The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (44 page)

“Let’s keep going,” Thornhill muttered. “Maybe it can’t stop us. Maybe we can escape it yet.”

“Which way do we go?” Marga asked. “I can’t see anything. Suppose we go over the edge?”

Come
, crooned the Watcher,
come back to the Valley. You have played your little game. I have enjoyed your struggles, and I’m proud of the battle you fought. But the time has come to return to the warmth and the love you may find in the Valley below
—

“Thornhill!” cried La Floquet suddenly, hoarsely. “I have it! Come help me!”

The Watcher’s voice died away abruptly; the black cloud swirled wildly. Thornhill whirled, peering through the darkness for some sign of La Floquet—

And found the little man on the ground, wrestling with—something. In the darkness, it was hard to tell—

“It’s the Watcher!” La Floquet grunted. He rolled over, and Thornhill saw a small snakelike being writhing under La Floquet’s grip, a bright-scaled serpent the size of a monkey.

“Here in the middle of the cloud—
here’s
the creature that held us here!” La Floquet cried. Suddenly, before Thornhill could move, the Aldebaranian came bounding forward, thrusting beyond Thornhill and Marga, and flung himself down on the strugglers. Thornhill heard a guttural bellow; the darkness closed in on the trio, and it was impossible to see what was happening.

He heard La Floquet’s cry: “Get … this devil … off me! He’s helping the Watcher!”

Thornhill moved forward. He reached into the struggling mass, felt the blubbery flesh of the Aldebaranian, and dug his fingers in hard. He wrenched; the Aldebaranian came away. Hooked claws raked Thornhill’s face. He cursed; you could never tell what an Aldebaranian was likely to do at any time. Perhaps the creature had been in league with the Watcher all along.

He dodged a blow, landed a solid one in the alien’s plump belly, and crashed his other fist upward into the creature’s jaw. The Aldebaranian rocked backward. Vellers appeared abruptly from nowhere and seized the being.

“No!” Thornhill yelled, seeing what Vellers intended. But it was too late. The giant held the Aldebaranian contemptuously dangling in the air, then swung him upward and outward. A high ear-piercing shriek resounded. Thornhill shuddered. It takes a long time to fall twenty thousand feet.

He glanced back now at La Floquet and saw the small man struggling to stand up, arms still entwined about the serpentlike being. Thornhill saw a metalmesh helmet on the alien’s head. The means by which they’d been controlled, perhaps.

La Floquet took three staggering steps. “Get the helmet off him!” he cried thickly. “I’ve seen these before. They are out of the Andromeda sector … telepaths, teleports … deadly creatures. The helmet’s his focus point.”

Thornhill grasped for it as the pair careened by; he missed, catching instead a glimpse of the Watcher’s devilish, hate-filled eyes. The Watcher had fallen into the hands of his own pets—and was not enjoying it.

“I can’t see you!” Thornhill shouted. “I can’t get the helmet!”

“If he gets free, we’re finished,” came La Floquet’s voice. “He’s using all his energy to fight me off … but all he needs to do is turn on the subsonics—”

The darkness cleared again. Thornhill gasped. La Floquet, still clutching the alien, was tottering on the edge of the mountain peak, groping for the helmet in vain. One of the little man’s feet was virtually standing on air. He staggered wildly. Thornhill rushed toward them, grasped the icy metal of the helmet, and ripped it away.

In that moment both La Floquet and the Watcher vanished from sight. Thornhill brought himself up short and peered downward, hearing nothing, seeing nothing—

There was just one scream … not from La Floquet’s throat but from the alien’s. Then all was silent. Thornhill glanced at the helmet in his hands, thinking of La Floquet, and in a sudden impulsive gesture hurled the little metal headpiece into the abyss after them.

He turned, catching one last glimpse of Marga, Vellers, McKay, Lona Hardin, the Regulan, and the Spican. Then, before he could speak, mountain peak and darkness and indeed the entire world shimmered and heaved dizzyingly about them, and he could see nothing and no one.

He was in the main passenger cabin of the Federation Spaceliner
Royal Mother Helene
bound for Vengamon out of Jurinalle. He was lying back in the comfortable pressurized cabin, the gray nothingness of hyperspace outside forming a sharp contrast to the radiant walls of the cabin, which glowed in soft yellow luminescence.

Thornhill opened his eyes slowly. He glanced at his watch:
12:13, 7 July 2671
. He had dozed off about 11:40 after a good lunch. They were due in at Port Vengamon later that day, and he would have to tend to mine business immediately. There was no telling how badly they had fouled things up in the time he had been vacationing on Jurinalle.

He blinked. Of a sudden, strange images flashed into his eyes—a valley somewhere on a barren, desolate planet beyond the edge of the galaxy. A mountain peak, and a strange alien being, and a brave little man falling to the death he dreaded, and a girl—

It couldn’t have been a dream
, he told himself.
No
.

Not a dream. It was just that the Watcher yanked us out of space-time for his little experiment, and when I destroyed the helmet, we re-entered the continuum at the instant we had left it
.

A cold sweat burst out suddenly all over his body.
That means
, he thought,
that La Floquet’s not dead. And Marga
—
Marga
—

Thornhill sprang from his gravity couch, ignoring the sign that urged him to PLEASE REMAIN IN YOUR COUCH WHILE SHIP IS UNDERGOING SPIN, and rushed down the aisle toward the steward. He gripped the man by the shoulder, spun him around.

“Yes, Mr. Thornhill? Is anything wrong? You could have signaled me, and—”

“Never mind that. I want to make a subradio call to Bellatrix VII.”

“We’ll be landing on Vengamon in a couple of hours, sir. Is it so urgent?”

“Yes.”

The steward shrugged. “You know, of course, that shipboard subradio calls may take some time to put through, and that they’re terribly expensive—”

“Damn the expense, man! Will you put through my call or won’t you?”

“Of course, Mr. Thornhill. To whom?”

He paused and said carefully, “To Miss Marga Fallis, in some observatory on Bellatrix VII.” He peeled a bill from his wallet and added, “Here. There’ll be another one for you if the call’s put through in the next half an hour. I’ll wait.”

The summons finally came. “Mr. Thornhill, your call’s ready. Would you come to Communications Deck, please?”

They showed him to a small, dimly lit cubicle. There could be no vision on an interstellar subradio call, of course, just voice transmission. But that would be enough. “Go ahead, Bellatrix-
Helene
. The call is ready,” an operator said.

Thornhill wet his lips. “Marga? This is Sam—Sam Thornhill!”

“Oh!” He could picture her face now. “It—it wasn’t a dream, then. I was so afraid it was!”

“When I threw the helmet off the mountain, the Watcher’s hold was broken. Did you return to the exact moment you had left?”

“Yes,” she said. “Back in the observatory, with my camera plates and everything. And there was a call for me, and at first I was angry and wouldn’t answer it the way I always won’t answer, and then I thought a minute and had a wild idea and changed my mind—and I’m glad I did, darling!”

“It seems almost like a dream, doesn’t it? The Valley, I mean. And La Floquet, and all the others. But it wasn’t any dream,” Thornhill said. “We were really there. And I meant the things I said to you.”

The operator’s voice cut in sharply:
“Standard call time has elapsed, sir. There will be an additional charge often credits for each further fifteen-second period of your conversation.
”

“That’s quite all right, Operator,” Thornhill said. “Just give me the bill at the end. Marga, are you still there?”

“Of course, darling.”

“When can I see you?”

“I’ll come to Vengamon tomorrow. It’ll take a day or so to wind things up here at the observatory. Is there an observatory on Vengamon?”

“I’ll build you one,” Thornhill promised. “And perhaps for our honeymoon we can go looking for the Valley.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever find it,” she said. “But we’d better hang up now. Otherwise you’ll become a pauper talking to me.”

He stared at the dead phone a long moment after they broke contact, thinking of what Marga looked like, and La Floquet, and all the others. Above all, Marga.

It wasn’t a dream
, he told himself. He thought of the shadow-haunted Valley where night never fell and men grew younger, and of a tall girl with dark flashing eyes who waited for him now half a galaxy away.

With quivering fingers he undid the sleeve of his tunic and looked down at the long, livid scar that ran almost the length of his right arm, almost to the wrist. Somewhere in the universe now was a little man named La Floquet who had inflicted that wound and died and returned to his point of departure, who now was probably wondering if it had all ever happened. Thornhill smiled, forgiving La Floquet for the ragged scar inscribed on his arm, and headed up the companionway to the passenger cabin, impatient now to see Vengamon once more.

WE KNOW WHO WE ARE

Originally published in
Amazing Stories
, July 1970.

“We know who we are and what we want to be,” say the people of Shining City whenever they feel particularly uncertain about things. Shining City is at least a thousand years old. It may be even older, but who can be sure? It stands in the middle of  a plain of purple sand that stretches from the Lake of No Return to the River Without Fish. It has room for perhaps six hundred thousand people. The recent population of Shining City has been perhaps six hundred people. They know who they are. They know what they want to be.

Things got trickier for them after the girl who was wearing clothes came walking in out of the desert.

Skagg was the first one to see her. He knew immediately that there was something unusual about her, and not just that she was wearing clothes. Anybody who ever goes out walking in the desert puts clothes on, because the heat is fierce—there being no Cool Machine out there—and the sun would roast you fast if you didn’t have some kind of covering, and the sand would blow against you and pick the meat from your bones. But the unusual thing about the girl was her face. It wasn’t a familiar one. Everybody in Shining City knew everybody else, and Skagg didn’t know this girl at all, so she had to be a stranger, and strangers just didn’t exist.

She was more than a child but less than a woman, and her body was slender and her hair was dark, and she walked the way a man would walk, with her arms swinging and her knees coming high and her legs kicking outward. When Skagg saw her he felt afraid, and he had never been afraid of a woman before.

“Hello,” she said. “I speak Language. Do you?”

Her voice was deep and husky, like the wind on a winter day pushing itself between two of the city’s towers. Her accent was odd, and the words came out as if she were holding her tongue in the wrong part of her mouth. But he understood her.

He said, “I speak Language, and I understand what you say. But who are you?”

“Fa Sol La,” she sang.

“Is that your name?”

“That is my name. And yours?”

“Skagg.”

“Do all the people in this city have names like Skagg?”

“I am the only Skagg,” said Skagg. “Where do you come from?”

She pointed eastward. “From a place beside the River Without Fish. Is this Shining City?”

“Yes,” Skagg said.

“Then I am where I want to be.” She unslung the pack that she was carrying over one shoulder and set it down, and then she removed her robe, so that she was as naked as he was. Her skin was very pale, and there was practically no flesh on her. Her breasts were tiny and her buttocks were flat. From where he stood, Skagg could easily have mistaken her for a boy. She picked up the pack again. “Will you take me into your city?” she asked.

They were on the outskirts, in the region of the Empty Buildings. Skagg sometimes went there when he felt that his mind was too full. Tall tapering towers sprouted here. Some were sagging and others had lost their outer trim. Repair Machines no longer functioned in this part of the city.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“To the place where the Knowing Machine is,” said Fa Sol La.

Frowning, he said, “How do you know about the Machine?”

“Everyone in the world knows about the Knowing Machine. I want to see it. I walked all the way from the River Without Fish to see the Knowing Machine. You’ll take me there, won’t you, Skagg?”

He shrugged. “If you want. But you won’t be able to get close to it. You’ll see. You’ve wasted your time.”

They began to walk toward the center of the city.

She moved with such a swinging stride that he had to work hard to keep up with her. Several times she came close to him, so that her hip or thigh brushed his skin, and Skagg felt himself trembling at the strangeness of her. They were silent a long while. The morning sun began to go down and the afternoon sun started to rise, and the double light, blending, cast deceptive shadows and made her body look fuller than it was. Near the Mirror Walls a Drink Machine came up to them and refreshed them. She put her head inside it and gulped as if she had been dry for months, and then she let the fluid run out over her slim body. Not far on a Riding Machine found them and offered to transport them to the center. Skagg gestured to her to get in, but she waved a no at him.

“It’s still a great distance,” he said.

“I’d rather walk. I’ve walked this far, and I’ll walk to the end. I can see things better.”

Skagg sent the machine away. They went on walking. The morning sun disappeared and now only the green light of afternoon illuminated Shining City.

She said, “Do you have a woman, Skagg?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you have a woman, I said.”

“I heard the words. But how does one
have
a woman? What does  it mean?”

“To live with. To sleep with. To share pleasure with. To have children with.”

“We live by ourselves,” he said. “There’s so much room here, why crowd together? We sleep sometimes with others, yes. We share pleasure with everyone. Children rarely come.”

“You have no regular mates here, then?”

“I have trouble understanding. Tell me how it is in your city.”

“In my city,” she said, “a man and a woman live together and do all things together. They need no one else. Sometimes, they realize they do not belong together and then they split up and seek others, but often they have each other for a lifetime.”

“This sounds quite strange,” said Skagg.

“We call it love,” said Fa Sol La.

“We have love here. All of us love all of us. We do things differently, I suppose. Does any man in your city have you, then?”

“No. Not any more. I had a man, but he was too simple for me. And I left and walked to Shining City.”

She frightened him even more, now.

They had started to enter the inhabited part of the city. Behind them were the long stately avenues and massive residential structures of the dead part; ahead lay the core, with its throbbing machines and eating centers and bright lights.

“Are you happy here?” Fa Sol La asked as they stepped between a Cleansing Machine’s pillars and were bathed in blue mist.

“We know who we are,” Skagg said, “and what we want to be. Yes, I think we’re happy.”

“I think you may be wrong,” she said, and laughed, and pressed her body tight up against him a moment, and sprinted ahead of him like something wild.

A Police Machine rose from the pavement and blocked her way. It shot out silvery filaments that hovered around her, ready to clamp close if she made a hostile move. She stood still. Skagg ran up and said, “It’s all right. She’s new to the city. Scan her and accept her.”

The machine bathed both of them in an amber glow and went away.

“What are you afraid of here?” Fa Sol La asked.

“Animals sometimes come in from the desert. We have to be careful. Did it scare you?”

“It puzzled me,” she said.

Others were nearing them now. Skagg saw Glorr, Derk, Prewger, and Simit; and more were coming. They crowded around the girl, none daring to touch her but everyone staring hard.

“This is Fa Sol La,” said Skagg. “I discovered her. She comes from a city at the River Without Fish and walked across the desert to visit us.”

“What is your city called?” Derk demanded.

“River City,” she said.

“How many people live there?” asked Prewger.

“I don’t know. Many but not
very
many.”

“How old are you?” Simit blurted.

“Five no-suns,” she said.

“Did you come alone?” Glorr said.

“Alone.”

“Why did you come here?” Prewger asked.

She said, “To see the Knowing Machine,” and they moved as if she had proclaimed herself to be the goddess of death.

“The Knowing Machine is dangerous,” said Prewger.

“No one may get close to it,” said Simit.

“We fear it,” said Glorr.

“It will kill you,” said Derk.

Fa Sol La said, “Where is the Knowing Machine?”

They backed away from her. Derk summoned a Soothing Machine and had a drink from it. Prewger stepped into a Shelter Machine. Simit went among the others who had gathered, whispering her answers to them. Glorr turned his face away and bowed his head.

“Why are you so afraid?” she asked.

Skagg said, “When the city was built, the builders used the Knowing Machine to make themselves like gods. And the gods killed them. They came out of the machine full of hate, and took weapons against one another, until only a few were left. And those who remained said that no one ever again would enter the Machine.”

“How long ago was that?”

“How should I know?” said Skagg.

“Show me the machine.”

He hesitated. He spoke a few faltering syllables of refusal.

She pressed herself close against him and rubbed her body against his. She put her teeth lightly on the lobe of his ear. She ran her fingers along the strong muscles of his back.

“Show me the machine,” she said. “I love you, Skagg. Can you refuse me the machine?”

He quivered. Her strangeness attracted him powerfully. He was eight no-suns old, and he knew every woman in Shining City all too well, and though he feared this girl he also was irresistibly drawn to her.

“Come,” he whispered.

They walked down sleek boulevards and glowing skyways, crossed brooks and ponds and pools, passed spiky statues and dancing beacons. It was a handsome city, the finest in the world, and Fa Sol La trilled and sighed at every beautiful thing in it.

“They say that those who live here never go anywhere else,” she said. “Now I begin to understand why. Have you ever been to another city, Skagg?”

“Never.”

“But you go outside sometimes?”

“To walk in the desert, yes. Most of the others never even do that.”

“But outside—there are so many cities, Skagg, so many different kinds of people! A dozen cities, a whole world! Don’t you ever want to see them?”

“We like it here. We know what we want.”

“It’s lovely here. But it isn’t right for you to stay in one place forever. It isn’t
human
. How would people ever have come to this world in the first place, if our ancestors had done as you folk do?”

“I don’t concern myself with that. Shining City cares for us, and we prefer not to go out. Obviously most others stay close to their cities too, since you are the first visitor I can remember.”

“Shining City is too remote from other cities,” Fa Sol La said. “Many dream of coming here, but few dare, and fewer succeed. But we travel everywhere else. I have been in seven cities besides my own, Skagg.”

The idea of that disturbed him intensely.

She went on, “Traveling opens the mind. It teaches you things about yourself that you never realized.”

“We know who we are,” he said.

“You only think you do.”

He glared at her, turned, pointed. “This is the Knowing Machine,” he said, glad to shift subjects.

They stood in the center of the great cobbled plaza before the machine. Two hundred strides to the east rose the glossy black column, flanked by the protective columns of shimmering white metal. The door-opening was faintly visible. Around the brow of the column the colors flickered and leaped, making the range of the spectrum as they had done for at least a thousand years.

“Where do I go in?” she asked.

“No one goes in.”

“I’m going in. I want you to come in with me, Skagg.”

He laughed. “Those who enter die.”

“No. No. The machine teaches love. It opens you to the universe. It awakens your mind. We have books about it. We
know
.”

“The machine kills.”

“It’s a lie, Skagg, made up by people whose souls were full of hate. They didn’t want anyone to experience the goodness that the machine brings. It isn’t the first time that men have prohibited goodness out of the fear of love.”

Skagg smiled. “I have a fear of death, girl, not of love. Go into the machine, if you like. I’ll wait here.”

Fury and contempt sparkled in her eyes. Without another word she strode across the plaza. He watched, admiring the trimness of her body, the ripple of her muscles. He did not believe she would enter the machine. She passed the Zone of Respect and the Zone of Obeisance and the Zone of Contemplation, and went into the Zone of Approach, and did not halt there, but entered the Zone of Peril, and as she walked on into the Zone of Impiety he cursed and started to run after her, shouting for her to halt.

Now she was on the gleaming steps. Now she was ascending. Now she had her hand on the sliding door.

“Wait!” he screamed. “No! I love you!”

“Come in with me, then.”

“It will kill us!”

“Then farewell,” she said, and went into the Knowing Machine.

Skagg collapsed on the rough red cobblestones of the Zone of Approach and lay there sobbing, face down, clutching at the stones with his fingers, remembering how vulnerable and fragile she had looked, and yet how strong and sturdy she was, remembering her small breasts and lean thighs, and remembering too the strangeness about her that he loved. Why had she chosen to kill herself this way?

After a long while he stood up and started to leave. Night had come and the first moons were out. The taste of loss was bitter in mouth.

“Skagg?” she called.

She was on the steps of the Knowing Machine. She ran toward him, seemingly floating, and her face was flushed and her eyes were radiant.

“You lived?” he muttered. “You came out?”

“They’ve been lying, Skagg. The machine doesn’t kill. It’s there to help. It was marvelous, Skagg.”

“What happened?”

“Voices speak to you, and tell you what to do. And you put a metal thing on your head, and fire shoots through your brain, and you
see
, Skagg, you see everything for the first time.”

“Everything? What everything?”

“Life. Love. Stars. The connections that hold people together. It’s all there. Ecstasy. It feels like having a whole planet making love to you. You see the patterns of life, and when you come out you want everybody else to see them too, so they don’t have to walk around crippled and cut off all the time. I just tried a little bit. You can take it mild, strong, any level you like. And when you take it, you begin to understand. You’re in tune at last. You receive signals from the universe. It opens you, Skagg. Oh, come inside with me, won’t you? I want to go in and take it stronger. And I want you to share it with me.”

He eluded her grasping hand. “I’m afraid.”

‘Don’t be. I went in. I came out.”

“It’s forbidden.”

“Because it’s good, Skagg. People have always been forbidding other people to have anything this good. And once you’ve had it, you’ll know why. You’ll see the kind of power that hate and bitterness have—and you’ll know how to soar to the sky and escape that power.”