The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine

  The walls were as blank as if Father Demetrios had whitewashed them. After a moment’s hesitation he put out his forefinger and rubbed. A rough stucco surface; no hint of the smoothness of mosaic tile anywhere. Even in this asphyxiating heat, Gardiner felt a chill spreading over him. This was the last straw, this newest mutation. He knew he had to flee, not just the church but the town itself. There was nothing solid here, only abysses beneath abysses.

  He went stumbling out. “There’s nothing there, father. An hour ago there were mosaics all over those walls!”

  “There were?” Father Demetrios said.

  Serafina met him at the hotel and said, “Will we have dinner together tonight?”

  “I think not,” Gardiner said. “I’m going to leave.”

  “Leave? Now? But it is already dark, and you have not eaten!”

  “That’s all right. I think I should go.”

  “Ah. Do you?”

  “This is no place for me. You’ve got too many different kinds of reality here, I think. A little retreating is in order, a little regrouping. There are other places, other mosaics, elsewhere, you know. Best to try my luck at one of those. A place without any ghosts.”

  She considered that for a moment. “Yes. Maybe you’re right.” She gave him a sad smile. “Do you blame me for this, what happened here?”

  “You? Why should I blame you?”

  “Good,” she said. “I would like you to have at least one happy memory of my village.”

  He thought he saw an unstated appeal in her eyes. “Will I see you again somewhere?” he asked. “In Palermo, maybe? If I ask for you at the Hertz office?”

  “You could do that, yes,” she said. “Yes. Please do.”

  They stood a little while together, neither of them speaking. Then she leaned forward and kissed him lightly, a quick brush against his lips, and took his hand and squeezed it, and smiled, not so sadly this time; and then she was gone.

  Gardiner went to his room and packed, and found the padrone and settled his bill, and started off down the road, southward into the sultry night, heading for the coast, not daring to look back at dwindling Monte Saturno in his mirror, as though fearing that he would see some titanic winged figure standing with folded arms above the town, grinning at his departure. Was there any place on this island, he wondered, that had no ghosts? Maybe not. But he knew that he needed a change of air. Different ghosts. Less volatile, less mischievous. Relicts of an older, cooler realm, one where reason had held sway at least for a little while. Monte Saturno’s mysteries had been too much for him—immense, unanswerable.

  He reached Agrigento on the southern shore just before dawn. The ancient Agrigentum, it was, where the clear-minded, logic-loving old Greeks had built a dozen elegant temples whose austere remains still could be seen. It was cooler, here. A fresh breeze was blowing from the sea. Gardiner felt a measure of steadiness returning. Amidst the clean, stark, tranquil ruins of the calm and rational classical era he watched, with tears of happiness and relief streaming down his face, the sun come up over the shattered columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

  HANOSZ PRIME GOES TO OLD EARTH

  Up to this point, all of the stories in the nine volumes of this collection have been arranged in strict chronological order of writing, beginning with September 1953’s “Gorgon Planet” and plodding on, decade after decade, to July 1996’s “The Church at Monte Saturno.” But putting “Hanosz Prime Goes to Old Earth” in its proper chronological place is something of a puzzle.

  Most of it was written in March of 1992—but not as a short story. It began life as an early chapter of what I think is my one and only abandoned novel—an epic of the far future, the first volume of a trilogy, no less, with which I struggled in an agonized way for seven or eight weeks before deciding that it would take me a thousand pages to tell the story I had in mind for the first volume alone, and it was quite possible that the book would make no sense even if I lived long enough to finish it. The novel, or at least the 150 pages that I managed to write before giving up, was written in an experimental, impressionistic style, of which this, the opening paragraph, is a fair sample:

  Heigh-ho! It’s time to sing of the ending of time! Yes, the death of worlds, the crumbling of the continuum, the great Folding-In of the Gloriously Unfolded. Here is how it came about: this is what befell in the Time of the Falling of the Stars, which led to the Crossing of the Dark, which brought about the Birth of the Universe. For what we are gathered here to pay homage to today is the Grand Circularity of Everything.

  First things first and last things last, that’s the way of the worlds—but also last things first, as you will be amply shown. That’s how it always goes: how it always has gone, how it always must. The cosmos is a serpent with its tail in its mouth, and who is to say which is the beginning and which the end? Not I, not you, not any of us.

  If I had been able to keep that up for the whole length of the book, I might have had something interesting, I suppose. But instead things went off in all directions, and then in no direction at all, leaving me with a collection of fancy set-pieces that didn’t add up to a good start for a novel. After much internal huffing and puffing I began to see that I needed to give the thing up as a failure, and I did. Over the years that followed I grabbed some of the interesting scenes from the torso of the thing and welded them into various other things I was writing, and, no, I won’t tell you which they are, partly because I don’t really remember any more. Take it on faith that I made good use of them and that my travail over that unfinished book eventually paid off.

  Now we jump to July of 1997. John R. Fultz, one of the pioneering e-publishers, has started an online publishing company and an online magazine called Cosmic Visions, and gets in touch with me about publishing some of my work in electronic form. In 1997 my house is still modem-free and the only computer I have uses the already antiquated DOS operating system, but I am willing to dip a toe or two in the e-publishing lake nevertheless. I agree to let Fultz distribute two of my novels on the Internet and, when he asks me for a short story for Cosmic Visions, I remember my abandoned novel and carve out a 4000-word chunk that follows one of the many story-lines of the book, taking a bit from this scene and a bit from that one until I have something that looks like a coherent short story.

  I don’t know whether Fultz ever published it in any real sense of the word. Since I didn’t have Internet access in 1997, he sent me a neat printout of the October 1997 issue of Cosmic Visions, and there indeed is “Hanosz Prime.” But soon afterward I learned from Fultz that cosmicvisions.com had come to the end of its days. Since I have no record of being paid for my story, perhaps his site didn’t last long enough to put it out on the Internet.

  Meanwhile I had met Luis Ortiz, another of the pioneers of modern-style s-f publishing, though what he was involved with then was a desktop-publishing endeavor rather than an online magazine. In 1993 K.J. Cypret had founded Non-Stop, which described itself as a magazine of “alternative science fiction,” and by way of establishing its credentials had run a lovely short story in its first issue by Paul Di Filippo, surely one of the most alternative of alternative s-f writers. The second issue, which appeared two years after the first one, had fiction by the equally alternative Barry Malzberg in it, and an essay by Di Filippo on the narrative art. There was a third issue somewhat later, which I’ve never seen. Ortiz, originally the art director of Non-Stop and later its editor, sent me the first two issues and asked if I would contribute a story for the forthcoming fourth one. Since Malzberg and Di Filippo are both good friends of mine, I thought it would be fun to join them on the contents page of this lively, irreverent magazine, and, having just been told by John Fultz that all rights in “Hanosz Prime” had reverted to me, I let Ortiz know about its existence. He accepted it immediately and I was paid $190 for it in February, 1998, after which Non-Stop went instantly out of business and “Hanosz Prime Goes to Old Earth” dropped completely from my mind.

  The next jum
p takes us to the early months of 2005. I am, by then, an Internet user like everyone else, and I belong to a science-fiction discussion group called Fictionmags, where, suddenly, a bibliographer is asking me questions about “Hanosz Prime.” I post an account of its history with Cosmic Visions and Non-Stop and add, “I have no idea who owns the rights to the story now, but maybe I do, and I ought to dig out the contract and see if I can get it into print somewhere.” Luis Ortiz saves me the trouble of doing that. He is a member of Fictionmags too, and he informs me that with Non-Stop long defunct, the rights to “Hanosz Prime” were all mine.

  Cold-eyed professional that I am, I whip off an e-mail to Sheila Williams of Asimov’s Science Fiction, telling her that I have unearthed a perfectly good short story that may or may not have been published on-line eight years previously and then had been bought but not used by an obscure and vanished desktop mag. Sheila replies that she’s interested in seeing it. I bring it up on screen for a once-over, rewrite it to make it seem more like a short story and less like an excerpted fragment, and she publishes it in the April-May 2006 issue of Asimov’s.

  So there you have the saga: part of an unfinished novel in 1992, transformed into a short story of sorts in 1997 and accepted by two ephemeral publications, one of which may have published it and one which did not, and then, rewritten again in the spring of 2005, finally put into print. I think it’s a lively item, but, I gather from some quick Googling around the blogs, many of Asimov’s readers found it incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s all for the best that I decided, back there in 1992, not to finish that novel.

  The whole thing got arranged, with surprising ease, in short order at long range.

  Hanosz Prime of Prime—young again and feeling restless, beginning his new life in startling new ways, eager to travel, suddenly desirous of seeing historic Old Earth while it was still there to be seen—caused word to be sent ahead by hyperwave, using diplomatic channels, in order to get himself invited to be a house-guest at the palatial home of one of the grandest and most famous of Earth’s immortal aristocrats, the distinguished and celebrated Sinon Kreidge. Prime had good social connections in more than one galaxy.

  And so the message went forth, pretty much instantaneously across two million light-years, through an elaborate interface of official intermediaries spanning half a dozen stellar systems, and the answer came back in a trice—a favorable one. Sinon Kreidge and his daughter Kaivilda have heard a great deal about the distinguished and celebrated Hanosz Prime of Prime, or at any rate they claim that they have, and will be happy to entertain him during his stay on Earth. And so the visit was arranged. Quick, quick, back and forth across the galaxies!

  It’s an age of miracles, the Ninth Mandala that is the era of Prime and Sinon Kreidge. Our own accomplishments are as nothing beside theirs, nothing. To the people of the Ninth Mandala, all we are is pathetic ignorant smelly primitives, mere shaggy shambling creatures from the dawn of time—computers, color televisions, space satellites, and all.

  By the time of Hanosz Prime of Prime, nine mandalas and a bunch of cycles and encompassments from now, they’ll have faster-than-light starships powered by devices that don’t exist even in concept right now. It’ll be a simple deal to travel quickly and cheaply and easily not just between cities or continents or planets or solar systems but between whole galaxies, faster than it would be for you or me to get from New York to Kansas City. Diplomats and tourists will pop back and forth across millions of light-years in hardly any time at all, say a week or two from here to the quasar 3C 279 without giving it a second thought. Intergalactic messages will move even more quickly—by sub-etheric telephone, let’s say, or hyperwave communicator, or some such thing.

  I know, it all sounds pretty damned improbable. But stop to think a moment. We’re talking about millions of years from now. The Ninth Mandala may very well be a lot farther in our future than the dinosaurs are in our past. A lot of impossible things can get to be possible in that many years.

  The dinosaurs, remember, didn’t know anything about anything. They were masters of the planet, but they didn’t have the simplest form of technology, not a smidgeon. Hell, they couldn’t even spell their own names. Look how far we’ve come, technologically speaking, in a mere 65,000,000 years. We have computers and color television and orbiting space satellites, all of them invented just a microsecond or two ago on the geological scale of things.

  And for us the age of miracles is only just beginning.

  So now Hanosz Prime is on his way to the threatened planet that once again calls itself Earth. Great wonders and strangenesses await him on the mother world of all humans.

  His departure was uneventful. We see him now aboard his elegant little ship as it plunged Earthward at incomprehensible velocity. Manned by an invisible crew, it has swiftly made its tumble through windows and wormholes, sliding down the slippery planes, through the thin places of the cosmos, descending by sly side-passages and tricksy topological evasions across the vast reaches of the dusty intergalactic darkness. Onward it goes across the light-years (or around them, whenever possible) skimming through nebulas aglow with clotted red masses of hydrogen gas, through zones where the newest and hottest stars of the ancient universe—latecomers, lastborn of the dying galaxy, never to run their full cycle of life—valiantly hurled their fierce blue radiance into the void; and now the journey is almost over.

  The small golden sun of Earth lay dead ahead. Around it danced Earth’s neighboring planets, whirling tirelessly through the changeless darkness along their various orbits, filling his screens with the brilliance of their reflected light.

  “Is that Earth?” he asked. “That little blue thing?”

  “That is exactly what it is,” replied the voice of Captain Tio Patnact, who had traveled from Aldebaran to Procyon and from Procyon to Rigel in the time of the Fifth Mandala, when that was a journey worth respecting. Captain Tio Patnact was what we would call software now, or what an earlier age than ours would probably have called a ghost. “It isn’t all that little, either. You’ll see when you get there.”

  “You’ve been there, right?”

  “Quite a while ago, yes.”

  “But it hasn’t changed much since your time, has it?”

  “It will have changed in small details,” said Captain Tio Patnact, after a time. “But not in any of the large ones, I suspect. They are a fundamentally conservative people, as very wealthy people who know they are going to live forever tend to be.”

  Hanosz Prime of Prime considered that. He regarded himself as wealthy, as anyone who had ruled and essentially owned most of an entire planet might be thought justified in doing. Was Captain Tio Pacnact being sarcastic, then, or patronizing, or simply rude?—or trying to prepare him for the shock of his life?

  “How wealthy are they?” he asked, finally.

  “They are all grand lords and ladies. Every one of them. And every one of them lives in a magnificent castle.”

  And yet they are doomed, Prime thinks. The grand immortals of glittering Earth, living under the shadow of unanticipated destruction. Prime is fascinated by that idea. It seems so appropriate, somehow—so interestingly perverse. Earth, of all places, going to be sucked into some mysterious and absolutely unstoppable vacancy that has opened in the middle of nowhere! What is it like, he wonders, if you are one of those immortal ones—envied by all, the high aristocracy of the cosmos!—and you suddenly discover that you are going to die after all, immortal or not, when your part of the galaxy gets swallowed up by this hungry hole?

  (The truth is that the curiosity he feels about precisely this thing is one of the motives that has pulled him across two million light-years to Earth. He wants to see how the immortals are handling their death sentence. Will they flee? Can they flee? Or will they—must they—remain on Earth to its very last moments, and go bravely down with the ship?

  “So it’s true, the stories people tell about the Earthfolk, how rich and splendid they all are. And they’re all pe
rfect, too, aren’t they?” said Hanosz Prime of Prime. “That’s what I’ve been hearing about them forever. Everything in balance, harmonious and self-regulating. A perfect world of perfect people who never have to die unless they want to, and even then it’s not necessarily permanent. Isn’t that so, Tio Patnact?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that they think they are perfect, and that you may very well think so too.”

  “Ah,” said Hanosz Prime, ex-ruler of Prime. He never knew when Captain Tio Patnact was having some fun with him. That was one of the problems of being only a couple of centuries old, more or less, in a time when most people tended to be very long-lived indeed and certain highly privileged ones like the people of Earth were capable of living forever.

  Brooding, Prime paces the length and breadth of the ship. It’s quite a fine ship, but it isn’t very big. Prime keeps it for his personal use, for jaunts between the planets of the Parasol system and occasionally to nearby star-groups. He’s never taken it this far before.

  Curving inlays of silver and burnished bronze brighten the walls. Heavy draperies of azure velvet flocked with gold add that little extra touch of regal splendor. Along the sides of the main cabin are holographic portraits of previous members of the royal family, twenty or thirty of them selected at random from the royal portrait gallery. Prime hadn’t put them there; they came with the ship, and he had always felt it would be rude to pull them down. The most impressive portrait of the bunch is that of Prime’s formidable grandfather, the fierce old undying tyrant who had finally relented and sired an heir in his six thousandth year, and then had lived another thousand anyway, so that Prime’s father had had the throne hardly more than a cycle or two. The old man’s deep-set eyes burn like suns: he seems ready to step down from the wall and take command of the ship.