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

by Robert Silverberg

  Jijibhoi looked genuinely amazed. “What? Are you saying one must have personal allegiance to the subject of one’s field of scholarship?” He laughed. “You are of Jewish birth, I think, and yet your doctoral thesis was concerned, was it not, with the early phases of the Third Reich?”

  Klein winced. “Touché!”

  “I find the subculture of the deads irresistible, as a sociologist,” Jijibhoi went on. “To have such a radical new aspect of human existence erupt during one’s career is an incredible gift. There is no more fertile field for me to investigate. Yet I have no wish, none at all, ever to deliver myself up for rekindling. For me, for my wife, it will be the Towers of Silence, the hot sun, the obliging vultures—and finish, the end, no more, terminus.”

  “I had no idea you felt this way. I suppose if I’d known more about Parsee theology, I might have realized—”

  “You misunderstand. Our objections are not theological. It is that we share a wish, an idiosyncratic whim, not to continue beyond the allotted time. But also I have serious reservations about the impact of rekindling on our society. I feel a profound distress at the presence among us of these deads; I feel a purely private fear of these people and the culture they are creating; I feel even an abhorrence for—” Jijibhoi cut himself short. “Your pardon. That was perhaps too strong a word. You see how complex my attitudes are toward this subject, my mixture of fascination and repulsion? I exist in constant tension between those poles. But why do I tell you all this, which if it does not disturb you, must surely bore you? Let us hear about your journey to Zanzibar.”

  “What can I say? I went, I waited a couple of weeks for her to show up, I wasn’t able to get near her at all, and I came home. All the way to Africa, and I never even had a glimpse of her.”

  “What a frustration, dear Jorge!”

  “She stayed in her hotel room. They wouldn’t let me go upstairs to her.”

  “They?”

  “Her entourage,” Klein said. “She was traveling with four other deads, a woman and three men. Sharing her room with the archeologist, Zacharias. He was the one who shielded her from me, and did it very cleverly, too. He acts as though he owns her. Perhaps he does. What can you tell me, Framji? Do the deads marry? Is Zacharias her new husband?”

  “It is very doubtful. The terms ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ are not in use among the deads. They form relationships, yes, but pair-bonding seems to be uncommon among them, possibly altogether unknown. Instead they tend to create supportive pseudofamilial groupings of three or four or even more individuals, who—”

  “Do you mean that all four of her companions in Zanzibar are her lovers?”

  Jijibhoi gestured eloquently. “Who can say? If you mean in a physical sense, I doubt it, but one can never be sure. Zacharias seems to be her special companion, at any rate. Several of the others may be part of her pseudofamily also, or all, or none. I have reason to think that at certain times every dead may claim a familial relationship to all others of his kind. Who can say? We perceive these people, as they say, through a glass, darkly.”

  “I don’t see Sybille even that well. I don’t even know what she looks like now.”

  “She has lost none of her beauty.”

  “So you’ve told me before. But I want to see her myself. You can’t really comprehend, Framji, how much I want to see her. The pain I feel, not able—”

  “Would you like to see her right now?”

  Klein shook in a convulsion of amazement. “What? Is she—”

  “Hiding in the next room? No, no, nothing like that. But I do have a small surprise for you. Come into the library.” Smiling expansively, Jijibhoi led the way from the dining room to the small study adjoining it, a room densely packed from floor to ceiling with books in an astonishing range of languages—not merely English, French, and German, but also Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujerati, Farsi, the tongues of Jijibhoi’s polyglot upbringing among the tiny Parsee colony of Bombay, a community in which no language once cherished was ever discarded. Pushing aside a stack of dog-eared professional journals, he drew forth a glistening picture-cube, activated its inner light with a touch of his thumb, and handed it to Klein.

  The sharp, dazzling holographic image showed three figures to a broad grassy plain that seemed to have no limits and was without trees, boulders, or other visual interruptions, an endlessly unrolling green carpet under a blank death-blue sky. Zacharias stood at the left, his face averted from the camera; he was looking down, tinkering with the action of an enormous rifle. At the far right stood a stocky, powerful-looking dark-haired man whose pale, harsh-featured face seemed all beard and nostrils. Klein recognized him: Anthony Gracchus, one of the deads who had accompanied Sybille to Zanzibar. Sybille stood beside him, clad in khaki slacks and a crisp white blouse. Gracchus’ arm was extended; evidently he had just pointed out a target to her, and she was intently aiming a gun nearly as big as Zacharias’.

  Klein shifted the cube about, studying her face from various angles, and the sight of her made his fingers grow thick and clumsy, his eyelids to quiver. Jijibhoi had spoken truly: she had lost none of her beauty. Yet she was not at all the Sybille he had known. When he had last seen her, lying in her casket, she had seemed to be a flawless marble image of herself, and she had that same surreal statuary appearance now. Her face was an expressionless mask, calm, remote, aloof; her eyes were glossy mysteries; her lips registered a faint, enigmatic, barely perceptible smile. It frightened him to behold her this way, so alien, so unfamiliar. Perhaps it was the intensity of her concentration that gave her that forbidding marmoreal look, for she seemed to be pouring her entire being into the task of taking aim. By tilting the cube more extremely, Klein was able to see what she was aiming at: a strange awkward bird moving through the grass at the lower left, a bird larger than a turkey, round as a sack, with ash-gray plumage, a whitish breast and tail, yellow-white wings, and short, comical yellow legs. Its head was immense and its black bill ended in a great snubbed hook. The creature seemed solemn, rather dignified, and faintly absurd; it showed no awareness that its doom was upon it. How odd that Sybille should be about to kill it, she who had always detested the taking of life: Sybille the huntress now, Sybille the lunar goddess, Sybille-Diana!

  Shaken, Klein looked up at Jijibhoi and said, “Where was this taken? On that safari in Tanzania, I suppose.”

  “Yes. In February. This man is the guide, the white hunter.”

  “I saw him in Zanzibar. Gracchus, his name is. He was one of the deads traveling with Sybille.”

  “He operates a hunting preserve not far from Kilimanjaro,” Jijibhoi said, “that is set aside exclusively for the use of the deads. One of the more bizarre manifestations of their subculture, actually. They hunt only those animals which—”

  Klein said impatiently, “How did you get this picture?”

  “It was taken by Nerita Tracy, who is one of your wife’s companions.”

  “I met her in Zanzibar too. But how—”

  “A friend of hers is an acquaintance of mine, one of my informants, in fact, a valuable connection in my researches. Some months ago I asked him if he could obtain something like this for me. I did not tell him, of course, that I meant it for you.” Jijibhoi looked close. “You seem troubled, dear friend.”

  Klein nodded. He shut his eyes as though to protect them from the glaring surfaces of Sybille’s photograph. Eventually he said in a flat, toneless voice, “I have to get to see her.”

  “Perhaps it would be better for you if you would abandon—”

  “No.”

  “Is there no way I can convince you that it is dangerous for you to pursue your fantasy of—”

  “No,” Klein said. “Don’t even try. It’s necessary for me to reach her. Necessary.”

  “How will you accomplish this, then?”

  Klein said mechanically, “By going to Zion Cold Town.”

  “You have already done that. They would not admit you.”

  “This time they wil
l. They don’t turn away deads.”

  The Parsee’s eyes widened. “You will surrender your own life? Is this your plan? What are you saying, Jorge?”

  Klein, laughing, said, “That isn’t what I meant at all.”

  “I am bewildered.”

  “I intend to infiltrate. I’ll disguise myself as one of them. I’ll slip into the Cold Town the way an infidel slips into Mecca.” He seized Jijibhoi’s wrist. “Can you help me? Coach me in their ways, teach me their jargon?”

  “They’ll find you out instantly.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe I’ll get to Sybille before they do.”

  “This is insanity,” Jijibhoi said quietly.

  “Nevertheless. You have the knowledge. Will you help me?”

  Gently Jijibhoi withdrew his arm from Klein’s grasp. He crossed the room and busied himself with an untidy bookshelf for some moments, fussily arranging and rearranging. At length he said, “There is little I can do for you myself. My knowledge is broad but not deep, not deep enough. But if you insist on going through with this, Jorge, I can introduce you to someone who may be able to assist you. He is one of my informants, a dead, a man who has rejected the authority of the Guidefathers, a person who is of the deads but not with them. Possibly he can instruct you in what you would need to know.”

  “Call him,” Klein said.

  “I must warn you he is unpredictable, turbulent, perhaps even treacherous. Ordinary human values are without meaning to him in his present state.”

  “Call him.”

  “If only I could discourage you from—”

  “Call him.”

  Five

  Quarreling brings trouble. These days lions roar a great deal. Joy follows grief. It is not good to beat children much. You had better go away now and go home. It is impossible to work today. You should go to school every day. It is not advisable to follow this path, there is water in the way. Never mind, I shall be able to pass. We had better go back quickly. These lamps use a lot of oil. There are no mosquitoes in Nairobi. There are no lions here. There are people here, looking for eggs. Is there water in the well? No, there is none. If there are only three people, work will be impossible today.

  D.V. Perrott: Teach Yourself Swahili

  Gracchus signals furiously to the porters and bellows, “Shika njia hii hii!” Three turn, two keep trudging along. “Ninyi nyote!” he calls. “Fanga kama hivi!” He shakes his head, spits, flicks sweat from his forehead. He adds, speaking in a lower voice and in English, taking care that they will not hear him, “Do as I say, you malevolent black bastards, or you’ll be deader than I am before sunset!”

  Sybille laughs nervously. “Do you always talk to them like that?”

  “I try to be easy on them. But what good does it do, what good does any of it do? Come on, let’s keep up with them.”

  It is less than an hour after dawn, but already the sun is very hot, here in the flat dry country between Kilimanjaro and Serengetti. Gracchus is leading the party northward across the high grass, following the spoor of what he thinks is a quagga, but breaking a trail in the high grass is hard work, and the porters keep veering away toward a ravine that offers the tempting shade of a thicket of thorn trees, and he constantly has to harass them in order to hold them to the route he wants. Sybille has noticed that Gracchus shouts fiercely to his blacks, as if they were no more than recalcitrant beasts, and speaks of them behind their backs with a rough contempt, but it all seems done for show, all part of his white-hunter role: she has also noticed, at times when she was not supposed to notice, that privately Gracchus is in fact gentle, tender, even loving among the porters, teasing them—she supposes—with affectionate Swahili banter and playful mock-punches. The porters are role players too: they behave in the traditional manner of their profession, alternately deferential and patronizing to the clients, alternately posing as well-knowing repositories of the lore of the bush and as simple, guileless savages fit only for carrying burdens. But the clients they serve are not quite like the sportsmen of Hemingway’s time, since they are deads, and secretly the porters are terrified of the strange beings whom they serve. Sybille has seen them muttering prayers and fondling amulets whenever they accidentally touch one of the deads, and she has occasionally detected an unguarded glance conveying unalloyed fear, possibly revulsion. Gracchus is no friend of theirs, however jolly he may get with them: they appear to regard him as some sort of monstrous sorcerer and the clients as fiends made manifest.

  Sweating, saying little, the hunters move in single file, first the porters with the guns and supplies, then Gracchus, Zacharias, Sybille, Nerita constantly clicking her camera, and Mortimer. Patches of white cloud drift slowly across the immense arch of the sky. The grass is lush and thick, for the short rains were unusually heavy in December. Small animals scurry through it, visible only in quick flashes, squirrels and jackals and guinea fowl. Now and then larger creatures can be seen: three haughty ostriches, a pair of snuffling hyenas, a band of Thomson gazelles flowing like a tawny river across the plain. Yesterday Sybille spied two wart hogs, some giraffes, and a serval, an elegant big-eared wildcat that slithered along like a miniature cheetah. None of these beasts may be hunted, but only those special ones that the operators of the preserve have introduced for the special needs of their clients; anything considered native African wildlife, which is to say anything that was living here before the deads leased this tract from the Masai, is protected by government decree. The Masai themselves are allowed to do some lion hunting, since this is their reservation, but there are so few Masai left that they can do little harm. Yesterday, after the wart hogs and before the giraffes, Sybille saw her first Masai, five lean, handsome, long-bodied men, naked under skimpy red robes, drifting silently through the bush, pausing frequently to stand thoughtfully on one leg, propped against their spears. At close range they were less handsome—toothless, fly-specked, herniated. They offered to sell their spears and their beaded collars for a few shillings, but the safarigoers had already stocked up on Masai artifacts in Nairobi’s curio shops, at astonishingly higher prices.

  All through the morning they stalk the quagga, Gracchus pointing out hoofprints here, fresh dung there. It is Zacharias who has asked to shoot a quagga. “How can you tell we’re not following a zebra?” he asks peevishly.

  Gracchus winks. “Trust me. We’ll find zebras up ahead too. But you’ll get your quagga.”

  Ngiri, the head porter, turns and grins. “Piga quagga m’uzuri bwana,” he says to Zacharias, and winks also, and then—Sybille sees it plainly—his jovial confident smile fades as though he has had the courage to sustain it only for an instant, and a veil of dread covers his dark glossy face.

  “What did he say?” Zacharias asks.

  “That you’ll shoot a fine quagga,” Gracchus replies.

  Quaggas. The last wild one was killed about 1870, leaving only three in the world, all females, in European zoos. The Boers had hunted them to the edge of extinction in order to feed their tender meat to Hottentot slaves and to make from their striped hides sacks for Boer grain, leather veldschoen for Boer feet. The quagga of the London zoo died in 1872, that in Berlin in 1875, the Amsterdam quagga in 1883, and none was seen alive again until the artificial revival of the species through breedback selection and genetic manipulation in 1990, when this hunting preserve was opened.

  It is nearly noon, now, and not a shot has been fired all morning. The animals have begun heading for cover; they will not emerge until the shadows lengthen. Time to halt, pitch camp, break out the beer and sandwiches, tell tall tales of harrowing adventures with maddened buffaloes and edgy elephants. But not quite yet. The marchers come over a low hill and see, in the long sloping hollow beyond, a flock of ostriches and several hundred grazing zebras. As the humans appear, the ostriches begin slowly and warily to move off, but the zebras, altogether unafraid, continue to graze. Ngiri points and says, “Piga quagga, bwana.”

  “Just a bunch of zebras,” Zacharias says.


  Gracchus shakes his head. “No. Listen. You hear the sound?”

  At first no one perceives anything unusual. But then, yes, Sybille hears it: a shrill barking neigh, very strange, a sound out of lost time, the cry of some beast she has never known. It is a song of the dead. Nerita hears it too, and Mortimer, and finally Zacharias. Gracchus nods toward the far side of the hollow. There, among the zebras, are half a dozen animals that might almost be zebras, but are not—unfinished zebras, striped only on their heads and foreparts; the rest of their bodies are yellowish-brown, their legs are white, their manes are dark-brown with pale stripes. Their coats sparkle like mica in the sunshine. Now and again they lift their heads, emit that weird percussive whistling snort, and bend to the grass again. Quaggas. Strays out of the past, relicts, rekindled specters. Gracchus signals and the party fans out along the peak of the hill. Ngiri hands Zacharias his colossal gun. Zacharias kneels, sights.

  “No hurry,” Gracchus murmurs. “We have all afternoon.”

  “Do I seem to be hurrying?” Zacharias asks. The zebras now block the little group of quaggas from his view, almost as if by design. He must not shoot a zebra, of course, or there will be trouble with the rangers. Minutes go by. Then the screen of zebras abruptly parts, and Zacharias squeezes his trigger. There is a vast explosion; zebras bolt in ten directions, so that the eye is bombarded with dizzying stroboscopic waves of black and white; when the convulsive confusion passes, one of the quaggas is lying on its side, alone in the field, having made the transition across the interface. Sybille regards it calmly. Death once dismayed her, death of any kind, but no longer.

  “Piga m’uzuri!” the porters cry exultantly.

  “Kufa,” Gracchus says. “Dead. A neat shot. You have your trophy.”

  Ngiri is quick with the skinning knife. That night, camping below Kilimanjaro’s broad flank, they dine on roast quagga, deads and porters alike. The meat is juicy, robust, faintly tangy.