Read To the Land of the Living Online
Authors: Robert Silverberg
To the Land of the Living
TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING
Robert Silverberg
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Per me si va ne la città dolente,
Per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
Fecemi la divina podestate,
La somma sapienza ed il primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
Se non etterne, ed io etterno duro.
LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE.
I am he whom you call Gilgamesh. I am the pilgrim who has seen everything within the confines of the Land, and far beyond it; I am the man to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death, most especially those of death. I have coupled with Inanna in the bed of the Sacred Marriage; I have slain demons and spoken with gods; I am two parts god myself, and only one part mortal. Here in Uruk I am king, and when I walk through the streets I walk alone, for there is no one who dares approach me too closely.
Jagged green lightning danced on the horizon and the wind came ripping like a blade out of the east, skinning the flat land bare and sending up clouds of gray-brown dust. Gilgamesh grinned broadly. By Enlil, now that was a wind! A lion-killing wind it was, a wind that turned the air dry and crackling. The beasts of the field gave you the greatest joy in their hunting when the wind was like that, hard and sharp and cruel.
He narrowed his eyes and stared into the distance, searching for this day’s prey. His bow of several fine woods, the bow that no man but he was strong enough to draw – no man but he, and Enkidu his beloved thrice-lost friend – hung loosely from his hand. His body was poised and ready. Come now, you beasts! Come and be slain! It is Gilgamesh king of Uruk who would make his sport with you this day!
Other men in this strange land, when they went about their hunting, made use of guns, those foul machines that the Later Dead had brought, which hurled death from a great distance along with much noise and fire and smoke; or they employed the even deadlier laser devices from whose ugly snouts came spurts of blue-white flame. Cowardly things, all those killing-machines! Gilgamesh loathed them, as he did most instruments of the Later Dead, those slick and bustling Johnny-come-latelies of the Afterworld. He would not touch them if he could help it. In all his thousands of years in this nether world, this land of dreams and spirits, of life beyond life, he had never used any weapons but those he had known during his first lifetime: the javelin, the spear, the double-headed axe, the hunting-bow, the good bronze sword. It took some skill, hunting with such weapons as those. And there was physical effort; there was more than a little risk. Hunting was a contest, was it not? Then it must make demands. Why, if the idea was merely to slaughter one’s prey in the fastest and easiest and safest way, then the sensible thing to do would be to ride high
above the hunting-grounds in a weapons-platform and drop a little nuke, and lay waste five kingdoms’ worth of beasts at a single stroke, he told himself. And laughed and strode onward.
“If you ever had come to Texas, H.P., this here’s a lot like what you’d have seen,” said the big barrel-chested man with the powerful arms and the deeply tanned skin. Gesturing sweepingly with one hand, he held the wheel of the Land Rover lightly with three fingers of the other, casually guiding the vehicle in jouncing zigs and zags over the flat trackless landscape. Gnarled gray-green shrubs matted the gritty ground. The sky was black with swirling dust. Far off in the distance barren mountains rose like dark jagged teeth. “Beautiful. Beautiful. As close to Texas in look as makes no never mind, this countryside is.”
“Beautiful?” said the other man uncertainly. “The After-world?”
“This stretch sure is. But if you think the Afterworld’s beautiful, you should have seen Texas!”
The burly man laughed and gunned the engine and the Land Rover went leaping and bouncing forward at a stupefying speed.
His travelling companion, a gaunt lantern-jawed man as pale as the other was bronzed, sat very still in the passenger seat, knees together, elbows digging in against his ribs, as if he expected a fiery crash at any moment. The two of them had journeyed across the interminable parched wastes of the Outback for many days now – how many, not even the Elder Gods could tell. They were ambassadors, these two: Their Excellencies Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft of the Kingdom of New Holy Resurrected England, envoys of His Britannic Majesty Henry VIII to the court of Prester John.
In an earlier life Lovecraft and Howard had been writers, fantasists, inventors of fables; but now they found themselves caught up in something far more fantastic than anything to be found in any of their tales, for this was no fable, this was no fantasy. This was the harsh reality of the Afterworld.
The Land Rover bounced, skidded, bounced again.
“Robert – please –” said the pale man, mildly, nervously.
Gilgamesh knew that some thought him a fool for his conservative ideas. Caesar, for one. Cocksure coldblooded Julius with the row of fragmentation grenades tucked into his belt and the Uzi slung across his shoulders: Caesar, who represented all that Gilgamesh most despised. “Why don’t you admit it?” Caesar had asked him some considerable time earlier, riding up in his jeep as Gilgamesh was making ready to set forth from the city of Nova Roma where he had lived too long, out toward the Afterworld’s open wilderness, the godforsaken Outback. “It’s a pure affectation, Gilgamesh, all this insistence on arrows and javelins and spears. This isn’t old Sumer you’re living in now.”
Gilgamesh spat. “Hunt with 9-millimeter automatics? Hunt with grenades and cluster bombs and lasers? You call that sport, Caesar?”
“I call it acceptance of reality. Is it technology you hate? What’s the difference between using a bow and arrow and using a gun? They’re both technology, Gilgamesh. It isn’t as though you kill the animals with your bare hands.”
“I have done that too,” said Gilgamesh.
“Bah! I’m on to your game. Big hulking Gilgamesh, the simple innocent oversized Bronze Age hero! That’s just an affectation too, my friend! You pretend to be a stupid stubborn thick-skulled barbarian because it suits you to be left alone to your hunting and your wandering, and that’s all you claim that you really want. But secretly you regard yourself as superior to anybody who lived in an era softer than your own. You mean to restore the bad old filthy ways of the ancient ancients, isn’t that so? If I read you the right way you’re just biding your time, skulking around with your bow and arrow in the dreary Outback until you think it’s the right moment to launch the
putsch
that carries you to supreme power here. Isn’t that it, Gilgamesh? You’ve got some crazy fantasy of lording it over all of us, supreme monarch and absolute dictator. And then we’ll live in mud cities again and make little chicken-scratches on clay tablets, the way you think human beings were meant to do. What do you say?”
“I say this is great nonsense, Caesar.”
“Is it? This place is rotten to bursting with kings and emperors and sultans and pharaohs and shahs and presidents and dictators, and every single one of them wants to be Number One again. My guess is that you’re no exception.”
“In this you are very wrong. It is well known to all that I have no lust to rule over men a second time.”
“I doubt that. I suspect you believe you’re the noblest of us all: you, the sturdy warrior, the great hunter, the maker of bricks, the builder of vast temples and lofty walls, the shining beacon of ancient heroism.” Caesar laughed. “Before Rome ever was, you and your dismal sun-baked little land of Mesopotamia were really big news, and you can’t ever let us forget that, can you? You think we’re all decadent rascally degenerates and that you’re the one true virtuous man. But you’re as proud and ambitious as any of us. Isn’t that how it is? This shunning of power for which you’re so famous: it’s only a pose. You’re a fraud, Gilgamesh, a huge musclebound fraud!”
“At least I am no slippery tricky serpent like you, Caesar, who buys and sells his friends at the best prices.”
Caesar looked untroubled by the thrust. “And so you pass three quarters of your time killing slow-witted lumpish monsters in the Outback and you make sure everyone knows that you’re too pious to have anything to do with modern weapons while you do it. You don’t fool me. It isn’t virtue that keeps you from doing your killing with a decent double-barreled .470 Springfield. It’s intellectual pride, or maybe simple laziness. The bow just happens to be the weapon you grew up with, who knows how many thousands of years ago. You like it because it’s familiar. But what language are you speaking now, eh? Is it your thick-tongued Euphrates gibberish? No, it seems to be English, doesn’t it? Did you grow up speaking English too, Gilgamesh? Did you grow up riding around in jeeps and choppers? Apparently
some
of the modern conveniences are acceptable to you.”
Gilgamesh shrugged. “I speak English with you because that is what is mainly spoken now in this place. In my heart I speak the old tongue, Caesar. In my heart I am still Gilgamesh of Uruk, and I will hunt as I hunt.”
“Your Uruk’s long gone to dust. This is the life after life, my friend, the little joke that the gods have played on us all. We’ve been here a long time. We’ll be here for all time to come, unless I miss my guess. New people constantly bring new ideas to this place, and it’s impossible to ignore them. Even you can’t do it. The new ways sink in and change you, however much you try to pretend that they can’t.”