Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

He subsisted on synthetics. Chemical analysis showed that it would be unwise to try local foods.

He drew the Pythagorean Theorem many times. He sketched a variety of arithmetical processes. He played Schonberg and Bach. He constructed equilateral triangles. He ventured into solid geometry. He sang. He spoke French, Russian, and Mandarin, as well as English, to show them the diversity of human tongues. He displayed a chart of the periodic table. After six months he still knew nothing more about the workings of their minds than he had an hour before landing. They tolerated his presence, but they said nothing to him; and when they communicated with one another it was mainly in quick, evanescent gestures, touches of the hand, flickers of the nostrils. They had a spoken language, it seemed, but it was so soft and breathy that he could not begin to distinguish words or even syllables. He recorded whatever he heard, of course.

Eventually they wearied of him and came for him. He slept.

He did not discover until much later what had been done to him while he slept.

He was eighteen years old, naked under the California stars. The sky was ablaze. He felt he could reach for the stars and pluck them from the heavens.

To be a god. To possess the universe.

He turned to her. Her body was cool and slender, slightly tense.

He cupped her breasts. He let his hand move across her flat belly. She shivered a little. “Dick,” she said. “Oh.” To be a god, he thought. He kissed her lightly, and then not lightly. “Wait,” she said. “I’m not ready.” He waited. He helped her get ready, or did the things he thought would help her get ready, and shortly she began to gasp. She spoke his name again. How many stars can a man visit in one lifetime? If each star has an average of twelve planets, and there are one hundred million stars within a galactic globe X light-years in diameter… Her thighs opened. His eyes closed. He felt soft old pine needles against his knees and elbows. She was not his first, but the first that counted. As the lightning ripped through his brain he was dimly aware of her response, tentative, halting, then suddenly vigorous. The intensity of it frightened him, but only for a moment, and he rode with her to the end. To be a god must be something like this.

They rolled over. He pointed to the stars and called off their names for her, getting half of them wrong, but she did not need to know that. He shared his dreams with her. Later they made love a second time, and it was even better.

He hoped it would rain at midnight, so they could dance in the rain, but the sky was clear. They went swimming instead, and came out shivering, laughing. When he took her home she washed down her pill with Chartreuse. He told her that he loved her.

They exchanged Christmas cards for several years.

The eighth world of Alpha Centauri B was a gas giant, with a low-density core and gravity not much more troublesome than that of Earth. Muller had honeymooned there the second time. It was partly a business trip, for there were troubles with the colonists on the sixth planet; they were talking of setting up a whirlpool effect that would suck away most of the eighth world’s highly useful atmosphere to use as raw materials.

Muller’s conferences with the locals went fairly well. He persuaded them to accept a quota system for their atmospheric grabs, and even won their praise for the little lesson in interplanetary morality he had administered. Afterward he and Nola were government guests for a holiday on the eighth world. Nola, unlike Lorayn, was the traveling sort. She would be accompanying him on many of his voyages.

Wearing support suits, they swam in an icy methane lake. They ran laughing along ammonia coasts. Nola was as tall as he, with powerful legs, dark red hair, green eyes. They embraced in a warm room of one-way windows overhanging a forlorn sea that stretched for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

“For always,” she said.

“Yes. For always.”

Before the week ended they quarreled bitterly. But it was only a game; for the more fiercely they quarreled, the more passionate was the reconciliation. For a while. Later they stopped bothering to quarrel. When the option in the marriage contract came up, neither of them wanted to renew. Afterward, as his reputation grew, he sometimes received friendly letters from her. He had tried to see her when he returned from Beta Hydri IV to Earth. Nola, he thought, would help him in his troubles. She of all people would not turn away from him. For old times’ sake.

But she was vacationing on Vesta with her seventh husband. Muller found that out from her fifth husband. He had been her third. He did not call her. He began to see there was no point in it.

The surgeon said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Muller. There’s nothing we can do for you. I wouldn’t want to raise false hopes. We’ve graphed your whole neural network. We can’t find the sites of alteration. I’m terribly sorry.”

He had had nine years to sharpen his memories. He had filled a few cubes with reminiscences, but that had mainly been in the early years of his exile, when he worried about having his past drift away to be lost in fog. He discovered that the memories grew keener with age. Perhaps it was training. He could summon sights, sounds, tastes, odors. He could reconstruct whole conversations convincingly. He was able to quote the full texts of several treaties he had negotiated. He could name England’s kings in sequence from first to last, William I through William VII. He remembered the names of the girls whose bodies he had known.

He admitted to himself that, given the chance, he would go back. Everything else had been pretense and bluster. He had fooled neither Ned Rawlins nor himself, he knew. The contempt he felt for mankind was real, but not the wish to remain isolated. He waited eagerly for Rawlins to return. While he waited he drank several goblets of the city’s liqueur; he went on a killing spree, nervously gunning down animals he could not possibly consume in a year’s time; he conducted intricate dialogues with himself; he dreamed of Earth.

Rawlins was running. Muller, standing a hundred meters deep in Zone C, saw him come striding through the entrance, breathless, flushed.

“You shouldn’t run in here,” Muller said, “not even in the safer zones. There’s absolutely no telling—”

Rawlins sprawled down beside a flanged limestone tub, gripping its sides and sucking air. “Get me a drink, will you?” he gasped. “That liqueur of yours—”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

Muller went to the fountain nearby and filled a handy flask with the sharp liqueur. Rawlins did not wince at all as Muller drew near to give it to him. He seemed altogether unaware of Muller’s emanation. Greedily, sloppily, he emptied the flask, letting driblets of the gleaming fluid roll down his chin and on his clothes. Then he closed his eyes a moment.

“You look awful,” Muller said. “As though you’ve just been raped, I’d say.”

“I have.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Wait. Let me get my breath. I ran all the way from Zone F.”

“You’re lucky to be alive, then.”

“Perhaps.”

“Another drink?”

“No,” said Rawlins. “Not just yet.”

Muller studied him, perplexed. The change was striking and unsettling, and mere fatigue could not account for it all. Rawlins was bloodshot, flushed, puffy-faced; his facial muscles were tightly knit; his eyes moved randomly, seeking and not finding. Drunk? Sick? Drugged?

Rawlins said nothing.

After a long moment Muller said, just to fill the vacuum of silence, “I’ve done a lot of thinking about our last conversation. I’ve decided that I was acting like a damned fool. All that cheap misanthropy I was dishing up.” Muller knelt and tried to peer into the younger man’s shifting eyes. “Look here, Ned, I want to take it all back. I’m willing to return to Earth for treatment. Even if the treatment’s experimental, I’ll chance it. I mean, the worst that can happen is that it won’t cure me, and—”