Multiples

by Robert Silverberg

  “A coward’s weapon!”

  “Again you call me a coward? You, Gilgamesh, you are the one who quivers in fear—”

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”

  “You fear my strength, Enkidu!”

  “You fear my skill. You with your pathetic old sword, your pitiful bow—”

  “Is this the Enkidu I loved, mocking me so?”

  “You were the first to mock, when you threw back the shotgun into my hands, spurning my gift, calling me a coward—”

  “The weapon, I said, was cowardly. Not you, Enkidu.”

  “It was the same thing.”

  “Bitte, bitte,” said Schweitzer. “This is not the way!”

  And again from Hemingway: “Gentlemen, please!”

  They took no notice.

  “I meant—”

  “You said—”

  “Shame—”

  “Fear—”

  “Three times over a coward!”

  “Five times five a traitor!”

  “False friend!”

  “Vain braggart!”

  “Gentlemen, I have to ask you—”

  But Hemingway’s voice, loud and firm though it was, was altogether drowned out by the roar of rage that came from the throat of Gilgamesh. Dizzying throbs of anger pounded in his breast, his throat, his temples. He could take no more. This was how it had begun the first time, when Enkidu had come to him with that shotgun and he had given it back and they had fallen into dispute. At first merely a disagreement, and then a hot debate, and then a quarrel, and then the hurling of bitter accusations. And then such words of anger as had never passed between them before, they who had been closer than brothers.

  That time they hadn’t come to blows. Enkidu had simply stalked away, declaring that their friendship was at an end. But now—hearing all the same words again, stymied by this quarrel even over the very method by which they were to fight—Gilgamesh could no longer restrain himself. Overmastered by fury and frustration, he rushed forward.

  Enkidu, eyes gleaming, was ready for him.

  Hemingway attempted to come between them. Big as he was, he was like a child next to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and they swatted him to one side without effort. With a jolt that made the ground itself reverberate, Gilgamesh went crashing into Enkidu and laid hold of him with both hands.

  Enkidu laughed. “So you have your way after all, King Gilgamesh! Bare hands it is!”

  “It is the only way,” said Gilgamesh.

  At last. At last. There was no wrestler in this world or the other who could contend with Gilgamesh of Uruk. I will break him, Gilgamesh thought, as he broke our friendship. I will snap his spine. I will crush his chest.

  As once they had done long ago, they fought like maddened bulls. They stared eye to eye as they contended. They grunted; they bellowed, they roared. Gilgamesh shouted out defiance in the language of Uruk and in any other language he could think of; and Enkidu muttered and stormed at Gilgamesh in the language of the beasts that once he had spoken when he was a wild man, the harsh growling of the lion of the plains.

  Gilgamesh yearned to have Enkidu’s life. He loved this man more dearly than life itself, and yet he prayed that it would be given him to break Enkidu’s back, to hear the sharp snapping sound of his spine, to toss him aside like a worn-out cloak. So strong was his love that it had turned to the brightest of hatreds. I will send him to the Undertaker once again, Gilgamesh thought. I will hurl him from Hell.

  But though he struggled as he had never struggled in combat before, Gilgamesh was unable to budge Enkidu. Veins bulged in his forehead; the sutures that held his wound burst and blood flowed down his arm; and still he strained to throw Enkidu to the ground, and still Enkidu held his place. And matched him, strength for strength, and kept him at bay. They stood locked that way a long moment, staring into each other’s eyes, locked in unbreakable stalemate.

  Then after a long while Enkidu said, as once he had said long ago, “Ah, Gilgamesh! There is not another one like you in all the world! Glory to the mother who bore you!”

  It was like the breaking of a dam, and a rush of life-giving waters tumbling out over the summer-parched fields of the Land.

  And from Gilgamesh in that moment of release and relief came twice-spoken words also:

  “There is one other who is like me. But only one.”

  “No, for Enlil has given you the kingship.”

  “But you are my brother,” said Gilgamesh, and they laughed and let go of each other and stepped back, as if seeing each other for the first time, and laughed again.

  “This is great foolishness, this fighting between us,” Enkidu cried.

  “Very great foolishness indeed, brother.”

  “What need have you of shotguns and disruptors?”

  “And what do I care if you choose to play with such toys?”

  “Indeed, brother.”

  “Indeed!”

  Gilgamesh looked away. They were all staring—the four party men, Lovecraft, Howard, the Hairy Man, Kublai Khan, Hemingway—all astonished, mouths drooping open. Only Schweitzer was beaming. The doctor came up to them and said quietly, “You have not injured each other? No. Gut. Gut. Then leave here, the two of you, together. Now. What do you care for Prester John and his wars, or for Mao and his? This is no business of yours. Go. Now.”

  Enkidu grinned. “What do you say, brother? Shall we go off hunting together?”

  “To the end of the Outback, and back again. You and I, and no one else.”

  “And we will hunt only with our bows and spears?”

  Gilgamesh shrugged. “With disruptors, if that is how you would have it. With cannons. With nuke grenades. Ah, Enkidu, Enkidu—!”

  “Gilgamesh!”

  “Go,” Schweitzer whispered. “Now. Leave this place and never look back. Auf Wiedersehen! Gluckliche Reise! Gottes Name, go now!”

  Watching them take their leave, seeing them trudge off together into the swirling winds of the Outback, Robert Howard felt a sudden sharp pang of regret and loss. How beautiful they had been, those two heroes, those two giants, as they strained and struggled! And then that sudden magic moment when the folly of their quarrel came home to them, when they were enemies no longer and brothers once more—

  And now they were gone, and here he stood amidst these others, these strangers—

  He had wanted to be Gilgamesh’s brother, or perhaps—he barely comprehended it—something more than a brother. But that could never have been. And, knowing that it could never have been, knowing that that man who seemed so much like his Conan was lost to him forever, Howard felt tears beginning to surge within him.

  “Bob?” Lovecraft said. “Bob, are you all right?”

  She-it, Howard thought. A man don’t cry. Especially in front of other men.

  He turned away, into the wind, so Lovecraft could not see his face.

  “Bob? Bob?”

  She-it, Howard thought again. And he let the tears come.

  The Pardoner’s Tale

  Another Playboy story, eleven months after the last one. During the intervening time I had been busy indeed. In the fall of 1985 had come the novella “Gilgamesh in the Outback,” the completion of which was delayed because of certain domestic rearrangements: I had lured Karen Haber out of her Texas domicile to live with me in far-off California, and she arrived in mid-November. Hardly had she unpacked her suitcases than I had moved on from my Gilgamesh novella to the immense picaresque novel Star of Gypsies, which occupied me all during the winter and spring of 1986, requiring a number of drafts before I was satisfied. And then, without pausing for breath, I did the second Afterworld novella about Gilgamesh, “The Fascination of the Abomination.”

  Some time off seemed in order, but back then my thoughts usually turned in the spring of the year to writing something for Alice Turner of Playboy, and that year’s Playboy project turned out to be “The Pardoner’s Tale,” title courtesy of Chaucer, who’d probably be puzzled by the story I appended to it
. At that time the term “cyberpunk” was being bandied about ad nauseam in the science-fiction world, and I suppose you could call this a cyberpunk story—Alice did, in her acceptance letter of July 1, 1986, and I didn’t quarrel with the description, although that wasn’t exactly what I had thought I was writing.

  She wanted about two pages of cuts—a line here, two lines there—in keeping with a dictum she had heard that quintessential cyberpunk featured “the hottest of all the technological futures, fast action, tight construction, and a disdain for all that is slow and boring.” As ever, when Alice Turner thought a line or two ought to be cut, I gave heed to what she said. I did the cutting with scarcely a demur, and the final version, sleek and taut, owes no little of its success to her nifty work with the scalpel. She ran it in the June, 1987 Playboy. Gardner Dozois picked it for his 1988 year’s-best anthology, my fifth appearance in that collection in five years, and Don Wollheim chose it also for his book, giving me one more sweep of the year’s-best books—although, since Terry Carr’s anthology no longer appeared, it was only a double sweep this time. As I have mentioned previously, I incorporated most of the story years later into my novel The Alien Years.

  ___________

  “Key Sixteen, Housing Omicron Kappa, aleph sub-one,” I said to the software on duty at the Alhambra gate of the Los Angeles Wall.

  Software isn’t generally suspicious. This wasn’t even very smart software. It was working off some great biochips—I could feel them jigging and pulsing as the electron stream flowed through them—but the software itself was just a kludge. Typical gatekeeper stuff.

  I stood waiting as the picoseconds went ticking away by the millions.

  “Name, please,” the gatekeeper said finally.

  “John Doe. Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x.”

  The gate opened. I walked into Los Angeles.

  As easy as Beta Pi.

  The wall that encircles L.A. is a hundred, a hundred fifty feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it’s at least sixty feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it—muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

  I suppose the walls around our cities were put there mostly as symbols. They highlight the distinction between city and countryside, between citizen and uncitizen, between control and chaos, just as city walls did five thousand years ago. But mainly they serve to remind us that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build them, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that. All the same, Chicago doesn’t have a wall sixty feet high and a hundred fifty feet deep. Houston doesn’t. Phoenix doesn’t. They make do with less. But L.A. is the main city. I suppose the Los Angeles wall is a statement: I am the Big Cheese. I am the Ham What Am.

  The walls aren’t there because the Entities are afraid of attack. They know how invulnerable they are. We know it too. They just wanted to decorate their capital with something a little special. What the hell, it isn’t their sweat that goes into building the walls. It’s ours. Not mine personally, of course. But ours.

  I saw a few Entities walking around just inside the wall, preoccupied as usual with God knows what and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were low-caste ones, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. I gave them plenty of room. They have a way sometimes of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they study him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. I don’t care for that. You don’t get hurt, but it isn’t agreeable to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a fifteen-foot-high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles. Happened to me once in St. Louis, long ago, and I’m in no hurry to have it happen again.

  The first thing I did when I was inside L.A. was find me a car. On Valley Boulevard about two blocks in from the wall I saw a ’31 Toshiba El Dorado that looked good to me, and I matched frequencies with its lock and slipped inside and took about ninety seconds to reprogram its drive control to my personal metabolic cues. The previous owner must have been fat as a hippo and probably diabetic: her glycogen index was absurd and her phosphines were wild.

  Not a bad car, a little slow in the shift but what can you expect, considering the last time any cars were manufactured on this planet was the year 2034.

  “Pershing Square,” I told it.

  It had nice capacity, maybe 60 megabytes. It turned south right away and found the old freeway and drove off toward downtown. I figured I’d set up shop in the middle of things, work two or three pardons to keep my edge sharp, get myself a hotel room, a meal, maybe hire some companionship. And then think about the next move. It was winter, a nice time to be in L.A. That golden sun, those warm breezes coming down the canyons.

  I hadn’t been out on the Coast in years. Working Florida mainly, Texas, sometimes Arizona. I hate the cold. I hadn’t been in L.A. since ’36. A long time to stay away, but maybe I’d been staying away deliberately. I wasn’t sure. That last L.A. trip had left bad-tasting memories. There had been a woman who wanted a pardon and I sold her a stiff. You have to stiff the customers now and then or else you start looking too good, which can be dangerous; but she was young and pretty and full of hope and I could have stiffed the next one instead of her, only I didn’t. Sometimes I’ve felt bad, thinking back over that. Maybe that’s what had kept me away from L.A. all this time

  A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange traffic began backing up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock. I told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.

  Slipping through roadblocks is scary and calls for a lot of hard work. I knew that I probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you don’t have to?

  I asked the car where I was.

  The screen lit up. Alameda near Banning, it said. A long walk to Pershing Square, looked like. I had the car drop me at Spring Street and went the rest of the way on foot. “Pick me up at l830 hours,” I told it. “Corner of—umm—Sixth and Hill.” It went away to park itself and I headed for the Square to peddle some pardons.

  It isn’t hard for a good pardoner to find buyers. You can see it in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left, that tells you right away, Here’s somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. I was in business within fifteen minutes.

  The first one was an aging surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. The Entities haven’t allowed surfing for ten, fifteen years—they’ve got their plankton seines just off shore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients they have to have, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up. But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the irregularities of the earth’s rotation, you could see how he would have been in the water. Sat down next to me, began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands. A wall-laborer. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger, forever simmering just below boil.

  I got him talking, after a while. A surfer, yes. Lost in the far-away and gone. He began sighing to me about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. “Trestle Beach,” he murmured. “That’s north of San Onofre. You had to sneak through Camp Pendleton. Sometimes the Marines would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara.” His blue eyes got misty. “Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man.” He flexed his h
uge fingers. “Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They own it. And I’m pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week next ten years.”

  “Ten?” I said. “That’s a shitty deal.”

  “You know anyone who doesn’t have a shitty deal?”

  “Some,” I said. “They buy out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It can be done.”

  A careful look. You never know who might be a borgmann. Those stinking collaborators are everywhere.

  “Can it?”

  “All it takes is money,” I said.

  “And a pardoner.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One you can trust.”

  I shrugged. “You’ve got to go on faith, man.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then, after a while: “I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, on the Reef. Nobody’s ever going to find him there. He’s out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that cost?”

  “About twenty grand,” I said.

  “Hey, that’s a sharp guess!”

  “No guess.”

  “Oh?” Another careful look. “You don’t sound local.”

  “I’m not. Just visiting.”

  “That’s still the price? Twenty grand?”

  “I can’t do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You’d be on your own once you were outside the wall.”

  “Twenty grand just to get through the wall?”

  “And a seven-year labor exemption.”

  “I pulled ten,” he said.

  “I can’t get you ten. It’s not in the configuration, you follow? But seven would work. You could get so far, in seven, that they’d lose you. You could goddamned swim to Australia. Come in low, below Sydney, no seines there.”

  “You know a hell of a lot.”

  “My business to know,” I said. “You want me to run an asset check on you?”