But he seemed to be under attack. He was at the back of the hold, up on the narrow boardwalk that ran along three sides of the room around the edges of the tank, and the four Sea-Lords stood crowding around him, jostling him roughly. They were clustered close, pushing fiercely at him with their shoulders, buffeting him from one to another, and Hamiruld, crying out in terror and pain, was trying to get out from among them. The two big males seemed to be letting the females do most of the shoving, but even they were bigger than Hamiruld, and when they thrust themselves against him he went ricocheting back like a flimsy toy.
“They’ll kill him!” Thalarne cried.
Nortekku nodded. It was hard to believe, these gentle, passive creatures wanting to kill, but surely the rough sport they were having with Hamiruld was doing great injury. And very likely they would kill anyone who tried to intervene, too. He hesitated, uncertain of what to do, looking around for something he could use to push the Sea-Lords back from him.
Then came footsteps in the corridor. Crewmen appearing, five or six of them, the night watch belatedly putting in its appearance.
Nortekku pointed. “Don’t you see what’s happening?”
They could see it, yes, and, seizing electric prods from a case mounted just inside the door, they ran into the room and headed down the boardwalk.
At the sight of them, the Sea-Lords closed in even more tightly. Hamiruld was completely hidden by them now. Out of the center of the group came a single horrible shriek, high-pitched, cracking at the end. Then the crewmen were in the midst of the melee themselves, jabbing at the Sea-Lords with the prods, trying to push them back into the water of the tank. One of the males swung a broad flipper at the nearest crewman and knocked him on a high curving arc into the tank. The other men danced backward, then approached with their prods again. There came the hissing sound of electrical discharges—the bright flash of light at the tips of the prods—
“No!” Thalarne called. “Not maximum! Don’t use maximum!”
Everything dissolved into confusion, then—Sea-Lords and crewmen lurching back and forth on the narrow platform, prods hissing, lights flashing, Hamiruld nowhere to be seen—and then, abruptly, it was over.
Two of the crewmen were in the tank. The rest stood gasping against the wall. All four of the Sea-Lords lay sprawling on the boardwalk, motionless. The crumpled figure of Hamiruld, broken and bent, was face-down at the edge of the tank, motionless also.
Nortekku and Thalarne, who had remained in the doorway throughout the struggle, moved out along the boardwalk now. Thalarne knelt beside Hamiruld. She touched his shoulder with the tip of a finger, very gently. Then she looked up.
“Dead, I think.”
“I imagine he is,” said Nortekku. He had reached one of the Sea-Lord females. “This one is, too. And this. They all are, all four. These idiots did have their prods turned to maximum!”
“Dangerous animals,” one of the crewmen mumbled. “Gone berserk. Anything could have happened. Look, they killed that man who came from the city—”
“Yes. So they did. And they’re dead too.”
So four of them, at least, had had their wish. The Sea-Lords at rest were awesome, mysterious, calm. There was a rightness, he thought, about their death. They were creatures out of place in time, who should have died when the Great World ended. They had carried on their backs the whole burden of the world’s past ages, and now they had relinquished it at last.
Nortekku looked toward Thalarne. “That was what they wanted most, wasn’t it? To die? It’s why they attacked him. They did it deliberately, to set things in motion. So that someone would come rushing in to defend him, someone who would kill them for the sake of protecting Hamiruld. Don’t you think so?”
“I think you’re right,” Thalarne said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. She was still kneeling by Hamiruld, holding his limp arm at the wrist. Letting go of it, she rose and looked about, surveying the carnage. “What a ghastly scene, though. Dead, all of them. And Hamiruld too.”
“He shouldn’t have been in here,” said Nortekku. “He had no right to be aboard.” But that only made it all the worse, blaming Hamiruld for his own death.
Some ungovernable impulse made him ask her, as he had asked her once before, “Did you love him, Thalarne?”
“I suppose I must have, once. In some way, yes, I did. After a fashion. But what difference does that make? I told him this afternoon I could never forgive him. For lying to you, for sponsoring this expedition, for agreeing to the capture of the Sea-Lords. I told him I wanted nothing more to do with him. Maybe that was why he came here tonight.”
“We’ll never know what really went on in this room, will we?”
“No,” she said. “We’ll never know.”
“Come. Let’s get out of here.”
He led her up on deck. The night air was warm, the moon was high and nearly full. The ship rocked gently against the pier. Out here it was as though none of the horror below had really happened.
He felt very strange. He had never been in the presence of violent death before. And yet, shocked and dazed as he was, he felt that what had happened had not entirely been a thing of horror, that some necessary act of liberation had taken place this night. Those four Sea-Lords would not now go onward to a humiliating life as exhibits in a zoo; and whatever forces had driven the tormented Hamiruld were at rest now also. Perhaps all of them, Hamiruld and the Sea-Lords both, had found in that terrible melee in the tank room that which they had been seeking most.
And for him everything that he thought he believed had been transformed in one moment of violence.
What now? Now, Nortekku thought, it is up to us to finish the job.
Thalarne moved close up beside him. He slipped one arm around her and they stood that way in silence.
“You said you’d file a report with the governments of Yissou and Dawinno, and let them decide what to do with the Sea-Lords,” he said, after a long time had passed. “But you know who has the last word in what those governments decide: Prince Til-Menimat, and Prince Samnibolon, and maybe Prince Vuldimin, and Prince This-and-That, all the rest of them who paid for this expedition so they could add Sea-Lord artifacts to their collections. Do you know what they’ll do, when they find out that the first try at bringing some live Sea-Lords back has failed? They’ll organize another expedition right away.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what they’ll do.”
“We have to get there first, don’t we?” He looked at her. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll speak to the captain, and ask him if his ship is available for making a voyage right back to where we just came from.”
She nodded. She understood. “Yes. We should go back there.”
“And we will,” he said. “We have to. Because now we have to show the rest of those Sea-Lords how to die.”
AGAINST THE CURRENT
Because I started so young—I was in my late teens when I began getting stories professionally published—my career as a science-fiction writer has been one of the longest on record, if you leave aside such probably unmatchable ones as those of Jack Williamson (who began writing in 1928 and went right on for 75 years plus, until his death a few years ago at the age of 98) and Frederik Pohl (whose earliest published story dates from 1939 and who was still at it more than 65 years later.) Ray Bradbury, whose career got under way in 1941, is another whose career span exceeds mine by quite some distance. But it is now some 56 years since editors began saying yes to my s-f stories, and through a lucky combination of longevity and precocity I have been able to exceed in the duration of my writing career those of such major figures of the field as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Poul Anderson, and, though I don’t expect to break the flabbergasting Williamson record, I do intend to keep heading toward it for some while longer.
The nine volumes of this series have demonstrated some changes along the route of my six-decade career. Not only has there been some growth in literary abil
ity, I hope, but there’s been a steady slowdown in productivity from what was, at the beginning, a virtually inhuman pace. If you look at the introductions I wrote for the stories in Volume One, To Be Continued, you will find an ongoing subtext of eerie high-volume production: “Despite the rigors of college work, I wrote short stories steadily throughout 1954—one in April, two in May, three in June, two in October after the summer break...and by June of 1955 I was writing a story a week.” A pace of a story a week would add up to fifty or so stories a year. But then we find, “I wrote [‘Alaree’] in March of 1956—one of eight stories that I managed to produce that month, while still carrying a full class load in college.” And then the topper: “June of 1956: the new college graduate, in his first official month as a full-time professional writer, turns out no less than eighteen stories plus two small nonfiction pieces—an average of just about one a day, considering that I always took Saturdays and Sundays off—and sells them all.”
Well, that had to stop. Not only weren’t there enough science-fiction magazines in existence to absorb eighteen stories a month by one writer, but I wasn’t going to be 21 forever, either, and no writer even of first-magnitude prolificity has ever been able to manage to keep up an eighteen-story-a-month pace for very long. As can be seen, volume after volume, my output of short stories gradually dropped to a more normal sort, partly because I had begun writing novels as well, partly because many of the old-line magazines that had encouraged my voluminous production had gone out of business, and partly because I just couldn’t keep hammering away at that frantic rate indefinitely. Writers, like everybody else, want to take things a little easier as the years mount up. Shakespeare and Hemingway didn’t write anything in their sixties. (They were dead by then.) Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, and Bradbury all slowed down some as time went along. So did I. And, as was more fully discussed in the introduction to this book, I had other reasons for cutting back on my output also. Gradually, then, over the years, I have come to write less and less, though I’ve continued to write steadily, by and large, except for the sabbatical years from 1974 to 1978. Volume Two of this series includes just twenty-one stories to represent the years 1962 to 1969, respectable enough productivity but a very far cry from the eighteen of June, 1956 alone. A similar slowing of pace is evident in the volumes that follow, and by the time we get to the present volume, we find just a dozen stories emerging from the entire decade beginning in 1995, and nearly all of those were the result of some direct request from an editor rather than my own burning desire to add one more short story to my long list. Indeed, I wrote no short stories at all between “The Church at Monte Saturno” in the summer of 1996 and “The Millennium Express” in December, 1998, except for a couple related to my Majipoor and Roma Eterna story sequences that are not included in this collection because their proper place is with the others of their kind. And my next four stories—“Travelers,” “The Colonel Returns to the Stars,” “The Eater of Dreams,” and “A Piece of the Great World”—all were instigated by editorial request rather than by some inner hunger to write.
But even an aging writer who feels that he has said just about all he wants to say in the way of science fiction over the many decades of his career still does occasionally feel the irresistible pull of a story that demands to be written. At least, that was my experience one sunny day in the fall of 2006 when, while reading a fifty-year-old anthology of fantasy stories that Ray Bradbury had edited, the idea of writing a story about a man who gets into his car and drives off into the past popped into my mind.
I wasn’t looking for story ideas. I had not let myself get drawn into any new writing obligations since finishing “A Piece of the Great World” early in 2005, and the rest of that year and most of 2006 had glided by without any new Silverberg fiction entering the world. But suddenly the story that I would call “Against the Current” was taking shape willy-nilly in my mind, and the only response that seemed appropriate was, “Why not write it?” So I did. Over the next week or so it came forth virtually of its own accord, an experience that has been, I have to confess, exceedingly rare for me in modern times. I didn’t stop to ask myself how it might be possible to get into one’s car and drive into one’s past. That would have spoiled the fun. All I wanted to do was tell the story as it told itself to me, and whether the story was science fiction (i.e. the car has been rigged to act as a sort of time machine) or fantasy (i.e. the car simply does what it does, no explanations offered) was irrelevant to me. I figured this story was a gift from the gods, and I wasn’t minded to look a gift story in the mouth.
The magazine most receptive to out-of-genre stories like this, over the years, has been Fantasy and Science Fiction. I had been an infrequent but regular contributor to F&SF since 1957, when the brilliant Anthony Boucher was its editor. It had published such stories of mine as “Sundance” and “Born with the Dead,” and it had serialized my novels The Stochastic Man and Lord Valentine’s Castle. Its editor and publisher now was Gordon van Gelder, with whom I had come to strike up a pleasant and curious friendship. (We are both involuntary early risers, and we have breakfast together at the World Science Fiction Convention each year in the dawn hours, while the rest of the convention-goers are still fast asleep.) I sent it to Gordon and he published it in his October-November 2007 issue.
About half past four in the afternoon Rackman felt a sudden red blaze of pain in both his temples at once, the sort of stabbing jab that you would expect to feel if a narrow metal spike had been driven through your head. It was gone as quickly as it had come, but it left him feeling queasy and puzzled and a little frightened, and, since things were slow at the dealership just then anyway, he decided it might be best to call it a day and head for home.
He stepped out into perfect summer weather, a sunny, cloudless day, and headed across the lot to look for Gene, his manager, who had been over by the SUVs making a tally of the leftovers. But Gene was nowhere in sight. The only person Rackman saw out there was a pudgy salesman named Freitas, who so far as he recalled had given notice a couple of weeks ago. Evidently he wasn’t gone yet, though.
“I’m not feeling so good and I’m going home early,” Rackman announced. “If Gene’s around here somewhere, will you tell him that?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Rackman.”
Rackman circled around the edge of the lot toward the staff parking area. He still felt queasy, and somewhat muddled too, with a slight headache lingering after that sudden weird stab of pain. Everything seemed just a bit askew. The SUVs, for instance—there were more of the things than there should be, considering that he had just run a big clearance on them. They were lined up like a whopping great phalanx of tanks. How come so many? He filed away a mental note to ask Gene about that tomorrow.
He put his card in the ignition slot and the sleek silver Prius glided smoothly, silently, out of the lot, off to the nearby freeway entrance. By the time he reached the Caldecott Tunnel twenty minutes later the last traces of the pain in his temple were gone, and he moved on easily through Oakland toward the bridge and San Francisco across the bay.
At the Bay Bridge toll plaza they had taken down all the overhead signs that denoted the FasTrak lanes. That was odd, he thought. Probably one of their mysterious maintenance routines. Rackman headed into his usual lane anyway, but there was a tolltaker in the booth—why?—and as he started to roll past the man toward the FasTrak scanner just beyond he got such an incandescent glare from him that he braked to a halt.
The FasTrak toll scanner wasn’t where it should be, right back of the tollbooth on the left. It wasn’t there at all.
Feeling a little bewildered now, Rackman pulled a five-dollar bill from his wallet, handed it to the man, got what seemed to be too many singles in change, and drove out onto the bridge. There was very little traffic. As he approached the Treasure Island tunnel, though, it struck him that he couldn’t remember having seen any of the towering construction cranes that ran alongside the torso of the not-quite-finished new bridge just
north of the old one. Nor was there any sign of them—or any trace of the new bridge itself, for that matter, when he glanced into his rear-view mirror.
This is peculiar, Rackman thought. Really, really peculiar.
On the far side of the tunnel the sky was darker, as though dusk were already descending—at 5:10 on a summer day?—and by the time he was approaching the San Francisco end of the bridge the light was all but gone. Even stranger, a little rain was starting to come down. Rain falls in the Bay Area in August about once every twenty years. The morning forecast hadn’t said anything about rain. Rackman’s hand trembled a little as he turned his wipers on. I am having what could be called a waking dream, Rackman thought, some very vivid hallucination, and when I’m off the bridge I better pull over and take a few deep breaths.
The skyline of the city just ahead of him looked somehow diminished, as though a number of the bigger buildings were missing. And the exit ramps presented more puzzles. A lot of stuff that had been torn down for the retro-fitting of the old bridge seemed to have been put back in place. He couldn’t find his Folsom Street off-ramp, but the long-gone Main Street one, which they had closed after the 1989 earthquake, lay right in front of him. He took it and pulled the Prius to curbside as soon as he was down at street level. The rain had stopped—the streets were dry, as if the rain had never been—but the air seemed clinging and clammy, not like dry summer air at all. It enfolded him, contained him in a strange tight grip. His cheeks were flushed and he was perspiring heavily.
Deep breaths, yes. Calm. Calm. You’re only five blocks from your condo.
Only he wasn’t. Most of the high-rise office buildings were missing, all right, and none of the residential towers south of the off-ramp complex were there, just block after block of parking lots and some ramshackle warehouses. It was night now, and the empty neighborhood was almost completely dark. Everything was the way it had looked around here fifteen, twenty years before. His bewilderment was beginning to turn into terror. The street signs said that he was at his own corner. So where was the thirty-story building where he lived?