Robert Silverberg: The Book of Changes

He found a match. Struck it. Stared at it for a moment, still terribly calm, and then brought it toward the corner of the stack.

“What are you doing?” Kasinibon cried, stepping swiftly into the room. Briskly the little man brought the heel of his boot down on the smoldering match and ground it out against the stone hearth. The pile of manuscript had not had time to ignite.

“What I’m doing is burning the poem,” said Furvain quietly. “Or trying to.”

“Doing what ?”

“Burning it,” Furvain said again.

“You’ve gone crazy. Your mind has snapped under the pressure of the work.”

Furvain shook his head. “No, I think I’m still sane. But I can’t go on with it, that I know. And once I came to that realization, I felt that it was best to destroy the incomplete poem.” In a low, unemotional tone he laid out for Kasinibon all that had passed through his mind in the last half hour.

Kasinibon listened without interrupting him. He was silent for a long moment thereafter. Then he said, looking past Furvain’s shoulder to the window and speaking in a strained, hollow, barely audible tone, “I have a confession to make, Furvain. Your ransom money arrived a week ago. From your friend the Duke. I was afraid to tell you, because I wanted you to finish the poem first, and I knew that you never would if I let you go back to Dundilmir. But I see that that’s wrong. I have no right to hold you here any longer. Do as you please, Furvain. Go, if you like. Only — I beg you — spare what you’ve written. Let me keep a copy of it when you leave.”

“I want to destroy it,” Furvain said.

Kasinibon’s eyes met Furvain’s. He said, speaking more strongly now, the old whiplash voice of the bandit chieftain, “No. I forbid you. Give it to me freely, or I’ll simply confiscate it.”

“I’m still a prisoner, then, I see,” said Furvain, smiling. “Have you really received the ransom money?”

“I swear it.”

Furvain nodded. It was his time for silence, now. He turned his back on Kasinibon and stared out toward the blood-red waters of the lake beyond.

Was it really so impossible, he wondered, to finish the poem?

Dizziness swept over him for an instant and he realized that some unexpected force was moving within him. Kasinibon’s shamefaced confession had broken things open. No longer did he feel as though he stood before that impassable barrier. Suddenly the way was open and the ninth canto was in his grasp after all.

It did not need to contain the answer to the Shapeshifter problem. Since Stiamot’s day, forty centuries of Coronals and Pontifexes had failed to solve that problem: why should a mere poet be able to do so? But questions of governance were not his responsibility. Writing poetry was. In The Book of Changes he had given Majipoor a mirror that would show the world its past; it was not his job to provide it with its future as well. At least not in any explicit way. Let the future discover itself as its own time unfolds.

Suppose, he thought — suppose — suppose — I end the poem with a prophecy, a cryptic vision of a tragic king of the years to come, a king who is, like Stiamot, a man of peace who must make war, and who will suffer greatly in the anguish of his kingship. Fragmentary phrases came to him: “A golden king… a crown in the dust… the holy embrace of sworn enemies…” What did they mean? He had no idea. But he didn’t need to know. He needed only to set them down. To offer the hope that in some century to come some unimaginable monarch, who could unite in himself the forces of war and peace in a way that would precisely balance the suffering and the achievement of Stiamot, would thereby put an end to the instability in the Commonwealth that was the inevitable consequence of the original sin of taking this planet from its native people. To end the poem with the idea that reconciliation is possible. Not to explain how it will be achieved: merely to say that achieving it is possible.

In that moment Furvain knew not only that he could go on to the finish but that he must go on, that it was his duty, and that this was the only place where that could be accomplished: here, under the watchful eye of his implacable captor and guardian. He would never do it back in Dundilmir, where he would inevitably retrogress into the shallowness of his old ways.

Turning, he gathered up a copy of the manuscript that included all that he had written thus far, and nudged it across the table to Kasinibon. “This is for you,” he said. “Keep it. Read it, if you want to. Just don’t say a word to me about it until I give you permission.”

Kasinibon silently took the bundle from him, clutching the pages to his breast and folding his arms across them.

Furvain said, then, “Send the ransom money back to Tanigel. Tell the Duke he paid it too soon. I’ll be staying here a little while longer. And send this with it.” He pulled one of his extra copies of the finished text of the Stiamot canto from the great mound of paper on the table. “So that he can see what his old lazy friend Furvain has been up to all this time out in the east-country, eh?” Furvain smiled. “And now, Kasinibon, please — if you’ll allow me to get back to work—”