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

  “Surely you can’t expect me to take part in—”

  “Decide for us, at least. The Louvre has to go. That’s a given. Well, then: implosion or explosion, which is it to be?”

  “Implosion,” says Einstein, swaying from side to side in front of Vulpius. The soft eyes beg for his support. Behind him, Hemingway makes vociferous gestures of agreement.

  “No,” Picasso says. “Blow it up!” He flings his arms grandly outward. “Boom! Boom!”

  “Boom, yes,” says Cleversmith, very quietly. “I agree. So, Vulpius: you will cast the deciding vote.”

  “No. I absolutely refuse to—”

  “Which? Which? One or the other?”

  They march around and around him, demanding that he decide the issue for them. They will keep him here, he sees, until he yields. Well, what difference does it make, explode, implode? Destruction is destruction.

  “Suppose we toss a coin for it,” Cleversmith says finally, and the others nod eager agreement. Vulpius is not sure what that means, tossing a coin, but sighs in relief: apparently he is off the hook. But then Cleversmith produces a sleek bright disk of silvery metal from his pocket and presses it into Vulpius’s palm. “Here,” he says. “You do it.”

  Coinage is long obsolete. This is an artifact, hundreds of years old, probably stolen from some museum. It bears a surging three-tailed comet on one face and the solar-system symbol on the other. “Heads we explode, tails we implode,” Einstein declares. “Go on, dear friend. Toss it and catch it and tell us which side is up.” They crowd in, close up against him. Vulpius tosses the coin aloft, catches it with a desperate lunge, claps it down against the back of his left hand. Holds it covered for a moment. Reveals it. The comet is showing. But is that side heads or tails? He has no idea.

  Cleversmith says sternly, “Well? Heads or tails?”

  Vulpius, at the last extremity of fatigue, smiles benignly up at him. Heads or tails, what does it matter? What concern of his is any of this?

  “Heads,” he announces randomly. “Explosion.”

  “Boom!” cries jubilant Picasso. “Boom! Boom! Boom!”

  “My friend, you have our deepest thanks,” Cleversmith says. “We are all agreed, then, that the decision is final? Ernest? Albert?”

  “May I go back to my hotel now?” Vulpius asks.

  They accompany him down the mountainside, see him home, wish him a fond farewell. But they are not quite done with him. He is still asleep, late that afternoon, when they come down into Zermatt to fetch him. They are leaving for Paris at once, Cleversmith informs him, and he is invited to accompany them. He must witness their deed once more; he must give it his benediction. Helplessly he watches as they pack his bag. A car is waiting outside.

  “Paris,” Cleversmith tells it, and off they go.

  Picasso sits beside him. “Brandy?” he asks.

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Don’t mind if I do?”

  Vulpius shrugs. His head is pounding. Cleversmith and Hemingway, in the front seat, are singing raucously. Picasso, a moment later, joins in, and then Einstein. Each one of them seems to be singing in a different key. Vulpius takes the flask from Picasso and pours some brandy for himself with an unsteady hand.

  In Paris, Vulpius rests at their hotel, a venerable gray heap just south of the Seine, while they go about their tasks. This is the moment to report them to the authorities, he knows. Briefly he struggles to find the will to do what is necesary. But it is not there. Somehow all desire to intervene has been burned out of him. Perhaps, he thinks, the all-too-placid world actually needs the goad of strife that these exasperating men so gleefully provide. In any case the train is nearing the station: it’s too late to halt it now.

  “Come with us,” Hemingway says, beckoning from the hallway.

  He follows them, willy-nilly. They lead him to the highest floor of the building and through a narrow doorway that leads onto the roof. The sky is a wondrous black star-speckled vault overhead. Heavy tropic warmth hangs over Paris this December night. Just before them lies the river, glinting by the light of a crescent moon. The row of ancient bookstalls along its rim is visible, and the gray bulk of the Louvre across the way, and the spires of Notre Dame far off to the right.

  “What time is it?” Einstein asks.

  “Almost midnight,” says Picasso. “Shall we do it, Vjong?”

  “As good a time as any,” says Cleversmith, and touches two tiny contacts together.

  For a moment nothing happens. Then there is a deafening sound and a fiery lance spurts up out of the glass pyramid in the courtyard of the museum on the far side of the river. Two straight fissures appear in the courtyard’s pavement, crossing at ninety-degree angles, and very quickly the entire surface of the courtyard peels upward and outward along the lines of the subterranean incision, hurling two quadrants toward the river and flipping the other two backward into the streets of the Right Bank. As the explosion gathers force, the thick-walled medieval buildings of the surrounding quadrangle of the Louvre are carried high into the air, the inner walls giving way first, then the dark line of the roof. Into the air go the hoarded treasures of the ages, Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus de Milo and the Codex of Hammurabi, Rembrandt and Botticelli, Michelangelo and Rubens, Titian and Brueghel and Bosch, all soaring grandly overhead. The citizenry of Paris, having heard that great boom, rush into the streets to watch the spectacle. The midnight sky is raining the billion fragments of a million masterpieces. The crowd is cheering.

  And then an even greater cry goes up, wrung spontaneously form ten thousand throats. The hour of the new millennium has come. It is, very suddenly, the year 3000. Fireworks erupt everywhere, a dazzling sky-splitting display, brilliant reds and purples and greens forming sphere within sphere within sphere. Hemingway and Picasso are dancing together about the rooftop, the big man and the small. Einstein does a wild solo, flinging his arms about. Cleversmith stands statue-still, head thrown back, face a mask of ecstasy. Vulpius, who has begun to tremble with strange excitement, is surprised to find himself cheering with all the rest. Unexpected tears of joy stream from his eyes. He is no longer able to deny the logic of these men’s madness. The iron hand of the past has been flung aside. The new era will begin with a clean slate.

  TRAVELERS

  The first science-fiction magazine I ever read was the February, 1949 issue of Amazing Stories, which appeared on the newsstands of Brooklyn, where I was born and raised, in December, 1948. Amazing, then, was owned by Ziff-Davis Publications of Chicago. By then the magazine had a long history behind it—it was the first of all s-f magazines, founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback—but by 1948 it was an uncouth-looking pulp magazine with gaudy cover illustrations that featured slam-bang adventure fiction, mostly of pretty feeble literary quality. To me, though, back there in Junior High School 232, the stories in Amazing were utterly wonderful, and I lost no time submitting (terrible) ones of my own to the magazine. Amazing lost no time in sending them back, either, for, as I discovered a year or two later, it was entirely written by a small in-house staff and unsolicited manuscripts were returned unread.

  Toward the end of 1949 Ziff-Davis moved its headquarters to New York. A couple of years later it experimented with turning Amazing from a shaggy-looking pulp into an attractive little slick magazine, dropping the old staff of hired hands and replacing their simple action stories with high-quality work by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and a hot new writer named Philip K. Dick. But the new policy was a commercial failure, and before long Amazing reverted to its old arrangement of using staff-written fiction only, though it remained in the digest-size format it had adopted during its brief slick phase. Once again a little group of writers turned out all the stories in every issue, each one having a quota of so many words a month to deliver. The editors didn’t bother reading the stories before accepting them, because they knew they could trust the staff writers to stay close to the standard pulp fo
rmula. You handed your work in, you got paid, and you went home to bang out the next story. Now that the magazine’s owners had moved to New York, a new group of staffers—Milton Lesser and Paul W. Fairman, primarily—came in to replace of the Chicago writers.

  But Lesser and Fairman couldn’t write the whole magazine, plus Amazing’s companion magazine Fantastic, all by themselves, and editor Howard Browne cast about for a couple of other New York-based contributors. And so, in the summer of 1955, somewhat to my own amazement, I found myself joining the Amazing staff. Bear in mind that this was less than seven years since I had begun reading the magazine in junior high school. Now I was a college senior, but I was also a precocious professional writer, and thanks to the good offices of an older writer—Randall Garrett—with whom I had struck up a collaborative partnership, I was taken aboard. My first story for Amazing appeared in the January, 1956 issue, and thereafter, either in collaboration with Garrett or flying solo, I sold the magazine dozens of stories under all sorts of pseudonyms.

  Editors came and went over the following years, editorial policies changed again and again, but throughout it all I remained a regular contributor. Eventually Ziff-Davis sold its fiction magazines to an outfit called the Ultimate Publishing Company, and Amazing staggered on through a decade and a half of diminishing sales under the successive editorships of Joseph Ross, Harry Harrison, Barry Malzberg, Ted White, and Eleanor Mavor. I wrote stories for Amazing, did book reviews occasionally, and, in the Mavor days, briefly transferred my long-running opinion column to it. When Ultimate Publishing gave up the ghost in 1982 it looked as though the venerable magazine was finished at last, but no, it was bought by TSR Hobbies, a big publisher of fantasy games, and I remained a regular contributor under the newest editor, George Scithers, and his successor, Patrick Lucien Price.

  In 1991 this ever-mutating magazine underwent its most startling transformation yet. TSR brought in Kim Mohan to replace Pat Price, and under Mohan’s guidance Amazing turned into a glorious large-size slick magazine with color illustrations, probably the most handsome science-fiction magazine ever published. I was there in the first transmogrified issue with a short story (“A Tip on a Turtle”) and an installment of my regular column in which I described the magazine’s long history and many of the details of my own involvement with it that I’ve just set down here.

  I never could understand the economic underpinnings of the Mohan Amazing. It sold for $3.95 a copy and probably cost $5 a copy to produce. But it went on for one magnificent issue after another until 1994, when TSR finally pulled the plug on it in a two-stage process: first it reverted to the digest-size format it had had between 1952 and 1991, getting rid of the slick paper and the color illustrations, and then, after limping on a few issues more, it expired altogether. This time it looked like the end, but no, no, back it came three and a half years later, published now by Wizards of the Coast, another game-playing company that had absorbed TSR. It still was edited by Kim Mohan, and was back in large slick format, nearly as glamorous as it had been before. Mohan called me and asked if I would write a new story to celebrate this latest revival of the seemingly unkillable Amazing. “But of course,” I replied, and, dipping into the virtually inexhaustible background material of my galaxy-spanning 1986 novel, I came up with “Travelers” in April of 1999. Mohan ran it in Amazing’s 597th issue, dated Summer, 1999.

  Eventually, though, someone at Wizards of the Coast noticed the gap between production costs and cover price, and suspended publication of Amazing with issue 602, Summer 2000. This time it really did seem that the magazine was finished after a 74-year run under at least eight different publishers. But, as we’ll see a couple of stories farther along in this book, it had one more life left in it, nor was my decades-long involvement with the magazine quite at an end either.

  Are we all ready, then?” Nikomastir asks. He has fashioned a crown of golden protopetaloids for himself and gleaming scarlet baubles dangle from his ears: the bright translucent shells of galgalids, strung on slender strands of pure gold. His long pale arms wave in the air as though he is conducting a symphony orchestra. “Our next destination is—” and he makes us wait for the announcement. And wait. And wait.

  “Sidri Akrak,” says Mayfly, giggling.

  “How did you know?” cries Nikomastir. “Sidri Akrak! Yes! Yes! Set your coordinates, everybody! Off we go! Sidri Akrak it is!”

  A faint yelp of dismay comes from Velimyle, and she shoots me a look of something that might almost have been fear, though perhaps there is a certain component of perverse delight in it also. I am not at all happy about the decision myself. Sidri Akrak is a nightmare world where gaudy monsters run screaming through the muddy streets. The people of Sidri Akrak are cold and dour and inhospitable; their idea of pleasure is to wallow in discomfort and ugliness. No one goes to Sidri Akrak if he can help it, no one.

  But we must live by our rules; and this day Nikomastir holds the right of next choice. It is devilish of Mayfly to have put the idea of going to Sidri Akrak into his head. But she is like that, is Mayfly. And Nikomastir is terribly easily influenced.

  Will we all perish on hideous Sidri Akrak, victims of Mayfly’s casual frivolity?

  I don’t think so, however nasty the visit turns out to be. We often get into trouble, sometimes serious trouble, but we always get out of it. We lead charmed lives, we four travelers. Someday Mayfly will take one risk too many, I suppose, and I would like not to be there when she does. Most likely I will be, though. Mayfly is my mask-sister. Wherever she goes, I go. I must look after her: thoughtful, stolid, foolish me. I must protect her from herself as we four go traveling on and on, spinning giddily across the far-flung worlds.

  Sidri Akrak, though—

  The four of us have been to so many wondrous lovely places together: Elang-Lo and the floating isle of Vont, and Mikni and Chchikkikan, Heidoth and Thant, Milpar, Librot, Froidis, Smoor, Xamur and Iriarte and Nabomba Zom, and on and on and on. And now—Sidri Akrak? Sidri Akrak?

  We stand in a circle in the middle of a field of grass with golden blades, making ourselves ready for our relay-sweep departure from Galgala.

  I wouldn’t have minded remaining here a few months longer. A lovely world indeed is Galgala the golden, where myriads of auriferous microorganisms excrete atoms of gold as metabolic waste. It is everywhere on this planet, the lustrous pretty metal. It turns the rivers and streams to streaks of yellow flame and the seas to shimmering golden mirrors. Huge filters are deployed at the intake valve of Galgala’s reservoirs to strain the silt of dissolved gold from the water supply. The plants of Galgala are turgid in every tissue, leaf and stem and root, with aureous particles. Gold dust, held in suspension in the air, transforms the clouds to golden fleece.

  Therefore the once-precious stuff has grievously lost value throughout the galaxy since Galgala was discovered, and on Galgala itself a pound of gold is worth less than a pound of soap. But I understand very little about these economic matters and care even less. Only a miser could fail to rejoice in Galgala’s luminous beauty. We have been here six weeks; we have awakened each morning to the tinkle of golden chimes, we have bathed in the golden rivers and come forth shining, we have wrapped our bodies round with delicate golden chains. Now, though, it is time for us to move along, and Nikomastir has decreed that our new destination is to be one of the universe’s most disagreeable worlds. Unlike my companions I can see nothing amusing about going there. It strikes me as foolish and dangerous whimsy. But they are true sophisticates, untrammeled creatures made of air and light, and I am the leaden weight that dangles from their soaring souls. We will go to Sidri Akrak.

  We all face Nikomastir. Smiling sweetly, he calls out the coordinate numbers for our journey, and we set our beacons accordingly and doublecheck the settings with care. We nod our readiness for departure to one another. Velimyle moves almost imperceptibly closer to me, Mayfly to Nikomastir.

  I would have chosen a less flighty lover for her than Nikomastir if matt
ers had been left to me. He is a slim elegant youth, high-spirited and shallow, a prancing fantastico with a taste for telling elaborate fanciful lies. And he is very young: only a single rebirth so far. Mayfly is on her fifth, as am I, and Velimyle claims three, which probably means four. Sembiran is Nikomastir’s native world, a place of grand valleys and lofty snow-capped mountains and beautiful meadows and thriving cities, where his father is a minor aristocrat of some sort. Or so Nikomastir has said, although we have learned again and again that it is risky to take anything Nikomastir says at face value.

  My incandescent mask-sister Mayfly, who is as small and fair as Nikomastir is tall and dark, encountered him while on a visit to Olej in the Lubrik system and was immediately captivated by his volatile impulsive nature, and they have traveled together ever since. Whither Mayfly goeth, thither go I: that is the pledge of the mask. So do I trudge along now from world to world with them, and therefore my winsome, sly, capricious Velimyle, whose psychosensitive paintings are sought by the connoisseurs of a hundred worlds but who belongs to me alone, has willy-nilly become the fourth member of our inseparable quartet.

  Some people find relay-sweep transport unlikable and even frightening, but I have never minded it. What is most bothersome, I suppose, is that no starship is involved: you travel unprotected by any sort of tangible container, a mere plummeting parcel falling in frightful solitude through the interstices of the continuum. A journey-helmet is all that covers you, and some flimsy folds of coppery mesh. You set up your coordinates, you activate your beacon, and you stand and wait, you stand and wait, until the probing beam of some far-off sweep-station intersects your position and catches you and lifts you and carries you away. If you’ve done things right, your baggage will be picked up and transported at the same time. Most of the time that is so.