Robert Silverberg - Homefaring

“That sounds very awesome. But I’m not sure it’ll matter that much, Mag. I’m just taking a little trip. If I were going to Paris, or Istanbul, or even Antarctica, would I come back totally transformed? I’d have had some new experiences, but—”

“It isn’t the same,” she said. “It isn’t even remotely the same.” She came across the room to him and put her hands on his shoulders, and stared deep into his eyes, which sent a little chill through him, as it always did; for when she looked at him that way there was a sudden flow of energy between them, a powerful warm rapport rushing from her to him and from him to her as though through a huge conduit, that delighted and frightened him both at once. He could lose himself in her. He had never let himself feel that way about anyone before. And this was not the moment to begin. There was no room in him for such feelings, not now, not when he was within a couple of hours of leaping off into the most unknown of unknowns. When he returned—if he returned—he might risk allowing something at last to develop with Maggie. But not on the eve of departure, when everything in his universe was tentative and conditional. “Can I tell you a little story, Jim?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“When my father was on the faculty at Cal, he was invited to a reception to meet a couple of the early astronauts, two of the Apollo men—I don’t remember which ones, but they were from the second or third voyage to the Moon. When he showed up at the faculty club, there were two or three hundred people there, milling around having cocktails, and most of them were people he didn’t know. He walked in and looked around and within ten seconds he had found the astronauts. He didn’t have to be told. He just knew. And this is my father, remember, who doesn’t believe in ESP or anything like that. But he said they were impossible to miss, even in that crowd. You could see it on their faces, you could feel the radiance coming from them, there was an aura, there was something about their eyes. Something that said, I have walked on the Moon, I have been to that place which is not of our world and I have come back, and now I am someone else. I am who I was before, but I am someone else also.”

“But they went to the Moon, Mag!”

“And you’re going to the future, Jim. That’s even weirder. You’re going to a place that doesn’t exist. And you may meet yourself there—ninety-nine years old, and waiting to shake hands with you—or you might meet me, or your grandson, or find out that everyone on Earth is dead, or that everyone has turned into a disembodied spirit, or that they’re all immortal superbeings, or—or—Christ, I don’t know. You’ll see a world that nobody alive today is supposed to see. And when you come back, you’ll have that aura. You’ll be transformed.”

“Is that so frightening?”

“To me it is,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“Dummy,” she said. “Dope. How explicit do I have to be, anyway? I thought I was being obvious enough.”

He could not meet her eyes. “This isn’t the best moment to talk about—”

“I know. I’m sorry, Jim. But you’re important to me, and you’re going somewhere and you’re going to become someone else, and I’m scared. Selfish and scared.”

“Are you telling me not to go?”

“Don’t be absurd. You’d go no matter what I told you, and I’d despise you if you didn’t. There’s no turning back now.”

“No.”

“I shouldn’t have dumped any of this on you today. You don’t need it right this moment.”

“It’s okay,” he said softly. He turned until he was looking straight at her, and for a long moment he simply stared into her eyes and did not speak, and then at last he said, “Listen, I’m going to take a big fantastic improbable insane voyage, and I’m going to be a witness to God knows what, and then I’m going to come back and yes, I’ll be changed— only an ox wouldn’t be changed, or maybe only a block of stone—but I’ll still be me, whoever me is. Don’t worry, okay? I’ll still be me. And we’ll still be us.”

“Whoever us is.”

“Whoever. Jesus, I wish you were going with me, Mag!”

“That’s the silliest schoolboy thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“True, though.”

“Well, I can’t go. Only one at a time can go, and it’s you. I’m not even sure I’d want to go. I’m not as crazy as you are, I suspect. You go, Jim, and come back and tell me all about it.”

“Yes.”

“And then we’ll see what there is to see about you and me.”

“Yes,” he said.

She smiled. “Let me show you a poem, okay? You must know it, because it’s Eliot, and you know all the Eliot there is. But I was reading him last night—thinking of you, reading him—and I found this, and it seemed to be the right words, and I wrote them down. From one of the Quartets.”

“I think I know,” he said:

“That’s a good one too,” Maggie said. “But it’s not the one I had in mind.” She unfolded a piece of paper. “It’s this:

“ ‘—And know the place for the first time,’ ” he completed. “Yes. Exactly. To arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.”

The lobsters were singing as they marched. That was the only word, McCulloch thought, that seemed to apply. The line of pilgrims now was immensely long—there must have been thousands in the procession by this time, and more were joining constantly—and from them arose an outpouring of chemical signals, within the narrowest of tonal ranges, that mingled in a close harmony and amounted to a kind of sustained chant on a few notes, swelling, filling all the ocean with its powerful and intense presence. Once again he had an image of them as monks, but not Benedictines, now: these were Buddhist, rather, an endless line of yellow-robed holy men singing a great Om as they made their way up some Tibetan slope. He was awed and humbled by it—by the intensity, and by the whole-heartedness of the devotion. It was getting hard for him to remember that these were crustaceans, no more than ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas; he sensed minds all about him, whole and elaborate minds arising out of some rich cultural matrix, and it was coming to seem quite natural to him that these people should have armored exoskeletons and joined eye-stalks and a dozen busy legs.

His host had still not broken its silence, which must have extended now over a considerable period. Just how long a period, McCulloch had no idea, for there were no significant alternations of light and dark down here to indicate the passing of time, nor did the marchers ever seem to sleep, and they took their food, as he had seen, in a casual and random way without breaking step. But it seemed to McCulloch that he had been effectively alone in the host’s body for many days.

He was not minded to try re-enter contact with the other just yet—not until he received some sort of signal from it. Plainly the host had withdrawn into some inner sanctuary to undertake a profound meditation; and McCulloch, now that the early bewilderment and anguish of his journey through time had begun to wear off, did not feel so dependent upon the host that he needed to blurt his queries constantly into his companion’s consciousness. He would watch, and wait, and attempt to fathom the mysteries of this place unaided.

The landscape had undergone a great many changes since the beginning of the march. That gentle bottom of fine white sand had yielded to a terrain of rough dark gravel, and that to one of a pale sedimentary stuff made up of tiny shells, the mortal remains, no doubt, of vast hordes of diatoms and foraminifera, that rose like clouds of snowflakes at the lobsters’ lightest steps. Then came a zone where a stratum of thick red clay spread in all directions. The clay held embedded in it an odd assortment of rounded rocks and clamshells and bits of chitin, so that it had the look of some complex paving material from a fashionable terrace. And after that they entered a region where slender spires of a sharp black stone, faceted like worked flint, sprouted stalagmite-fashion at their feet. Through all of this the lobster-pilgrims marched unperturbed, never halting, never breaking their file, moving in a straight line whenever possible and making only the slightest of deviations when compelled to it by the harshness of the topography.