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

by Robert Silverberg

  She was surprised and, I suppose, skeptical, justifiably so; I went on to other things and forgot all about Heroic Visions. But on December 19, “9981,” she tried again, asking me if there was any hope of getting the story. I replied that I’d do it, provided she could see a Son of Man spinoff as appropriate to her theme. She had read the book and knew it well. Back came her enthusiastic okay, and on January 9, 1982, I sent “Dancers in the Time-Flux” to her.

  As you’ll see, it departs considerably from the scrawled original note of the previous July. The twentieth-century woman disappears from the plot—I tried without success to return to her later on, in a sequel that I never finished writing—and the man of ancient China or Sumer is transmogrified into the sixteenth-century Dutch circumnavigator Olivier van Noort, an actual historical figure about whom I had written at length years before in a non-fiction book called The Longest Voyage. I do think the story recaptures the tone of Son of Man to a considerable extent, but whether it has the headlong wildness of that book is not so clear to me. It may be that years like 1969 come around only once in a lifetime. Which is, perhaps, a good thing.

  ——————

  Under a warm golden wind from the west, Bhengarn the Traveler moves steadily onward toward distant Crystal Pond, his appointed place of metamorphosis. The season is late. The swollen scarlet sun clings close to the southern hills. Bhengarn’s body—a compact silvery tube supported by a dozen pairs of sturdy three-jointed legs—throbs with the need for transformation. And yet the Traveler is unhurried. He has been bound on this journey for many hundreds of years. He has traced across the face of the world a glistening trail that zigzags from zone to zone, from continent to continent, and even now still glimmers behind him with a cold brilliance like a thread of bright metal stitching the planet’s haunches. For the past decade he has patiently circled Crystal Pond at the outer end of a radial arm one-tenth the diameter of the Earth in length; now, at the prompting of some interior signal, he has begun to spiral inward upon it.

  The path immediately before him is bleak. To his left is a district covered by furry green fog; to his right is a region of pale crimson grass sharp as spikes and sputtering with a sinister hostile hiss; straight ahead a roadbed of black clinkers and ashen crusts leads down a shallow slope to the Plain of Teeth, where menacing porcelaneous outcroppings make the wayfarer’s task a taxing one. But such obstacles mean little to Bhengarn. He is a Traveler, after all. His body is superbly designed to carry him through all difficulties. And in his journeys he has been in places far worse than this.

  Elegantly he descends the pathway of slag and cinders. His many feet are tough as annealed metal, sensitive as the most alert antennae. He tests each point in the road for stability and support, and scans the thick layer of ashes for concealed enemies. In this way he moves easily and swiftly toward the plain, holding his long abdomen safely above the cutting edges of the cold volcanic matter over which he walks.

  As he enters the Plain of Teeth he sees a new annoyance: an Eater commands the gateway to the plain. Of all the forms of human life—and the Traveler has encountered virtually all of them in his wanderings, Eaters, Destroyers, Skimmers, Interceders, and the others—Eaters seem to him the most tiresome, mere noisy monsters. Whatever philosophical underpinnings form the rationale of their bizarre way of life are of no interest to him. He is wearied by their bluster and offended by their gross appetites.

  All the same he must get past this one to reach his destination. The huge creature stands straddling the path with one great meaty leg at each edge and the thick fleshy tail propping it from behind. Its steely claws are exposed, its fangs gleam, driblets of blood from recent victims stain its hard reptilian hide. Its chilly inquisitive eyes, glowing with demonic intelligence, track Bhengarn as the Traveler draws near.

  The Eater emits a boastful roar and brandishes its many teeth.

  “You block my way,” Bhengarn declares.

  “You state the obvious,” the Eater replies.

  “I have no desire for an encounter with you. But my destiny draws me toward Crystal Pond, which lies beyond you.”

  “For you,” says the Eater, “nothing lies beyond me. Your destiny has brought you to a termination today. We will collaborate, you and I, in the transformation of your component molecules.”

  From the spiracles along his sides the Traveler releases a thick blue sigh of boredom. “The only transformation that waits for me is the one I will undertake at Crystal Pond. You and I have no transaction. Stand aside.”

  The Eater roars again. He rocks slightly on his gigantic claws and swishes his vast saurian tail from side to side. These are the preliminaries to an attack, but in a kind of ponderous courtesy he seems to be offering Bhengarn the opportunity to scuttle back up the ash-strewn slope.

  Bhengarn says, “Will you yield place?”

  “I am an instrument of destiny”

  “You are a disagreeable boastful ignoramus,” says Bhengarn calmly, and consumes half a week’s energy driving the scimitars of his spirit to the roots of the world. It is not a wasted expense of soul, for the ground trembles, the sky grows dark, the hill behind him creaks and groans, the wind turns purplish and frosty. There is a chill droning sound which the Traveler knows is the song of the time-flux, an unpredictable force that often is liberated at such moments. Despite that, Bhengarn will not relent. Beneath the Eater’s splayed claws the fabric of the road ripples. Sour smells rise from sudden crevasses. The enormous beast utters a yipping cry of rage and lashes his tail vehemently against the ground. He sways; he nearly topples; he calls out to Bhengarn to cease his onslaught, but the Traveler knows better than to settle for a half measure. Even more fiercely he presses against the Eater’s bulky form.

  “This is unfair,” the Eater wheezes. “My goal is the same as yours: to serve the forces of necessity.”

  “Serve them by eating someone else today,” answers Bhengarn curtly, and with a final expenditure of force shoves the Eater to an awkward, untenable position that causes it to crash down onto its side. The downed beast, moaning, rakes the air with his claws but does not arise, and as Bhengarn moves briskly past the Eater he observes that fine transparent threads, implacable as stone, have shot forth from a patch of swamp beside the road and are rapidly binding the fallen Eater in an unbreakable net. The Eater howls. Glancing back, Bhengarn notices the threads already cutting their way through the Eater’s thick scales like tiny streams of acid. “So, then,” Bhengarn says, without malice, “the forces of necessity will be gratified today after all, but not by me. The Eater is to be eaten. It seems that this day I prove to be the instrument of destiny.” And without another backward look he passes quickly onward into the plain. The sky regains its ruddy color, the wind becomes mild once more, the Earth is still. But a release of the time-flux is never without consequences, and as the Traveler trundles forward he perceives some new creature of unfamiliar form staggering through the mists ahead, confused and lost, lurching between the shining lethal formations of the Plain of Teeth in seeming ignorance of the perils they hold. The creature is upright, two-legged, hairy, of archaic appearance. Bhengarn, approaching it, recognizes it finally as a primordial human, swept millions of years past its own true moment.

  “Have some care,” Bhengarn calls. “Those teeth can bite!”

  “Who spoke?” the archaic creature demands, whirling about in alarm.

  “I am Bhengarn the Traveler. I suspect I am responsible for your presence here.”

  “Where are you? I see no one! Are you a devil?”

  “I am a Traveler, and I am right in front of your nose.”

  The ancient human notices Bhengarn, apparently for the first time, and leaps back, gasping. “Serpent!” he cries. “Serpent with legs! Worm! Devil!” Wildly he seizes rocks and hurls them at the Traveler, who deflects them easily enough, turning each into a rhythmic juncture of gold and green that hovers, twanging softly, along an arc between the other and himself. The archaic one lifts
an immense boulder, but as he hoists it to drop it on Bhengarn he overbalances and his arm flies backward, grazing one of the sleek teeth behind him. At once the tooth releases a turquoise flare and the man’s arm vanishes to the elbow. He sinks to his knees, whimpering, staring bewilderedly at the stump and at the Traveler before him.

  Bhengarn says, “You are in the Plain of Teeth, and any contact with these mineral formations is likely to be unfortunate, as I attempted to warn you.”

  He slides himself into the other’s soul for an instant, pushing his way past thick encrusted stalagmites and stalactites of anger, fear, outraged pride, pain, disorientation, and arrogance, and discovers himself to be in the presence of one Olivier van Noort of Utrecht, former tavernkeeper at Rotterdam, commander of the voyage of circumnavigation that set forth from Holland on the second day of July, 1598, and traveled the entire belly of the world, a man of exceedingly strong stomach and bold temperament, who has experienced much, having gorged on the meat of penguins at Cape Virgines and the isle called Pantagoms, having hunted beasts not unlike stags and buffalos and ostriches in the cold lands by Magellan’s Strait, having encountered whales and parrots and trees whose bark had the bite of pepper, having had strife with the noisome Portugals in Guinea and Brazil, having entered into the South Sea on a day of divers storms, thunders, and lightnings, having taken ships of the Spaniards in Valparaiso and slain many Indians, having voyaged thence to the Isles of Ladrones or Thieves, where the natives bartered bananas, coconuts, and roots for old pieces of iron, overturning their canoes in their greed for metal, having suffered a bloody flux in Manila of eating palmitos, having captured vessels of China laden with rice and lead, having traded with folk on a ship of the Japans, whose men make themselves bald except a tuft left in the hinder part of the head, and wield swords that would, with one stroke, cut through three men, having traded also with the bare-breasted women of Borneo, bold and impudent and shrewd, who carry iron-pointed javelins and sharp darts, and having after great privation and the loss of three of his four ships and all but 45 of his 248 men, many of them executed by him or marooned on remote islands for their mutinies but a good number murdered by the treacheries of savage enemies, come again to Rotterdam on the 26th of August in 1601, bearing little in the way of salable goods to show for his hardships and calamities. None of this has any meaning to Bhengarn the Traveler except in the broadest, which is to say that he recognizes in Olivier van Noort a stubborn and difficult man who has conceived and executed a journey of mingled heroism and foolishness that spanned vast distances, and so they are brothers, of a sort, however millions of years apart. As a fraternal gesture Bhengarn restores the newcomer’s arm. That appears to be as bewildering to the other as was its sudden loss. He squeezes it, moves it cautiously back and forth, scoops up a handful of pebbles with it. “This is Hell, then,” he mutters, “and you are a demon of Satan.”

  “I am Bhengarn the Traveler, bound toward Crystal Pond, and I think that I conjured you by accident out of your proper place in time while seeking to thwart that monster.” Bhengarn indicates the fallen Eater, now half dissolved. The other, who evidently had not looked that way before, makes a harsh choking sound at the sight of the giant creature, which still struggles sluggishly. Bhengarn says, “The time-flux has seized you and taken you far from home, and there will be no going back for you. I offer regrets.”

  “You offer regrets? A worm with legs offers regrets! Do I dream this, or am I truly dead and gone to Hell?”

  “Neither one.”

  “In all my sailing round the world I never saw a place so strange as this, or the likes of you, or of that creature over yonder. Am I to be tortured, demon?”

  “You are not where you think you are.”

  “Is this not Hell?”

  “This is the world of reality.”

  “How far are we, then, from Holland?”

  “I am unable to calculate it,” Bhengarn answers. “A long way, that’s certain. Will you accompany me toward Crystal Pond, or shall we part here?”

  Noort is silent a moment. Then he says, “Better the company of demons than none at all, in such a place. Tell me straight, demon: am I to be punished here? I see hellfire on the horizon. I will find the rivers of fire, snow, toads, and black water, will I not? And the place where sinners are pronged on hooks jutting from blazing wheels? The ladders of red-hot iron, eh? The wicked broiling on coals? And the Arch-Traitor himself, sunk in ice to his chest—he must be near, is he not?” Noort shivers. “The fountains of poison. The wild boars of Lucifer. The aloes biting bare flesh, the dry winds of the abyss—when will I see them?”

  “Look here,” says Bhengarn. Beyond the Plain of Teeth a column of black flame rises into the heavens, and in it dance creatures of a hundred sorts, melting, swirling, coupling, fading. A chain of staring lidless eyes spans the sky. Looping whorls of green light writhe on the mountaintops. “Is that what you expect? You will find whatever you expect here.”

  “And yet you say this is not Hell?”

  “I tell you again, it is the true world, the same into which you were born long ago.”

  “And is this Brazil, or the Indies, or some part of Africa?”

  “Those names mean little to me.”

  “Then we are in the Terra Australis,” says Noort. “It must be. A land where worms have legs and speak good Dutch, and rocks can bite, and arms once lost can sprout anew—yes, it must surely be the Terra Australis, or else the land of Prester John. Eh? Is Prester John your king?” Noort laughs. He seems to be emerging from his bewilderment. “Tell me the name of this land, creature, so I may claim it for the United Provinces, if ever I see Holland again.”

  “It has no name.”

  “No name! No name! What foolishness! I never found a place whose folk had no name for it, not even in the endless South Sea. But I will name it, then. Let this province be called New Utrecht, eh? And all this land, from here to the shores of the South Sea, I annex hereby to the United Provinces in the name of the States-General. You be my witness, creature. Later I will draw up documents. You say I am not dead?”

  “Not dead, not dead at all. But far from home. Come, walk beside me, and touch nothing. This is troublesome territory.”

  “This is strange and ghostly territory,” says Noort. “I would paint it, if I could, and then let Mynheer Brueghel look to his fame, and old Bosch as well. Such sights! Were you a prince before you were transformed?”

  “I have not yet been transformed,” says Bhengarn. “That awaits me at Crystal Pond.” The road through the plain now trends slightly uphill; they are advancing into the farther side of the basin. A pale yellow tint comes into the sky. The path here is prickly with little many-faceted insects whose hard sharp bodies assail the Dutchman’s bare tender feet. Cursing, he hops in wild leaps, bringing him dangerously close to outcroppings of teeth, and Bhengarn, in sympathy, fashions stout gray boots for him. Noort grins. He gestures toward his bare middle, and Bhengarn clothes him in a shapeless gray robe.

  “Like a monk, is how I look!” Noort cries. “Well, well, a monk in Hell! But you say this is not Hell. And what kind of creature are you, creature?”

  “A human being,” says Bhengarn, “of the Traveler sort.”

  “A human being!” Noort booms. He leaps across a brook of sparkling bubbling violet-hued water and waits on the far side as Bhengarn trudges through it. “A human under an enchantment, I would venture.”

  “This is my natural form. Humankind has not worn your guise since long before the falling of the Moon. The Eater you saw was human. Do you see, on yonder eastern hill, a company of Destroyers turning the forest to rubble? They are human.”

  “The wolves on two legs up there?”

  “Those, yes. And there are others you will see. Awaiters, Breathers, Skimmers—”

  “These are mere noises to me, creature. What is human? A Dutchman is human! A Portugal is human! Even a Chinese, a black, a Japonder with a shaven head. But those beasts on yon hill? Or
a creature with more legs than I have whiskers. No, Traveler, no! You flatter yourself. Do you happen to know, Traveler, how it is that I am here? I was in Amsterdam, to speak before the Lords Seventeen and the Company in general, to ask for ships to bring pepper from the Moluccas, but they said they would choose Joris van Spilbergen in my place—do you know Spilbergen? I think him much overpraised—and then all went dizzy, as though I had taken too much beer with my gin—and then—then—ah, this is a dream, is it not, Traveler? At this moment I sleep in Amsterdam. I am too old for such drinking. Yet never have I had a dream so real as this, and so strange. Tell me: when you walk, do you move the legs on the right side first, or the left?” Noort does not wait for a reply. “If you are human, Traveler, are you also a Christian, then?”