“My father went swimming in that one,” Nikomastir replies, and gives me a defiant glare. “It’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”
I doubt, of course, that any such lake exists. If it’s there,
though, I hope he isn’t fool enough to go swimming in it. My affection for the boy is real; I don’t want him to come to harm.
But I let the matter drop. I’ve already said too much. The surest way to prod him into trouble, I know, is oppose him in one of his capricious fancies. My hope is that Nikomastir’s attention will be diverted elsewhere in the next day or two and all thought of that dismal house, and of the fiery lake that may or may not be behind it, will fly out of his mind.
It’s generally a good idea, when visiting a world you know very little about, to keep out of places of unknown chemical properties. When we toured Megalo Kastro, we stood at the edge of a cliff looking down into the famous living sea, that pink custardy mass that is in fact a single living organism of gigantic size, spreading across thousands of kilometers of that world. But it did not occur to us to take a swim in that sea, for we understood that in a matter of hours it would dissolve and digest us if we did.
And when we were on Xamur we went to see the Idradin crater, as everyone who goes to Xamur does. Xamur is the most perfect of worlds, flawless and serene, a paradise, air like perfume and water like wine, every tree in the ideal place, every brook, every hill.
It has only one blemish—the Idradin, a huge round pit that reaches deep into the planet’s primordial heart. It is a hideous place, that crater. Concentric rings of jagged cooled lava surround it, black and eroded and bleak. Stinking gases rise out of the depths, and yellow clouds of sulfuric miasma belch forth, and wild red shafts of roaring flame, and you peer down from the edge into a roiling den of hot surging magma. Everyone who goes to Xamur must visit the Idradin, for if you did not see perfect Xamur’s one terrible flaw you could never be happy on any other world. And so we stared into it from above, and shivered with the horror we were expected to feel; but we were never at all tempted to clamber down the crater’s sides and dip our toes into that realm of fire below.
It seems unlikely to me that Nikomastir will do anything so stupid here. But I have to be careful not to prod him in the wrong direction. I don’t mention the lake to him again.
Our exploration of Sidri Akrak proceeds. We visit new swamps, new groves of fetid-smelling malproportioned trees, new neighborhoods of misshapen and graceless buildings. One drizzly disheartening day succeeds another, and finally I am unable to bear the sight of that brown sky and greenish sun any longer. Though it is a violation of our agreements, I stay behind at the hotel one morning and let the other three go off without me.
It is a quiet time. I spend the hours reflecting on our travels of years past, all the many worlds we have seen. Icy Mulano of the two suns, one yellow, one bloody red, and billions of ghostly electric life-forms glimmering about you in the frigid air. Estrilidis, where the cats have two tails and the insects have eyes like blue diamonds. Zimbalou, the sunless nomad world, where the cities are buried deep below the frozen surface. Kalimaka, Haj Qaldun, Vietoris, Nabomba Zom—
So many places, so many sights. A lifetime of wonderful experiences; and yet what, I ask myself, has it all meant? How has it shaped me? What have I learned?
I have no answers, only to say that we will continue to go onward, ever onward. It is our life. It is what we do. We are travelers by choice, but also by nature, by destiny.
I am still lost in reverie when I hear Velimyle’s voice outside my window, calling to me, telling me that I must come quickly. “Nikomastir—” she cries. “Nikomastir!”
“What about him?”
But she can only gesture and wave. Her eyes are wild. We run together through the muddy streets, paying no heed to the bulky and grotesque Akrakikan monstrosities that occasionally intersect our path. I realize after a time that Velimyle is leading me toward the tumbledown house at the edge of town that Nikomastir has claimed as his family’s former home. A narrow grassy path leads around one side of it to the rear; and there, to my amazement, I see the phosphorescent lake of Nikomastir’s fantasies, with Mayfly beside it, leaping up and down in agitation that verges on frenzy.
She points toward the water. “Out there—there—”
On this ugly world even a phosphorescent lake can somehow manage to be an unlovely sight. I saw one once on Darma Barma that flashed like heavenly fire in rippling waves of cobalt and amethyst, magenta and gold, aquamarine and emerald and jade. But from this lake emanates the most unradiant of radiances, a dull, prosaic, sickly gleam, dark-toned and dispiriting, except in one place off toward the farther shore where a disturbance of some sort is setting up whirlpools of glinting metallic effects, swirls of eye-jabbing bright sparkles, as though handfuls of iron filings are being thrown through a magnetic field.
The disturbance is Nikomastir. He—his body, rather—is tossing and heaving at the lake’s surface, and all about him the denizens of the lake can be seen, narrow scaly jutting heads popping up by the dozens, hinged jaws snapping, sharp teeth closing on flesh. A widening pool of blood surrounds him. They, whatever they are, are ripping him to shreds.
“We have to get him out of there,” Mayfly says, her voice congested with horror and fear.
“How?” I ask.
“I told him not to do it,” says trembling Velimyle. “I told him, I told him, I told him. But he plunged right in, and when he was halfway across they began to break the surface, and then—then he began screaming, and—”
Mayfly plucks urgently at my sleeve. “What can we do? How can we rescue him?”
“He’s beyond rescuing,” I tell her hollowly.
“But if we can get his body back,” she says, “there’ll be a way to revive him, won’t there? I know there is. Scientists can do anything nowadays.” Velimyle, more tentatively, agrees. Some kind of scientific miracle, Nikomastir gathered up and repaired somehow by the regeneration of tissue—
But tissue is all that’s left of him now, frayed sorry scraps, and the creatures of the lake, frantic now with blood-lust, are devouring even those in furious haste.
They want me to tell them that Nikomastir isn’t really dead.
But he is: really, really, really dead. Dead forever. What has been played out on this shore today was not a game. There is nothing that can be saved, no way to regenerate. I have never seen the death of a human being before. It is a dizzying thing to contemplate: the finality, the utterness. My mind is whirling; I have to fight back convulsions of shock and horror.
“Couldn’t you have stopped him?” I ask angrily, when I am able to speak again.
“But he wanted so badly to do it,” Mayfly replies. “We couldn’t have stopped him, you know. Not even if we—”
She halts in midsentence.
“Not even if you had wanted to?” I say. “Is that it?” Neither of them can meet my furious gaze. “But you didn’t want to, did you? You thought it would be fun to see Nikomastir swim across the phosphorescent lake. Fun. Am I right? Yes. I know that I am. What could you have been thinking, Mayfly? Velimyle?”
There is no sign of Nikomastir at the surface any longer. The lake is growing still again. Its phosphorescence has subsided to a somber tarnished glow.
For a long time, minutes, hours, weeks, none of us is capable of moving. Silent, pale, stunned, we stand with bowed heads by the shore of that frightful lake, scarcely even able to breathe.
We are in the presence of incontrovertible and permanent death, which to us is a novelty far greater even than the living sea of Megalo Kastro or the blue dawn of Nabomba Zom, and the immense fact of it holds us rooted to the spot. Was this truly Nikomastir’s ancestral world? Was his father actually born in that great old falling-down house, and did he really once swim in this deadly lake? And if none of that was so, how did Nikomastir know that the lake was there? We will never be able to answer those questions. Whatever we do not know about Nikomastir that
we have already learned, we will never come to discover now. That is the meaning of death: the finality of it, the severing of communication, the awful unanswerable power of the uncompromising curtain that descends like a wall of steel. We did not come to Sidri Akrak to learn about such things, but that is what we have learned on Sidri Akrak, and we will take it with us wherever we go henceforth, pondering it, examining it.
“Come,” I say to Mayfly and Velimyle, after a time. “We need to get away from here.”
So, then. Nikomastir was foolish. He was bold. He has had his swim and now he is dead. And why? Why? For what? What was he seeking, on this awful world? What were we? We know what we found, yes, but not what it was that we were looking for. I wonder if we will ever know.
He has lived his only life, has Nikomastir, and he has lost it in the pursuit of idle pleasure. There is a lesson in that, for me, for Velimilye, for Mayfly, for us all. And one day I will, I hope, understand what it is.
All I do know after having lived these hundreds of years is that the universe is very large and we are quite small. We live godlike lives these days, flitting as we do from world to world, but even so we are not gods. We die: some sooner, some later, but we do die. Only gods live forever. Nikomastir hardly lived at all.
So be it. We have learned what we have learned from Nikomastir’s death, and now we must move on. We are travelers by nature and destiny, and we will go forward into our lives. Tomorrow we leave for Marajo. The shining sands, the City of Seven Pyramids. Marajo will teach us something, as Xamur once did, and Nabomba Zom, and Galgala. And also Sidri Akrak. Something. Something. Something.
© 1999 by Agberg, Ltd.
Originally appeared in Amazing Stories.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.
Author Spotlight: Robert Silverberg
Wendy N. Wagner
In “Travelers,” Robert Silverberg has created a future where travel between planets is the entirety of many people’s lives, people no more rooted in place than a zephyr or tornado. Without restrictions like health issues, life span or economics, the humans in this future can enjoy jaunting across galaxies the way twenty-first century oil barons enjoy island-hopping in the Caribbean. It can be a hedonistic lifestyle—or it can be a way to expand one’s horizons, ever-deepening one’s understanding of humanity through exposure to The Other: other people, other cultures, other worlds.
As a boy, Robert Silverberg did his traveling via armchair, soaking up the otherly, the wondrous and the exotic from the pages of National Geographic. A smart and curious child, Earth-bound adventures soon became too prosaic, and the wonders of science fiction captured his interest. Science fiction offered his restless mind the chance to explore new worlds that not even the heartiest of geographical surveyors could reach. He became an avid collector of pulp magazines, poring over the stories and studying their depths.
It was just a matter of time before he started writing the stuff himself.
Silverberg began mailing out science fiction short stories when he was fourteen years old. He’d never even left New York state, but his mind had roved across galaxies and he was more than ready to try his hand creating new worlds. It took about three years of practice, but he made his first professional sale in 1954. He was barely eighteen.
Now, close to sixty years later, Robert Silverberg has had a chance to visit many of the places he read about in those National Geographics, and he has sold thousands of stories. He’s written many novels, edited more than twenty anthologies and written a vast quantity of nonfiction, from books about history to his well-respected column in Asimov’s. He has created more worlds than most people have even read about.
Even in “Travelers,” just a single story of his vast oeuvre, Robert Silverberg has created many memorable locales. There’s Galgala, a world made gilt by strange microorganisms; Marajo, famed for its Seven Pyramids; Megalo Kastro with its living sea; and of course the rough world of Sidri Akrak, where people and monsters live side-by-side. For a story that’s only about seven thousand words long, that’s a lot of exploration to serve up.
But for Robert Silverberg, that’s part of the job. As he said in his book, Reflections and Refractions: “Is it not true that one of the primary things we science-fiction writers try to accomplish is to bring a note of, well, enwonderment to our readers’ minds—to startle and delight and astonish them with miraculous and magical visions of wondrous things?”1
For those readers lucky enough to pick up one of Robert Silverberg’s works and give themselves over to that enwonderment, they will find themselves transported to magical and delightful places indeed. His remarkable worldbuilding is perhaps at the heart of his successful and long-lived career as one of the greatest writers of science fiction. He is a master of place and setting.
The protagonist of “Travelers” says that he and his friends are “travelers by nature and destiny.” But he might well be speaking for Robert Silverberg himself—that traveler of the imagination and creator of countless wondrous worlds.
1 Robert Silverberg, Reflections & Refractions, (Grass Valley, CA: Underwood Books, 1997), p2.
See also: Robert Silverberg, Other Spaces, Other Times, (New York: Nonstop Press, 2009).
Wendy N. Wagner’s first novel, Her Dark Depths, is forthcoming from the small press Virtual Tales. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology 2012 A.D. and in the online magazine Crossed Genres. Another is forthcoming in The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams. In addition to her fiction writing, she has conducted interviews for horror-web.com. She shares her Portland, Oregon, home with one painting husband, one brilliant daughter, and no zombies.
Interview: John Scalzi
Erin Stocks
Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, whatever.scalzi.com. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.”
But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly. And it’s well-deserved traffic, too, in light of the man’s reputation for posting unique content. The blog’s main focus is exactly its title–”Whatever.” Scalzi writes about anything from movies to politics to a page entirely devoted to bacon. He also features regular postings by other writers entitled “The Big Idea”, where authors talk about their latest project and its inspiration.
As far as his own work, there’s at least one novel, a handful of short stories, and even some ambient electronic music that he composed himself that he’s posted and offers up free to anyone who’s interested. And most unique of all, he’s got insider knowledge on the SyFy channel’s Stargate Universe–he’s a creative consultant for the show.
But after perusing his public musings and finding myself entertained and intrigued—not to mention weighed down with a list of new books to read—I still had a few more questions.
I would venture a guess that most people meet you through your blog-which has spawned books like You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing and Your Hate Mail will be Graded. What prompted you t
o start that blog back in 1998?
I started it because prior to ‘98 I had been both a newspaper and an online columnist, and at the time I was between column gigs and wanted to keep sharp in that particular writing format, just in case anyone ever offered me another column. Because it was mostly writing exercise for me, I wasn’t particularly worried about the size of my audience, which was good because at the beginning it was about 50 of my friends who even knew it was there. There was also no pressure for me to grow the audience, either. People eventually started linking to me and coming around.
How long have you been writing, then?
I haven’t the slightest idea. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember not writing creatively in some form or another. I imagine whatever it was, I got some nice positive feedback on it, which encouraged me to do it more. But beyond that, since I don’t remember it, it’s difficult to say that whatever it was had any sort of effect.
It seems the act of writing itself is your forte, no matter the subject content. Besides your blog, you’ve authored nonfiction guides about money, the universe, and science fiction movies, as well as books about the stupid things people do. But nearly all your fiction books can be classified as military science fiction. What appeals to you about that subgenre?
Before writing Old Man’s War, I went into a bookstore to see what kind of science fiction was selling; I saw more military SF than anything else, so I decided that’s what I should probably write if I wanted to sell a book. This sounds mercenary to some, but more charitably it was market research. I wanted to sell a book, so I was pretty dispassionate about what book that should be. Now, having chosen military science fiction to write, I made sure it was a book I myself would want to read—market research is fine and good but if you’re not writing something you’d actually want to read, then that book’s probably not going to be something anyone else would want to read either.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 4 Page 8
