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

  That project fell to Nortekku because Vuldimin was distantly related to Silina’s father, who was, for all his lofty ancestry, an impoverished aristocrat eager to see Silina married off to a man of wealth and importance. He saw the job of designing Vuldimin’s palace as a useful step in the building of his future son-in-law’s career, and arranged a meeting between Nortekku and the prince. It went very well: Vuldimin spelled out his ideas for the new palace, Nortekku dared to make some suggestions for bettering them, and Vuldimin showed what appeared to be unfeigned enthusiasm. And so two contracts were drawn up, one pledging the troth of Silina and Nortekku, the other engaging Nortekku as the architect of Vuldimin’s palace. The voiding of one contract now might well cause the other to be be broken as well, with disastrous results for Nortekku’s career.

  Well, there was no helping any of it. If his father refused to name him as his heir, if Vuldimin withdrew the commission for designing the palace, so be it. Nortekku wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life listening to the Princess Silina’s whinnying laughter and mindless girlish chatter.

  The day he went to pay the ceremonial call on Silina’s family to explain his reluctance to undertake the mating, it happened, just to make everything worse, that Prince Vuldimin was there. But there was no turning back. Silina’s parents and brothers and cousins and uncles, perhaps anticipating what he was about to say, stood arrayed before him like a court of inquisition, every one of them glaring at him with those eerie crimson Beng eyes of theirs, while he lamely told them that he had looked into the depths of his soul in the past few weeks and seen how hastily, carried away by his infatuation with Silina’s great beauty and fascinating personality, he had allowed himself to plunge into the marriage contract.

  He understood now how rash that decision had been, he said.

  He did not see how the marriage could be a success.

  He told them that he felt unready for mating, that he was too callow and flighty to be able to offer a splendid woman like Silina the sort of life she deserved, that he felt covered with shame and chagrin but saw no alternative but to withdraw from the contract. It was his hope, he said, that the Princess Silina would before long find a mate more worthy of her than he could possibly be.

  This produced an immediate uproar, loud and intense. Nortekku considered the possibility that there might even be violence. Silina, sobbing, rushed from the room. Her parents puffed up in rage like infuriated adders. The brothers and cousins and uncles shook fists and shouted. Threats of legal action were uttered.

  There was something almost comic about it, Nortekku thought, although he knew that the developments following upon his repudiation of Silina were not likely to be in any way amusing. He stood stock-still in the midst of the clamor, pondering how he was going to manage to make his escape.

  In the end it was Prince Vuldimin, who had witnessed the whole scene from the side, who rescued him. The prince, a short, stocky older man of almost regal presence and authority, cut through the hubbub with a few quick pacifying words, delivered in a tone that could not fail to gain attention, and in the moment of shocked calm that ensued took Nortekku by the elbow and led him swiftly from the room.

  When they were outside, Nortekku saw that the prince was smiling, even choking back a giggle. A great flood of relief washed over him.

  I have an ally here, he realized.

  The prince, who must understand his kinsmen here as well as anyone, had plainly sized up the situation in a moment and his sympathies were all with Nortekku. Thanks be to all the gods for that, Nortekku told himself.

  “What a pack of buffoons,” Vuldimin murmured. “How did you ever get entangled with them, anyway? Were you really so very infatuated with the princess?”

  “Not for a second,” Nortekku said. “It was all my father’s doing. He arranged it and told me about it afterward.—But I’m in trouble now, aren’t I? What do you think will happen next?”

  “Nothing that you’re going to like. If they’re wise, they’ll hush the whole thing up and try to find another husband for their girl before she gets branded as unmarriageable. But, as you see, they aren’t wise. So there’ll probably be a noisy lawsuit, breach of contract, defamation of character, the gods only know what else. They’ll want to portray you as a worthless adventurer, an evil seducer, a shameless social climber—”

  “I seduced no one here. And if I’m such a shameless social climber, why would I back out of a mating with a Beng princess, however much of a ninny she may be? There’s no sense to any of that.”

  “Maybe so. But there’d be plenty of sense to suing you if the real goal is to squeeze a couple of million units out of your father to settle the suit.”

  Nortekku gasped. “He’s already threatened to disinherit me if I don’t go through with the wedding. He’s certainly not going to pay my legal bills. And I don’t have a unit of my own to my name.”

  Vuldimin seemed to know that already. There was an almost fatherly warmth in his golden eyes as he looked up toward the much taller Nortekku and said, “Then the best thing for you is to get out of town for a while. Come up to Yissou; stay at my estate for a month or two. We’ll say that you need to begin surveying the site of the country palace. There’s truth in that, after all. And process-servers from Dawinno have no jurisdiction up there, so the lawsuit will be stalled for however much time you’re out of town, and perhaps in your absence I can talk my kinsmen here into forgetting about the whole unfortunate event without making it even worse by suing. Once they realize that your father isn’t going to underwrite any settlement they may be willing to be rational about things. But in the meanwhile, get yourself to my place in Yissou and wait it out. What do you say?”

  “I couldn’t be more grateful, your grace,” said Nortekku, and thought for one wild moment that he was about to burst into tears.

  That night he left for Yissou, not aboard the regular evening train but—at Vuldimin’s suggestion—as a passenger on a freight caravan, where no Dawinno bailiff would be likely to look for him. In Yissou he was given lavish quarters at Vuldimin’s sprawling dark-walled palace just off an enormous square known as the Plaza of the Sun, and during the succeeding weeks was treated by the prince’s huge staff of servants as though he were a visiting member of some royal house. Vuldimin himself returned from Dawinno shortly, assured Nortekko that his problems with Silina’s family would in one way or another be overcome, and made it clear that his breaking of the marriage contract would in no way affect the commission to build the new palace.

  Nortekku had never cared much for Yissou, which was far to the north of Dawinno and had a much colder climate, especially now, in winter. One’s first view of the city was utterly off-putting. Its entire core was surrounded by a colossal, brooding wall of black stone, a wall of enormous height and breadth that had been constructed nearly two centuries before by one of the earliest kings of the city, who feared all manner of enemies both real and unreal and had devoted a reign of many decades to raising that wall ever higher and higher, until its implacable shadow came to dominate almost the whole of the city within.

  Once you were inside the wall things were no prettier. Nortekku’s architect’s eye was offended by the cramped and twisting alleyways that passed for streets and the squat, ungraceful, ponderous stone buildings that filled them, each jammed up against the next, low thick-walled ground-hugging boxes with the narrowest of slits to serve as windows. Marketplaces had been situated with seeming randomness throughout the city, so you were assailed everywhere by the smell of produce that was no longer fresh and seafood that had spent too many days away from the sea. And one whole quarter of the city was populated by Hjjks, those giant yellow-and-black insect-creatures that were the only one of the Six Peoples of the Great World that had survived the cataclysm of the death-stars. Nortekku had no great fondness for Hjjks, even though the ancient threat of warfare between the hive-dwellers and the People had subsided more than a century ago. He was displeased by the look of them, their d
ry, harsh, chittering voices, their icy alien reserve. But there were very few of them in Dawinno, far to the south, and he rarely encountered one there. Here in Yissou, much closer to the bleak Hjjk homeland that spanned the northern half of the continent, one saw them everywhere, tall menacing-looking six-legged creatures with formidable claws and beaks. He greatly disliked rubbing shoulders with them in the streets.

  Still, life in Yissou had its compensations. Vuldimin’s palace was handsome and comfortable, and so long as Nortekku stayed indoors the ugliness and dank coldness of the city were no problem for him. Vuldimin himself was warm and friendly in a quasi-paternal way, and clearly had taken a liking to him. Nortekku, who had never known much in the way of affection from his own blustering, churlish father, found that very welcome. And it was the prince, rather than Yissou’s monarch, his gloomy cousin Falid, who was at the center of Yissou’s social and political life. Vuldimin was a man of great cultivation and progressive ideas, unarguably superior in intellect and vision and charisma to the cautious, reactionary king, and it was to him that Yissou’s brightest and most interesting people flocked. Thus it came to pass that Nortekku, at one of the regular assemblages of industrialists and scientists and artists one evening at Prince Vuldimin’s palace, found himself face to face with the brilliant young archaeologist Thalarne and had his life turned upside down between one moment and the next.

  He had noticed her from the far side of the room, engaged in an animated conversation with six or seven persons who, Nortekku observed, all happened to be men. She was an instaneously compelling sight: tall, nearly as tall as Nortekku himself, with a fine figure and a thick, gleaming pelt of dark fur spotted here and there by oval splotches of dazzling white.

  Every aspect of her commanded attention. Her eyes were of a rich emerald color, glistening with an inner light; her features were delicately and beautifully formed, her expression a searching, mobile one; her stance was alert and dynamic. She wore the vivid yellow sash that Nortekku knew indicated membership in Yissou’s Institute of Scientific Study, the counterpart of his own city’s great research center, the House of Knowledge. Several of the men surrounding her wore the yellow sash also.

  Nortekku drifted closer.

  She was speaking of the tendency of sophisticated people in Yissou nowadays to regard the stories of the People’s past as just that—stories, mere myth. Indeed Nortekku had encountered the same phenomenon among his friends in Dawinno, who brushed the popular historical tales aside as the stuff of legend. Had there ever really been a Long Winter? Did the People actually live once upon a time in underground cocoons? Had the Great World truly been as magnificent as the legends would have it?

  “We have the evidence of the Chronicles, of course,” one of the men said.

  “So we do,” said another, “but how do we know that they represent actual history? They may be no more reliable than the history plays we see in the theater.”

  “Yes. Torlyri and Trei Husathirn, said a third man. “The Boyhood of Hresh. Hresh at the Nest of Nests.”

  “And there’s that play about Nialli Apuilana and her captivity among the Hjjks, and how she faced down the Hjjk Queen and defeated Her,” said another.

  “You speak of them as though they’re just fiction,” the first man said. “These people actually existed. They really did the things that they’re credited with doing. Otherwise, how did we get here? Who led us from the cocoon, if not Koshmar and Torlyri? Who founded the cities, if not Hresh and Harruel and Salaman? Who drove back the Hjjks when they wanted to take over all our land? Why, Thalarne here is a direct descendant herself of Taniane, Hresh, Thu-Kimnibol—”

  “They were real, yes,” said the second man. “But can we be sure that any of their great deeds actually took place? What if it’s all just a bunch of children’s fables?”

  It was at that point, by which time Nortekku had brought himself to the very edge of the circle around Thalarne and was standing directly opposite her, that she said, in a deep, throaty voice that made him tingle with delight, “Which is exactly why all the evidence of the Chronicles needs to be challenged, reviewed, subjected to modern scientific examination. And the first step in that, I think, is to retrace the great trek, eastward all the way to the Hallimalla, and find the original Koshmar cocoon. Which is what I intend to do.”

  “How soon will you be leaving?” one of the other sash-wearers asked.

  “Two months, maybe three,” she said. “However long it takes to get the funding together and acquire the equipment.”

  “Excuse me,” Nortekku said then. “I couldn’t help overhearing your discussion. I’m Nortekku of Dawinno, an architect, here to design a palace outside the wall for Prince Vuldimin.” He was addressing himself directly to her, as though the others weren’t there at all.

  “Thalarne Koshmar,” she said.

  His name, his link to his father’s vast wealth, didn’t seem to mean anything to her. But she was looking straight back at him, very intently indeed. He knew what an intense stare like that usually meant. He knew, also, that he was probably staring at her the same way.

  “And did I hear correctly that you’re planning an expedition to the original cocoon?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I most certainly am.”

  “Well, then,” said Nortekku at once. “I wonder if there might be room in your group for someone who isn’t himself an archaeologist, but who—”

  The words were out of his mouth before he had given the thing half a thought. He had no idea what use an architect would be to a bunch of archaeologists, but that hardly mattered. Four or five weeks, even a couple of months, perhaps, out there in the back woods with this wondrous Thalarne—why would he hesitate for so much as a moment?

  “Are you serious?” she asked, with a little flurrying show of surprise.

  “Positively! To be part of a project like that—why, it’s the most fascinating idea I’ve heard in years, Thalarne!” Shamelessly he said, almost believing it for the moment, “History has always been one of my great interests, as a matter of fact.”

  “Ah, has it? Why, that’s wonderful!” she said, as though she might not be entirely sure of his sincerity, but wanted to be.

  “And to be on hand when scientists enter the original Koshmar cocoon—to help recover whatever artifacts our forefathers might have left behind at the Time of Going Forth—to gain new knowledge of the early days of the People—!”

  His mind went racing ahead, looking for reasons that might make his presence on the expedition plausible. As an architect, he would be well equipped to map and sketch the intricate layout of the underground chambers that had been inhabited so long. They surely went great distances into the earth. He might even be able to provide technical aid with the excavations. And he could offer financial support too, if that was needed—by way of his father’s many business enterprises he was well connected among the princes and great merchants of Dawinno, many of whom claimed to have a profound interest in matters of antiquity.

  But it was unnecessary to muster any of those arguments. He could see right away, from the sudden brightness in Thalarne’s eyes and the sudden quivering of her sensing-organ and the unmistakable rising of her lustrous black fur, that Thalarne wanted him on the expedition as much as he wanted to be on it, and for the same reasons, which had very little, actually, to do with archaeology.

  Over the weeks that followed his mind dwelled on the adventure to come to the exclusion of almost everything else. Enamored of her and newly enraptured by the science to which she had devoted her life, he flung himself into his belated study of antiquity, the better to understand her.

  She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end—the world of the humans, of which not the slightest speck remained, and the Great World, whose merest outlines alone survived, and the hidden world of the now abandoned cocoons in which the People, created out of simple apelike animals by the humans to be the successors to the Great World
, had waited out the Long Winter. And now, rising atop those strata of antiquity, the brave new world that the People had created for themselves since the Time of Going Forth. Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.

  Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least in some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future. And in the months ahead, he told himself, that comprehension would only grow and deepen as Thalarne and he made their way, side by side, into the ancestral cocoon.

  These months in Yissou were the happiest of his life. He and Thalarne had become lovers almost immediately, and soon after that became twining-partners also, even before he discovered that she already had a mate, a certain Hamiruld, who was yet another kinsman of the king of Yissou and of Prince Vuldimin. The fact that Thalarne was married did not appear to be a serious obstacle. Nortekku quickly came to see Hamiruld as a sly and effete man, who appeared to have no particular interest in Thalarne and displayed no overt signs of love for her. Why he had married her, the gods alone knew, but he seemed not to be in any way possessive. Indeed, he seemed to go beyond complaisance into indifference. Quite likely he would step aside if asked; for Nortekku, for the first time ever, had mating on his mind. Thalarne’s stunning beauty, her soaring spirit, her keen intelligence—

  But that was for later. Finishing the plans for the expedition was the central thing now. Nortekku busied himself putting together the financial backing and purchasing the necessary equipment—Prince Til-Menimat, the famous collector of antiquities, provided most of the money—while Thalarne assembled her team of fellow archaeologists and worked out the details of the route to the ancestral cocoon.