The Palace at Midnight - 1980–82 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  She managed a jaunty smile. “You’re straight, aren’t you?”

  “Sure. Most of the time, anyway.”

  “I thought you were. Good.”

  They got into the car. “Frederick Street,” he told the driver, “between Clayton and Cole.”

  The trip took twenty minutes. Neither of them spoke. He knew what she was thinking about: the senile Emperor, dribbling and babbling under the bright spotlights. The mighty Norton VII, ruler of everything from San Rafael to San Mateo, from Half Moon Bay to Walnut Creek. Such is pomp and circumstance in imperial San Francisco in these latter days of Western civilization. Christensen sent the driver away, and they went upstairs. The cats were hungry again.

  “It’s a lovely apartment,” she told him.

  “Three rooms, bath, hot and cold running water. Not bad for a mere foreign minister. Some of the boys have suites at the palace, but I like it better here.” He opened the door to the deck and stepped outside. Somehow, now that he was home, the night was not so cold. He thought about the Realm of Wicca, far off up there in green, happy Oregon, sending a hundred fifty thousand kindly goddess-worshiping neopagans down here to celebrate the rebirth of the sun. A nuisance, a mess, a headache. Tomorrow he’d have to call a meeting of the Cabinet, when everybody had sobered up, and start the wheels turning, and probably he’d have to make trips to places like Petaluma and Palo Alto to get the alliance flanged together. Damn. But it was his job. Someone had to carry the load.

  He slipped his arm around the slender woman from Monterey.

  “The poor Emperor,” she said softly.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “The poor Emperor. Poor everybody.”

  He looked toward the east. In a few hours the sun would be coming up over that hill, out of the place that used to be the United States of America and now was a thousand, thousand crazy fractured, fragmented entities. Christensen shook his head. The Grand Duchy of Chicago, he thought. The Holy Carolina Confederation. The Three Kingdoms of New York. The Empire of San Francisco. No use getting upset—much too late for getting upset. You played the hand that was dealt you, and you did your best, and you carved little islands of safety out of the night. Turning to her, he said, “I’m glad you came home with me tonight.” He brushed his lips lightly against hers. “Come. Let’s go inside.”

  THE MAN WHO FLOATED IN TIME

  It was an era of odd-concept science-fiction anthologies, and one of the oddest concepts of all was the book called Speculations, which a writer named Laura Haywood (who wrote and edited under the pseudonym of Alice Laurance) was doing in collaboration with Isaac Asimov. The idea was to commission short stories from a group of well-known science-fiction writers and identify them only in code, so that their names were nowhere visible on the outside of the book and a complex decoding process was necessary in order to figure out who had written what. This didn’t strike me as a particularly fruitful way to present a science-fiction anthology, since readers often like to know whose work is contained in the book before they buy it, but I went along with the project anyway. So did Jack Williamson, Gene Wolfe, R.A. Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, and a bunch of others, including Asimov himself.

  To make it easy for those who didn’t want to bother solving the puzzle, I chose a theme that I have been identified with throughout much of my career—time travel—and wrote the story, in January, 1981, in as Silverbergian-sounding style as I could manage. It was published the following year in the Laurance-Asimov anthology under a code name 35 digits long, beginning with “411332111323”. In retrospect, I see that I played the game the wrong way: I should have written something that no one could possibly have recognized as my work by its style and content alone. If anyone ever asks me to write for such an anthology again, that’s what I’ll do. But I doubt that the opportunity is going to arise.

  ——————

  There was something shady and sly about him. For one thing, he was small and slightly built, and I have an instinctive mistrust of men who stand less than five feet five: they seem too agile and unpredictable, shifty little Napoleons who are apt to come at you from three directions at once. Then too, his narrow glittery gray eyes, though they did actually make contact with mine, never seemed to be aimed directly at me, but rather somehow sent a beam of vision hooking around a sharply banked curve, even when his face looked at me right square on. I didn’t like that. He was about sixty, sixty-five, lean and trim, not well dressed, his gray hair cropped very short and gone at the crown. “What I do,” he said, “is travel in time. I float freely back to other eras.”

  “Really,” I said. “Never forward?”

  “Oh, no, never. That’s quite impossible. The future doesn’t exist. The past is there, solid and real, a place, you know, like Des Moines or Wichita. One can go to Wichita if one makes the proper connection. But one can’t go to a city that’s never been built. It isn’t conceivable. Well, perhaps it’s conceivable, but it isn’t do-able, do you follow me? I go to the past, though. I’ve seen Attila the Hun. I’ve seen Julius Caesar. I wish I could say I went to bed with Catherine the Great, but I didn’t, although I had a few vodkas with someone who did. She smelled of garlic, he said, and she took forever to come. You don’t believe any of what I’m saying, do you?”

  “You’re asking me to swallow quite a lot,” I said mildly.

  He leaned forward in a conspiratorial way. “You’re not the kind of man who’s easily convinced of the unusual. I can tell. No ancient astronaut stuff for you, no UFO contact stories, no psychic spoon-bendings. That’s good. I don’t want an easy believer. I want a skeptic to hear me out, test my words, and arrive at his own acceptance of the truth his own way. That’s all I ask of you—that you don’t scoff, that you don’t write me off instantly as a crackpot. All right?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Now, what do you feel when I tell you I’ve traveled in time?”

  “Instinctive resistance. An immediate sense that I’ve got myself mixed up with a crackpot or at best a charming liar.”

  “Fine. I wouldn’t have come to you if I thought you’d react any other way.”

  “What do you want from me, then?”

  “That you listen to me, suspend your disbelief at least now and then, and ask me a question or two, probe me, test me, give me the benefit of the doubt long enough to let me get through to you. And then that you help me get my experiences down on paper. I’m old and I’m sick and I’m not going to be here much longer, and I want to leave a memoir, a record, do you see? And I need someone like you to help me.”

  “Why not write it yourself?” I asked.

  “Easy enough to say. But I’m no writer. I don’t have the gift. I can’t even do letters without freezing up.”

  “Doing a memoir doesn’t require a gift. You simply put down your story on paper, just as though you were telling it to me. Writing’s not as hard as nonwriters like to think it is.”

  “Writing is easy for you,” he said, “and time-traveling is easy for me. And I’m about as capable of writing as you are of traveling in time. Do you see?” He put his hand on my wrist, a gesture of premature intimacy that sent a quick and quickly suppressed quiver through my entire arm. “Help me to get my story down, will you? You think I’m a crazy old drunk, and you wish you had never given me minute one of your time, but I ask you to put those feelings aside and accept just for the moment the possibility that this isn’t just a mess of lies and fantasies. Can you do that?”

  “Go on,” I said. “Tell me about yourself.”

  He said his time-traveling had begun when he was a boy. The technique by which he claimed to be able to unhitch himself from the bonds of the continuum and drift back along the time line was apparently one that he developed spontaneously, a sort of applied meditation that amounted to artfully channeled fantasizing. Through this process, which he refined and perfected between the ages of eight and eleven, he achieved what I suppose must be called out-of-the-body experiences in which his psyche, his consciousnes
s, his walking intelligence, vanished into the past while his body remained here, ostensibly asleep.

  On his first voyage he found himself in an American city of the Colonial era. He had no idea where he was—when he was older, working from his searingly vivid memories of the journey, he was able to identify it as Charleston, South Carolina—but he knew at once, from his third-grade studies, that the powdered wigs and three-cornered hats must mean the eighteenth century. He was there for three days, fascinated at first, then frightened and confused, and terribly hungry—

  “Hungry?” I said. “A wandering psyche with an appetite?”

  “You don’t perceive yourself as disembodied,” he replied, looking pleased that I had raised an objection. “You feel that you have been quite literally transplanted to the other era. You need to eat, to sleep, to perform bodily functions. I was a small boy lost in a pre-Revolutionary city. The first night I slept in a forest. In the morning I returned to the city where some people found me, dirty and lost, and took me to a mansion where I was bathed and fed—”

  “And given clothes? You must have been in your pajamas.”

  “No, you are always clothed in the clothing of the era when you arrive,” he said. “And equipped with the language of the region and a certain amount of local currency.”

  “How very convenient. What providential force takes care of those little details?”

  He smiled. “Those are part of the illusion. Plainly, I have no real coins with me, and of course I haven’t magically learned new languages. But the aspect of me that makes the journey has the capacity to lead others to feel that they are receiving true coinage from me; and as my soul makes contact with theirs, they imagine that it is their own language I speak. What I do is not actual bodily travel, you understand. It is astral projection, to use a phrase that I know will arouse hostility in you. My real body, in its pajamas, remained snug in my bed; but the questing anima, the roving spirit, arrived fully equipped. Of course the money is dream money and melts away the moment I go farther from it than a certain range. In my travels I have left angry innkeepers and cheated peddlers and even a few swindled harlots all over the world, I’m afraid. But for the moment what I give them passes as honest coin.”

  “Yet the astral body must be fed with real food?”

  “Indeed. And I think that if the astral body is injured, the sleeping real body feels the pain.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Because,” he said, “I have fallen headlong down temple steps in the Babylon of Hammurabi and awakened to find bruises on my thigh and shoulder. I have slashed myself on vines in the jungles of ancient Cambodia and awakened to see the cuts. I have stood in the snows of Pleistocene Europe shivering with the Neanderthals and awakened with frostbite in July.”

  There is an Italian saying: Se non è vero, è ben trovato: “If it is not true, it is well invented.” There was in his eyes and on his thin gray-stubbled face at that moment a look of such passionate conviction, such absolute sincerity, that I began to tremble, hearing him talk of feeling the bite of Pleistocene winds, and for the first time I began to allow myself the possibility of thinking that this man could be something other than a boozy old scamp with a vivid imagination. But I was far from converted.

  I said, “Then if through some mischance you were killed when traveling, your real body would perish also?”

  “I have every reason to think so,” he replied quietly.

  He traveled through vast reaches of space and time when he was still a child. Most of the places he visited were bewilderingly alien to him, and he had little idea of where or when he was, but he learned to observe keenly, to note salient details, to bring back with him data that sooner or later would help him to determine what he had experienced. He was a bookish child anyway, and so it caused no amazement when he burrowed feverishly through the National Geographic or the Britannica or dusty volumes of history. As he grew older and his education deepened it became easier for him to learn the identity of his destinations; and when he was still older, fully grown, it was not at all difficult for him simply to ask those about him, What is the name of this city? Who is the king here? What is the event of the day? Exactly as though he were a traveler newly arrived from a far-off land. For although he had journeyed in the form of a boy at first, his astral self always mirrored his true self, and, as he aged, the projection that he sent to the past kept pace with him.

  So, then, while still a child he visited the London of the Tudors, where rivers of muck ran in the streets, and he stood at the gates of Peking to watch the triumphal entry of the Great Khan Kublai, and he crept cautiously through the forests of the Dordogne to spy on the encampments of Neolithic huntsmen, and he tiptoed along the brutal brick battlements of a terrifying city of windowless buildings that proved to be Mohenjo-daro on the Indus, and he slipped with awe through the boulevards and plazas of majestic Tenochtitlán of the Aztecs, his pale skin growing sunburned under the heat of the pre-Columbian sun. And when he was older he stood in the frenzied crowd before the bloody guillotine of the Terror, and saw virgins hurled into the sacred well of Chichén Itzá, and wandered through the smoldering ruins of Atlanta a week after General Sherman had put it to the torch, and drank thick red wine in a lovely town on the slopes of Vesuvius that may have been Pompeii. The stories rolled from him in wondrous profusion, and I listened to the charming old crank hour after hour, telling me sly tales of a history not to be found in books. Julius Caesar, he said, was a mincing dandy who reeked of vile perfume, and Cleopatra was squat and thick-lipped, and the Israelites of King David’s time were brawling, conniving primitives no holier than the desert folk the next tribe over, and the Great Wall of China had been mostly a slovenly rampart of mud, decaying as fast as it was slapped together, and Socrates had never lived at all, but was only a convenient pedagogical invention of Plato’s, and Plato had charged an enormous fee even for mere conversation. As for the Crusaders, they were more feared by Christians than Saracens, for they raped and stole and sacked mercilessly as they trekked across Europe to the Holy Land; and Alexander the Great had rarely been sober enough to stand upright after the age of twenty-three; and the orchestras of Mozart’s time played mostly out of tune on feeble, screechy instruments. All this poured from him in long disjointed monologues, which I interrupted less and less frequently for clarifications and amplifications. He spoke with utter conviction and with total disregard for my disbelief: I was invited to accept his tales as whatever I pleased—gospel revelations or amusing fraud—so long as I listened.

  At our fifth or sixth meeting, after he had told me about his adventures among the bare-breasted wenches of Minoan Crete—the maze, he said, was nothing much, just some alleyways and gutters—and in the Constantinople of Justinian and in the vast unpeopled bison-herd lands of ancient North America, I said to him, “Is there any time or place you haven’t visited?”

  “Atlantis,” he said. “I kept hoping to identify the unmistakable Atlantis, but never, never once—”

  “Everywhere else, and every era?”

  “Hardly. I’ve had only one lifetime.”

  “I wondered. I haven’t been keeping a tally, but it seems to me it must have taken you eighty or ninety years to see all that you’ve seen—a week here, a month there; it adds up, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And while you’re gone you remain asleep here for weeks or months at a time?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “You’ve misunderstood. Time spent there has no relation to elapsed time here. I can be gone for many days, and no more than an instant will have passed here. At most, an hour or two. Why, I’ve taken off on journeys even while I was sitting here talking with you!”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday, as we spoke of the San Francisco earthquake—between one eye-blink and the next, I spent eighteen hours in some German principality of the fourteenth century.”

  “And never said a word about it when you returned?”

&nb
sp; He shrugged. “You were prickly and unreceptive yesterday, and I was having trouble keeping your sympathies. I felt it would be too stagy to tell you, Oh, by the way, I’ve just been in Augsburg or Reutlingen or Ulm or whichever it was. Besides, it was a boring trip. I found it so dreary I didn’t even trouble to ask the name of the place.”

  “Then why did you stay for so long?”

  “Why, I have no control over that,” he said.

  “No control?”

  “None. I drift away and I stay away however long I must, and then I come back. It’s been like that from the start. I can’t choose my destination either. I can best compare it to getting into a plane and being spirited off for a vacation of unknown length in an unknown land, and not having a word to say about any of it. There have been times when I thought I wouldn’t ever come back.”

  “Did that frighten you?”

  “Only when I didn’t like where I happened to be,” he said. “The idea of spending the rest of my life in some mudhole in the middle of Mongolia, or in an igloo in Greenland, or—well, you get the idea.” He pursed his lips. “Another thing: It happens automatically to me.”

  “I thought there was a ritual, a meditative process—”

  “When I was a child, yes. But in time I internalized it so well that it happens of its own accord. Which is terrifying, because it can come over me anywhere, anytime, like a fit. Did you think there were no drawbacks to this? Did you think it was a lifelong picnic, roving space and time? I’ve had two or three uncontrolled departures a year since I was twenty. It’s been my luck that I haven’t fallen down unconscious in the street, or anything like that. Though there have been some great embarrassments.”

  “How have your explained them?”

  “With lies,” he said. “You are the first to whom I’ve told the truth about myself.”

  “Should I believe that?”

  “You are the first,” he said, with intense conviction. “And that because my time is almost over and I need at last to share my story with someone. Eh? Is that plausible? Do you still think I’ve fabricated it all?”