Robert Silverberg: A Time of Changes

I had nothing with me but the clothes I wore. My wardrobe, my weapons, my ornaments, my wealth itself, must remain behind in Manneran. As a boy-prince fleeing from Salla to Glin, I had had the prudence to transfer funds ahead of myself, but now I was cut off. My assets would be sequestered; my sons would be paupered. There had been no time for preparations.

Here at least my friends were of service. The Procurator-General, who was nearly of a size with me, had brought several changes of handsome clothing. The Commissioner of the Treasury had obtained for me a fair fortune in Sallan currency. The Duke of Mannerangu Smor pulled two rings and a pendant from his own body, so that I should not go unadorned into my native province. The Marquis of Woyn pressed on me a ceremonial dagger and his heat-rod, with a hilt worked with precious gems. Mihan promised to speak with Segvord Helalam, and tell him the details of my downfall; Segvord would be sympathetic, Mihan believed, and would protect my sons with all his influence, and keep them untainted by their father’s indictment.

Lastly, the Duke of Sumar came to me at the deepest time of the night, when I sat alone sourly eating the dinner I had had no time for earlier, and handed me a small jeweled case of bright gold, of the sort one might carry medicine in. “Open it carefully,” he said. I did, and found it brimming with white powder. In amazement I asked him where he had obtained this; he had lately sent agents secretly to Sumara Borthan, he replied, who had returned with a small supply of the drug. He claimed to have more, but I believe he gave me all he had.

“In an hour’s time you will leave,” said the duke, to smother my gush of gratitude.

I asked to be allowed to make a call first.

“Segvord will explain matters to your wife,” the duke said.

“One did not mean one’s wife. One meant one’s bondsister.” In speaking of Halum I could not drop easily into the rough grammar we selfbarers affected. “One has had no chance to make one’s farewell to her.”

The duke understood my anguish, for he had been within my soul. But he would not grant me the call. Lines might be tapped; he could not risk having my voice go forth from his home this night. I realized then how delicate a position even he must be in, and I did not force the issue. I could call Halum tomorrow, when I had crossed the Woyn and was safe in Salla.

Shortly it was time for me to depart. My friends had already gone, some hours since; the duke alone led me from the house. His majestic groundcar waited, and a corps of bodyguards on individual powercycles. The duke embraced me. I climbed into the car and settled back against the cushions. The driver opaqued the windows, hiding me from view though not interfering with my own vision. The car rolled silently forward, picked up speed, plunged into the night, with my outriders, six of them, hovering about it like insects. It seemed that hours went by before we came even to the main gate of the duke’s estate. Then we were on the highway. I sat like a man carved of ice, scarcely thinking of what had befallen me. Northward lay our route, and we went at such a rate that the sun was not yet up when we reached the margin of the Marquis of Woyn’s estate, on the border between Manneran and Salla. The gate opened; we shot through; the road cut across a dense forest, in which, by moonlight, I could see sinister parasitic growths like hairy ropes tangling tree to tree. Suddenly we erupted into a clearing and I beheld the banks of the River Woyn. The car halted. Someone in dark robes helped me out, as though I were a dodderer, and escorted me down the spongy bank to a long narrow pier, barely visible in the thick mist rising off the breast of the river. A boat was tied up, no great craft, hardly more than a dinghy. Yet it traveled at great speed across the broad and turbulent Woyn. Still I felt no inner response to my banishment from Manneran. I was like one who has gone forth in battle and had his right leg sliced off at the thigh by a fire-bolt, and who now lies in a tumbled heap, staring calmly at his stump and sensing no pain. The pain would come, in time.

Dawn was near. I could make out the shape of the Sallan side of the river. We pulled up at a dock that jutted out of a grassy bank, plainly some nobleman’s private landing. Now I felt my first alarm. In a moment I would step ashore in Salla. Where would I find myself? How would I reach some settled region? I was no boy, to beg rides from passing trucks. But all this had been settled for me hours before. As the boat bumped the shoulder of the pier, a figure emerged in the dimness and extended a hand: Noim. He drew me forth and clasped me in a tight hug. “I know what has happened,” he said. “You will stay with me.” In his emotion he abandoned polite usage with me for the first time since our boyhood.

At midday, from Noim’s estate in southwestern Salla, I phoned the Duke of Sumar to confirm my safe arrival — it was he, of course, who had arranged for my bondbrother to meet me at the border — and then I put through a call to Halum. Segvord had told her just a few hours earlier of the reasons for my disappearance. “How strange this news is,” she said. “You never spoke of the drug. Yet it was so important to you, for you risked everything to use it. How could it have had such a role in your life, and yet be kept a secret from your bondsister?” I answered that I had not dared to let her know of my preoccupation with it, for fear I might be tempted to offer it to her. She said, “Is opening yourself then to your bondsister so terrible a sin?”

Noim treated me with every courtesy, indicating that I could stay with him as long as I wished — weeks, months, even years. Presumably my friends in Manneran would succeed eventually in freeing some of my assets, and I would buy land in Salla and take up the life of a country baron; or perhaps Segvord and the Duke of Sumar and other men of influence would have my indictment quashed, so that I could return to the southern province. Until then, Noim told me, his home was mine. But I detected a subtle coolness in his dealings with me, as if this hospitality was offered only out of respect for our bonding. Only after some days did the source of his remoteness reach the surface. Sitting late past dinner in his great whitewashed feasting-hall, we were talking of childhood days — our main theme of conversation, far safer than any talk of recent events — when Noim suddenly said, “Is that drug of yours known to give people nightmares?”

“One has heard of no such cases, Noim.”

“Here’s a case, then. One who woke up drenched with chilly sweat night after night, for weeks after we shared the drug in Manneran. One thought one would lose one’s mind.”

“What kind of dreams?” I asked.

“Ugly things. Monsters. Teeth. Claws. A sense of not knowing who one is. Pieces of other minds floating through one’s own.” He gulped at his wine. “You take the drug for pleasure, Kinnall?”

“For knowledge.”

“Knowledge of what?”

“Knowledge of self, and knowledge of others.”

“One prefers ignorance, then.” He shivered. “You know, Kinnall, one was never a particularly reverent person. One blasphemed, one stuck his tongue out at drainers, one laughed at the god-tales they told, yes? You’ve nearly converted one into a man of faith with that stuff. The terror of opening one’s mind — of knowing that one has no defenses, that you can slide right into one’s soul, and are doing it — it’s impossible to take.”

“Impossible for you,” I said. “Others cherish it.”

“One leans toward the Covenant,” said Noim. “Privacy is sacred. One’s soul is one’s own. There’s a dirty pleasure in baring it.”