Sailing to Byzantium (50 page)
Read Sailing to Byzantium Online
Authors: Robert Silverberg
Tags: #Library Books, #Fiction, #Science Fiction
She is standing with her back to the great reddish-yellow sun of this place, and it seems to me that light is streaming from her as it does from the Master, that she is aglow, that she is luminous, that she is herself a sun.
“Goddess save you, Lady,” I say quietly.
All the worlds of the galaxy are whirling about me. I will take this road and see where it leads, for now I know there is no other.
“Goddess save you,” I say. “Goddess save you, Lady.”
I make no secret of my admiration for the work of Joseph Conrad. (Or for Conrad himself, the tough, stubborn little man who—although English was only his third language, after Polish and French—was able not only to pass the difficult oral qualifying exam to become a captain in the British merchant marine, but then, a decade or so later, transformed himself into one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century English literature.) Most of what I owe to Conrad as a writer is buried deep in the substructure of my stories—a way of looking at narrative, a way of understanding character. But occasionally I’ve made the homage more visible. My 1970 novel
Downward to the Earth
is a kind of free transposition of his novella “Heart of Darkness” to science fiction, a borrowing that I signaled overtly by labeling my most tormented character with the name of Kurtz. Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” when I first encountered it as a reader almost fifty years ago, had been packaged as half of a two-novella paperback collection, the other story being his “The Secret Sharer.” And some time late in 1986, I felt the urge, I know not why—a love of symmetry? A compulsion toward completion?—to finish what I had begun in
Downward to the Earth
by writing a story adapted from the other great novella of that paperback of long ago.
This time I was less subtle than before, announcing my intentions not by using one of Conrad’s character names, but by appropriating his story’s actual title. (This produced a pleasantly absurd result when my story was published in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
and a reader wrote to the editor, somewhat indignantly, to ask whether I knew that the title had already been used by Joseph Conrad!) I swiped not only the title but Conrad’s basic story situation, that of the ship captain who finds a stowaway on board and eventually is drawn into a strange alliance with him. (Her, in my story.) But otherwise I translated the Conrad into purely science-fictional terms and produced something that I think represents completely original work, however much it may owe to the structure of a classic earlier story.
“Translate” is perhaps not the appropriate term for what I did. A “translation,” in the uncompromising critical vocabulary set forth by Damon Knight and James Blish in the 1950s, upon which I based much of my own fiction-writing esthetic, is defined as an adaptation of a stock format of mundane fiction into s-f by the simple one-for-one substitution of science-fictionish noises for the artifacts of the mundane genre. That is, change “Colt .44” to “laser pistol” and “horse” to “greeznak” and “Comanche” to “Sloogl” and you can easily generate a sort of science fiction out of a standard western story, complete with cattle rustlers, scalpings, and cavalry rescues. But you don’t get real science fiction; you don’t get anything new and intellectually stimulating, just a western story that has greeznaks and Sloogls in it. Change “Los Angeles Police Department” to “Dry-lands Patrol” and “crack dealer” to “canal-dust dealer” and you’ve got a crime story set on Mars, but so what? Change “the canals of Venice” to “the marshy streets of Venusburg” and the sinister agents of S.M.E.R.S.H. to the sinister agents of A.A.A.A.R.G.H. and you’ve got a James Bond story set on the second planet, but it’s still a James Bond story.
I don’t think that that’s what I’ve done here. The particular way in which Vox stows away aboard the
Sword of Orion
is nothing that Joseph Conrad could have understood, and arises, I think, purely out of the science-fictional inventions at the heart of the story. The way she leaves the ship is very different from anything depicted in Conrad’s maritime fiction. The starwalk scene provides visionary possibilities quite unlike those afforded by a long stare into the vastness of the trackless Pacific. And so on. “The Secret Sharer” by Robert Silverberg is, or so I believe, a new and unique science-fiction story set, for reasons of the author’s private amusement, within the framework of a well-known century-old masterpiece of the sea by Joseph Conrad.
“The Secret Sharer”mine, not Conrad’s—appeared in the September 1988 issue of
Asimov’s
and was a Nebula and Hugo nominee in 1988 as best novella of the year, but didn’t get the trophies. It did win the third of the major s-f honors, the Locus Award. Most of the Locus winners usually go on to get Hugos as well, but that year it didn’t happen. I regretted that. But Joseph Conrad’s original version of the story didn’t win a Hugo or a Nebula either, and people still read it admiringly to this day. You take your lumps in this business, and you go bravely onward: It’s the only way. Conrad would have understood that philosophy.
I
T WAS MY FIRST
time to heaven and I was no one at all, no one at all, and this was the voyage that was supposed to make me some-one.
But though I was no one at all I dared to look upon the million worlds and I felt a great sorrow for them. There they were all about me, humming along on their courses through the night, each of them believing it was actually going somewhere. And each one wrong, of course, for worlds go nowhere, except around and around and around, pathetic monkeys on a string, forever tethered in place. They seem to move, yes. But really they stand still. And —I who stared at the worlds of heaven and was swept with compassion for them—I knew that though I seemed to be standing still, I was in fact moving. For I was aboard a ship of heaven, a ship of the Service, that was spanning the light-years at a speed so incomprehensibly great that it might as well have been no speed at all.
I was very young. My ship, then as now, was the
Sword of Orion
, on a journey out of Kansas Four bound for Cul-de-Sac and Strappado and Mangan’s Bitch and several other worlds, via the usual spinarounds. It was my first voyage and I was in command. I thought for a long time that I would lose my soul on that voyage; but now I know that what was happening aboard that ship was not the losing of a soul but the gaining of one. And perhaps of more than one.
R
OACHER THOUGHT I WAS
sweet. I could have killed him for that; but of course he was dead already.
You have to give up your life when you go to heaven. What you get in return is for me to know and you, if you care, to find out; but the inescapable thing is that you leave behind anything that ever linked you to life on shore, and you become something else. We say that you give up the body and you get your soul. Certainly you can keep your body too, if you want it. Most do. But it isn’t any good to you any more, not in the ways that you think a body is good to you. I mean to tell you how it was for me on my first voyage aboard the
Sword of Orion
, so many years ago.
I was the youngest officer on board, so naturally I was captain.
They put you in command right at the start, before you’re anyone. That’s the only test that means a damn: they throw you in the sea and if you can swim you don’t drown, and if you can’t you do. The drowned ones go back in the tank and they serve their own useful purposes, as push-cells or downloaders or mind-wipers or Johnny-scrub-and-scour or whatever. The ones that don’t drown go on to other commands. No one is wasted. The Age of Waste has been over a long time.
On the third virtual day out from Kansas Four, Roacher told me that I was the sweetest captain he had ever served under. And he had served under plenty of them, for Roacher had gone up to heaven at least two hundred years before, maybe more.
“I can see it in your eyes, the sweetness. I can see it in the angle you hold your head.”
He didn’t mean it as a compliment.
“We can put you off ship at Ultima Thule,” Roacher said.
“Nobody will hold it against you. We’ll put you in a bottle and send you down, and the Thuleys will catch you and decant you and you’ll be able to find your way back to Kansas Four in twenty or fifty years. It might be the best thing.”
Roacher is small and parched, with brown skin and eyes that shine with the purple luminescence of space. Some of the worlds he has seen were forgotten a thousand years ago.
“Go bottle yourself, Roacher,” I told him.
“Ah, captain, captain! Don’t take it the wrong way. Here, captain, give us a touch of the sweetness.” He reached out a claw, trying to stroke me along the side of my face. “Give us a touch, captain, give us just a little touch!”
“I’ll fry your soul and have it for breakfast, Roacher. There’s sweetness for you. Go scuttle off, will you? Go jack yourself to the mast and drink hydrogen, Roacher. Go. Go.”
“So sweet,” he said. But he went. I had the power to hurt him. He knew I could do it, because I was captain. He also knew I wouldn’t; but there was always the possibility he was wrong. The captain exists in that margin between certainty and possibility. A crewman tests the width of that margin at his own risk. Roacher knew that. He had been a captain once himself, after all.
There were seventeen of us to heaven that voyage, staffing a ten-kilo Megaspore-class ship with full annexes and extensions and all virtualities. We carried a bulging cargo of the things regarded in those days as vital in the distant colonies: pre-read vapor chips, artificial intelligences, climate nodes, matrix jacks, mediq machines, bone banks, soil converters, transit spheres, communication bubbles, skin-and-organ synthesizers, wildlife domestication plaques, gene replacement kits, a sealed consignment of obliteration sand and other proscribed weapons, and so on. We also had fifty billion dollars in the form of liquid currency pods, central-bank-to-central-bank transmission. In addition there was a passenger load of seven thousand colonists. Eight hundred of these were on the hoof and the others were stored in matrix form for body transplant on the worlds of destination. A standard load, in other words. The crew worked on commission, also as per standard, one percent of bill-of-lading value divided in customary lays. Mine was the 50th lay—that is, two percent of the net profits of the voyage—and that included a bonus for serving as captain; otherwise I would have had the l00th lay or something even longer.
Roacher had the l0th lay and his jackmate Bulgar the l4th, although they weren’t even officers. Which demonstrates the value of seniority in the Service. But seniority is the same thing as survival, after all, and why should survival not be rewarded? On my most recent voyage I drew the l9th lay. I will have better than that on my next.
Y
OU HAVE NEVER SEEN
a starship. We keep only to heaven; when we are to worldward, shoreships come out to us for the downloading. The closest we ever go to planetskin is a million shiplengths. Any closer and we’d be shaken apart by that terrible strength which emanates from worlds.
We don’t miss landcrawling, though. It’s a plague to us. If I had to step to shore now, after having spent most of my lifetime in heaven, I would die of the drop-death within an hour. That is a monstrous way to die; but why would I ever go ashore? The likelihood of that still existed for me at the time I first sailed the
Sword of Orion
, you understand, but I have long since given it up. That is what I mean when I say that you give up your life when you go to heaven. But of course what also goes from you is any feeling that to be ashore has anything to do with being alive. If you could ride a starship, or even see one as we see them, you would understand. I don’t blame you for being what you are.
Let me show you the
Sword of Orion
. Though you will never see it as we see it.
What would you see, if you left the ship as we sometimes do to do the starwalk in the Great Open?
The first thing you would see was the light of the ship. A starship gives off a tremendous insistent glow of light that splits heaven like the blast of a trumpet. That great light both precedes and follows. Ahead of the ship rides a luminescent cone of brightness bellowing in the void. In its wake the ship leaves a photonic track so intense that it could be gathered up and weighed. It is the stardrive that issues this light: a ship eats space, and light is its offthrow.
Within the light you would see a needle ten kilometers long. That is the ship. One end tapers to a sharp point and the other has the Eye, and it is several days’ journey by foot from end to end through all the compartments that lie between. It is a world self-contained. The needle is a flattened one. You could walk about easily on the outer surface of the ship, the skin of the top deck, what we call Skin Deck. Or just as easily on Belly Deck, the one on the bottom side. We call one the top deck and the other the bottom, but when you are outside the ship these distinctions have no meaning. Between Skin and Belly lie Crew Deck, Passenger Deck, Cargo Deck, Drive Deck. Ordinarily no one goes from one deck to another. We stay where we belong. The engines are in the Eye. So are the captain’s quarters.
That needle is the ship, but it is not the whole ship. What you will not be able to see are the annexes and extensions and virtualities. These accompany the ship, enfolding it in a webwork of intricate outstructures. But they are of a subordinate level of reality and therefore they defy vision. A ship tunnels into the void, spreading far and wide to find room for all that it must carry. In these outlying zones are kept our supplies and provisions, our stores of fuel, and all cargo traveling at second-class rates. If the ship transports prisoners, they will ride in an annex. If the ship expects to encounter severe probability turbulence during the course of the voyage, it will arm itself with stabilizers, and those will be carried in the virtualities, ready to be brought into being if needed. These are the mysteries of our profession. Take them on faith, or ignore them, as you will: they are not meant for you to know.