Now it is the morning of the third day after his awakening, and he has guests: Sybille, Nerita, Zacharias, Mortimer, Gracchus. They file into his room and stand in an arc at the foot of his bed, radiant in the glow of light that pierces the narrow windows. Like demigods, like angels, glittering with a dazzling inward brilliance, and now he is of their company. Formally they embrace him, first Gracchus, then Nerita, then Mortimer. Zacharias advances next to his bedside, Zacharias who sent him into death, and he smiles at Klein and Klein returns the smile, and they embrace. Then it is Sybille’s turn: she slips her hand between his, he draws her close, her lips brush his cheek, his touch hers, his arm encircles her shoulders.
“Hello,” she whispers.
“Hello,” he says.
They ask him how he feels, how quickly his strength is returning, whether he has been out of bed yet, how soon he will commence his drying-off. The style of their conversation is the oblique, elliptical style favored by the deads, but not nearly so clipped and cryptic as the way of speech they normally would use among themselves; they are favoring him, leading him inch by inch into their customs. Within five minutes he thinks he is getting the knack.
He says, using their verbal shorthand, “I must have been a great burden to you.”
“You were, you were,” Zacharias agrees. “But all that is done with now.”
“We forgive you,” Mortimer says.
“We welcome you among us,” declares Sybille.
They talk about their plans for the months ahead. Sybille is nearly finished with her work on Zanzibar; she will retreat to Zion Cold Town for the summer months to write her thesis. Mortimer and Nerita are off to Mexico to tour the ancient temples and pyramids; Zacharias is going to Ohio, to his beloved mounds. In the autumn they will reassemble at Zion and plan the winter’s amusement: a tour of Egypt, perhaps, or Peru, the heights of Machu Picchu. Ruins, archeological sites, delight them; in the places where death has been busiest, their joy is most intense. They are flushed, excited, verbose—virtually chattering, now. Away we will go, to Zimbabwe, to Palenque, to Angkor, to Knossos, to Uxmal, to Nineveh, to Mohenjo-daro. And as they go on and on, talking with hands and eyes and smiles and even words, even words, torrents of words, they blur and become unreal to him, they are mere dancing puppets perking about a badly painted stage, they are droning insects, wasps or bees or mosquitoes, with all their talk of travels and festivals, of Boghazköy and Babylon, of Megiddo and Masada, and he ceases to hear them, he tunes them out, he lies there smiling, eyes glazed, mind adrift. It perplexes him that he has so little interest in them. But then he realizes that it is a mark of his liberation. He is freed of old chains now. Will he join their set? Why should he? Perhaps he will travel with them, perhaps not, as the whim takes him. More likely not. Almost certainly not. He does not need their company. He has his own interests. He will follow Sybille about no longer. He does not need, he does not want, he will not seek. Why should he become one of them, rootless, an amoral wanderer, a ghost made flesh? Why should he embrace the values and customs of these people who had given him to death as dispassionately as they might swat an insect, only because he had bored them, because he had annoyed them? He does not hate them for what they did to him, he feels no resentment that he can identify, he merely chooses to detach himself from them. Let them float on from ruin to ruin, let them pursue death from continent to continent; he will go his own way. Now that he has crossed the interface, he finds that Sybille no longer matters to him.
—Oh, sir, things change—
“We’ll go now,” Sybille says softly.
He nods. He makes no other reply.
“We’ll see you after your drying-off,” Zacharias tells him, and touches him lightly with his knuckles, a farewell gesture used only by the deads.
“See you,” Mortimer says.
“See you,” says Gracchus.
“Soon,” Nerita says.
Never, Klein says, saying it without words, but so they will understand. Never. Never. Never. I will never see any of you. I will never see you, Sybille. The syllables echo through his brain, and the word, never, never, never, rolls over him like the breaking surf, cleansing him, purifying him, healing him. He is free. He is alone.
“Goodbye,” Sybille calls from the hallway.
“Goodbye,” he says.
It was years before he saw her again. But they spent the last days of ’99 together, shooting dodos under the shadow of mighty Kilimanjaro.
Schwartz Between the Galaxies
In the two years following the completion of the novel Dying Inside in the fall of 1971, I wrote nothing but short stories and the novella “Born with the Dead.” Despite the struggle that those stories, and “Born with the Dead” in particular had been, I allowed myself to take on commitments to write two more novels, which would eventually become The Stochastic Man and Shadrach in the Furnace. I also let two friends talk me into writing short stories for publications they were editing. But, even as I locked myself into these four projects, I felt an increasing certainty that I was going to give up writing science fiction once those jobs were done.
My own personal fatigue was only one factor in that decision. Another was my sense of having been on the losing side in a literary revolution.
Among the many revolutions that went on in the era known as the Sixties (which actually ran from about 1967 to 1972) there was one in science fiction. A host of gifted new writers, both in England and the United States, brought all manner of advanced literary techniques to bear on the traditional matter of s-f, producing stories that were more deeply indebted to Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Mann, and even e.e. cummings than they were to Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke. This period of stylistic and structural innovation, which reached its highest pitch of activity between 1966 and 1969, was a heady, exciting time for science-fiction writers, especially newer ones such as Thomas Disch, Samuel R. Delany, R.A. Lafferty, and Barry Malzberg, although some relatively well-established people like John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, and, yes, Robert Silverberg, joined in the fun. My stories grew more and more experimental in mode—you can see it beginning to happen in “Sundance” and “Good News from the Vatican”—and most of them were published, now, in anthologies of original stories rather than in the conventional s-f magazines.
What was fun for the writers, though, turned out to be not so much fun for the majority of the readers, who quite reasonably complained that if they wanted to read Joyce and Kafka, they’d go and read Joyce and Kafka. They didn’t want their s-f to be Joycified and Kafkaized. So they stayed away from the new fiction in droves, and by 1972 the revolution was pretty much over. We were heading into the era of Star Wars, the trilogy craze, and the return of literarily conservative action-based science fiction to the center of the stage.
One of the most powerful figures in the commercialization of science fiction at that time was the diminutive Judy-Lynn del Rey, a charming and ferociously determined woman whose private reading tastes inclined toward Ulysses but who knew, perhaps better than anyone else ever had, what the majority of s-f readers wanted to buy. As a kind of side enterprise during her dynamic remaking of the field, she started a paperback anthology series called Stellar, and—despite my recent identification with the experimental side of science fiction—asked me, in May, 1973, to do a story for it.
Her stated policy was to bring back the good old kind of s-f storytelling, as exemplified in the magazines of the 1950s, a golden age for readers like me. “I don’t want mood pieces without plots,” she warned. “I don’t want vignettes; I don’t want character sketches; and I don’t want obvious extrapolations of current fads and newspaper stories. These yarns should have beginnings, middles, and ends. I want the writers to solve the problems they postulate….”
Since most of what I had been writing recently embodied most of the characteristics she thus decried, there was a certain incompatibility between Judy-Lynn’s strongly voiced requirements and her equally strong insistence on having a Silverb
erg story for her first issue. And yet I had no real problem with her stated policy. My own tastes in s-f had been formed largely in the early 1950s, when such writers as C.M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Theodore Sturgeon, and Fritz Leiber had been at the top of their form. I had always felt more comfortable with their kind of fiction than with the wilder stuff of fifteen years later; I thought myself rather a reactionary writer alongside people like Disch, Lafferty, Malzberg, or J.G. Ballard. And I thought “Schwartz Between the Galaxies,” which I wrote in October, 1973, was a reasonably conservative story, too—definitely a story of the 1970s but not particularly experimental in form or tone.
Judy-Lynn bought it—it would have been discourteous not to, after urging me so strenuously to write something for her—but she obviously felt let down, even betrayed. Here she was putting together her theme-setting first issue, and here I was still trying to write literature. To her surprise and chagrin, though, the story was extremely popular—one of the five contenders for the Hugo award for best short story the following year—and was fairly widely anthologized afterward.
I won the skirmish, yes; but Judy-Lynn, bless her, won the war. Our little literary revolution ended in total rout, with the space sagas and fantasy trilogies that she published sweeping the more highbrow kind of science fiction into oblivion, and many of the literary-minded writers left science fiction, never to return.
I was among those who left, although, as you will note, I did come back after a while. But it seemed certain to me as 1974 began that my days as a science-fiction writer were over forever. For one thing, the work had become terribly hard: my work-sheets indicate that “Schwartz Between the Galaxies” took me close to three weeks to write. In happier days I could have written a whole novel, and a good one, in that time. Then, too, despite that Hugo nomination, I felt that the readers were turning away from my work. I was still getting on the awards ballots as frequently as ever, but I wasn’t winning anything. That seemed symptomatic. The readers no longer understood me, and I felt I understood them all too well.
So in late 1973 I wrote one more short story—“In the House of Double Minds”—because I had promised it to an editor, and then I swore a mighty oath that I would never write short s-f again. In the spring of 1974 I wrote the first of my two promised novels, The Stochastic Man. About six months later I launched into the second one, Shadrach in the Furnace and finished it in the spring of 1975 after a horrendous battle to get the words down on paper.
That was it. I had spent two decades as a science-fiction writer, and had emerged out of my early hackwork to win a considerable reputation among connoisseurs, and now it was all over. I would never write again, I told myself. (And told anyone else who would listen, too.)
And I didn’t. For a while, anyway.
~
This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned—passive, suspended—in a first-class passenger rack aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.
There are no starships. Probably there never will be any. Here we are, a dozen decades after the flight of Apollo 11, and no human being goes anywhere except back and forth across the face of the little O, the Earth, for the planets are barren and the stars are beyond reach. That little O is too small for Schwartz. Too often it glazes for him; it turns to a nugget of dead porcelain; and lately he has formed the habit, when the world glazes, of taking refuge aboard that interstellar ship. So what JAL Flight 411 holds is merely his physical self, his shell, occupying a costly private cubicle on a slender 200-passenger vessel which, leaving Buenos Aires shortly after breakfast, has sliced westward along the Tropic of Capricorn for a couple of hours and will soon be landing at Papua’s Torres Skyport. But his consciousness, his anima, the essential Schwartzness of him, soars between the galaxies.
What a starship it is! How marvelous its myriad passengers! Down its crowded corridors swarms a vast gaudy heterogeny of galactic creatures, natives of the worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Altair, Canopus, Polaris, Antares, beings both intelligent and articulate, methane-breathing or nitrogen-breathing or argon breathing, spiny-skinned or skinless, many-armed or many-headed or altogether incorporeal, each a product of a distinct and distinctly unique and alien cultural heritage. Among these varied folk moves Schwartz, that superstar of anthropologists, that true heir to Kroeber and Morgan and Malinowski and Mead, delightedly devouring their delicious diversity. Whereas aboard this prosaic rocket, this planet-locked stratosphere needle, one cannot tell the Canadians from the Portuguese, the Portuguese from the Romanians, the Romanians from the Irish, unless they open their mouths, and sometimes not always then.
In his reveries he confers with creatures from the Fomalhaut system about digital circumcision; he tapes the melodies of the Achernarnian eye-flute; he learns of the sneeze-magic of Acrux, the sleep-ecstasies of Aldebaran, the asteroid-sculptors of Thuban. Then a smiling JAL stewardess parts the curtain of his cubicle and peers in at him, jolting him from one reality to another. She is blue-eyed, frizzy-haired, straight-nosed, thin-lipped, bronze -skinned, a genetic mishmash, your standard twenty-first-century- model mongrel human, perhaps Melanesian-Swedish-Turkish- Bolivian, perhaps Polish-Berber-Tatar-Welsh. Cheap inter continental transit has done its deadly work: all Earth is a crucible, all the gene pools have melted into one indistinguishable fluid. Schwartz wonders about the recessivity of those blue eyes and arrives at no satisfactory solution. She is beautiful, at any rate. Her name is Dawn—O sweet neutral nonculture-bound cognomen!—and they have played at a flirtation, he and she, Dawn and Schwartz, at occasional moments of this short flight. Twinkling, she says softly, “We’re getting ready for our landing, Dr. Schwartz. Are your restrictors in polarity?”
“I never unfastened them.”
“Good.” The blue eyes, warm, interested, meet his. “I have a layover in Papua tonight,” she says.
“That’s nice.”
“Let’s have a drink while we’re waiting for them to unload the baggage,” she suggests with cheerful bluntness. “All right?”
“I suppose,” he says casually. “Why not?” Her availability bores him: somehow he enjoys the obsolete pleasures of the chase. Once such easiness in a woman like this would have excited him, but no longer. Schwartz is forty years old, tall, square-shouldered, sturdy, a showcase for the peasant genes of his rugged Irish mother. His close-cropped black hair is flecked with gray; many women find that interesting. One rarely sees gray hair now. He dresses simply but well, in sandals and Socratic tunic. Predictably, his physical attractiveness, both within his domestic sixness and without, has increased with his professional success. He is confident, sure of his powers, and he radiates an infectious assurance. This month alone eighty million people have heard his lectures.
She picks up the faint weariness in his voice. “You don’t sound eager. Not interested?”
“Hardly that.”
“What’s wrong, then? Feeling sub, Professor?”
Schwartz shrugs. “Dreadfully sub. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes.” He smiles, full force depriving his words of all their weight.
She registers mock anguish. “That sounds bad,” she says. “That sounds awful!”
“I’m only quoting Chuang Tzu. Pay no attention to me. Actually, I feel fine, just a little stale.”
“Too many skyports?”
He nods. “Too much of a sameness wherever I go.” He thinks of a star-bright, top-deck bubble dome where three boneless Spicans do a twining dance of propitiation to while away the slow hours of nine-light travel. “I’ll be all right,” he tells her. “It’s a date.”
Her hybrid face flows with relief and anticipation. “See you in Papua,” she tells him, and winks, and moves jauntily down the aisle.
Papu
a. By cocktail time Schwartz will be in Port Moresby. Tonight he lectures at the University of Papua; yesterday it was Montevideo; the day after tomorrow it will be Bangkok. He is making the grand academic circuit. This is his year: he is very big, suddenly, in anthropological circles, since the publication of The Mask Beneath the Skin. From continent to continent he flashes, sharing his wisdom, Monday in Montreal, Tuesday Veracruz, Wednesday Montevideo, Thursday—Thursday? He crossed the international date line this morning, and he does not remember whether he has entered Thursday or Tuesday, though yesterday was surely Wednesday. Schwartz is certain only that this is July and the year is 2083, and there are moments when he is not even sure of that.
The JAL rocket enters the final phase of its landward plunge. Papua waits, sleek, vitrescent. The world has a glassy sheen again. He lets his spirit drift happily back to the gleaming starship making its swift way across the whirling constellations.
He found himself in the starship’s busy lower-deck lounge, having a drink with his traveling companion, Pitkin, the Yale economist. Why Pitkin, that coarse, florid little man? With all of real and imaginary humanity to choose from, why had his unconscious elected to make him share this fantasy with such a boor?
“Look,” Pitkin said, winking and leering. “There’s your girlfriend.”
The entry-iris had opened and the Antarean not-male had come in.
Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four Page 43
