Robert Silverberg: The Book of Changes

“Go on.”

“There’s very little more to say.”

“But there’s something, eh? Say it, then.”

“It’s nothing that I haven’t said before.”

“Well, say it again. I can be very obtuse, Dolitha.”

He saw the little quiver of her nostrils that he had been expecting, the tiny movement of the tip of her tongue between her closed lips. It was clear to him from that that he could expect no mercy from her now. But mercy was not the commodity for which he had come to her this evening.

Quietly she said, “The path you’ve taken isn’t the right path. I don’t know what the right path would be, but it’s clear that you aren’t on it. You need to reshape your life, Aithin. To make something new and different out of it for yourself. That’s all. You’ve gone along this path as far as you can, and now you need to change. I knew ten years ago, even if you didn’t, that something like this was going to come.

Well, now it has. As you finally have come to realize yourself.”

“I suppose I have, yes.”

“It’s time to stop hiding.”

“Hiding?”

“From yourself. From your destiny, from whatever that may be. From your true essence. You can hide from all those, Aithin, but you can’t hide from the Divine. So far as the Divine is concerned, there’s no place where you can’t be seen. — Change your life, Aithin. I can’t tell you how.”

He looked at her, stunned.

“No. Of course you can’t.” He was silent a moment. “I’ll start by taking a trip,” he said. “Alone. To some distant place where there’ll be no one but myself, and I can meet myself face to face. And then we’ll see.”

In the morning, dismissing all thought of the royal library and whatever maps it might or might not contain — the time for planning was over; it was the time simply to go — he returned to Dundilmir and spent a week putting his house in order and arranging for the provisions he would need for his journey into the east-country. Then he set out, unaccompanied, saying nothing to anyone about where he was going. He had no idea what he would find, but he knew he would find something, and that he would be the better for it. This would be, he thought, a serious venture, a quest, even: a search for the interior life of Aithin Furvain, which somehow he had misplaced long ago. You have to change your life, Dolitha had said, and, yes, yes, that was what he would do. It would be a new thing for him. He had never embarked on anything serious before. He set out now in a strangely optimistic mood, alert to all vibrations of his consciousness. And was barely a week beyond the small dusty town of Vrambikat when he was captured by a party of roving outlaws and taken to Kasinibon’s hilltop stronghold.

That there should be anarchy of this sort in an outlying district like the east-country was something that had never occurred to him, but it was no major surprise. Majipoor was, by and large, a peaceful place, where the rulers had for thousands of years ruled by the freely given consent of the governed; but the distances were so vast, the writ of the Pontifex and Coronal so tenuous in places, that quite probably there were many districts where the central government existed only in name. When it took months for news to travel between the centers of the administration and remote Zimroel or sun-blasted Suvrael in the south, was it proper to say that the arm of the government actually reached those places? Who could know, up there at the summit of Castle Mount, or in the depths of the Labyrinth, what really went on in those distant lands? Everyone generally obeyed the law, yes, because the alternative was chaos: but it was quite conceivable that in many districts the citizens did more or less as they pleased most of the time, while maintaining staunchly that they were faithful in their obedience to the commandments of the central government.

And out here, where no one dwelled anyway, or hardly anyone, and the government did not so much as attempt to maintain a presence — what need was there for a government at all, or even the pretense of one?

Since leaving Vrambikat Furvain had been riding quietly along through the quiet countryside, with titanic Castle Mount still a mighty landmark behind him in the west but now beginning to dwindle a little, and a dark range of hills starting to come into view ahead of him. Every prospect before him appeared to go on for a million miles. He had never seen open space such as this, with no hint anywhere that human life might be present on this world. The air was clear as glass here, the sky cloudless, the weather gentle, springlike. Broad rolling meadows of bright golden grass, short-leaved, fleshy-stemmed, dense as a tightly woven carpet, stretched off before him. Here and there some beast of a sort unknown to Furvain browsed on the grass, paying no heed to him. This was the ninth day of his journey. The solitude was refreshing. It cleansed the soul. The deeper he went into this silent land, the greater was his sense of inner healing, of purification.

He paused at noon at a place where little rocky hills jutted from the blunt-stalked yellow grass to rest his mount and allow it to graze. He had brought an elegant beast with him, high-spirited and beautiful, a racing-mount, really, not perfectly suited for long plodding marches. It was necessary to halt frequently while the animal gathered its strength.

Furvain did not mind that. With no special destination in mind, there was no reason to adopt a hurried pace.

His mind roved ahead into the emptiness and tried to envision the marvels that awaited him. The Viper Rift, for example: what would that be like, that colossal cleft in the bosom of the world? Vertical walls that gleamed like gold, so steep that one could not even think of descending to the rift floor, where a swift green river, a serpent that seemed to have neither head nor tail, flowed toward the sea. The Great Sickle, said to be a slender, curving mass of shining white marble, a sculpture fashioned by the hand of the Divine, rising in superb isolation to a height of hundreds of feet above a tawny expanse of flat desert, a fragile arc that sighed and twanged like a harp when strong winds blew across its edge: an account dating from Lord Stiamot’s time, four thousand years before, said that the sight of it, limned against the night sky with a moon or two glistening near its tip, was so beautiful it would make a Skandar drayman weep. The Fountains of Embolain, where thunderous geysers of fragrant pink water smooth as silk went rushing upward every fifty minutes, day and night — and then, a year’s journey away, or perhaps two or three, the towering cliffs of black stone, riven by dazzling veins of white quartz, that guarded the shore of the Great Sea, the unbroken and unnavigable expanse of water that covered nearly half of the giant planet—

“Stand,” a harsh voice suddenly said. “You are trespassing here. Identify yourself.”

Furvain had been alone in this silent wilderness for so long that the grating sound ripped across his awareness like a blazing meteor’s jagged path across a starless sky. Turning, he saw two glowering men, stocky and roughly dressed, standing atop a low outcropping of rock just a few yards behind him. They were armed. A third and a fourth, farther away, guarded a string of a dozen or so mounts roped together with coarse yellow cord.

He remained calm. “A trespasser, you say? But this place belongs to no one, my friend! Or else to everyone.”

“This place belongs to Master Kasinibon,” said the shorter and surlier looking of the two, whose eyebrows formed a single straight black line across his furrowed forehead. He spoke in a coarse, thick-tongued way, with an unfamiliar accent that muffled all his consonants. “You’ll need his permission to travel here. What is your name?”