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

by Robert Silverberg

  On the thirtieth day she said goodbye.

  “Please,” I said. “Another week.”

  “Those were the terms.”

  “Even so.”

  “If we refuse to honor contracts, all society collapses.”

  “Have I bored you?” Foolish question, inviting destruction.

  “Not nearly as much as I thought you would,” she replied, and I loved her for it, having expected worse. “But I have other things to do. My new Shaping, Sandalphon.”

  “You won’t. What you are now is too beautiful to discard.”

  “What I will be next will surpass it.”

  “I beg you—stay as you are a little longer.”

  “I undergo engineering tomorrow at dawn,” she said, “at the gene surgery in Katmandu.”

  Arguing with her was hopeless. We had our last night, a night of miracles, and while I slept, she vanished, and the walls of the world fell in on me. I hurried out to my friends and was house guest in turn with Nullamar and Mandragora and Melanoleum and Candelabra, and not one of them said the name of Domitilla to me, and at the end of the year I went to Spinifex and Mortissa to admire the new child in the graceful shell of my happy designing, and then, despondent, I popped to Katmandu. All year long, a new Domitilla had been emerging from the altered genetic material of the previous one, and now her Shaping was nearly complete. They wouldn’t let me see her, but they sent messages in, and she agreed to my request to have dinner with her on the day of her coming forth. That was still a month away. I could have gone anywhere in the world, but I stayed in Katmandu, staring at the mountains, thinking that my month of Domitilla had gone by in a flick and this month of waiting was taking an eternity; and then it was the day.

  The inner door opened and nurses came out, standard humans, and an orderly or two, and then the surgeon, and then Domitilla. I recognized her at once, the same wiry armature as ever. The new body she wore was the one she had designed for the child of Spinifex and Mortissa. A standard human frame, mortifyingly human, the body of a servant, of a hewer of wood and drawer of water, except that it glowed with the inner fire that burned in Domitilla and that no member of the lower orders could conceivably have. And she was different from the standards in another way, for she was naked and she had used the hermaphrodite design—breasts above, male organs below. I felt as if I had been kicked; I wanted to clutch my gut and double over. Her eyes gleamed.

  “Do you like it?” she asked, mocking me.

  I was unable to look. I turned and tried to run, but she called after me, “Wait, Sandalphon!”

  Trembling, I halted. “What do you want?”

  “Tell me if you like it?”

  “The terms of the contest bound you not to use any of the designs,” I said bitterly. “You claimed always to abide by terms.”

  “Always. Except when I choose not to.” She spread her arms. “What do you think? Tell me you like it and I’m yours for tonight!”

  “Never, Domitilla.”

  She touched her groin. “Because of this?”

  “Because of you,” I said. I shivered. “How could you do it? A standard, Domitilla. A standard!”

  “You poor old fool,” she said.

  Again I turned, and this time she let me go. I traveled to Madagascar and Turkey and Greenland and Bulgaria, and her images blazed in my mind, the wolverine girl I had loved and the grotesque thing she had become. Gradually, the pain grew less. I went in for a new Shaping, despite Hapshash and his coterie, and came out simpler, more sleek, less conglomeroid. I felt better then. I was recovering from her.

  A year went by. At a party in Oaxaca, I told the story, finally, to Melanoleum, stunning in her new streamlined form. “If I had it all to do over, I would,” I said, “One has to remain in an existentially pliant posture, of course. One must keep alert to all possibilities. And so I have no regrets. But yet—but yet—she hurt me so badly, love—”

  “Look over there,” said Melanoleum.

  I followed her glance, past Hapshash and Mandragora and Negresca, to the slender, taut-bodied stranger scooping fish from the pond: beetle wings, black and yellow; luminescent spots glowing on thighs and forearms; cat whiskers; needle-sharp fangs. She looked toward me and our eyes met, a contact that seared me, and she laughed and her laughter shriveled me with postcausal mockery, contralinear scorn. In front of them all, she destroyed me. I fled. I am fleeing still. I may flee her forever.

  THE TROUBLE WITH SEMPOANGA

  This was one of those odd jobs that come a professional writer’s way every now and then. A magazine called Beyond was getting started, published out of Los Angeles, and intended, I think, for distribution entirely on college campuses. They wanted to publish a science-fiction story by a well-known writer in each issue. Harlan Ellison put its editor, Judith Sims, in touch with me in September of 1981; a good price was being offered and I was then in the midst of the rush of creative activity that in recent months had produced the Majipoor Chronicles short stories and four or five others; after doing “The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party” for Playboy I sat right down and wrote “The Trouble With Sempoanga” for this new magazine. At this late date it may seem to have been inspired by the AIDS epidemic, but in fact AIDS had not yet surfaced as a major problem in 1981 and if there was any kind of real-world inspiration for this little story, it was the epidemic of genital herpes that then was a big topic of conversation in the United States.

  At any rate, I wrote the story and Beyond published it in its second issue (I think the magazine lasted four issues altogether) and that was that. I haven’t given that ephemeral magazine a thought for decades. Even Google seems to know nothing about it and I’m not sure where my file copy is. (I had to ask Harlan for some of the details I’ve noted here.) But I did get a nice nasty story out of the project.

  ——————

  When Helmut Schweid decided to go to Sempoanga for his holiday, he knew the risks, but of course he assumed they didn’t apply to him. “You’ll pick up a dose of zanjak and never get out of quarantine,” his friends told him. Helmut laughed. He was a careful man, especially with his body. He would avoid getting zanjak by avoiding going to bed with women who had zanjak: that was simple enough to manage, wasn’t it?

  By common agreement Sempoanga was the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. See one sunrise on Sempoanga, everyone said, and you won’t care if you never see anything else anywhere. The trouble with Sempoanga was the dismal parasite its humanoid natives harbored. There was only one way to transmit that parasite—by making love. Since the natives of Sempoanga are a good deal less attractive to humans than its sunrises, it is not easy to understand how any human could ever have caught it, but somehow someone had, and it had adapted nicely to human bodies, thriving and multiplying and making itself remarkably contagious, and in the past few years a good many human visitors to Sempoanga had passed it around to one another, with horrendous results. Biologists were working on a cure and hoped they might see results in just a few more years. But meanwhile no one went home from Sempoanga without undergoing tests, and if you caught zanjak, you stayed quarantined there indefinitely, because the parasite’s effect on the human reproductive system was so startling that the future of the entire species might be in jeopardy if it were allowed to spread to the other civilized worlds.

  For his first few days on Sempoanga Helmut was so busy experiencing the gorgeous planet itself that he was in no danger of catching any kind of venereal disease, neither the old standbys nor the exotic local specialty. His own world, Waldemar, was a frosty place with a planetwide winter for three-quarters of the year, and on Sempoanga he erupted with great gusto into eternal tropical summer. From dawn to midnight he toured the wonders—Hargillin Falls, where the water is the color of red wine, and Stinivong Chute, a flawless mountain of obsidian at the edge of a lake of phosphorescent pink gas, and The Bubbles, where subterranean psychedelic vapors percolate upward through a shield of porous yellow rock with delightful effect. He ran naked
through a grove of voluptuous ferns that wrapped him in their fleshy fronds. He swam in crystalline rivers, eye to eye with vast harmless turtles the size of small islands. And each night he staggered back to his hotel, wonderfully weary, to collapse into his solitary sleep-tube for a few hours.

  But after those early greedy gulps of natural marvels, his normal social instincts reasserted themselves. On the fourth day he saw a striking-looking radium-blonde from one of the Rigel worlds at the gravity-ball court. She met his tentative grin with a dazzling one of her own and quickly agreed to have dinner with him. Everything was going beautifully until she excused herself for a moment late in the meal, and the waiter who was bringing the brandies paused to whisper to Helmut, “Watch out for that one. Zanjak.”

  He was stunned. Was she trying to hide it from him, then? No, give her more credit than that: as they strolled through the garden under the light of the five moons she said, “I’d like to spend the night with you. But only if you’re already carrying. I am, you know.” So that was that. He walked her to her room and kissed her sadly and warmly goodnight, and trembled for a moment as her soft elegant body moved close against his; but he managed to escape without doing anything foolish.

  The next night, sitting alone in the hotel cocktail lounge and beginning to feel more than lonely, he noticed another woman noticing him. She was dark-haired and long-legged and perhaps two or three years younger than he was. They exchanged glances and then smiles, and he tapped his empty glass and she nodded and they rose and went to the bar and ritualistically bought each other drinks. Her name was Marbella and she had been on holiday here since last month, escaping from a collapsed six-group on the planet of Tlon. “The divorce is going to take years,” she told him. “It’s a universal-option planet, the six of us come from four different worlds and everybody’s home-world laws apply, some of the lawyers aren’t even human—”

  “And you plan to hide out on Sempoanga until it’s all over?”

  “Can you imagine a better place?”

  “Except for—”

  “Well, yes, there’s that. But every paradise has its little snake, after all.” Quickly she shifted topics. “I saw you this morning at the puff-glider field. You looked like you wanted to try it.”

  “How is it done?” he asked. Helmut had watched hotel guests clambering into huge fungoid puff-balls, which immediately broke free of their moorings and went drifting out across golden Lake Mangalole in what looked like guided flight.

  “Would you like me to teach you? It’s a matter of controlling the puffer’s hydrogen-synthesis. Stroke it one way and it gets more buoyant, another and it sinks. And you learn how to ride the thermals and all. Where did you say you were from?”

  “Waldemar.”

  “Brr,” she said. “Are you free for dinner tonight?”

  He liked her forthright, aggressive ways. They arranged to meet for dinner and to try the puff-gliders in the morning. What might happen in between was left undiscussed, but once again Helmut found himself confronting the problem of zanjak. She had been here more than long enough to pick up an infection, and, coming out of a turbulent marriage, it was hardly likely that she had been chaste in this sensuous place. On the other hand, if she did carry the parasite, she would certainly tell him about it ahead of time, as the other woman had. There was bound to be an etiquette about such things.

  Over dinner they spoke of her complex marriage and his simpler, but ultimately just as disastrous, one, and briefly of his work and hers and of his planet and hers, and then of the splendors of Sempoanga. He liked her very much. And the gleam in her eyes told him he was making the right impression.

  When he invited her to his room, though, she turned him down—warmly and graciously and with what seemed like genuine regret, explaining that this was the last night of her five-day contraceptive holiday; she was fertile as a mink just now and feared giving way to temptation. She seemed sincere. “There’ll be other nights, you know,” she said, and her smile left him with no doubts.

  In the morning they met at the puff-glider field and she taught him quickly and expertly how to control the great organisms. Within an hour they were off and soaring. They crossed the lake, landed on the slopes of jag-toothed Mount Monolang for a lunch of sun-grilled fish and wineberries and ran laughing toward a glistening stream for a dip. Later, when they lay sunning themselves on shelves of glassy rock, he studied her bare body as surreptitiously as possible for signs of zanjak—some swelling around the thighs, perhaps, or maybe little puckered red marks below the navel, anything at all that seemed irregular. Nothing visible, at any rate. The pamphlet on zanjak that the hotel had thoughtfully left beside his bed had told him there were no external symptoms, but he was uneasy all the same.

  It would have been simple enough to drift into lovemaking on this secluded hillside, but his uncertainties held him back, nor did she try to take the initiative. Eventually they dressed and resumed their glider-journey. They halted again to visit a village of natives—flat-faced warty creatures with furry mothlike antennae, so ugly that Helmut wondered what sort of tourist could have been desperate enough to catch the original parasite from one of them—and then in late afternoon, strolling hand in hand in fields of mildly aphrodisiac blossoms, they slipped into one of those low-toned, earnest, intimate conversations that only people who are about to become lovers engage in. “What a lovely day this has been,” she told him when they were heading back to the hotel.

  That night she asked him to her room. Two themes marched through his mind as they undressed. One was his admiration for her beauty, her warmth and intelligence, her desirability. And the other was zanjak, zanjak, zanjak.

  What to do? By dimmed light he came to her. He imagined himself saying, “Forgive me, Marbella, but I need to know. That terrible parasite—that monstrous disease—” And he could see her turning bleak and furious as he blurted his tactless questions, demanding icily whether he thought she were the sort of woman who might deliberately hide from him anything so ghastly and shoving him into the hall, slamming the door, screaming curses after him—

  He faltered. She smiled. Her eyes were bright with desire and refusing her was absurd. He drew her into his arms.

  They were inseparable, night and day, the rest of the week. He had no illusions: this was only a resort-planet romance, and when his time was up he would go back to Waldemar and that would be the end of it. But it was wondrous while it lasted. She was a fine companion, and she appeared to be altogether in love with him, sincerely and a little worrisomely so. He was already rehearsing the speech he was going to have to make after breaking the news to her that business responsibilities would not permit him to extend his Sempoangan holiday beyond the five days that remained.

  Then one drowsy morning as they were lying in bed he felt a dismaying internal twitch, as if some tiny supple creature were trying to swim downstream in his urethra.

  He said nothing to her. But after breakfast he invented the need to put a call through to his firm on Waldemar and, in terror, got himself off to the hotel medical office, where a blandly unsympathetic doctor processed him through the diagnostat and told him he had zanjak. “You see those little red flecks in your urine? Just a couple of microns in diameter. They’re symptomatic. And this blood sample—it’s loaded with zanjak excreta.”

  Helmut shivered. “I can’t have had it more than a couple of days. Perhaps because we’ve detected it so soon—”

  “Sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “What do I do now?” he asked tonelessly.

  The doctor was already tapping data into a terminal. “We put you on the master list, first. That slaps a hold on your passport. You know about the quarantine, don’t you? If your home world is covered by the covenant, your government will pay the expenses of transferring your funds and a certain quantity of your possessions to Sempoanga. You can live in the hotel as long as you can afford to, of course. After that, you’re entitled to a rent-free room at the Quarantine Cent
er, which is on the southern continent in a very pleasant region where the fishing is said to be superb. You’ll be asked to take part in the various test programs for cures, but otherwise you’ll be left alone.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Helmut muttered.

  “These harsh measures are absolutely necessary, of course. You must realize that. The parasite has passed through your genito-urinary tract and has taken up residence in your bloodstream, where it’s busy filling you with threadlike reproductive bodies known as microfilariae. Whenever you have sexual relations with a woman—or with another man, for that matter, or with any mammalian organism at all—you’ll inevitably transmit microfilariae. If the organism you infect is female, the microfilariae will travel in a few weeks to the ovaries, infiltrate unfertilized eggs and impose their own genetic material by a process we call pseudofertilization, causing the eggs to mature into hybrids, part zanjak and part host-species. What appears to be a normal pregnancy follows, though the term is only about twelve weeks in human hosts; offspring are born in litters, adapted quite cunningly to penetrate whatever ecosphere they find themselves in.”

  “All right. Don’t tell me any more.”

  “No need to. You see the picture. These things could take over the universe if they ever got beyond Sempoanga.”

  “Then Sempoanga should be closed to interplanetary travel!”

  “Ah, but this is a major resort area! Besides, the quarantine is one hundred percent effective. If only new tourists were not so careless or unethical as they seem to be, we would isolate all cases in a matter of weeks and after that—”

  “I thought I was being careful!”

  “Not careful enough, it seems.”

  “And you? Don’t you worry about getting it?”

  The doctor gave Helmut a scathing look. “When I was a small child, I learned quickly not to put my fingers into electrical sockets. I conduct my sexual activities with the same philosophy. Good morning, Mr. Schweid. I’ll have your quarantine documents sent round to your room when they’re ready.”