Valley beyond time, p.1
Valley Beyond Time, page 1
17-09-2023
How much pain will a man endure for revenge?
SPACEROGUE
Can something unknown, unreal, and unfathomable be the most lethal entity in the universe?
THE FLAME AND
THE HAMMER
What price must a man pay for dealing in human flesh?
THE WAGES OF DEATH
Can men and women love without sex, live without aging, and be damned in paradise?
VALLEY BEYOND TIME
VALLEY
BEYOND
TIME
ROBERT
SILVERBERG
A DELL BOOK
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
valley beyond time, copyright © 1957 by
Royal Publications, Inc. spacerogue, copyright ® 1958 by
Royal Publications, Inc.
THE FLAME AND THE HAMMER, Copyright©1957 by
Royal Publications, Inc. the wages of death, copyright © 1958 by
Quinn Publishing Co., Inc.
Published by
Dell Publishing Co., Inc
New York, New York 10017
Copyright © 1972 by Robert Silverberg
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.
Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc
Printed in the United States of America
First Dell printing—January 1973
INTRODUCTION
These are early stories, written more than twelve years ago. I offer that fact here as an explanation, not an apology, for if the stories needed apologies, they would not be again appearing in print. They are not, however, the kind of stories I would write today, and I think some warning to that effect ought to be issued here.
No man is really the same person today that he was yesterday, let alone a dozen years ago; and a writer, in particular, is subject to the changes of time because it is a writer’s business to be constantly receptive, to have his antennae out at all times; the bombardment of experience and insights he has will most probably transform him. Woe betide him if not, for a writer who docs not change and grow with time is a writer who will lose his audience and who will probably bore himself to death as well.
So the one who types these lines in the dying moments of 1969 is different in a number of important ways from the one who wrote these stories in 1956 and 1957. He has lived, for one thing, half again as many years as that other fellow. He has read a great deal that his earlier self had no chance of reading. He has seen a few places like
Istanbul and Jerusalem and Zanzibar that existed only in that younger man’s fantasies. He has been through the external traumas of our public events, and he has had a few private ordeals to endure, too. He has forgotten some things, but he has learned some things, also. All of this shows up in the fiction he writes. The themes he chooses to tackle today, the characters he writes about, the texture of his style, are those of his current self. He could not write like that man of 1957 even if he wished to. There are some readers who prefer the earlier writer to the present one because they find more entertainment in his work; this is their privilege, although the present writer himself does not share their opinion.
Science fiction has also changed in a dozen years. It has always been a house of many mansions, embodying flamboyant adventure, cold cerebration, pulpit-pounding didacticism, and a good many other things; a writer might work in one mode or another as the needs of his material dictated. At the beginning of my career, in the 1950s, I employed all the available forms of science fiction, but more frequently than not I slipped into the tradition of the action story: strong plots, swift stripped-down style, direct conflict of man against man and man against environment. It was a good way for a beginning writer to learn the essentials of his craft, and also, under the dismal commercial conditions that prevailed in science fiction at that time, it was a reasonable way for a young married man to keep three steps ahead of his creditors. All of the stories in this collection can be considered action stories of this kind, I suppose, although three of them take great liberties with the accepted formulas of magazine fiction. Today, of course, a very different sort of science fiction has come into being, one that draws on the techniques of “quality” literature and that makes great demands on reader and writer both; this is the species of science fiction that I prefer to write at present, but it is not the only species, and I would regret the disappearance of the robust narrative modes of other days.
So here are four stories, plus explanations, minus apology. The young man who wrote them had fun doing them, the readers who encountered them in the long ago apparently liked them, and I was able to reread them after a lapse of many years without undue distress. They still seem to make sense to me as stories, and it was interesting to encounter, here and there, the seeds of a theme I would later return to or the presence of a passage that might have come out of one of my most recent books. Aside from some very minor surgery I have made no changes in the stories. I hope they will be received in the spirit in which they are offered.
—ROBERT SILVERBERG
Contents:-
INTRODUCTION
VALLEY BEYOND TIME
THE FLAME AND THE HAMMER
THE WAGES OF DEATH
SPACEROGUE
VALLEY
BEYOND
TIME
I
The Valley, Sam Thornhill thought, had never looked lovelier. Drifting milky clouds hung over the two towering bare purple fangs of rock that bordered the Valley on either side and closed it off at the rear. Both suns were in the sky, the sprawling pale red one and the more distant, more intense blue; their beams mingled, casting a violet haze over tree and shrub and on the fast-flowing waters of the river that led to the barrier.
It was late in the forenoon, and all was well. Thornhill, a slim, compactly made figure in satinfab doublet and tunic, dark blue with orange trim, felt deep content. He watched the girl and the man come toward him up the winding path from the stream, wondering who they were and what they wanted with him.
The girl, at least, was attractive. She was dark of complexion and just short of Thornhill’s own height; she wore a snug rayon blouse and a yellow knee-length lustrol sheath. Her bare shoulders were wide and sun-darkened.
The man was small, well set, hardly an inch over five feet tall. He was nearly bald; a maze of wrinkles furrowed his domed forehead. His eyes caught Thornhill’s attention immediately. They were very bright, quick eyes that darted here and there in rapid glittering motions—the eyes of a predatory animal, of a lizard perhaps ready to pounce.
In the distance Thornhill caught sight of others, not all of them human. A globular Spican was visible near the stream’s edge. Then Thornhill frowned for the first time; who were they, and what business had they in his Valley?
“Hello,” the girl said. “My name’s Marga Fallis. This is La Floquet. You just get here?”
She glanced toward the man named La Floquet and said quietly, “He hasn’t come out of it yet, obviously. He must be brand-new.”
“He’ll wake up soon,” La Floquet said. His voice was dark and sharp.
“What are you two muttering?” Thornhill demanded angrily. “How did you get here?”
“The same way you did,” the girl said, “and the sooner you admit that to yourself—”
Hotly, Thornhill said, “I’ve always been here, damn you! This is the Valley! I’ve spent my whole life here! And I’ve never seen either of you before. Any of you. You just appeared out of nowhere, you and this little rooster and those others down by the river, and I—” He stopped, feeling a sudden wrenching shaft of doubt.
Of course I’ve always lived here, he told himself.
He began to quiver. He leaped abruptly forward, seeing in the smiling little man with the wisp of russet hair around his ears the enemy that had cast him forth from Eden. “Damn you, it was fine till you got here!
You had to spoil itl I’ll pay you back, though.”
Thornhill sprang at the little man viciously, thinking to knock him to the ground. But to his astonishment he was the one to recoil; La Floquet remained unbudged, still smiling, still glinting birdlike at him. Thornhill sucked in a deep breath and drove forward at La Floquet a second time. This time he was efficiently caught and held; he wriggled, but though La Floquet was a good twenty years older and a foot shorter, there was surprising strength in his wiry body. Sweat burst out-on Thornhill. Finally he gave ground and dropped back.
“Fighting is foolish,” La Floquet said tranquilly. “It accomplishes nothing. What’s your name?”
“Sam Thornhill.”
“Now, attend to me. What were you doing in the moment before you first knew you were in the Valley?”
“I’ve always been in the Valley,” Thornhill said stubbornly.
“Think,” said the girl. “Look back. There was a time before you came to the Valley.”
Thornhill turned away, looking upward at the mighty mountain peaks that hemmed them in, at the fast-flowing stream that wound between them and out toward the Barrier. A grazing beast wandered on the upreach of the foothill, nibbling the sharp-toothed grass. Had there ever been a someplace else, Thornhill wondered?
No. There had always been the Valley, and here he had lived alone and at peace until that final deceptive moment of tranquility, followed by this strange unwan ted invasion.
“It usually takes several hours for the effect to wear off,” the girl said. “Then you’ll remember…the way we remember. Think. You’re from Earth, aren’t you?”
“Earth?” Thornhill repeated dimly.
“Green hills, spreading cities, oceans, spaceliners. Earth. No?”
“Observe the heavy tan,” La Floquet pointed out. “He’s from Earth, but he hasn’t lived there for a while. How about Vengamon?”
“Vengamon,” Thornhill declared, not questioningly this time. The strange syllables seemed to have meaning: a swollen yellow sun, broad plains, a growing city of colonists, a flourishing ore trade. “I know the word,” he said.
“Was that the planet where you lived?” the girl prodded. “Vengamon?”
“I think—” Thorinhill began hesitantly. His knees felt weak. A neat pattern of life was breaking down and cascading away from him, sloughing off as if-it had never been at all.
It had never been.
“I lived on Vengamon,” he said.
“Good!” La Floquet cried. “The first fact has been elicited! Now to think where you were the very moment before you came here. A spaceship, perhaps? Traveling between worlds? Think, Thornhill.”
He thought. The effort was mind-wracking, but he deliberately blotted out the memories of his life in the Valley and searched backward until—
“I was a passenger on the liner Royal Mother Helene, bound into Vengamon from the neighboring world of Jurinalle. I…had been on holiday. I was returning to my—my plantation? No, not plantation.
Mine. I own mining land on Vengamon. That’s it, yes—mining land.” The light of the double suns became oppressively warm; he felt dizzy. “I remember now: The trip was an uneventful one; I was bored and dozed off a few minutes. Then I recall sensing that I was outside the ship, somehow—and—blank. Next thing, I was here in the Valley.”
“The standard pattern,” La Floquet said. He gestured to the others down near the stream. “There are eight of us in all, including you. I arrived first—yesterday, I call it, though actually there’s been no night. The girl came after me. Then three others. You’re the third one to come today.”
Thornhill blinked. “We’re just being picked out of nowhere and dumped here? How is it possible?”
La Floquet shrugged. “You will be asking that question more than once before you’ve left the Valley. Come. Let’s meet the others.”
The small man turned with an imperious gesture and retraced his steps down the path; the girl followed, and Thornhill fell in line behind her. He realized he had been standing on a ledge overlooking the river, one of the foothills of the two great mountains that formed the Valley’s boundaries.
The air was warm, with a faint breeze stirring through it. He felt younger than his thirty-seven years, certainly; more alive, more perceptive. He caught the fragrance of the golden blossoms that lined the riverbed and saw the light sparkle of the double sunlight scattered by the water’s spray.
He thought of glancing at his watch. The hands read 14:23. That was interesting enough. The day hand said 7 July 2671. It was still the same day, then. On 7 July 2671 he had left Jurinalle for Vengamon, and he had lunched at n 140. That meant he had probably dozed off about noon—and unless something were wrong with his watch, only two hours had passed since then. Two hours. And yet—the memories still said, though they were fading fast now—he had spent an entire life in this Valley, unmarred by intruders until a few moments before.
“This is Sam Thornhill,” T.a Floquet suddenly said. “He’s our newest arrival. He’s out of Vengamon.”
Thornhill eyed the others curiously. There were five of them, three human, one humanoid, one nonhumanoid. The nonhumanoid, globular in its yellow-green phase just now but seeming ready to shift to its melancholy brownish-red guise, was a being of Spica. Tiny clawed feet peeked out from under the great melonlike body; dark grapes atop stalks studied Thornhill with unfathomable alien curiosity.
The humanoid, Thornhill saw, hailed from one of the worlds of Regulus. He was keen-eyed, pale orange in color. The heavy flap of flesh swinging from his throat was the chief external alien characteristic of the being. Thornhill had met his kind before.
Of the remaining three, one was a woman, small, plain-looking, dressed in drab gray cloth garments. There were two men: a spidery spindle-shanked sort with mild scholarly eyes and an apologetic smile and a powerfully built man of thirty or so, shirtless, scowling impatiently.
“As you can see, it’s quite a crew,” La Floquet remarked to Thornhill. “Vellers, did you have any luck ’ down by the barrier?”
The big man shook his head. “I followed the main stream as far as I dared. But you get beyond that grassy bend down there and come smack against that barrier, like a wall you can’t see planted in the water.” His accent was broad and heavy; he was obviously of Earth, Thornhill thought, and not from one of the colony worlds.
La Floquet frowned. “Did you try swimming underneath? No, of course you didn’t. Eh?”
Vellers’ scowl grew darker. “There wasn’t any percentage in it, Floquet. I dove ten-fifteen feet, and the barrier was still like glass—smooth and clean to the touch, y’know, but strong. I didn’t aim to go any lower.”
“All right,” La Floquet said sharply. ‘It doesn’t matter. Few of us could swim that deep, anyway.” He glanced at Thornhill. “You see that this lovely Valley is likely to become our home for life, don’t you?”
“There’s no way out?”
The small man pointed to the gleaming radiance of the barrier, which rose in a high curving arc from the water and formed a triangular wedge closing off the lower end of the Valley. vYou see that thing down there. We don’t know what’s at the other end, but we’d have to climb twenty thousand feet of mountain to find out. There’s no way out of here.”
“Do we want to get out?” asked the thin man in a shallow, petulant voice. “I was almost dead when I came here, La Floquet. Now I’m alive again. I don’t know if I’m so anxious to leave here.”
La Floquet whirled. His eyes flashed angrily as he said, “Mr. McKay, I’m delighted to hear of your recovery. But life still waits for me outside this place, lovely as the Valley is. I don’t intend to rot away in here forever—not La Floquet I”
McKay shook his head slowly. “I wish there were some way of stopping you from looking for a way out. I’ll die in a week if I go out of the Valley. If you escape, La Floquet, you’ll be my murderer!”
“I just don’t understand,” Thornhill said in confusion. “If La Floquet finds a way out, what’s it to you, McKay? Why don’t you just stay here?”
McKay smiled unhappily. “I guess you haven’t told him, then,” he said to La Floquet.
“No. I didn’t have a chance.” La Floquet turned to Thornhill. “What this dried-up man of books is saying is that the Watcher has warned us that if one of us leaves the Valley, all the others must go.”
“The Watcher?”Thornhill repeated.
“It was he who brought you here. You’ll see him again. Occasionally he talks to us and tells us things. This morning he told us this-: that our fates are bound together.”
“And I ask you not to keep searching for the way out,” McKay said dolefully. “My life depends on staying in the Valley!”
“And mine on getting out!” La Floquet blazed. He lunged forward and sent McKay sprawling to the ground in one furious gesture of contempt.
McKay turned even paler and clutched at his chest as he landed. “My heart! You shouldn’t—”
Thornhill moved forward and assisted McKay to his feet. The tall, stoop-shouldered man looked dazed and shaken, but unhurt. He drew himself together and said quietly, “Two days ago a blow like that would have killed me. And now—you see?” he asked, appealing to Thornhill. “The Valley has strange properties. I don’t want to leave. And he—he’s condemning me to die!”
