The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4: Trips: 1972-73

by Robert Silverberg

  She laughs. “I make no guarantees. I’ve never tried to talk to angels before. But I’ll try, my friends, I’ll try.”

  Black (Year-Captain)

  White (Noelle)

  Black remains on offensive through Move 89. White then breaks through weak north stones and encloses a major center territory. Black is unable to reply adequately and White runs a chain of stones along the 19th line. At Move 141 Black launches a hopeless attack, easily crushed by White, inside White’s territory. Game ends at Move 196 after Black is faced with the cat-in-the-basket trap, by which it will lose a large group in the process of capturing one stone. Score: White 81, Black 62.

  R16

  Q4

  C4

  E3

  D17

  D15

  E16

  K17

  O17

  E15

  H17

  M17

  R6

  Q6

  Q7

  P6

  R5

  R4

  D6

  C11

  K3

  H3

  N4

  O4

  N3

  O3

  R10

  O8

  O15…

  M15…

  She has never done anything like this before. It seems almost an act of infidelity, this opening of her mind to something or someone who is not Yvonne. But it must be done. She extends a tenuous tendril of thought that probes like a rivulet of quicksilver. Through the wall of the ship, into the surrounding grayness, upward, outward, toward, toward—

  —angels?—

  Angels. Oh. Brightness. Strength. Magnetism. Yes. Awareness now of a fierce roiling mass of concentrated energy close by. A mass in motion, laying a terrible stress on the fabric of the cosmos: the angel has angular momentum. It tumbles ponderously on its colossal axis. Who would have thought an angel could be so huge? Noelle is oppressed by the shifting weight of it as it makes its slow heavy axial swing. She moves closer. Oh. She is dazzled. Too much light! Too much power! She draws back, overwhelmed by the intensity of the other being’s output. Such a mighty mind: she feels dwarfed. If she touches it with her mind she will be destroyed. She must step down the aperture, establish some kind of transformer to shield herself against the full blast of power that comes from it. It requires time and discipline. She works steadily, making adjustments, mastering new techniques, discovering capacities she had not known she possessed. And now. Yes. Try again. Slowly, slowly, slowly, with utmost care. Outward goes the tendril.

  Yes.

  Approaching the angel.

  See? Here am I. Noelle. Noelle. Noelle. I come to you in love and fear. Touch me lightly. Just touch me—

  Just a touch—

  Touch—

  Oh. Oh.

  I see you. The light—eye of crystal—fountains of lava—oh, the light—your light—I see—I see—

  Oh, like a god—

  —and Semele wished to behold Zeus in all his brightness, and Zeus would have discouraged her; but Semele insisted and Zeus who loved her could not refuse her; so Zeus came upon her in full majesty and Semele was consumed by his glory, so that only the ashes of her remained, but the son she had conceived by Zeus, the boy Dionysus, was not destroyed, and Zeus saved Dionysus and took him away sealed in his thigh, bringing him forth afterward and bestowing godhood upon him—

  —Oh God I am Semele—

  She withdraws again. Rests, regroups her powers. The force of this being is frightening. But there are ways of insulating herself against destruction, of letting the overflow of energy dissipate itself. She will try once more. She knows she stands at the brink of wonders. Now. Now. The questing mind reaches forth.

  I am Noelle. I come to you in love, angel.

  Contact.

  The universe is burning. Bursts of wild silver light streak across the metal dome of the sky. Words turn to ash. Walls smolder and burst into flames. There is contact. A dancing solar flare—a stream of liquid fire—a flood-tide of brilliant radiance, irresistible, unendurable, running into her, sweeping over her, penetrating her. Light everywhere.

  —Semele.

  The angel smiles and she quakes. Open to me, cries the vast tolling voice, and she opens and the force enters fully, sweeping through her.

  optic chiasma

  sylvian fissure

  thalamus

  medulla oblongata

  hypothalamus

  limbic system

  reticular system

  pons varolii

  corpus callosum

  cingulate sulcus

  cuneas

  orbital gyri

  cingulate gyrus

  caudate nucleus

  —cerebrum!—

  claustrum

  operculum

  putamen

  fornix

  chloroid glomus

  medial lemniscus

  —MESENCEPHALON!—

  dura mater

  dural sinus

  arachnoid granulation

  subarachnoid space

  pia mater

  cerebellum

  cerebellum

  cerebellum

  She has been in a coma for days, wandering in delirium. Troubled, fearful, the year-captain keeps a somber vigil at her bedside. Sometimes she seems to rise toward consciousness; intelligible words, even whole sentences, bubble dreamily from her lips. She talks of light, of a brilliant, unbearable white glow, of arcs of energy, of intense solar eruptions. A star holds me, she mutters. She tells him that she has been conversing with a star. How poetic, the year-captain thinks: what a lovely metaphor. Conversing with a star. But where is she, what is happening to her? Her face is flushed; her eyes move about rapidly, darting like trapped fish beneath her closed lids, Mind to mind, she whispers, the star and I, mind to mind. She begins to hum—an edgy, whining sound, climbing almost toward inaudibility, a high-frequency keening. It pains him to hear it: hard aural radiation. Then she is silent.

  Her body goes rigid. A convulsion of some sort? No. She is awakening. He sees lightning-bolts of perception flashing through her quivering musculature; the galvanized frog, twitching at the end of its leads. Her eyelids tremble. She makes a little moaning noise.

  She looks up at him.

  The year-captain says gently, “Your eyes are open. I think you can see me now, Noelle. Your eyes are tracking me, aren’t they?”

  “I can see you, yes.” Her voice is hesitant, faltering, strange for a moment, a foreign voice, but then it becomes more like its usual self as she asks, “How long was I away?”

  “Eight ship-days. We were worried.”

  “You look exactly as I thought you would look,” she says. “Your face is hard. But not a dark face. Not a hostile face.”

  “Do you want to talk about where you went, Noelle?”

  She smiles. “I talked with the—angel.”

  “Angel?”

  “Not really an angel, year-captain. Not a physical being, either, not any kind of alien species. More like the energy-creatures Heinz was discussing. But bigger. Bigger. I don’t know what it was, year-captain.”

  “You told me you were talking with a star.”

  “—a star!”

  “In your delirium. That’s what you said.”

  Her eyes blaze with excitement. “A star! Yes! Yes, year-captain! I think I was, yes!”

  “But what does that mean: talking to a star?”

  She laughs. “It means talking to a star, year-captain. A great ball of fiery gas, year-captain, and it has a mind, it has a consciousness. I think that’s what it was. I’m sure now. I’m sure!”

  “But how can a—”

  The light goes abruptly from her eyes. She is traveling again; she is no longer with him. He waits beside her bed. An hour, two hours, half a day. What bizarre realm has she penetrated? Her breathing is a distant, impersonal drone. So far away from him now, so remote from any place he comprehends. At last her eyelids flicker. She
looks up. Her face seems transfigured. To the year-captain she still appears to be partly in that other world beyond the ship. “Yes,” she says. “Not an angel, year-captain. A sun. A living intelligent sun.” Her eyes are radiant. “A sun, a star, a sun,” she murmurs. “I touched the consciousness of a sun. Do you believe that, year-captain? I found a network of stars that live, that think, that have minds, that have souls. That communicate. The whole universe is alive.”

  “A star,” he says dully. “The stars have minds.”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them? Our own sun too?”

  “All of them. We came to the place in the galaxy where this star lives, and it was broadcasting on my wavelength, and its output began overriding my link with Yvonne. That was the interference, year-captain. The big star, broadcasting.”

  This conversation has taken on for him the texture of a dream. He says quietly, “Why didn’t Earth’s sun override you and Yvonne when you were on Earth?”

  She shrugs. “It isn’t old enough. It takes—I don’t know—billions of years until they’re mature, until they can transmit. Our sun isn’t old enough, year-captain. None of the stars close to Earth is old enough. But out here—”

  “Are you in contact with it now?”

  “Yes. With it and with many others. And with Yvonne.”

  “Yvonne too?”

  “She’s back in the link with me. She’s in the circuit.” Noelle pauses. “I can bring others into the circuit. I could bring you in, year-captain.”

  “Me?”

  “You. Would you like to touch a star with your mind?”

  “What will happen to me? Will it harm me?”

  “Did it harm me, year-captain?”

  “Will I still be me afterward?”

  “Am I still me, year-captain?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Open to me. Try. See what happens.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Touch a star, year-captain.”

  He puts his hand on hers. “Go ahead,” he says, and his soul becomes a solarium.

  Afterward, with the solar pulsations still reverberating in the mirrors of his mind, with blue-white sparks leaping in his synapses, he says, “What about the others?”

  “I’ll bring them in too.”

  He feels a flicker of momentary resentment. He does not want to share the illumination. But in the instant that he conceives his resentment, he abolishes it. Let them in.

  “Take my hand,” Noelle says.

  They reach out together. One by one they touch the others. Roy. Sylvia. Heinz. Elliot. He feels Noelle surging in tandem with him, feels Yvonne, feels greater presences, luminous, eternal. All are joined. Ship-sister, star-sister: all become one. The year-captain realizes that the days of playing go have ended. They are one person; they are beyond games.

  “And now,” Noelle whispers, “now we reach toward Earth. We put our strength into Yvonne, and Yvonne—”

  Yvonne draws Earth’s seven billion into the network.

  The ship hurtles through the nospace tube. Soon the year-captain will initiate the search for a habitable planet. If they discover one, they will settle there. It not, they will go on, and it will not matter at all, and the ship and its seven billion passengers will course onward forever, warmed by the light of the friendly stars.

  THIS IS THE ROAD

  As this volume demonstrates, many were the anthologies of original science fiction that were spawned in the early 1970’s, and not a few of them were edited by me. One format that I particularly liked was the novella trio, in which some writer would propound a theme for stories and three other writers independently worked to that theme at short-novel length. Usually I chose myself as one of the three writers for each trio volume, a process that produced novellas such as “How It Was When the Past Went Away,” “Thomas the Proclaimer,” and “The Feast of St. Dionysus,” all of them reprinted in earlier volumes of this series.

  Of all these trio books of mine, I have particular affection for the one called No Mind of Man, which got put together around a living-room table in Berkeley, California, one day in the spring or summer of 1972. All three authors were present—Terry Carr, Richard A. Lupoff, and me—three old-time science-fiction fans who had gone on to become professional writers, who had known each other well when we all lived in New York City, and now, in the 1970’s, had all turned up living in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of us—I don’t remember who it was—suggested that the three of us ought to do a novella book together. Someone else—I don’t remember which one of us that was, either—proposed that we write stories of transformation. Lupoff—that I do remember—provided the title, No Mind of Man. And off we went to write our novellas.

  Dick Lupoff, who had worked for IBM before becoming a freelance writer, did a splendid high-tech story, “The Partridge Project.” Terry Carr, whose stories often had soaring, joyous spiritual themes, produced the exhilarating “The Winds at Starmont”. And my contribution was the novella reprinted here, which I wrote in January of 1973, and of which I always have been fond, particularly for the elegiac final page or so, beginning with the lines, “These are the times we were meant to live in, and no asking why…”

  Close students of my work may find a few familiar passages in the text. Half a dozen years later, when I was writing the novel Lord Valentine’s Castle, I coolly plagiarized myself to the tune of a few hundred words, transforming the wagon journey of Crown and Leaf and Sting and Shadow into an incident involving my band of itinerant jugglers on the giant planet Majipoor. There is otherwise no connection between the two stories: I needed a tense wagon journey through a forest, and I knew where a good one was available, and without any hesitation I lifted a few choice bits from it and put them in place in my new book. But I did get the permission of the original author first, at least. Most plagiarists are not that courteous.

  ——————

  Leaf, lolling cozily with Shadow on a thick heap of furs in the airwagon’s snug passenger castle, heard rain beginning to fall and made a sour face: very likely he would soon have to get up and take charge of driving the wagon, if the rain was the sort of rain he thought it was.

  This was the ninth day since the Teeth had begun to lay waste to the eastern provinces. The airwagon, carrying four who were fleeing the invaders’ fierce appetites, was floating along Spider Highway somewhere between Theptis and Northman’s Rib, heading west, heading west as fast as could be managed. Jumpy little Sting was at the power-reins, beaming dream-commands to the team of six nightmares that pulled the wagon along; burly Crown was amidwagon, probably plotting vengeance against the Teeth, for that was what Crown did most of the time; that left Leaf and Shadow at their ease, but not for much longer. Listening to the furious drumming of the downpour against the wagon’s taut-stretched canopy of big-veined stickskin, Leaf knew that this was no ordinary rain, but rather the dread purple rain that turns the air foul and brings the no-leg spiders out to hunt. Sting would never be able to handle the wagon in a purple rain. What a nuisance, Leaf thought, cuddling close against Shadow’s sleek, furry blue form. Before long he heard the worried snorting of the nightmares and felt the wagon jolt and buck: yes, beyond any doubt, purple rain, no-leg spiders. His time of relaxing was just about over.

  Not that he objected to doing his fair share of the work. But he had finished his last shift of driving only half an hour ago. He had earned his rest. If Sting was incapable of handling the wagon in this weather and Shadow, too, Shadow could never manage in a purple rain—then Crown ought to take the reins himself. But of course Crown would do no such thing. It was Crown’s wagon, and he never drove it himself. “I have always had underbreeds to do the driving for me,” Crown had said ten days ago, as they stood in the grand plaza of Holy Town with the fires of the Teeth blazing in the outskirts.

  “Your underbreeds have all fled without waiting for their master,” Leaf had reminded him.

  “So? There are others to drive.”

&n
bsp; “Am I to be your underbreed?” Leaf asked calmly. “Remember, Crown, I’m of the Pure Stream stock.”

  “I can see that by your face, friend. But why get into philosophical disputes? This is my wagon. The invaders will be here before nightfall. If you would ride west with me, these are the terms. If they’re too bitter for you to swallow, well, stay here and test your luck against the mercies of the Teeth.”

  “I accept your terms,” Leaf said.

  So he had come aboard—and Sting, and Shadow—under the condition that the three of them would do all the driving. Leaf felt degraded by that—hiring on, in effect, as an indentured underbreed—but what choice was there for him? He was alone and far from his people; he had lost all his wealth and property; he faced sure death as the swarming hordes of Teeth devoured the eastland. He accepted Crown’s terms. An aristocrat knows the art of yielding better than most. Resist humiliation until you can resist no longer, certainly, but then accept, accept, accept. Refusal to bow to the inevitable is vulgar and melodramatic. Leaf was of the highest caste, Pure Stream, schooled from childhood to be pliable, a willow in the wind, bending freely to the will of the Soul. Pride is a dangerous sin; so is stubbornness; so too, more than the others, is foolishness. Therefore he labored while Crown lolled. Still, there were limits even to Leaf’s capacity for acceptance, and he suspected those limits would shortly be reached.