Robert Silverberg - Majipoor Chronicles

MAJIPOOR

CHRONICLES

by

Robert Silverberg

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part One - Thesme and the Ghayrog

- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Part Two - The Time of the Burning

Part Three - In the Fifth Year of the Voyage

Part Four - Calintane Explains

Part Five - The Desert of Stolen Dreams

- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Part Six - The Soul-Painter and the Shapeshifter

Part Seven - Crime and Punishment

Part Eight - Among the Dream-Speakers

Part Nine - A Thief in Ni-moya

- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Part Ten - Voriax and Valentine

Part Eleven

Praise for LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE:

"An imaginative fusion of action, sorcery and science fiction."

—The New York Times Book Review

"A grand, picaresque tale… by one of the great storytellers of the century."

—Roger Zelazny

"A surefire pageturner… The giant planet of Majipoor is a brilliant concept of the

imagination."

—Chicago Sun-Times

"In Majipoor, Silverberg has created a big planet chock-ablock with life and

potential stories."

—Washington Post

And for MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES:

"Well-written… thought-provoking."

—West Coast Review of Books

"These interlocking… stories, with their diversity of viewpoints and sharper focus,

give us a better picture than ever of magical Majipoor."

—Publishers Weekly

"Setting the book down, there are two things that abide… absolute awe at

Silverberg's capacity for creating images… he makes you see, believe, be there

witnessing… and overarching compassion [that] colors every word and all the souls

in his enormous planet"

—Theodore Sturgeon, Los Angeles Times

"I was happy to visit Majipoor again, and glad to know there's room on that great

and grand world for even more events to be chronicled."

—Baird Searles, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES

Robert Silverberg

Bantam Books by Robert Silverberg

Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

THE BOOK OF SKULLS

LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE

MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES

BANTAM BOOKS

Toronto  New York  London  Sydney

This low-priced Bantam Book has been completely reset in a type face designed

for easy reading, and was printed from new plates. It contains the complete text of

the original hard-cover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES

A Bantam Book / Published by arrangement with Arbor House Publishing

Company

PRINTING HISTORY Arbor House edition published December 1981

A Selection of Science Fiction Book Club

Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat

different form in Omni, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

Bantam edition / February 1983

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by

mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address:

Arbor House Publishing Company,

East 45th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017.

ISBN 0-553-22928-1 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of

the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S.

Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam

Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

printed in the united states of america

for

Kirby

Who may not have been driven all the way to despair by this one, but who

certainly got as far as the outlying suburbs.

Prologue

In the fourth year of the restoration of the Coronal Lord Valentine a great mischief

has come over the soul of the boy Hissune, a clerk in the House of Records of the

Labyrinth of Majipoor. For the past six months it has been Hissune's task to prepare

an inventory of the archives of the tax-collectors—an interminable list of documents

that no one is ever going to need to consult—and it looks as though the job will keep

him occupied for the next year or two or three. To no purpose, so far as Hissune

can understand, since who could possibly care about the reports of provincial

tax-collectors who lived in the reign of Lord Dekkeret or Lord Calintane or even the

ancient Lord Stiamot? These documents had been allowed to fall into disarray, no

doubt for good reason, and now some malevolent destiny has chosen Hissune to put

them to rights, and so far as he can see it is useless work, except that he will have a

fine geography lesson, a vivid experience of the hugeness of Majipoor. So many

provinces! So many cities! The three giant continents are divided and subdivided

and further divided into thousands of municipal units, each with its millions of

people, and as he toils, Hissune's mind overflows with names, the Fifty Cities of

Castle Mount, the great urban districts of Zimroel, the mysterious desert settlements

of Suvrael, a torrent of metropolises, a lunatic tribute to the fourteen thousand years

of Majipoor's unceasing fertility: Pidruid, Narabal, Ni-moya, Alaisor, Stoien, Piliplok,

Pendiwane, Amblemorn, Minimool, Tolaghai, Kangheez, Natu Gorvinu—so much,

so much, so much! A million names of places! But when one is fourteen years old

one can tolerate only a certain amount of geography, and then one begins to grow

restless.

Restlessness invades Hissune now. The mischievousness that is never far from

the surface in him wells up and overflows.

Close by the dusty little office in the House of Records where Hissune sifts and

classifies his mounds of tax reports is a far more interesting place, the Register of

Souls, which is closed to all but authorized personnel, and there are said to be not

many authorized personnel. Hissune knows a good deal about that place. He knows

a good deal about every part of the Labyrinth, even the forbidden places, especially

the forbidden places—for has he not, since the age of eight, earned his living in the

streets of the great underground capital by guiding bewildered tourists through the

maze, using his wits to pick up a crown here and a crown there? "House of

Records," he would tell the tourists. "There's a room in there where millions of

people of Majipoor have left memory-readings. You pick up a capsule and put it in a

special slot, and suddenly it's as if you were the person who made the reading, and

you find yourself living in Lord Confalume's time, or Lord Siminave's, or out there

fighting the Metamorph Wars with Lord Stiamot—but of course hardly anyone is

allowed to consult the memory-reading room." Of course. But how hard would it be,

Hissune wonders, to insinuate himself into that room on the pretext of needing data

for his research into the tax archives? And then to live in a million other minds at a

million other times, in all the greatest and most glorious eras of Majipoor's

history—yes!

Yes, it would certainly make this job more tolerable if he could divert himself with

an occasional peek into the Register of Souls.

From that realization it is but a short journey to the actual attempting of it. He

equips himself with the appropriate passes—he knows where all the

document-stampers are kept in the House of Records—and makes his way through

the brightly lit curving corridors late one afternoon, dry-throated, apprehensive,

tingling with excitement.

It has been a long time since he has known any excitement. Living by his wits in

the streets was exciting, but he no longer does that; they have civilized him, they

have housebroken him, they have given him a job. A job! They! And who are they?

The Coronal himself, that's who! Hissune has not overcome his amazement over

that. During the time when Lord Valentine was wandering in exile, displaced from his

body and his throne by the usurper Barjazid, the Coronal had come to the Labyrinth,

and Hissune had guided him, recognizing him somehow for what he truly was; and

that had been the beginning of Hissune's downfall. For the next thing Hissune knew,

Lord Valentine was on his way from the Labyrinth to Castle Mount to regain his

crown, and then the usurper was overthrown, and then at the time of the second

coronation Hissune found himself summoned, the Divine only knew why, to attend

the ceremonies at Lord Valentine's Castle. What a time that was! Never before had

he so much as been out of the Labyrinth to see the light of day, and now he was

journeying in an official floater, up the valley of the Glayge past cities he had known

only in dreams, and there was Castle Mount's thirty-mile-high bulk rising like another

planet in the sky, and at last he was at the Castle, a grimy ten-year-old boy standing

next to the Coronal and trading jokes with him—yes, that had been splendid, but

Hissune was caught by surprise by what followed. The Coronal believed that

Hissune had promise. The Coronal wished him to be trained for a government post.

The Coronal admired the boy's energy and wit and enterprise. Fine. Hissune would

become a protege of the Coronal. Fine. Fine. Back to the Labyrinth, then—and into

the House of Records! Not so fine. Hissune has always detested the bureaucrats,

those mask-faced idiots who pushed papers about in the bowels of the Labyrinth,

and now, by special favor of Lord Valentine, he has become such a person himself.

Well, he supposes he has to do something by way of earning a living besides take

tourists around—but he never imagined it would be this! Report of the Collector of

Revenue for the Eleventh District of the Province of Chorg, Prefecture of Bibiroon,

11th Pont. Kinniken Cor. Lord Ossier—oh, no, no, not a lifetime of that! A month,

six months, a year of doing his nice little job in the nice little House of Records,

Hissune hopes, and then Lord Valentine might send for him and install him in the

Castle as an aide-de-camp, and then at last life would have some value! But the

Coronal seems to have forgotten him, as one might expect. He has an entire world of

twenty or thirty billion people to govern, and what does one little boy of the

Labyrinth matter? Hissune suspects that his life has already passed its most glorious

peak, in his brief time on Castle Mount, and now by some miserable irony he has

been metamorphosed into a clerk of the Pontificate, doomed to shuffle documents

forever—But there is the Register of Souls to explore. Even though he may never

leave the Labyrinth again, he might—if no one caught him—roam the minds of

millions of folk long dead, explorers, pioneers, warriors, even Coronals and

Pontifexes. That's some consolation, is it not?

He enters a small antechamber and presents his pass to the dull-eyed Hjort on

duty.

Hissune is ready with a flow of explanations: special assignment from the

Coronal, important historical research, need to correlate demographic details,

necessary corroboration of data profile—oh, he's good at such talk, and it lies coiled

waiting back of his tongue. But the Hjort says only, "You know how to use the

equipment?"

"It's been a while. Perhaps you should show me again."

The ugly warty-faced fellow, many-chinned and flabby, gets slowly to his feet and

leads Hissune to a sealed enclosure, which he opens by some deft maneuver of a

thumb-lock. The Hjort indicates a screen and a row of buttons. "Your control

console. Send for the capsules you want. They plug in here. Sign for everything.

Remember to turn out the lights when you're done."

That's all there is to it. Some security system! Some guardian!

Hissune finds himself alone with the memory-readings of everyone who has ever

lived on Majipoor.

Almost everyone, at any rate. Doubtless billions of people have lived and died

without bothering to make capsules of their lives. But one is allowed every ten years,

beginning at the age of twenty, to contribute to these vaults, and Hissune knows that

although the capsules are minute, the merest flecks of data, there are miles and miles

of them in the storage levels of the Labyrinth. He puts his hands to the controls. His

fingers tremble.

Where to begin?

He wants to know everything. He wants to trek across the forests of Zimroel with

the first explorers, he wants to drive back the Metamorphs, to sail the Great Sea, to

slaughter sea-dragons off the Rodamaunt Archipelago, to—to—to—he shakes with

the frenzy of yearning. Where to begin? He studies the keys before him. He can

specify a date, a place, a specific person's identity—but with fourteen thousand

years to choose from—no, more like eight or nine thousand, for the records, he

knows, go back only to Lord Stiamot's time or a little before—how can he decide

on a starting point? For ten minutes he is paralyzed with indecision.

Then he punches at random. Something early, he thinks. The continent of

Zimroel; the time of the Coronal Lord Barhold, who had lived even before Stiamot;

and the person—why, anyone! Anyone!

A small gleaming capsule appears in the slot.

Quivering in amazement and delight, Hissune plugs it into the playback outlet and

dons the helmet. There are crackling sounds in his ears. Vague blurred streaks of

blue and green and scarlet cross his eyes behind his closed lids. Is it working? Yes!

Yes! He feels the presence of another mind! Someone dead nine thousand years,

and that person's mind—her mind, she was a woman, a young woman—flows into

Hissune's, until he cannot be sure whether he is Hissune of the Labyrinth or this

other, this Thesme of Narabal—

With a little sobbing sound of joy he releases himself entirely from the self he has

lived with for the fourteen years of his life and lets the soul of the other take

possession of him.

ONE

Thesme and the Ghayrog

1

For six months now Thesme had lived alone in a hut that she had built with her

own hands, in the dense tropical jungle half a dozen miles or so east of Narabal, in a

place where the sea breezes did not reach and the heavy humid air clung to

everything like a furry shroud. She had never lived by herself before, and at first she

wondered how good she was going to be at it; but she had never built a hut before

either, and she had done well enough at that, cutting down slender sijaneel saplings,

trimming away the golden bark, pushing their slippery sharpened ends into the soft

moist ground, lashing them together with vines, finally tying on five enormous blue

vramma leaves to make a roof. It was no masterpiece of architecture, but it kept out

the rain, and she had no need to worry about cold. Within a month her sijaneel

timbers, trimmed though they were, had all taken root and were sprouting leathery

new leaves along their upper ends, just below the roof; and the vines that held them

were still alive too, sending down fleshy red tendrils that searched for and found the

rich fertile soil. So now the house was a living thing, daily becoming more snug and

secure as the vines tightened and the sijaneels put on girth, and Thesme loved it. In

Narabal nothing stayed dead for long; the air was too warm, the sunlight too bright,

the rainfall too copious, and everything quickly transformed itself into something else

with the riotous buoyant ease of the tropics.

Solitude was turning out to be easy too. She had needed very much to get away

from Narabal, where her life had somehow gone awry: too much confusion, too

much inner noise, friends who became strangers, lovers who turned into foes. She

was twenty-five years old and needed to stop, to take a long look at everything, to

change the rhythm of her days before it shook her to pieces. The jungle was the ideal

place for that. She rose early, bathed in a pond that she shared with a sluggish old

gromwark and a school of tiny crystalline chichibors, plucked her breakfast from a

thokka vine, hiked, read, sang, wrote poems, checked her traps for captured

animals, climbed trees and sunbathed in a hammock of vines high overhead, dozed,

swam, talked to herself, and went to sleep when the sun went down. In the beginning

she thought there would not be enough to do, that she would soon grow bored, but

that did not seem to be the case; her days were full and there were always a few

projects to save for tomorrow.

At first she expected that she would go into Narabal once a week or so, to buy

staple goods, to pick up new books and cubes, to attend an occasional concert or a

play, even to visit her family or those of her friends that she still felt like seeing. For a

while she actually did go to town fairly often. But it was a sweaty, sticky trek that

took half a day, nearly, and as she grew accustomed to her reclusive life she found

Narabal ever more jangling, ever more unsettling, with few rewards to compensate

for the drawbacks. People there stared at her. She knew they thought she was

eccentric, even crazy, always a wild girl and now a peculiar one, living out there by

herself and swinging through the treetops. So her visits became more widely spaced.

She went only when it was unavoidable. On the day she found the injured Ghayrog

she had not been to Narabal for at least five weeks.

She had been roving that morning through a swampy region a few miles northeast

of her hut, gathering the sweet yellow fungi known as calimbots. Her sack was

almost full and she was thinking of turning back when she spied something strange a

few hundred yards away: a creature of some sort with gleaming, metallic-looking

gray skin and thick tubular limbs, sprawled awkwardly on the ground below a great

sijaneel tree. It reminded her of a predatory reptile her father and brother once had

killed in Narabal Channel, a sleek, elongated, slow-moving thing with curved claws

and a vast toothy mouth. But as she drew closer she saw that this life-form was

vaguely human in construction, with a massive rounded head, long arms, powerful

legs. She thought it might be dead, but it stirred faintly when she approached and

said, "I am damaged. I have been stupid and now I am paying for it."

"Can you move your arms and legs?" Thesme asked.

"The arms, yes. One leg is broken, and possibly my back. Will you help me?"

She crouched and studied it closely. It did look reptilian, yes, with shining scales

and a smooth, hard body. Its eyes were green and chilly and did not blink at all; its

hair was a weird mass of thick black coils that moved of their own accord in a slow

writhing; its tongue was a serpent-tongue, bright scarlet, forked, flickering constantly

back and forth between the narrow fleshless lips.

"What are you?" she asked.

"A Ghayrog. Do you know of my kind?"

"Of course," she said, though she knew very little, really. All sorts of non-human

species had been settling on Majipoor in the past hundred years, a whole menagerie

of aliens invited here by the Coronal Lord Melikand because there were not enough

humans to fill the planet's immensities. Thesme had heard that there were four-armed

ones and two-headed ones and tiny ones with tentacles and these scaly

snake-tongued snake-haired ones, but none of the alien beings had yet come as far

as Narabal, a town on the edge of nowhere, as distant from civilization as one could

get. So this was a Ghayrog, then? A strange creature, she thought, almost human in

the shape of its body and yet not at all human in any of its details, a monstrosity,

really, a nightmare-being, though not especially frightening. She pitied the poor

Ghayrog, in fact—a wanderer, doubly lost, far from its home world and far from

anything that mattered on Majipoor. And badly hurt, too. What was she going to do

with it? Wish it well and abandon it to its fate? Hardly. Go all the way into Narabal

and organize a rescue mission? That would take at least two days, assuming anyone

cared to help. Bring it back to her hut and nurse it to good health? That seemed the

most likely thing to do, but what would happen to her solitude, then, her privacy,

and how did one take care of a Ghayrog, anyway, and did she really want the

responsibility? And the risk, for that matter: this was an alien being and she had no

idea what to expect from it.

It said, "I am Vismaan."

Was that its name, its title, or merely a description of its condition? She did not

ask. She said, "I am called Thesme. I live in the jungle an hour's walk from here.

How can I help you?"

"Let me brace myself on you while I try to get up. Do you think you are strong

enough?"

"Probably."

"You are female, am I right?"

She was wearing only sandals. She smiled and touched her hand lightly to her

breasts and loins and said, "Female, yes."

"So I thought. I am male and perhaps too heavy for you."

Male? Between his legs he was as smooth and sexless as a machine. She

supposed that Ghayrogs carried their sex somewhere else. And if they were reptiles,

her breasts would indicate nothing to him about her sex. Strange, all the same, that

he should need to ask.

She knelt beside him, wondering how he was going to rise and walk with a broken

back. He put his arm over her shoulders. The touch of his skin against hers startled

her: it felt cool, dry, rigid, smooth, as though he wore armor. Yet it was not an

unpleasant texture, only odd. A strong odor came from him, swampy and bitter with

an undertaste of honey. That she had not noticed it before was hard to understand,

for it was pervasive and insistent; she decided she must have been distracted by the

unexpectedness of coming upon him. There was no ignoring the odor now that she

was aware of it, and at first she found it intensely disagreeable, though within

moments it ceased to bother her.

He said, "Try to hold steady. I will push myself up."

Thesme crouched, digging her knees and hands into the soil, and to her

amazement he succeeded in drawing himself upward with a peculiar coiling motion,

pressing down on her, driving his entire weight for a moment between her shoulder

blades in a way that made her gasp. Then he was standing, tottering, clinging to a

dangling vine. She made ready to catch him if he fell, but he stayed upright.

"This leg is cracked," he told her. "The back is damaged but not, I think,

broken."

"Is the pain very bad?"

"Pain? No, we feel little pain. The problem is functional. The leg will not support

me. Can you find me a strong stick?"

She scouted about for something he might use as a crutch and spied, after a

moment, the stiff aerial root of a vine dangling out of the forest canopy. The glossy

black root was thick but brittle, and she bent it backward and forward until she

succeeded in snapping off some two yards of it. Vismaan grasped it firmly, draped

his other arm around Thesme, and cautiously put his weight on his uninjured leg.

With difficulty he took a step, another, another, dragging the broken leg along. It

seemed to Thesme that his body odor had changed: sharper, now, more vinegar,

less honey. The strain of walking, no doubt. The pain was probably less trivial than

he wanted her to think. But he was managing to keep moving, at any rate.

"How did you hurt yourself?" she asked.

"I climbed this tree to survey the territory just ahead. It did not bear my weight."

He nodded toward the slim shining trunk of the tall sijaneel. The lowest branch,

which was at least forty feet above her, was broken and hung down by nothing more

than shreds of bark. It amazed her that he had survived a fall from such a height;

after a moment she found herself wondering how he had been able to get so high on

the slick smooth trunk in the first place.

He said, "My plan is to settle in this area and raise crops. Do you have a farm?"

"In the jungle? No, I just live here."

"With a mate?"

"Alone. I grew up in Narabal, but I needed to get away by myself for a while."

They reached the sack of calimbots she had dropped when she first noticed him

lying on the ground, and she slung it over her shoulder. "You can stay with me until

your leg has healed. But it's going to take all afternoon to get back to my hut this

way. Are you sure you're able to walk?"

"I am walking now," he pointed out.

"Tell me when you want to rest."

"In time. Not yet."

Robert Silverberg - Majipoor Chronicles

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