Robert Silverberg - Schwartz Between the Galaxies

“What do they say?”

“They say, ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me!’”

“Go to them, then,” said the Antarean simply. “Step through the hatch.”

“And perish?”

“And enter into your next transition. Poor Schwartz! Do you love your present body so?”

“My present body isn’t so bad. Do you think I’m likely to get another one some day?”

“No?”

“No,” Schwartz said. “This one is all I get. Isn’t it that way with you?”

“At the Time of Openings I receive my next housing. That will be fifty years from now. What you see is the fifth form I have been given to wear.”

“Will the next be as beautiful as this?”

“All forms are beautiful,” the Antarean said. “You find me attractive?”

“Of course.”

A slitted wink. A bobbing nod toward the viewport. “As attractive as those ?”

Schwartz laughed. “Yes. In a different way.”

Coquettishly the Antarean said, “If I were out there, you would walk through the hatch into space?”

“I might. If they gave me a spacesuit and taught me how to use it.”

“But not otherwise? Suppose I were out there right now. I could live in space five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I am there and I say, ‘Come to me, Schwartz, come to me!’ What do you do?”

“I don’t think I’m all that much self-destructive.”

“To die for love, though! To make a transition for the sake of beauty.”

“No. Sorry.”

The Antarean pointed toward the undulating Capellans. “If they asked you, you would go.”

“They are asking me,” he said.

“And you refuse the invitation?”

“So far. So far.”

The Antarean laughed an Antarean laugh, a thick silvery snort. “Our voyage will last many weeks more. One of these days, I think, you will go to them.”

“You were unconscious at least five minutes,” Dawn says. “You gave everyone a scare. Are you sure you ought to go through with tonight’s lecture?”

Nodding, Schwartz says, “I’ll be all right. I’m a little tired, is all. Too many time zones this week.” They stand on the terrace of his hotel room. Night is coming on, already, here in late afternoon: it is midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, though the fragrance of tropic blossoms perfumes the air. The first few stars have appeared. He has never really known which star is which. That bright one, he thinks, could be Rigel, and that one Sirius, and perhaps this is Deneb over there. And this? Can this be red Antares, in the heart of the Scorpion, or is it only Mars? Because of his collapse at the skyport he has been able to beg off the customary faculty reception and the formal dinner; pleading the need for rest, he has arranged to have a simple snack at his hotel room, a deux . In two hours they will come for him and take him to the University to speak. Dawn watches him closely. Perhaps she is worried about his health, perhaps she is only waiting for him to make his move toward her. There’s time for all that later, he figures. He would rather talk now. Warming up for the audience he seizes his earlier thread:

“For a long time I didn’t understand what had taken place. I grew up insular, cut off from reality, a New York boy, bright mind and a library card. I read all the anthropological classics, Patterns of Culture and Coming of Age in Samoa and Life of a South African Tribe and the rest, and I dreamed of field trips, collecting myths and grammars and folkways and artefacts and all that, until when I was twenty-five I finally got out into the field and started to discover I had gone into a dead science. We have only one worldwide culture now, with local variants but no basic divergences—there’s nothing primitive left on Earth, and there are no other planets. Not inhabited ones. I can’t go to Mars or Venus or Saturn and study the natives. What natives? And we can’t reach the stars. All I have to work with is Earth. I was thirty years old when the whole thing clicked together for me and I knew I had wasted my life.”

She says, “But surely there was something for you to study on Earth.”

“One culture, rootless and homogeneous. That’s work for a sociologist, not for me. I’m a romantic, I’m an exotic, I want strangeness, difference. Look, we can never have any real perspective on our own time and lives. The sociologists try to attain it, but all they get is a mound of raw indigestible data. Insight comes later—two, five, ten generations later. But one way we’ve always been able to learn about ourselves is by studying alien cultures, studying them completely, and defining ourselves by measuring what they are that we aren’t. The cultures have to be isolated, though. The anthropologist himself corrupts that isolation in the Heisenberg sense when he comes around with his camera and scanners and starts asking questions, but we can compensate more or less, for the inevitable damage a lone observer causes. We can’t compensate when our whole culture collides with another and absorbs and obliterates it. Which we technological-mechanical people now have done everywhere. One day I woke up and saw there were no alien cultures left. Hah! Crushing revelation! Schwartz’s occupation is gone!”

“What did you do?”

“For years I was in an absolute funk. I taught, I studied, I went through the motions, knowing it was all meaningless. All I was doing was looking at records of vanished cultures left by earlier observers and trying to cudgel new meanings. Secondary sources, stale findings: I was an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence. Paleontology. Dinosaurs are interesting, but what do they tell you about the contemporary world and the meaning of its patterns? Dry bones, Dawn, dry bones. Despair. And then a clue. I had this Nigerian student, this Ibo—well, basically an Ibo, but she’s got some Israeli in her and I think Chinese—and we grew very close, she was as close to me as anybody in my own sixness, and I told her my troubles. I’m going to give it all up, I said, because it isn’t what I expected it to be. She laughed at me and said, What right do you have to be upset because the world doesn’t live up to your expectations? Reshape your life, Tom; you can’t reshape the world. I said, But how? And she said, Look inward, find the primitive in yourself, see what made you what you are, what made today’s culture what it is, see how these alien streams have flowed together. Nothing’s been lost here, only merged. Which made me think. Which gave me a new way of looking at things. Which sent me on an inward quest. It took me three years to grasp the patterns, to come to an understanding of what our planet has become, and only after I accepted the planet—”

It seems to him that he has been talking forever. Talking. Talking. But he can no longer hear his own voice. There is only a distant buzz.

“After I accepted—”

A distant buzz.

“What was I saying?” he asks.

“After you accepted the planet—”

“After I accepted the planet,” he says, “that I could begin—” Buzz. Buzz. “That I could begin to accept myself.”

He was drawn toward the Spicans too, not so much for themselves—they were oblique, elliptical characters, self-contained and self-satisfied, hard to approach—as for the apparently psychedelic drug they took in some sacramental way before the beginning of each of their interminable ritual dances. Each time he had watched them take the drug, they had seemingly made a point of extending it toward him, as if inviting him, as if tempting him, before popping it into their mouths. He felt baited; he felt pulled.

There were three Spicans on board, slender creatures two and a half meters long, with flexible cylindrical bodies and small stubby limbs. Their skins were reptilian, dry and smooth, deep green with yellow bands, but their eyes were weirdly human, large liquid-brown eyes, sad Levantine eyes, the eyes of unfortunate medieval travelers transformed by enchantment into serpents. Schwartz had spoken with them several times. They understood English well enough—all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth—but the construction of their vocal organs was such that they had no way of speaking it, and they relied instead on small translating machines hung around their necks that converted their soft whispered hisses into amber words pulsing across a screen.