Collected Short Fiction, page 1460
That was when I ripped up Macauley’s diagram and heaved the paperweight into the gizzard of my beloved synthesizer, cutting off the Mozart in the middle of a high C. Kolfmann turned around in horror, but I was the one who was really horrified.
I know. Macauley has redrawn his diagram and I haven’t stopped the wheels of science. I feel pretty futile about it all. But before you label me reactionary and stick me away, consider this:
Art is a function of intelligent beings. Once you create a machine capable of composing original music, capable of an artistic act, you’ve created an intelligent being. And one that’s a lot stronger and smarter than we are. We’ve synthesized our successor.
Gentlemen, we are all obsolete.
2007
The Eater of Dreams
Robert Silverberg’s new story collection, To Be Continued was published by Subterranean Press late last year. It’s the first volume in what is intended as a nine-volume set of Bob’s collected (not complete!) science fiction stories. This first volume covers stories written between 1953 and 1958. Obviously, it will take a while before we see the volume that includes this latest tale by our resident Grand Master.
The Queen-Goddess feels another dream coming to her tonight, and she knows it will be a dark one. So I am summoned to her, masked in the mask of my profession, and I crouch by her pallet, awaiting the night. The Queen-Goddess sleeps, lying asprawl like a child’s discarded doll. At the foot of the bed lurks the Vizier in his homed mask: our chaperone. No man, not even the royal Eater of Dreams, may enter the Queen-Goddess’ bedchamber unescorted.
Her spirit flutters and trembles. Her eyes move quickly beneath their lids. She is reaching the dream-world now. Her dreams are always true visions. Therefore she suffers when a dark one comes, for such dreams acquaint her with pain and grief, and we suffer when she suffers, since all things flow to us through the spirit of the Queen-Goddess. What she will bring us after such a dream is pain and grief. We cannot abide pain or grief; and so I must take her dark dreams from her as swiftly as I can.
Last night she dreamed—she could not communicate it well to me—of ashes and min, of ugliness and shame, of strife and sadness. From her vague description, I knew that she has been ranging through ancient times again. She often makes contact with some epoch of the distant preimperial past, that era of apocalyptic nightmare out of which our own shining civilization emerged. Last night’s dream, for which, alas, I was not summoned in time, has cast its shadow over today’s flow of beneficial energy. If another like it comes tonight, I will be here to guard her majesty against it.
And, yes, yes, the dream is coming, and it is the same.
Surely her majesty has slipped once more into the black abyss of time past. I say the words that unlock the portals other spirit, link my mind with hers, and see a fearful strangeness. The stars, of which she gives me just the most fleeting of glimpses before her gaze turns away from them, seem to have an unfamiliar look: the constellations I so quickly see do not appear to be the constellations we know today.
They must be those of some long-ago epoch. The stars in their courses travel great distances over time.
And what I behold under these strange skies is bleakness and horror.
We are in a hideous city. It is an era I have never seen in her dreams before, an awful one. The buildings are brutal towers, looming inexorably. On myriad interlacing roadways, vehicles move like swarming beetles. I see an ashen sky; I see stunted trees with blackened leaves; I see hordes of people with faces twisted in anguish. The air itself has a poisonous-looking pall. It is the past, yes; it is one of those dark predecessor civilizations, ridden with pain and error, out of which we have emerged into sunlight and joy. What can this terrible ancient era be, if not the dreadful world of eight, ten, twelve thousand years ago, that grim time so proud of the frenzied, furious industriousness that its builders mistook for wealth, from which the benevolence of her majesty’s dynasty has emancipated us all forever?
“Majesty,” I say softly. “Give me this dream.”
I utter the words of transfer and the dream enters me in all its fury. For a moment I recoil; but I am skilled in my art, and quickly I engulf the images, neutralize them, dissipate them, and then it is over and I am rising, trembling, drenched in sweat, fighting nausea. It will take me a while to recover. But I am used to that. Her majesty’s face is tranquil. She sleeps like a happy child. The Vizier comes to me and we embrace, mask against mask. “Well done,” he says. “But I fear this is not the last of them.”
The day that follows is a happy one. Strength and joy flow from her majesty from dawn to dusk. It is a day of golden sunlight, of cloudless skies, of unfolding blossoms and rising fragrance. The great lawns sweeping down to the river have never looked greener; the river’s pure flow is a celestial blue. We are a blessed people. We will not make the mistakes of yesteryear. Our civilization will endure eternally.
But at midnight the Vizier summons me again.
“Another,” he says. “The third night. This one will be the worst.”
Smiling, I tell him, “Whatever it is, I am ready.”
Indeed I am. For sixty years now I have guarded her majesty against the terrors of the night, and we have moved together from triumph to triumph. In the privacy of my soul I flatter myself with the thought that I am essential to the realm—that, without my diligence and skill, the Queen-Goddess would be ridden nightly by horror and torment and all the world would be the worse for that.
I don my mask. The Vizier dons his. The Queen, ever youthful, ever beautiful, is asleep. Signs of tension are visible on her brow. The dream is coming. I say the words. The link is formed.
It comes now, the dream.
Her wandering mind has entered that same ancient era, but this night there are significant differences. The brutal towers now are shattered: charred stumps are everywhere. Those interlacing roads are twisted and broken. Vehicles lie piled in rusting heaps along their margins. The air is black and oily. The citizens—there are just a few in the ruined streets—have a dazed, stunned look. Some dreadful thing has happened. The dreaming mind of the Queen-Goddess must have found the very end of the former era, the disastrous climactic time of the Great Collapse, when all assumptions were overthrown and the corrosive prosperity of the day tumbled overnight into that dreary poverty out of which, after so many centuries, our Imperial government created the serene, lovely epoch in which we live today.
It is a much more powerful vision than last night’s, and I know that afterward I will reverberate with it for hours, but so be it. I will take it from her and all will be well. “Majesty” I say, as ever. “Give me—”
But then her head shifts, and she murmurs in her sleep, and the perspective changes and she shows me the sky, not the brief glimpse of last night but a long, slow, clear view, and everything is wrong. The moon, our familiar pockmarked moon, is a chipped and broken thing, and the stars whose patterns I have studied so well are not the stars of some vanished yesterday nor the stars of today but stars strung across the sky in some utterly unknown configuration. And in that moment all my strength leaves me, for I know this dream to be too huge to swallow. It is the future, not the past, through which the Queen-Goddess walks tonight, and what it shows is that the cycle of destruction will come round again, that our green and golden era that we thought to be invulnerable will not last eternally after all, that we too will be swept away as all earlier civilizations of Earth have been swept away. I can protect her against the past, but there is no way I can stave off the onrushing future, and I fling my mask aside and crouch and weep while the Vizier, maskless and stunned as well, comes hurrying to my side.
The Emperor and the Maula
Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series New Dimensions, perhaps the most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post New Wave era of the seventies, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grandmaster Award.
His novels include the acclaimed Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightimngs, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, Mountains of Majipoor, and two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and a massive retrospective collection: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here, but include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One and the distinguished Alpha series, among dozens of others. His most recent books are the novel The Long Way Home, the mosaic novel Roma Eterna, and a massive new retrospective collection, Phases of the Moon: Stones from Six Decades. Coming up is a new collection, In the Beginning. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.
Robert Silverberg is the only author in this book with a writing career long enough that he actually produced some of the Old Space Opera, back in the pulp magazines of the fifties, decades before most of the newcomers here even sat down at their first computer keyboard. He’s lost none of his chops in the intervening years, though, as he proves with the lush and gorgeously colored story that follows, in which an intrepid human woman dares to penetrate to the heart of a hostile alien empire and confront the all-powerful Emperor himself, armed only with her brains and wit and heart, and enter a contest of wills with everything that’s important to her—including her own life—at stake.
Bogan 17, 82nd Dynastic Cycle
(August 3, A.D. 3001)
The gongs have sounded throughout the ship. We have crossed the invisible line that separates Territorial Space from Imperial Space and now my life is officially forfeit.
And I have chosen to break the code of tiihad that demands my life. We will see what happens when we land on Capital World.
Meanwhile here I am—an Earthborn woman, a mere barbaric maula, getting deeper into Imperial Space with each passing light-second. I should be trembling with fear, I suppose.
No. Let the Emperor tremble. Laylah is here!
—From the Diaries of Laylah Walis
1
It was an unusual case. No one at Capital World Starport had ever seen anything like it, which is how it reached the attention, finally, of no one less than the Emperor Ryah VII himself, the High Ansaar, the Supreme Omniscience, the Most Holy Defender of the Race.
The chain that led to the Emperor began with Loompan Chilidor, an arbiter of passenger manifests. He was a short-crested, pale-skinned low-caste person whose job was to check the identity circuits of passengers of newly arrived starships. Routine stuff. But this time, when he ran the transit check on the travelers coming from Seppuldidorior on the starship Velipok, jagged incandescent green streaks burst forth on the purple surface of the field.
Tiihad violation!
The highest of the six levels of irregularity—higher even than vribor, the carrying of infectious disease, and gulimil, the smuggling of dangerous weapons, and shhtek, the wearing of medallions of the extinct and proscribed Simgoin Dynasty. Violation of tiihad was an assault on the structure of the Empire itself.
Loompan Chilidor’s long dangling arms jerked in shock. His small yellow eyes turned orange with surprise. He pressed the red button that sealed the luminance field and summoned his immediate superior, Domtel Tribuso, Manager of Passenger Flow.
Domtel Tribuso, stocky and slow, appeared in due course. The purple luminance field was now a rubbery purple cage. A few dozen travelers were trapped inside.
Domtel Tribuso stared in puzzlement at the green streaks criss-crossing the field. “Green? Tiihad violation?”
Most of those in the cage were Ansaar. There were a few Liigachi and some Vrulvruls and a cluster of agitated-looking Zmachs. All those races had held full citizenship in the Imperium for centuries, and surely understood the law.
But one was a creature Domtel Tribuso could not identify at all: a non-Imperial alien, a barbaric life-form from the Territories, a trespasser and transgressor here on this hallowed world. A maula. Domtel Tribuso felt amazement and disgust and anger.
The maula was thin to the point of gauntness, and its face was as flat as a platter, the features close together, eyes practically next to each other, nose a tiny button just below, its mouth—was that its mouth?—a mere slit near its chin. Its legs were much too long and its arms grotesquely short. The creature had no crest, only a short crop of unpleasant dark fur sprouting from its skull. There were two strange round swellings on its chest.
The Manager of Passenger Flow summoned his aides. “Get that maula out of there and bring it to Examination Chamber Three.”
That was the holding cell for unauthorized life-forms, normally used for unfamiliar pets or trophy animals that a citizen of the Imperium had brought back and that needed to be checked by an Imperial veterinarian before being released from quarantine.
But this was no pet, no trophy, this maula. Plainly it was an intelligent life-form—a ticketed passenger in its own right. It stood quite calmly among the passengers of Citizen rank as though it regarded itself as one of them. It was even carrying several pieces of expensive-looking luggage.
How could a maula have been able to buy a ticket to Haraar, and why had it been allowed to board the Velipok, and why hadn’t the Velipok’s captain called ahead to say that a maula was on board? An investigation was needed. Domtel Tribuso summoned his superior, Graligal Dren, and turned the maula over to her.
Graligal Dren, a mid-caste woman of a rich olive hue with a high-peaked sagittal crest of admirable narrowness and delicacy, glowered through the thick glass wall and said, “Are you able to understand Universal Imperial, creature?”
“I speak it quite well, thank you.” The maula’s voice was clear and high-pitched with a slight West Quadrant accent.
“And do you have a name?”
“My name is Laylah Walis.”
An incomprehensible gargling noise, mere sounds. Well, one would expect barbarians to have barbaric names. There it was on the passenger manifest: LAYLAH WALIS. The emigration people who had let it board a Haraar-bound ship must have been out of their minds.
“You embarked from Hathpoin in the Seppuldidorior system?”
“That’s correct.”
“And where did you come from before that?”
“Mingtha, in the Ghair system. Which I reached by way of Zemblano, which is in Briff. And before that—”
“Don’t give me your whole itinerary, creature. Just tell me where you are from originally.”
“Earth,” the maula said. “A small world in what you’d call the Northwest Arm. Part of the Empire about twenty years now.”
The Northwest Arm was a zone of scruffy worlds inhabited by bestial creatures—frontier worlds, barely civilized, dismal primitive outposts of the Empire. It amazed her that a creature from a world like that spoke Universal Imperial with such precision and force; and with such haughtiness too. You would think that this maula had twenty generations of Dynastic blood in its veins.
But it had made no attempt to assume a posture of respect. It simply stared at her in its ugly flat-faced way. Arrogance! Foolishness! But only an arrogant fool of a maula would have attempted to come to Haraar. “Tell me, Laylah Walis,” said Graligal Dren, “are you aware of where you are now?”
“This is Haraar, the Capital World.”
“Yes. The heart and soul of the Empire. And you came knowing that Territorials may not enter any part of Imperial Space?”
“Yes.”
Madness. “How did you get a ticket?” Graligal Dren asked.
“A long story,” said the maula.” I told someone who could get one for me that I wanted to visit Haraar, and it was arranged.”
The maula had a kind of lunatic self-confidence. “This world is sacred,” Graligal Dren said slowly. “The fount and origin of our race. We revere the very dust that blows through its humblest alleyways. We can never let this holy world be desecrated by creatures who are—whom we regard as—who can be defined as—”
“Maulas,” said Laylah Walis. “Barbarians. Inferior beings.”
“Exactly.”
“And any maula who dares set foot here is put to death.”
“You knew that before you came? And you came anyway?”
“It does seem that way,” said Laylah Walis.
2
If what this creature wanted was to commit suicide, it had to do it without the help of Graligal Dren. She passed it to the Director of Immigration Facilities, who sent it on to Starport Security. Commissioner Twimat Dulik of Security interrogated the prisoner and confirmed it was a Territorial, native to a conquered world in the West Quadrant. It seemed intelligent enough, for a maula, but a maula was what it was: subcivilized, contemptible, and unclean by definition. And for desecrating the Capital World it had to die.
The damnable thing was that the maula seemed to understand all that, and didn’t appear to care.
