The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (35 page)

ROBERT SILVERBERG

Robert Silverberg won the Hugo Award for most promising new author in 1956, less
than two years after his first professional sale. After an apprenticeship that lasted
nearly ten years and yielded millions of words, Silverberg emerged in the 1960s as one
of the most articulate and conscientious writers of the time. Works from this period of
his career are memorable for their psychologically complex character studies, morally
trenchant themes, and vivid depictions of oppressive and limiting environments that the
individual must try to transcend. “To See the Invisible Man,” “Hawksbill Station,” and
Thorns
are futuristic studies of the individual alienated through a variety of means:
social ostracism, penal exile, and exploitative victimization. Silverberg’s crowning
achievement in this vein is
Dying Inside,
the poignant tale of a telepath alienated by his
uniqueness who is further isolated by the loss of his powers and thus his only means of
relating to normal humanity.

Both
Nightwings
and
Downward to Earth
present contact with alien species as
potentially rejuvenating experiences with religious overtones of resurrection and
redemption.
The World Inside
chronicles the dehumanizing potential of overpopulation
on a society in which privacy and intimacy are virtually impossible.

At the dramatic core of Silverberg’s strongest stories are individuals confronted with
mortality. “Born with the Dead” details the difficulties of life in a world that is shared
by mortals and the revived dead.
The Second Trip
centers on the idea of the death of
identity; a man discovers that he is a former criminal punished with obliteration of his
true personality, a spark of which is reignited and threatens to overwhelm his new
persona. The quest for immortality is a sounding board for ruminations on mortality in
The Book of Skulls,
about the pursuit of an occult sect that has supposedly found the
secret of eternal life, and the impact of the quest on the individuals who seek it.

Since the late 1970s Silverberg has concentrated on the development of his Majipoor
saga, an epic science fantasy series that includes the novels
Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Majipoor Chronicles,
and
Valentine Pontifex.
He has also written two fantasy
novels,
Gilgamesh the King
and
To the Land of the Living,
based on Sumerian
mythology. His many short fiction collections include
Next Stop the Stars, To Worlds Beyond, Dimension Thirteen, Born with the Dead,
and
The Secret Sharer.
He has
written many novels and works of nonfiction for children, and edited more than seventy
anthologies.

“Sailing to Byzantium” is another story that, like Joe Haldeman’s, deals with the far,
far future, and it takes place in a world that Silverberg has made at once vaguely
familiar through his use of history, and utterly alien by virtue of its population. A
winner of the Nebula Award in 1985, it is a look at what it means to be human, now and
forever.

by Robert Silverberg

At dawn he arose and stepped out onto the patio for his first look at Alexandria, the one city he had not yet seen. That year the five cities were Chang-an, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo, Alexandria: the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities. He and Gioia, making the long flight from Asgard in the distant north the night before, had arrived late, well after sundown, and had gone straight to bed. Now, by the gentle apricot-hued morning light, the fierce spires and battlements of Asgard seemed merely something he had dreamed.

The rumor was that Asgard’s moment was finished, anyway. In a little while he had heard they were going to tear it down and replace it, elsewhere, with Mohenjo-daro.

Though there were never more than five cities, they changed constantly. He could remember a time when they had had Rome of the Caesars instead of Chang-an, and Rio de Janeiro rather than Alexandria. These people saw no point in keeping anything very long.

It was not easy for him to adjust to the sultry intensity of Alexandria after the frozen splendors of Asgard. The wind, coming off the water, was brisk and torrid both at once.

Soft turquoise wavelets lapped at the jetties. Strong presences assailed his senses: the hot heavy sky, the stinging scent of the red lowland sand borne on the breeze, the sullen swampy aroma of the nearby sea. Everything trembled and glimmered in the early light.

Their hotel was beautifully situated, high on the northern slope of the huge artificial mound known as the Paneium that was sacred to the goat-footed god. From here they had a total view of the city: the wide noble boulevards, the soaring obelisks and monuments, the palace of Hadrian just below the hill, the stately and awesome Library, the temple of Poseidon, the teeming marketplace, the royal lodge that Mark Antony had built after his defeat at Actium. And of course the Lighthouse, the wondrous many-windowed Lighthouse, the seventh wonder of the world, that immense pile of marble and limestone and reddish-purple Aswan granite rising in majesty at the end of its mile-long causeway. Black smoke from the beacon-fire at its summit curled lazily into the sky. The city was awakening. Some temporaries in short white kilts appeared and began to trim the dense dark hedges that bordered the great public buildings. A few citizens wearing loose robes of vaguely Grecian style were strolling in the streets.

There were ghosts and chimeras and phantasies everywhere about. Two slim elegant centaurs, a male and a female, grazed on the hillside. A burly thick-thighed swordsman appeared on the porch of the temple of Poseidon holding a Gorgon’s severed head; he waved it in a wide arc, grinning broadly. In the street below the hotel gate three small pink sphinxes, no bigger than housecats, stretched and yawned and began to prowl the curbside. A larger one, lion-sized, watched warily from an alleyway: their mother, surely. Even at this distance he could hear her loud purring.

Shading his eyes, he peered far out past the Lighthouse and across the water. He hoped to see the dim shores of Crete or Cyprus to the north, or perhaps the great dark curve of Anatolia.
Carry me toward that great Byzantium,
he thought.
Where all is
ancient, singing at the oars.
But he beheld only the endless empty sea, sun-bright and blinding though the morning was just beginning. Nothing was ever where he expected it to be. The continents did not seem to be in their proper places any longer. Gioia, taking him aloft long ago in her little flitterflitter, had shown him that. The tip of South America was canted far out into the Pacific; Africa was weirdly foreshortened; a broad tongue of ocean separated Europe and Asia. Australia did not appear to exist at all.

Perhaps they had dug it up and used it for other things. There was no trace of the world he once had known. This was the fiftieth century. “The fiftieth century after
what
?” he had asked several times, but no one seemed to know, or else they did not care to say. 

“Is Alexandria very beautiful?” Gioia called from within.

“Come out and see.”

Naked and sleepy-looking, she padded out onto the white-tiled patio and nestled up beside him. She fit neatly under his arm. “Oh, yes, yes!” she said softly. “So very beautiful, isn’t it? Look, there, the palaces, the Library, the Lighthouse! Where will we go first? The Lighthouse, I think. Yes? And then the marketplace—I want to see the Egyptian magicians—and the stadium, the races—will they be having races today, do you think? Oh, Charles, I want to see everything!”

“Everything? All on the first day?”

“All on the first day, yes,” she said. “Everything.”

“But we have plenty of time, Gioia.”

“Do we?”

He smiled and drew her tight against his side.

“Time enough,” he said gently.

He loved her for her impatience, for her bright bubbling eagerness. Gioia was not much like the rest in that regard, though she seemed identical in all other ways. She was short, supple, slender, dark-eyed, olive-skinned, narrow-hipped, with wide shoulders and flat muscles. They were all like that, each one indistinguishable from the rest, like a horde of millions of brothers and sisters—a world of small, lithe, childlike Mediterraneans, built for juggling, for bull-dancing, for sweet white wine at midday and rough red wine at night. They had the same slim bodies, the same broad mouths, the same great glossy eyes. He had never seen anyone who appeared to be younger than twelve or older than twenty. Gioia was somehow a little different, although he did not quite know how; but he knew that it was for that imperceptible but significant difference that he loved her. And probably that was why she loved him also.

He let his gaze drift from west to east, from the Gate of the Moon down broad Canopus Street and out to the harbor, and off to the tomb of Cleopatra at the tip of long slender Cape Lochias. Everything was here and all of it perfect, the obelisks, the statues and marble colonnades, the courtyards and shrines and groves, great Alexander himself in his coffin of crystal and gold: a splendid gleaming pagan city. But there were oddities

—an unmistakable mosque near the public gardens, and what seemed to be a Christian church not far from the Library. And those ships in the harbor, with all those red sails and bristling masts—surely they were medieval, and late medieval at that. He had seen such anachronisms in other places before. Doubtless these people found them amusing.

Life was a game for them. They played at it unceasingly. Rome, Alexandria, Timbuctoo—why not? Create an Asgard of translucent bridges and shimmering ice-girt palaces, then grow weary of it and take it away? Replace it with Mohenjo-daro? Why not? It seemed to him a great pity to destroy those lofty Nordic feasting-halls for the sake of building a squat, brutal, sun-baked city of brown brick; but these people did not look at things the way he did. Their cities were only temporary. Someone in Asgard had said that Timbuctoo would be the next to go, with Byzantium rising in its place. Well, why not? Why not? They could have anything they liked. This was the fiftieth century, after all. The only rule was that there could be no more than five cities at once. “Limits,”

Gioia had informed him solemnly when they first began to travel together, “are very important.” But she did not know why, or did not care to say.

He stared out once more toward the sea.

He imagined a newborn city congealing suddenly out of mists, far across the water: shining towers, great domed palaces, golden mosaics. That would be no great effort for them. They could just summon it forth whole out of time, the Emperor on his throne and the Emperor’s drunken soldiery roistering in the streets, the brazen clangor of the cathedral gong rolling through the Grand Bazaar, dolphins leaping beyond the shoreside pavilions. Why not? They had Timbuctoo. They had Alexandria. Do you crave Constantinople? Then behold Constantinople! Or Avalon, or Lyonesse, or Atlantis. They could have anything they liked. It is pure Schopenhauer here: the world as will and imagination. Yes! These slender dark-eyed people journeying tirelessly from miracle to miracle. Why not Byzantium next? Yes! Why not?
That is no country for old men,
he thought.
The young in one another’s arms, the birds in the trees—
yes! Yes! Anything they liked. They even had him. Suddenly he felt frightened. Questions he had not asked for a long time burst through into his consciousness.
Who am I? Why am I here? Who is
this woman beside me?

“You’re so quiet all of a sudden, Charles,” said Gioia, who could not abide silence for very long. “Will you talk to me? I want you to talk to me. Tell me what you’re looking for out there.”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“I could see you seeing something.” 

“Byzantium,” he said. “I was imagining that I could look straight across the water to Byzantium. I was trying to get a glimpse of the walls of Constantinople.”

“Oh, but you wouldn’t be able to see as far as that from here. Not really.”

“I know.”

“And anyway Byzantium doesn’t exist.”

“Not yet. But it will. Its time comes later on.”

“Does it?” she said. “Do you know that for a fact?”

“On good authority. I heard it in Asgard,” he told her. “But even if I hadn’t, Byzantium would be inevitable, don’t you think? Its time would have to come. How could we not do Byzantium, Gioia? We certainly will do Byzantium, sooner or later. I know we will. It’s only a matter of time. And we have all the time in the world.”

A shadow crossed her face. “Do we? Do we?”

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Paris and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Aires and a multitude of others, all at the same time. There had been four and a half billion people in the world then; now he doubted that there were as many as four and a half million.

Nearly everything had changed beyond comprehension. The moon still seemed the same, and the sun; but at night he searched in vain for familiar constellations. He had no idea how they had brought him from then to now, or why. It did no good to ask. No one had any answers for him; no one so much as appeared to understand what it was that he was trying to learn. After a time he had stopped asking; after a time had had almost entirely ceased wanting to know.

He and Gioia were climbing the Lighthouse. She scampered ahead, in a hurry as always, and he came along behind her in his more stolid fashion. Scores of other tourists, mostly in groups of two or three, were making their way up the wide flagstone ramps, laughing, calling to one another. Some of them, seeing him, stopped a moment, stared, pointed. He was used to that. He was so much taller than any of them; he was plainly not one of them. When they pointed at him he smiled. Sometimes he nodded a little acknowledgment.