throaty-voiced, a kosher Mae West. The two Israelis danced around him, melted and flowed, and were gone. Hornkastle pawed at his eyes. He would have fallen, for his legs were growing swollen and rubbery, but the press of the crowd was too tight.

  “This is the Seventh Station, where Jesus fell the second time,” said the cool clear voice behind him, and the tones echoed and reverberated until they were tolling like gongs. Just ahead, a dozen Arabs in dark blue suits were singing some ominous hymn as they hauled their cross along; he perceived the words of the song as individual gleaming blades that severed each instant from the next. “And here,” said the woman, “Jesus spoke to the compassionate daughters of Jerusalem. This is where He fell the third time. We are nearly at the end of the Via Dolorosa. The last five stations are within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

  Hornkastle felt the ancient paving stones squirming and sliding beneath his feet. He stumbled and would have pitched headlong, but the blue-suited Arabs caught him, laughing and cheering now, and passed him from hand to hand, tossed him about like a sack of old clothes, moved him uphill. He saw a woman in an upper window making the sign of the cross at him and throwing kisses. The hymn was unbearably loud.

  His back was pressed up against the Arabs’ enormous wooden cross. He saw, clearly as though he were at a movie, how a dozen men with the same triangular face and fierce swollen eyes were holding him in place and driving in the nails. It was not the nails that bothered him but the sound of the hammer blows, wh
ich rang in his head with clamorous frenzy. Hornkastle went limp and let it happen to him. A voice as mighty as that of Zeus cried, “Help him, he’s having a fit!” But Hornkastle simply smiled and shook his head. All was well. Push me, kick me, do whatever you want to me. I am yours. God is in me, he thought. God is everywhere, but especially He is within me. He could taste the fiery presence of the Godhead on his lips, his tongue, deep in his belly. They had the cross upright now. “Make room! Get him out of here before he’s trampled!” No. No. There are still five more Stations of the Cross, are there not? We have not reached the end of the Via Dolorosa. Hornkastle felt utterly tranquil. This is the true ekstasis, the parting of the soul from the body. He closed his eyes.

  When he returned to consciousness, he found himself lying in a hospital bed with a placid sweet-faced nun watching him. His arms were rigidly outstretched, his fingers were tightly coiled, the palms of his hands seemed to be on fire, and wave upon wave of nausea swept across his middle. From far away came the sound of wild bells ringing and the roar of mad voices crying a rhythmic slogan over and over.

  To the nun he said faintly, “What are they shouting? I can’t make it out.” She touched his blazing forehead lightly and replied, “Christos, anesti, Christos anesti, Christ is risen!”

  HOW THEY PASS THE TIME IN PELPEL

  Writing “A Thousand Paces on the Via Dolorosa” had been a pleasing experience, even if I didn’t succeed in getting it published in the magazine for which I had intended it. The story had a certain fantastic quality about it, and yet it was set right in our here-and-now twentieth-century reality, not on some remote planet or in some distant era. And, since Ted Klein, the editor of Twilight Zone, had received “Dolorosa” so enthusiastically, I set out soon afterward to write another one in the same vein for him.

  The idea behind it was given to me by the famous botanist and horticulturalist Paul Hutchison, who ran a wonderful nursery full of exotic plants in Southern California that I frequently visited. (My garden in California is full of the sort of weird science-fictional plants that Paul’s nursery specialized in.) Paul had also been a science-fiction reader for many decades, and we struck up a close friendship based on our two great shared interests. He had made a number of botanical expeditions to the particularly arid and forbidding coast of Chile, and on one of my visits he told me an anecdote—not a story—about something he had observed in a small town down there while on one of his cactus-collecting journeys.

  “You ought to make a story out of it,” he said.

  “I will,” I told him.

  And I did, in November of 1980, using his situation but adding characters, plot, and a resolution to the central anecdote he had provided, and making Paul himself the narrator. I was pleased with the result; so was Paul, who was fascinated by the way a professional writer had gone about manufacturing a complete story out of a slender anecdote; and Ted Klein of the Twilight Zone magazine sent me a nice check for it and ran it in his May, 1981 issue.

  ——————

  “You know,” Dan Britton said, pointing to a particularly sinister-looking ash gray cactus on the nursery bench, “all these plants have stories, and some of them are damned strange stories. I don’t mean botanical stories. I mean that all these peculiar plants that we grow here in California and that we take pretty much for granted had to be discovered by someone in some nasty corner of the world and collected and brought back and propagated and distributed. And in the process of all that, odd things have occasionally happened to the people who went out and found those plants.” He picked up the ash gray cactus. It was strange even as cacti go, not only because of its deathly color but because of the glossy black spines, heavy and menacing, running in rigidly aligned vertical rows down its sides. “Copiapoa cinerea,” said Britton, “from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. This one and most of the others you’ll see are descended from the parent plants that I collected thirty years ago in the Atacama, between Pelpel and Sabroso. I ought to tell you that story some time.”

  Britton is a compact, weatherbeaten-looking man who for the last dozen years or so has run a little nursery in Santa Barbara. That’s a quiet town and he leads a quiet life, selling fuchsias and pelargoniums and chrysanthemums to the local gardeners. But his own enthusiasms run to stranger stuff—proteas and tree aloes and cycads and such—and you can find those things on sale there, too.

  I don’t think running a nursery really interests him. Being around plants, yes: that’s what he’s done ever since he was a boy. When he was younger he had a considerable reputation as a field botanist, venturing into remote and unappetizing places and coming back with enough unknown plants to give himself a distinct if minor niche in the history of botanical exploration. That’s all behind him now, of course.

  Business was slow that winter day and he closed the nursery about half past four. I was staying overnight. We drove in silence past Mission Santa Barbara and into the foothills where he has his small house, a modest adobe surrounded by awesome specimens of botanical rarities. On the way in, I saw in his cactus garden a giant clump of the ash gray Copiapoa cinerea that somehow I had never noticed before. Britton nodded. “From the Quebrada Pelpel, east of the town. One of my original specimens, in fact. The Greek told me where to look for them.”

  “The Greek?”

  “It’s a long story,” Britton said.

  He opened a bottle of chilled chenin blanc and we settled on his patio to watch twilight descend on Santa Barbara. An odd winter light made the red-tiled rooftops look almost pink, and fog was beginning to encroach on the harbor. But the air was mild and the garden surrounding us was lush with blooming things, two enormous aloes sending up giant red spikes and a row of nine-foot-high proteas ablaze with implausibly intricate blossoms and a rare Mexican yucca unfolding a torrent of white flowers.

  We were halfway through the wine before either of us spoke. Then Britton said, “The Atacama Desert—it must be the driest place in the world. Three, four, five years at a time without any rain, and then maybe an inch, and then dry for two or three more years. But yet there are plants there. They live on the winter fog, the camanchaca, and nothing else.” He looked straight at me, and his eyes are intense and piercing, but he seemed to be seeing through me into a sear and horrid realm of dryness almost beyond my comprehension. “This happened in January or February of 1952, when I was collecting along the South American coast for the University, trying to make some sense out of the genus Copiapoa, which, as you may know, was at that time very poorly understood and in desperate need of revision—”

  My headquarters down there was in Pelpel, a parched little fishing village on the coast a couple of hundred kilometers south of Antofagasta. These days, for all I know, it’s a magnificent resort with a high-rise Hilton and a racetrack and six casinos, but I doubt it very much. Back then it was utterly dismal—a thousand people or so, living mainly in tin-roofed shacks. Dust blowing everywhere. The water supply was piped in for a few hours every other day. If you went inland a little way, up on the ridges back of town where there’s a little fog condensation, you found some cactus growing, but in the town itself nothing at all could grow. You can’t imagine how dreary and drab it was.

  The center of social life was a bleak scruffy plaza that was bordered by a squalid old hotel, and across the way from that a beer parlor and pool hall that was run by a Greek named Panagiotis. The Greek’s place had a loudspeaker that blared music into the plaza every evening, and the big event was the grand promenade: single women going around the plaza in one direction, single men in the other, and eventually some couples would form and go off together for the night, and the next night it would all start over.

  I was the only guest in the hotel, and from the way people stared at me when I arrived I suspect that I was the first guest in seven or eight years. The place was clean enough—an old German woman ran it, and she spent hours every day dusting and sweeping—but the beams were dry and shrunken, the plaster was cracking, the roof w
as a sounding board that rattled miserably every time the wind blew. My room was upstairs and I was delighted to find a shower next door—a shower of sorts, anyway, with an overhead bag and a pull-chain. But when I tried to use it, nothing came out but a trickle of sand. Obviously it hadn’t held water in a long time. Pelpel was strictly basin-and-spongebath territory.

  But I didn’t mind. I was young and not very concerned with comfort, and I was glad enough to have a roof over my head at all. What really mattered to me were the Copiapoas in the hinterlands, not the luxuries available in Pelpel. And I wasn’t in Pelpel long before I found out where the Copiapoas were.

  The Greek helped me. He was the only person in town who showed the slightest warmth toward me. The others simply gave me cold blank stares and tight-lipped scowls, behind which lay an apparent instant hostility that I suppose was the natural response of these hardbitten people—forlorn dwellers in a desolate land—to an intruder, and outsider, a fortunate Norteamericano who had come to them out of the cozy world of hot and cold running water, air-conditioning, and Technicolor movies. The fact that I spoke only the most basic Spanish at that time, and spoke it with a California-Mexican accent that must have seemed ludicrous, barbarous, and close to unintelligible to these Chileans, did not make it easier for me to win friends in Pelpel.

  At least there was Panagiotis. I thought at first that his friendliness was just a professional trait, the standard good-fellowship that any tavern keeper tends to develop, or else that it was only his irrepressible Greek exuberance that led him to greet me with a big toothy smile, whereas I got nothing but sullen frosty scowls from the rest of them. Probably those factors did figure into it to some degree. But also I think he genuinely took a liking to me—that he saw me not as overprivileged and condescending ambassador from a civilization of unimaginable and unattainable marvels, but rather as I really was, a young and rather shy botanist who was voluntarily making a long, uncomfortable journey into their disagreeable environment for the sake of bringing back scientific information. I suppose Panagiotis was clever enough to see that what the others must have interpreted as haughtiness and arrogance was actually just the product of my shyness and my difficulties with their language.