The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72

by Robert Silverberg

  Kenneth continues to attack poor Carciofo’s motives for withdrawing. Beverly occasionally applauds his cruel sallies. Miss Harshaw several times declares her unwillingness to remain a communicant of a Church whose leader is a machine. I find this dispute distasteful and swing my chair away from the table to have a better view of the Vatican. At this moment the cardinals are meeting in the Sistine Chapel. How I wish I were there! What splendid mysteries are being enacted in that gloomy, magnificent room! Each prince of the Church now sits on a small throne surmounted by a violet-hued canopy. Fat wax tapers glimmer on the desk before each throne. Masters-of-ceremonies move solemnly through the vast chamber, carrying the silver basins in which the blank ballots repose. These basins are placed on the table before the altar. One by one the cardinals advance to the table, take ballots, return to their desks. Now, lifting their quill pens, they begin to write. “I, Cardinal———, elect to the Supreme Pontificate the Most Reverend Lord my Lord Cardinal———.” What name do they fill in? Is it Carciofo? Is it Asciuga? Is it the name of some obscure and shriveled prelate from Madrid or Heidelberg, some last-minute choice of the anti-robot faction in its desperation? Or are they writing his name? The sound of scratching pens is loud in the chapel. The cardinals are completing their ballots, sealing them at the ends, folding them, folding them again and again, carrying them to the altar, dropping them into the great gold chalice. So have they done every morning and every afternoon for days, as the deadlock has prevailed.

  “I read in the Herald Tribune a couple of days ago,” says Miss Harshaw, “that a delegation of two hundred and fifty young Catholic robots from Iowa is waiting at the Des Moines airport for news of the election. If their man gets in, they’ve got a chartered flight ready to leave, and they intend to request that they be granted the Holy Father’s first public audience.”

  “There can be no doubt,” Bishop FitzPatrick agrees, “that his election will bring a great many people of synthetic origin into the fold of the Church.”

  “While driving out plenty of flesh-and-blood people!” Miss Harshaw says shrilly.

  “I doubt that,” says the bishop. “Certainly there will be some feelings of shock, of dismay, of injury, of loss, for some of us at first. But these will pass. The inherent goodness of the new Pope, to which Rabbi Mueller alluded, will prevail. Also I believe that technologically-minded young folk everywhere will be encouraged to join the Church. Irresistible religious impulses will be awakened throughout the world.”

  “Can you imagine two hundred and fifty robots clanking into St. Peter’s?” Miss Harshaw demands.

  I contemplate the distant Vatican. The morning sunlight is brilliant and dazzling, but the assembled cardinals, walled away from the world, cannot enjoy its gay sparkle. They all have voted, now. The three cardinals who were chosen by lot as this morning’s scrutators of the vote have risen. One of them lifts the chalice and shakes it, mixing the ballots. Then he places it on the table before the altar; a second scrutator removes the ballots and counts them. He ascertains that the number of ballots is identical to the number of cardinals present. The ballots now have been transferred to a ciborium, which is a goblet ordinarily used to hold the consecrated bread of the Mass. The first scrutator withdraws a ballot, unfolds it, reads its inscription; passes it to the second scrutator, who reads it also; then it is given to the third scrutator, who reads the name aloud. Asciuga? Carciofo? Some other? His?

  Rabbi Mueller is discussing angels. “Then we have the Angels of the Throne, known in Hebrew as arelim or ophanim. There are seventy of them, noted primarily for their steadfastness. Among them are the angels Orifiel, Ophaniel, Zabkiel, Jophiel, Ambriel, Tychagar, Barael, Quelamia, Paschar, Boel, and Raum. Some of these are no longer found in Heaven and are numbered among the fallen angels in Hell.”

  “So much for their steadfastness,” says Kenneth.

  “Then, too,” the rabbi goes on, “there are the Angels of the Presence, who apparently were circumcised at the moment of their creation. These are Michael, Metatron, Suriel, Sandalphon, Uriel, Saraqael, Astanphaeus, Phanuel, Jehoel, Zagzagael, Yefefiah, and Akatriel. But I think my favorite of the whole group is the Angel of Lust, who is mentioned in Talmud Bereshith Rabba 85 as follows, that when Judah was about to pass by—”

  They have finished counting the votes by this time, surely. An immense throng has assembled in the Square of St. Peter’s. The sunlight gleams off hundreds if not thousands of steel-jacketed crania. This must be a wonderful day for the robot population of Rome. But most of those in the piazza are creatures of flesh and blood: old women in black, gaunt young pickpockets, boys with puppies, plump vendors of sausages, and an assortment of poets, philosophers, generals, legislators, tourists, and fishermen. How has the tally gone? We will have our answer shortly. If no candidate has had a majority, they will mix the ballots with wet straw before casting them into the chapel stove, and black smoke will billow from the chimney. But if a pope has been elected, the straw will be dry, the smoke will be white.

  The system has agreeable resonances. I like it. It gives me the satisfactions one normally derives from a flawless work of art: the Tristan chord, let us say, or the teeth of the frog in Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony. I await the outcome with fierce concentration. I am certain of the result; I can already feel the irresistible religious impulses awakening in me. Although I feel, also, an odd nostalgia for the days of flesh-and-blood popes. Tomorrow’s newspapers will have no interviews with the Holy Father’s aged mother in Sicily, nor with his proud younger brother in San Francisco. And will this grand ceremony of election ever be held again? Will we need another Pope, when this one whom we will soon have can be repaired so easily?

  Ah. The white smoke! The moment of revelation comes!

  A figure emerges on the central balcony of the facade of St. Peter’s, spreads a web of cloth-of-gold, and disappears. The blaze of light against that fabric stuns the eye. It reminds me perhaps of moonlight coldly kissing the sea at Castellamare, or, perhaps even more, of the noonday glare rebounding from the breast of the Caribbean off the coast of St. John. A second figure, clad in ermine and vermilion, has appeared on the balcony. “The cardinal-archdeacon,” Bishop FitzPatrick whispers. People have started to faint. Luigi stands beside me, listening to the proceedings on a tiny radio. Kenneth says, “It’s all been fixed.” Rabbi Mueller hisses at him to be still. Miss Harshaw begins to sob. Beverly softly recites the Pledge of Allegiance, crossing herself throughout. This is a wonderful moment for me. I think it is the most truly contemporary moment I have ever experienced.

  The amplified voice of the cardinal-archdeacon cries, “I announce to you great joy. We have a Pope.”

  Cheering commences, and grows in intensity as the cardinal-archdeacon tells the world that the newly chosen Pontiff is indeed that cardinal, that noble and distinguished person, that melancholy and austere individual, whose elevation to the Holy See we have all awaited so intensely for so long. “He has imposed upon himself,” says the cardinal-archdeacon, “the name of—”

  Lost in the cheering, I turn to Luigi. “Who? What name?”

  “Sisto Settimo,” Luigi tells me.

  Yes, and there he is, Pope Sixtus the Seventh, as we now must call him. A tiny figure clad in the silver and gold papal robes, arms outstretched to the multitude, and, yes! the sunlight glints on his cheeks, his lofty forehead, there is the brightness of polished steel. Luigi is already on his knees. I kneel beside him. Miss Harshaw, Beverly, Kenneth, even the rabbi all kneel, for beyond doubt this is a miraculous event. The Pope comes forward on his balcony. Now he will deliver the traditional apostolic benediction to the city and to the world. “Our help is in the Name of the Lord,” he declares gravely. He activates the levitator-jets beneath his arms; even at this distance I can see the two small puffs of smoke. White smoke, again. He begins to rise into the air. “Who hath made heaven and earth,” he says. “May Almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, bless you.” His voice rolls majestical
ly toward us. His shadow extends across the whole piazza. Higher and higher he goes, until he is lost to sight. Kenneth taps Luigi. “Another round of drinks,” he says, and presses a bill of high denomination into the innkeeper’s fleshy palm. Bishop FitzPatrick weeps. Rabbi Mueller embraces Miss Harshaw. The new Pontiff, I think, has begun his reign in an auspicious way.

  THOMAS THE PROCLAIMER

  This story comes from another of the series of “triplet” theme anthologies that I edited in the 1970’s. As with the volume called Four Futures, from which “Going” was drawn, I turned to a well-known science-fiction writer to provide a challenging concept that would be used as the basis for novella-length stories by the three invited contributors.

  For the 1972 book I invited Lester del Rey to set the theme. In much of his own work del Rey had taken iconoclastic views of conventional religious ideas, and that was precisely what he did here. We read in the Book of Joshua how the Israelite warrior Joshua, not wanting night to fall while he was in the midst of battle, cried out, “Sun, stand thou still,” and the Lord complied: “The sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day,” and Joshua was victorious.

  What del Rey asked was what would happen if in our own era of widespread disbelief the same miracle were to take place: that a great leader would appear and cry out to God for a sign in the heavens so that the unbelieving should heed, and God would comply, so that “for a day and a night the Earth moved not around the Sun, neither did it rotate. And the laws of momentum were confounded.” And the question that Lester propounded to the three writers was, “What kind of world might exist were the basis of faith replaced by certain knowledge?”

  I named the anthology The Day the Sun Stood Still (though of course it was the Earth that would cease to move), asked those experienced old professionals, Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, to write stories for the book, and chose to write the third one myself. They came through magnificently, Anderson with a splendid novella called “A Chapter of Revelation,” and Dickson with his very fine “Things Which Are Caesar’s.”

  My own story, which I wrote in April of 1971, was “Thomas the Proclaimer,” which is reprinted here. I was still being swept along on an irresistible tide of creative energy, which had another couple of years to run. Stories were pouring out of me as fast as I could get them down on paper: I had just finished the novel The Book of Skulls and the short story “Good News from the Vatican,” which would win a Nebula, and in a few months I would start on Dying Inside. I chose to set “Thomas the Proclaimer” at the very edge of what we later would come to call Y2K: the miracle occurs on June 6, 1999, and the story moves inexorably along to the apocalyptic end of December.

  I’ve never felt that science fiction should be taken as literal prophecy, and that belief is confirmed again here. The future era that I imagined for “Thomas the Proclaimer” has by this time receded into the past: we know now that neither the Sun nor the Earth stood still on June 6, 1999, and no wild-eyed hordes of religious fanatics were rampaging through our cities as December 31 approached. Nor did such events as the Children’s Crusade for Sanity, the Nine Weeks’ War, or the Night of the Lasers occur during the 1980’s. But the future looked very chaotic indeed to me in 1971 as I wrote the story, and much of that chaos did unfold in one form and another in the years that followed, and though “Thomas the Proclaimer” is in no way literally prophetic, I think you will find that it quite accurately prefigured much of what would occur in the world in the generation just ended.

  ——————

  One

  Moonlight, Starlight, Torchlight

  How long will this night last? The blackness, though moon-pierced, star-pierced, torch-pierced, is dense and tangible. They are singing and chanting in the valley. Bitter smoke from their firebrands rises to the hilltop where Thomas stands, flanked by his closest followers. Fragments of old hymns dance through the trees. “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul, Let Me to Thy Bosom Fly.” Thomas is the center of all attention. A kind of invisible aura surrounds his blocky, powerful figure, an unseen crackling electrical radiance. Saul Kraft, at his side, seems eclipsed and obscured, a small, fragile-looking man, overshadowed now but far from unimportant in the events of this night. “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Thomas begins to hum the tune, then to sing. His voice, though deep and magical, the true charismatic voice, tumbles randomly from key to key: the prophet has no ear for music. Kraft smiles sourly at Thomas’ dismal sounds.

  “Watchman, tell us of the night,

  What its signs of promise are.

  Traveler, o’er yon mountain’s height,

  See that glory-beaming star!”

  Ragged shouts from below. Occasional sobs and loud coughs. What is the hour? The hour is late. Thomas runs his hands through his long, tangled hair, tugging, smoothing, pulling the strands down toward his thick shoulders. The familiar gesture, beloved by the multitudes. He wonders if he should make an appearance. They are calling his name; he hears the rhythmic cries punching through the snarl of clashing hymns. Tho-mas! Tho-mas! Tho-mas! Hysteria in their voices. They want him to come forth and stretch out his arms and make the heavens move again, just as he caused them to stop. But Thomas resists that grand but hollow gesture. How easy it is to play the prophet’s part! He did not cause the heavens to stop, though, and he knows that he cannot make them move again. Not of his own will alone, at any rate.

  “What time is it?” he asks.

  “Quarter to ten,” Kraft tells him. Adding, after an instant’s thought: “P.M.”

  So the twenty-four hours are nearly up. And still the sky hangs frozen. Well, Thomas? It this not what you asked for? Go down on your knees, you cried, and beg Him for a Sign, so that we may know He is still with us, in this our time of need. And render up to Him a great shout. And the people knelt throughout all the lands. And begged. And shouted. And the Sign was given. Why, then, this sense of foreboding? Why these fears? Surely this night will pass. Look at Kraft. Smiling serenely. Kraft has never known any doubts. Those cold eyes, those thin wide lips, the fixed expression of tranquility.

  “You ought to speak to them,” Kraft says.

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “A few words of comfort for them.”

  “Let’s see what happens, first. What can I tell them now?”

  “Empty of words, Thomas? You, who have had so much to proclaim?”

  Thomas shrugs. There are times when Kraft infuriates him: the little man needling him, goading, scheming, never letting up, always pushing this Crusade toward some appointed goal grasped by Kraft alone. The intensity of Kraft’s faith exhausts Thomas. Annoyed, the prophet turns away from him. Thomas sees scattered fires leaping on the horizon. Prayer meetings? Or are they riots? Peering at those distant blazes, Thomas jabs idly at the tuner of the radio before him.

  “…rounding out the unprecedented span of twenty-four hours of continuous daylight in much of the Eastern Hemisphere, an endless daybreak over the Near East and an endless noon over Siberia, eastern China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Meanwhile western Europe and the Americas remain locked in endless night…”

  “…then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day…”

  “…an astonishing culmination, apparently, to the campaign led by Thomas Davidson of Reno, Nevada, known popularly as Thomas the Proclaimer. The shaggy-bearded, long-haired, self-designated Apostle of Peace brought his Crusade of Faith to a climax yesterday with the worldwide program of simultaneous prayer that appears to have been the cause of…”

 
; “Watchman, does its beauteous ray

  Aught of joy or hope foretell?

  Traveler, yes; it brings the day,

  Promised day of Israel.”

  Kraft says sharply, “Do you hear what they’re singing, Thomas? You’ve got to speak to them. You got them into this; now they want you to tell them you’ll get them out of it.”

  “Not yet, Saul.”

  “You mustn’t let your moment slip by. Show them that God still speaks through you!”

  “When God is ready to speak again,” Thomas says frostily, “I’ll let His words come forth. Not before.” He glares at Kraft and punches for another change of station.

  “…continued meetings in Washington, but no communiqué as yet. Meanwhile, at the United Nations…”

  “…Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him: and all kindreds of the Earth shall wail because of Him. Even so, Amen…”

  “…outbreaks of looting in Caracas, Mexico City, Oakland, and Vancouver. But in the daylight half of the world, violence and other disruption has been slight, though an unconfirmed report from Moscow…”

  “…and when, brethren, when did the sun cease in its course? At six in the morning, brethren, six in the morning, Jerusalem time! And on what day, brethren? Why, the sixth of June, the sixth day of the sixth month! Six—six—six! And what does Holy Writ tell us, my dearly beloved ones, in the thirteenth chapter of Revelations? That a beast shall rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the Holy Book tells us the number of the beast, beloved, and the number is six hundred three score and six, wherein we see again the significant digits, six—six—six! Who then can deny that these are the last days, and that the Apocalypse must be upon us? Thus in this time of woe and fire as we sit upon this stilled planet awaiting His judgment, we must…”