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

by Robert Silverberg

  During the morning commute, Laurel came to him with stunning images of desert landscapes, eroded geological strata, mysterious dark mesas, distant flame-colored sandstone walls. He sent her Pacific surf, cypresses bending to the wind, tide pools swarming with anemones and red starfish. Then, timidly, he sent her a kiss and had one from her in return; and then, as he was crossing the toll plaza of the bridge, she shifted to words.

  —What do you do?

  —Securities analyst. I read reports and make forecasts.

  —Sounds terribly dull. Is it?

  —If it is, I don’t let myself notice. It’s OK work. What about you?

  —I’m a potter. I’m a very good one. You’d like my stuff.

  —Where can I see it?

  —There’s a gallery in Santa Fe. And one in Tucson. And, of course, Phoenix. But you mustn’t come to Phoenix.

  —Are you married?

  There was a pause.

  —Yes. But that isn’t why you mustn’t come here.

  —I’m married, too.

  —I thought you were. You feel like a married sort of man.

  —Oh? I do?

  —That isn’t an insult. You have a very stable vibe, do you know what I mean?

  —I think so. Do you have children?

  —No. Do you?

  —Two. Little girls. How long have you been married, Laurel?

  —Six years.

  —Nine.

  —We must be about the same age.

  —I’m thirty-seven.

  —I’m thirty-four.

  —Close enough. Do you want to know my sign?

  —Not really.

  She laughed and sent him a complex, awesome image: the entire wheel of the zodiac, which flowered into the shape of the Aztec calendar stone, which became the glowing rose window of a Gothic cathedral. An undercurrent of warmth and love and amusement rode with it. Then she was gone, leaving him on the bridge in a silence so sharp it rang like iron.

  He did not reach toward her but drove on into the city in a mellow haze, wondering what she looked like. Her mental “voice” sounded to him like that of a tall, clear-eyed, straight-backed woman with long brown hair, but he knew better than to put much faith in that; he had played the same game with people’s telephone voices and he had always been wrong. For all he knew, Laurel was squat and greasy. He doubted that; he saw no way that she could be ugly. But why, then, was she so determined not to have him come to Phoenix? Perhaps she was an invalid; perhaps she was painfully shy; perhaps she feared the intrusion of any sort of reality into their long-distance romance.

  At lunchtime he tuned himself to her wave length and sent her an image of the first page of the report he had written last week on Exxon. She replied with a glimpse of a tall, olive-hued porcelain jar of a form both elegant and sturdy at once. Her work in exchange for his: he liked that. Everything was going to be perfect.

  A week later, he went out to Salt Lake City for a couple of days to do some field research on a mining company headquartered there. He took an early-morning flight, had lunch with three earnest young Mormon executives overflowing with joy at the bounty of God as manifested by the mineral wealth of the Overthrust Belt in Wyoming, spent the afternoon leafing through geologists’ survey sheets and had dinner alone at his hotel. Afterward, he put in his obligatory call to Jan, worked up his notes of the day’s conferences and watched TV for an hour, hoping it would make him drowsy. Maitland didn’t mind these business trips, but he slept badly when he slept alone, and any sort of time-zone change, even a trifling one like this, disrupted his internal clock. He was still wide awake when he got into bed about 11.

  He thought of Laurel. He felt very near to her, out here in this spacious mountain-ringed city with the wide, bland streets. Probably Salt Lake City was not significantly closer to Phoenix than San Francisco was, but he regarded both Utah and Arizona as the true wild West, while his own suburban and manicured part of California, paradoxically, did not seem Western to him at all. Somewhere due south of here, just on the far side of all these cliffs and canyons, was the unknown woman he loved.

  As though on cue, she was in his mind:

  —Lonely?

  —You bet.

  —I’ve been thinking of you all day. Poor Chris, sitting around with those businessmen, talking all that depletion gibberish.

  —I’m a businessman, too.

  —You’re different. You’re a businessman outside and a freak inside.

  —Don’t say that.

  —It’s what we are, Chris. Face it. Flukes, anomalies, sports, changelings—

  —Please stop, Laurel. Please.

  —I’m sorry.

  A silence. He thought she was gone, taking flight at his rebuke. But then:

  —Are you very lonely?

  —Very. Dull, empty city; dull, empty bed.

  —You’re in it.

  —But you aren’t.

  —Is that what you want? Right now?

  —I wish we could, Laurel.

  —Let’s try this.

  He felt a sudden astounding intensifying of her mental signal, as if she had leaped the hundreds of miles and lay curled against him here. There was a sense of physical proximity, of warmth, even the light perfume of her skin, and into his mind swept an image so acutely clear that it eclipsed for him the drab realities of his room: the shore of a tropical ocean, fine pink sand, gentle pale-green water, a dense line of heavy-crowned palms.

  —Go on, Chris. Into the water.

  He waded into the calm wavelets until the delicate sandy bottom was far below his dangling feet and he floated effortlessly in an all-encompassing warmth, in an amniotic bath of placid, soothing fluid. Placid but not motionless, for he felt, as he drifted, tiny convulsive quivers about him, an electric oceanic caress, pulsations of the water against his bare skin, intimate, tender, searching. He began to tingle. As he moved farther out from shore, so far now that the land was gone and the world was all warm water to the horizon, the pressure of those rhythmic pulsations became more forceful, deeply pleasurable: the ocean was a giant hand lightly squeezing him. He trembled and made soft sighing sounds that grew steadily more vehement and closed his eyes and let ecstasy overwhelm him in the ocean’s benignly insistent grip. Then he grunted and his heart thumped and his body went rigid and then lax, and moments later he sat up, blinking, astonished, eerily tranquil.

  —I didn’t think anything like that was possible.

  —For us, anything’s possible. Even sex across seven hundred miles. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I guess it did, didn’t it? Did you like it?

  —Do you need an answer, Laurel?

  —I feel so happy.

  —How did you do it? What was the trick?

  —No trick. Just the usual trick, Chris, a little more intense than usual. I hated the idea that you were all alone, horny, unable to sleep.

  —It was absolutely marvelous.

  —And now we’re lovers. Even though we’ve never met.

  —No. Not altogether lovers, not yet. Let me try to do it to you, Laurel. It’s only fair.

  —Later, OK? Not now.

  —I want to.

  —It takes a lot of energy. You ought to get some sleep, and I can wait. Just lie there and glow and don’t worry about me. You can try it with me another time.

  —An hour? Two hours?

  —Whenever you want. But not now. Rest now. Enjoy. Good night, love.

  —Good night, Laurel.

  He was alone. He lay staring up into the darkness, stunned. He had been unfaithful to Jan three times before, not bad for nine years, and always the same innocuous pattern: a business trip far from home, a couple of solitary nights, then an official dinner with some woman executive, too many drinks, the usual half-serious banter turning serious, a blurry one-night stand, remorse in the morning and never any follow-up. Meaningless, fragmentary stuff. But this—this long-distance event with a woman he had never even seen—seemed infinitely more explosive. For he had
the power and Jan did not and Laurel did; and Jan’s mind was closed to his and his to hers, and they could only stagger around blindly trying to find each other, while he and Laurel could unite at will in a communion whose richness was unknown to ordinary humans. He wondered if he could go on living with Jan at all now. He felt no less love for her than before, and powerful ties of affection and sharing held him to her; but yet—even so—

  In guilt and confusion, Maitland drifted off into sleep. It was still dark when he woke—3:13 A.M., said the clock on the dresser—and he felt different guilt, different confusion, for it was of Laurel now that he thought. He had taken pleasure from her and then he had collapsed into postorgasmic stupor. Never mind that she had told him to do just that. He felt, and always had, a peculiarly puritanical obligation to give pleasure for pleasure, and unpaid debts were troublesome to him. Taking a deep breath, he sent strands of consciousness through the night toward the south, over the fire-hued mountains of central Utah, over the silent splendor of the Grand Canyon, down past the palm trees into torrid Phoenix, and touched Laurel’s warm, sleepy mind.

  —Hnhh.

  —It’s me. I want to, now.

  —All right. Yes.

  The image she had chosen was a warm sea, the great mother, the all-encompassing womb. He, reaching unhesitatingly for a male equivalent, sent her a vision of himself coming forth on a hot, dry summer day into a quiet landscape of grassy hills as round as tawny breasts. Cradled in his arms he held her gleaming porcelain jar, the one she had showed him. He bent, tipping it, pouring forth from it an enormous snake, long and powerful but not in any way frightening, that flowed like a dark rivulet across the land, seeking her, finding, gliding up across her thighs, her belly. Too obvious? Too coarsely phallic? He wavered for a moment but only a moment, for he heard her moan and whimper, and she reached with her mind for the serpent as it seemed he was withdrawing it; he drove back his qualms and gave her all the energy at his command, seizing the initiative as he sensed her complete surrender. Her signal shivered and lost focus. Her breathing grew ragged and hoarse, and then into his mind came a quick, surprising sound, a strange, low growling that terminated in a swift, sharp gasp.

  —Oh, love. Oh. Oh. Thank you.

  —It wasn’t scary?

  —Scare me like that as often as you want, Chris.

  He smiled across the darkness of the miles. All was well. A fair exchange: symbol for symbol, metaphor for metaphor, delight for delight.

  —Sleep well, Laurel.

  —You too, love. Mmm.

  This time Jan knew that something had happened while he was away. He saw it on her face, which meant that she saw it on his; but she voiced no suspicions, and when they made love the first night of his return it was as good as ever. Was it possible, he wondered, to be bigamous, to take part with Laurel in a literally superhuman oneness while remaining Jan’s devoted husband and companion? He would, at any rate, try. Laurel had shared his soul as no one ever had and Jan never could, yet she was a phantom, faceless, remote, scarcely real; and Jan, cut off from him as most humans are from all others, nevertheless was his wife, his partner, his bedmate, the mother of his children. He would try.

  So he took the office gossip home to her as always and went out with her twice a week to the restaurants they loved and sat beside her at night watching cassettes of operas and movies and Shakespeare, and on weekends they did their weekend things, boating on the bay and tennis and picnics in the park and dinner with their friends, and everything was fine. Everything was very fine. And yet he managed to do the other thing, too, as often as he could. Just as he had successfully hidden from Jan the enigmatic secret mechanism within his mind that he did not dare reveal to anyone not of his sort, so, too, now did he hide the second marriage, rich and strange, that that mechanism had brought him.

  His lovemaking with Laurel had to be furtive, of course, a thing of stolen moments. She could hardly draw him into that warm, voluptuous ocean while he lay beside Jan. But there were the business trips—he was careful not to increase their frequency, which would have been suspicious, but she came to him every night while he was away—and there was the occasional Saturday afternoon when he lay drowsing in the sun of the garden and found that whispering transparent surf beckoning to him, and once she enlivened a lunchtime for him on a working day. He roused the snake within his soul as often as he dared; and nearly always she accepted it, though there were times when she told him no, not now, the moment was wrong. They had elaborate signals to indicate a clear coast. And for the ordinary conversation of the day, there were no limits; they popped into each other’s consciousness a thousand times a day, quick, flickering interchanges, a joke, a bit of news, a job triumphantly accomplished, an image of beauty too potent to withhold. As he was crossing the bridge, entering his office, reaching for the telephone, unfolding a napkin—suddenly, there she was, often for the briefest flare of contact, a tag touch and gone. He loved that. He loved her. It was a marriage.

  He snooped in Mountain Bell directories at the library and found her telephone number, which he hardly needed, and her address, which at least confirmed that she really did exist in tangible, actual Phoenix. He manufactured a trip to Albuquerque to appraise the earnings prospects of a small electronics company and slipped off up the freeway to Santa Fe to visit the gallery that showed her pottery: eight or ten superb pieces, sleek, wondrously skilled. He bought one of the smaller ones. “You don’t have any information about the artist, do you?” he asked the proprietor, trying to be casual, heart pounding, hoping to be shown a photograph.

  The proprietor thought there might be a press release in the files and rummaged for it. “She lives down Phoenix way,” she said. “Comes up here once or twice a year with her new work. I think it’s museum quality, don’t you?” But she could not find the press release. When Laurel flashed into his mind that night back in Albuquerque, he did not tell her he owned one of her jars or that he had been researching her. But he wondered desperately what she looked like. He played with the idea of visiting Phoenix and somehow getting to meet her without telling her who he was. So long as he kept his mind sheathed, she would never know, he thought. But it seemed sneaky and treacherous; and it might be dangerous, too. She had told him often enough not to come to her city.

  In the fourth month of their relationship, he could no longer control his curiosity. She sent him a view of her studio, amazingly neat, the clay, the wheels, the kiln, the little bowls of pigment and glaze all fastidiously in their proper places.

  —You left one thing out, Laurel.

  —What’s that?

  —The potter herself. You didn’t show me her.

  —Oh, Chris.

  —What’s the matter? Aren’t you ever curious about what I look like? We’ve been all over each other’s minds and bodies for months and I still don’t have any idea what you look like. That’s absurd.

  —It’s so much more abstract and pure this way.

  —Wonderful. Abstract love! I want to see you.

  —I have to confess. I want to see you, too.

  —Here, then. Now.

  He sent her, before she could demur, a mental snapshot of his face, trying not to retouch and enhance it. The nose a trifle too long, the cleft chin absurdly Hollywood, the dark hair thinning a bit at the part line. Not a perfect face but good enough, pleasant, honest, nothing to apologize for, he thought. It brought silence.

  —Well? Am I remotely what you expected?

  —Exactly, Chris. Steady-looking, strong, decent—no surprise at all. I like your face. I’m very pleased.

  —Your turn.

  —You’ll promise not to be disappointed?

  —Stop being silly.

  —All right.

  She flared in his mind, not just her face but all of her, long-legged, broad-shouldered, a woman of physical presence and strength, with straightforward open features, wide-set brown eyes, a good smile, a blunt nose, conspicuous cheekbones. She was not far from the woman h
e had imagined, and one aspect, the dark, thick, straight hair falling past her shoulders, was amazingly as he had thought.

  —You’re beautiful.

  —No, not really. But I’m OK.

  —Are you an Indian?

  —I must have sent you a good picture, then. I’m half. My mother was Navaho.

  —You learned your pottery from her?

  —No, dopey. Navahos make rugs. Pueblos make pottery. I learned mine in New York, Greenwich Village. I studied with Hideki Shinoda.

  —Doesn’t sound Pueblo.

  —Isn’t. Little Japanese man with marvelous hands.

  —I’m glad we did this, Laurel.

  —So am I.

  But seeing her in the eye of his mind, while gratifying one curiosity, had only intensified another. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her.

  Snake. Ocean. They were practiced lovers now, a year of constant mental communion behind them. She came to him as a starfish, thousands of tiny suction-cup feet and a startling devouring mouth, and at another time as a moist, voluptuous mass of warm, smooth white clay and as a whirlpool and as a great, coy, lighthearted amoeba; and he manifested himself to her as a flash flood roaring down a red-rock canyon and as a glistening vine coiling through a tropic night and as a spaceship plunging in eternal free fall between worlds. All of these were effective, for they needed only to touch one another with their minds to bring pleasure; and each new access of ingenuity brought an abstract pleasure of its own. But even so, they tended often to revert to the original modes, snake and ocean, ocean and snake, the way one might return to a familiar and modest hotel where one had spent a joyous weekend at the beginning of an affair, and somehow it was always best that way.

  Their skill at pleasuring each other struck them both as extraordinary. They liked to tell each other that the kind of lovemaking they had invented and of which they were perhaps the sole practitioners in the history of humanity was infinitely superior to the old-fashioned type, which was so blatant, so obvious, so coarse, so messy. Even so, even as he said things like that, he knew he was lying. He wanted her skin against his skin, her breath on his breath.