To The Dark Star

by Silverberg, Robert

  At eight, just as he was getting up momentum for the long night’s work, he heard a knock at the door. Carole’s signal. He had disconnected the doorbell, and robots didn’t have the sense to knock. Uneasily, he went to the door. She was there.

  “So?” he said.

  “So I came back. So it starts all over.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  “I suppose. I’m working, but come in.”

  She said, “I talked it over with Pete. We both decided I ought to go back to you.”

  “You aren’t much for consistency, are you?”

  “I have to take things as they happen. When I lost my memory, I came to you. When I remembered things again, I felt I ought leave. I didn’t want to leave. I felt I ought to leave. There’s a difference.”

  “Really,” he said.

  “Really. I went to Pete, but I didn’t want to be with him. I want to be here.”

  “I hit you and made your lip bleed. I threw the Ming vase at you.”

  “It wasn’t Ming, it was K’ang-hsi.”

  “Pardon me. My memory still isn’t so good. Anyway, I did terrible things to you, and you hated me enough to want a divorce. So why come back?”

  “You were right, yesterday. You aren’t the man I came to hate. You’re the old Paul.”

  “And if my memory of the past nine months returns?”

  “Even so,” she said. “People change. You’ve been through hell and come out the other side. You’re working again. You aren’t sullen and nasty and confused. We’ll go to Caracas, or wherever you want, and you’ll do your work and pay your debts, just as you said yesterday.”

  “And Pete?”

  “He’ll arrange an annulment. He’s being swell about it.”

  “Good old Pete,” Mueller said. He shook his head. “How long will this neat happy ending last, Carole? If you think there’s a chance you’ll be bouncing back in the other direction by Wednesday, say so now. I’d rather not get involved again, in that case.”

  “No chance. None.”

  “Unless I throw the Chi’ien-lung vase at you.”

  “K’ang-hsi,” she said.

  “Yes. K’ang-hsi.” He managed to grin. Suddenly he felt the accumulated fatigue of these days register all at once. “I’ve been working too hard,” he said. “An orgy of creativity to make up for lost time. Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  They went out, just as a dunning robot was arriving. “Top of the evening to you, sir,” Mueller said.

  “Mr. Mueller, I represent the accounts receivable department of Acme Brass and—”

  “See my attorney,” he said.

  Fog was rolling in off the sea now. There were no stars. The downtown lights were invisible. He and Carole walked west, toward the park. He felt strangely light-headed, not entirely from lack of sleep. Reality and dream had merged; these were unusual days. They entered the park from the Panhandle and strolled toward the museum area, arm in arm, saying nothing much to one another. As they passed the conservatory Mueller became aware of a crowd up ahead, thousands of people staring in the direction of the music shell. “What do you think is going on?” Carole asked. Mueller shrugged. They edged through the crowd.

  Ten minutes later they were close enough to see the stage. A tall, thin, wild-looking man with unruly yellow hair was on the stage. Beside him was a small, scrawny man in ragged clothing, and there were a dozen others flanking them, carrying ceramic bowls.

  “What’s happening?” Mueller asked someone in the crowd.

  “Religious ceremony.”

  “Eh?”

  “New religion. Church of Oblivion. That’s the head prophet up there. You haven’t heard about it yet?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Started around Friday. You see that ratty-looking character next to the prophet?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s the one that put the stuff in the water supply. He confessed and they made him drink his own drug. Now he doesn’t remember a thing, and he’s the assistant prophet. Craziest damn stuff!”

  “And what are they doing up there?”

  “They’ve got the drug in those bowls. They drink and forget some more. They drink and forget some more.”

  The gathering fog absorbed the sounds of those on the stage. Mueller strained to listen. He saw the bright eyes of fanaticism, the alleged contaminator of the water looked positively radiant. Words drifted out into the night.

  “Brothers and sisters…the joy, the sweetness of forgetting…come up here with us, take communion with us…oblivion…redemption…even for the most wicked…forget…forget…”

  They were passing the bowls around on stage, drinking, smiling. People were going up to receive the communion, taking a bowl, sipping, nodding happily. Toward the rear of the stage the bowls were being refilled by three sober-looking functionaries.

  Mueller felt a chill. He suspected that what had been born in this park during this week would endure, somehow, long after the crisis of San Francisco had become part of history; and it seemed to him that something new and frightening had been loosed upon the land.

  “Take…drink…forget…” the prophet cried.

  And the worshippers cried, “Take…drink…forget…”

  The bowls were passed.

  “What’s it all about?” Carole whispered.

  “Take…drink…forget…”

  “Take…drink…forget…”

  “Blessed is the sweet oblivion.”

  “Blessed is the sweet oblivion.”

  “Sweet if it is to lay down the burden of one’s soul.”

  “Sweet it is to lay down the burden of one’s soul.”

  “Joyous it is to begin anew.”

  “Joyous it is to begin anew.”

  The fog was deepening. Mueller could barely see the aquarium building just across the way. He clasped his hand tightly around Carole’s and began to think about getting out of the park.

  He had to admit, though, that these people might have hit on something true. Was he not better off for having taken a chemical into his bloodstream, and thereby shedding a portion of his past? Yes, of course. And yet—to mutilate one’s mind this way, deliberately, happily, to drink deep of oblivion—

  “Blessed are those who are able to forget,” the prophet said.

  “Blessed are those who are able to forget,” the crowd roared in response.

  “Blessed are those who are able to forget,” Mueller heard his own voice cry. And he began to tremble. And he felt sudden fear: He sensed the power of this strange new movement, the gathering strength of the prophet’s appeal to unreason. It was time for a new religion, maybe, a cult that offered emancipation from all inner burdens. They would synthesize this drug and turn it out by the ton, Mueller thought, and repeatedly dose cities with it, so that everyone could be converted, so that everyone might taste the joys of oblivion. No one will be able to stop them. After a while no one will want to stop them. And so we’ll go on, drinking deep, until we’re washed clean of all pain and all sorrow, of all sad recollection, we’ll sip a cup of kindness and part with auld lang syne, we’ll give up the griefs we carry around, and we’ll give up everything else, identity, soul, self, mind. We will drink sweet oblivion. Mueller shivered. Turning suddenly, tugging roughly at Carole’s arm, he pushed through the joyful worshipping crowd, and hunted somberly in the fogwrapped night, trying to find some way out of the park.

  A HAPPY DAY IN 2381

  This was the era when the anthology of original stories came to replace the science-fiction magazine as the central zone of short science fiction. Some appeared in hard covers, like Damon Knight’s Orbit and Roger Elwood’s Continuum. Some came out as paperbacks, like Terry Carr’s Universe, Bob Hoskins’ Infinity, Samuel R. Delany’s Quark, and my own New Dimensions. All of those were periodical publications, appearing anywhere from annually to quarterly, but also there were plenty of one-shots,
like Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, Joe Elder’s The Farthest Reaches, Anne McCaffrey’s Alchemy and Academe, and the innumerable titles that the indefatigable anthologist Roger Elwood was soon to loose on the publishing world.

  Harry Harrison, an old friend of mine who had been a key figure in science fiction for many years both as editor and writer, joined the original-anthology bandwagon in 1969 with Nova, a hard-cover series destined to see four volumes over the next five years. He asked me to write a story for his first issue, and I responded in March, 1969 with “A Happy Day in 2381,” a story that grew out of my interest in the work of the visionary architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri, just then, was getting a lot of attention with his concept of “arcologies”: supersized apartment buildings, each packing many thousands of inhabitants into a single gigantic tower so that open space could be conserved to meet agricultural needs in our overpopulated future. I was fascinated by the elaborate architectural blueprints had drawn for these fantastic buildings, and saw both an upside and a downside to the scheme, an ambivalence which is reflected in the portrayal of the Urban Monad culture that I invented for my story.

  “A Happy Day in 2381” was published in Harry’s Nova in 1970. By then it had occurred to me that the Urban Monad idea was too good to drop after a single short story, and I was at work at a whole series of them—”In the Beginning,” which I did for another original-story anthology called Science Against Man, and four others—”The Throwbacks,” “The World Outside,” “We Are Well Organized,” and “All the Way Up, All the Way Down,” that I wrote for Galaxy Science Fiction, where Ejler Jakobsson had replaced Fred Pohl as editor. A year or so later I pulled the six of them together into the novel The World Inside. Reprinting all six here would be pretty much the same as inserting that novel into this collection, which I don’t want to do; but, inasmuch as I had no idea that I was beginning a novel when I wrote “A Happy Day in 2381” for Harry Harrison, I include it here as a sample of the whole group.

  ~

  Here is a happy day in 2381. The morning sun is high enough to reach the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad 116. Soon the building’s entire eastern face will glitter like the sea at dawn.. Charles Mattern’s window, activated by the dawn’s early photons, deopaques. He stirs. God bless, he thinks. His wife stirs. His four children, who have been up for hours, now can officially begin the day. They rise and parade around the bedroom, singing:

  “God bless, god bless, god bless!

  God bless us every one!

  God bless Daddo, god bless Mommo, god bless you and me!

  God bless us all, the short and tall,

  Give us f er-til-I-tee!”

  They rush toward their parents’ sleeping platform. Mattern rises and embraces them. Indra is eight, Sandor is seven, Marx is five, Cleo is three. It is Charles Mattern’s secret shame that his family is so small. Can a man with only four children truly be said to have reverence for life? But Principessa’s womb no longer flowers. The medics have said she will not bear again. At twenty-seven she is sterile. Mattern is thinking of taking in a second woman. He longs to hear the yowls of an infant again; in any case, a man must do his duty to god.

  Sandor says, “Daddo, Siegmund is still here. He came in the middle of the night to be with Mommo.”

  The child points. Mattern sees. On Principessa’s side of the sleeping platform, curled against the inflation pedal, lies fourteen-year-old Siegmund Kluver, who had entered the Mattern home several hours after midnight to exercise his rights of propinquity. Siegmund is fond of older women. Now he snores; he has had a good workout. Mattern nudges him. “Siegmund? Siegmund, it’s morning!” The young man’s eyes open. He smiles at Mattern, sits up, reaches for his wrap. He is quite handsome. He lives on the 787th floor and already has one child and another on the way.

  “Sorry,” says Siegmund. “I overslept. Principessa really drains me. A savage, she is!”

  “Yes, she’s quite passionate,” Mattern agrees. So is Siegmund’s wife, Mattern has heard. When she is a little older, Mattern plans to try her. Next spring, perhaps.

  Siegmund sticks his head under the molecular cleanser. Principessa now has risen from bed. She kicks the pedal and the platform deflates swiftly. She begins to program breakfast. Indra switches on the screen. The wall blossoms with light and color. “Good morning,” says the screen. “The external temperature, if anybody’s interested, is 28˚. Today’s population figures at Urbmon 116 are 881,115, which is +102 since yesterday and +14,187 since the first of the year. God bless, but we’re slowing down! Across the way at Urbmon 117 they added 131 since yesterday, including quads for Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky. She’s eighteen and has had seven previous. A servant of god, isn’t she? The time is now 0620. In exactly forty minutes Urbmon 116 will be honored by the presence of Nicanor Gortman, the visiting sociocomputator from Hell, who can be recognized by his outbuilding costume in crimson and ultraviolet. Dr. Gortman will be the guest of the Charles Matterns of the 799th floor. Of course we’ll treat him with the same friendly blessmanship we show one another. God bless Nicanor Gortman! Turning now to news from the lower levels of Urbmon 116—”

  Principessa says, “Hear that, children? We’ll have a guest, and we must be blessworthy toward him. Come and eat.”

  When he has cleansed himself, dressed, and eaten, Charles Mattern goes to the thousandth-floor landing stage to greet Nicanor Gortman. Mattern passes the floors on which his brothers and sisters and their families live. Three brothers, three sisters. Four of them younger than he, two older. One brother died, unpleasantly, young. Jeffrey. Mattern rarely thinks of Jeffrey. He rises through the building to the summit. Gortman has been touring the tropics and now is going to visit a typical urban monad in the temperate zone. Mattern is honored to have been named the official host. He steps out on the landing stage, which is at the very tip of Urbmon 116. A forcefield shields him from the fierce winds that sweep the lofty spire. He looks to his left and sees the western face of Urban Monad 115 still in darkness. To his right, Urbmon 117’s eastern windows sparkle. Bless Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky and her eleven littles, Mattern thinks. Mattern can see other urbmons in the row, stretching on and on toward the horizon, towers of super-stressed concrete three kilometers high, tapering ever so gracefully. It is as always a thrilling sight. God bless, he thinks. God bless, god bless, god bless!

  He hears a cheerful hum of rotors. A quickboat is landing. Out steps a tall, sturdy man dressed in high-spectrum garb. He must be the visiting sociocomputator from Hell.

  “Nicanor Gortman?” Mattern asks.

  “Bless god. Charles Mattern?”

  “God bless, yes. Come.”

  Hell is one of the eleven cities of Venus, which man has reshaped to suit himself. Gortman has never been on Earth before. He speaks in a slow, stolid way, no lilt in his voice at all; the inflection reminds Mattern of the way they talk in Urbmon 84, which Mattern once visited on a field trip. He has read Gortman’s papers: solid stuff, closely reasoned. “I particularly liked Dynamics of the Hunting Ethic,” Mattern tells him while they are in the dropshaft. “Remarkable. A revelation.”

  “You really mean that?” Gortman asks, flattered.

  “Of course. I try to keep up with a lot of the Venusian journals. It’s so fascinatingly alien to read about hunting wild animals.”

  “There are none on Earth?”

  “God bless, no,” Mattern says. “We couldn’t allow that! But I love reading about such a different way of life as you have.”

  “It is escape literature for you?” asks Gortman.

  Mattern looks at him strangely. “I don’t understand the reference.”

  “What you read to make life on Earth more bearable for yourself.”

  “Oh, no. No. Life on Earth is quite bearable, let me assure you. It’s what I read for amusement. And to obtain a necessary parallax, you know, for my own work,” says Mattern. They have reached the 799th level. “Let me show you my home first.” He steps from the dropshaft and beckons to Go
rtman. “This is Shanghai. I mean, that’s what we call this block of forty floors, from 761 to 800. I’m in the next-to-top level of Shanghai; which is a mark of my professional status. We’ve got twenty- five cities altogether in Urbmon 116. Reykjavik’s on the bottom and Louisville’s on the top.”

  “What determines the names?”

  “Citizen vote. Shanghai used to be Calcutta, which I personally prefer, but a little bunch of malcontents on the 775th floor rammed a referendum through in ‘75.”

  “I thought you had no malcontents in the urban monads,” Gortman says.

  Mattern smiles. “Not in the usual sense. But we allow certain conflicts to exist. Man wouldn’t be man without conflicts, even here!”

  They are walking down the eastbound corridor toward Mattern’s home. It is now 0710, and children are streaming from their homes in groups of three and four, rushing to get to school. Mattern waves to them. They sing as they run along. Mattern says, “We average 6.2 children per family on this floor. It’s one of the lowest figures in the building, I have to admit. High status people don’t seem to breed well. “They’ve got a floor in Prague—I think it’s 117—that averages 9.9 per family! Isn’t that glorious?”

  “You are speaking with irony?” Gortman asks.

  “Not at all.” Mattern feels an uptake of tension. “We like children. We approve of breeding. Surely you realized that before you set out on this tour of— “

  “Yes, yes,” says Gortman hastily. “I was aware of the general cultural dynamic. But I thought perhaps your own attitude—”

  “Ran counter to norm? Just because I have a scholar’s detachment, you shouldn’t assume that I disapprove in any way of my cultural matrix.”

  “I regret the implication. And please don’t think I show disapproval of your matrix either, although your world is quite strange to me. Bless god, let us not have strife, Charles.”

  “God bless, Nicanor. I didn’t mean to seem touchy.”

  They smile. Mattern is dismayed by his show of irritation.