A time of changes, p.1
A Time of Changes, page 1
A TIME OF
CHANGES
BOOKS BY ROBERT SILVERBERG
FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
Dying Inside
A Time of Changes
EDITED BY ROBERT SILVERBERG
Legends-Vol. 1 Stories by the Masters of Modern Fantasy
Legends-Vol. 2 Stories by the Masters of Modern Fantasy
Legends-Vol. 3 Stories by the Masters of Modern Fantasy
Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One
A TIME OF
CHANGES
ROBERT
SILVERBERG
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events
portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously.
A TIME OF CHANGES
Copyright © 1971 by Agberg, Ltd.
Preface copyright © 2009 by Agberg, Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Originally published in 1971 by Doubleday. A shorter version
of this novel was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction.
Map by Isaac Stewart
An Orb Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.torforge.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2231-9
ISBN-10: 0-7653-2231-5
First Orb Edition: May 2009
Printed in the United States of America
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For Terry and Carol Carr
PREFACE
Someone once wrote, so I am told, a novel using no word that contains the letter “e.” When I first heard about it, the idea gave me the shivers, for writing novels is hard enough work when one is employing the full range of one’s vocabulary, and tossing in a handicap of that sort is enough to guarantee a case of terminal hiccups, at the very least. Spare me, I prayed, from the urge to attempt such stunts.
And then, years later, I found myself embarked on a novel in which it was forbidden for any character to refer to himself in the first person.
I had been working on it for a week or so, struggling against the strange self-imposed constraint of having to avoid the vertical pronoun, when I remembered that “e”-less novel. I broke into a sweat as I wondered how I was ever going to get to the other end of my book with my sanity reasonably intact; and then I took a deep breath, told myself that I wasn’t writing my book under such a strange limitation as a stunt or as an act of penance, but because it was a story that had to be told that way by virtue of the nature of the society I had invented for it, and I got back to work. And eventually I finished the book and it was published, and it went on to win the Nebula Award for the best science-fiction novel of 1971, and both it and I lived happily ever after, and I’ll never ask a similar exercise of myself again.
My purpose in avoiding the use of the word “I” in A Time of Changes was not to display my own cleverness, of course, or to make a hard job harder for myself, but only to represent, by a grammatical approximation in an equivalent language, the linguistic practices of an imaginary extraterrestrial culture so repressed, so enchained by rigorous self-effacement, that all verbal references to self are taboo and must be handled euphemistically. It wasn’t a particularly original notion—there are existing cultures in our own world, notably among the Eskimo, where first person singular is considered improper usage—but I thought it might be new to science fiction. In that I was wrong, naturally. (Absolutely new ideas in science fiction are a lot less common than is generally suspected. I mean altogether new ideas, not merely ingenious variations on familiar ones. The last such really original SF idea I can think of is Bob Shaw’s “slow glass” concept in the short story “The Light of Other Days,” and that was more than forty years ago. It will probably turn out that something much like slow glass figures in some Jules Verne novel of the 1880s, anyway.)
My central situation in A Time of Changes has had at least one well-known previous use—in a book that I had read in 1953 and long since forgotten. This was Ayn Rand’s Anthem, a short novel first published in 1946 and dedicated to Rand’s usual theme, “The world is perishing from an orgy of altruism.” In the dystopian society depicted in Anthem, the collective society has triumphed, and the first-person-singular pronoun has been abolished; the narrator speaks of himself as “we,” as does everyone else in that society, but eventually he discovers the Unspeakable Word and launches a revolution intended to restore the sacred rights of the individual ego. This is not quite what I was doing in A Time of Changes, where the problem is not all-engulfing collectivist socialism but rather a dour, ritualized, formalized pseudo-modesty that conceals ferocious macho self-assertiveness. The narrative effect, though, is the same. Rand’s character and mine struggle toward liberation of self, which requires them, among other things, to move through dense grammatical thickets, hers speaking of himself as “we” and mine speaking of himself as “one,” and there is a similar rigid courtliness to the style. What struck me as eerie, though, was the similarity between Rand’s opening lines and my own. When I rediscovered Anthem in 1972, almost twenty years after I had read or thought of it and several years after I had finished writing A Time of Changes, I was astonished to find that its opening paragraph went like this:
It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven! (....)
It is dark here. The flame of the candle stands still in the air. Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. We are alone here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our head.
Now look at the opening page of A Time of Changes. The resemblance is startling—Rand’s narrator alone in a tunnel, mine in a desert shack, each beginning his tale by speaking of his transgression against a rigid society. I had forgotten even the existence of her book when I began my own, and unless you would argue that everything we read is permanently recorded in some cerebral niche and is apt to come floating back up to consciousness at any time, the similarity can only be considered coincidence, though a strange one. (The rest of my book is scarcely at all like Anthem—thank goodness.)
I wrote A Time of Changes in the summer of 1970, and it was, I suppose, my response to all that had been happening in American life and in my own in the last few years of the 1960s, that time of changes for so many of us. I had been as rigid and controlled as anyone else in the old pre-Beatles, pre-psychedelic, prerevolutionary world of the Eisenhower years, and I had been rocked by transformations in the crazy decade that followed, transformations that had altered my attitude toward life, my manner of dress, my work, and just about everything else. In 1970 I hovered emotionally and spiritually somewhere between my native New York and far-off, beckoning California, the center of the cultural revolution—between the old life and the new. For a long while I oscillated uncertainly, not yet having opted fully for California, and A Time of Changes is to some extent the record of that inner upheaval, modulated by the metaphors of science fiction but thoroughly recognizable for what lay behind them. (Some of my more staid friends misunderstood the book, thinking it was merely a tract urging wider and wider use of psychedelic drugs. That wasn’t my intention at all—it was the liberation that the drugs helped to bring, not the use of drugs for their own sake, that I was talking about—but it was hard to convince them.)
The novel was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, which was at the time the leading SF magazine in the field and my own main magazine publisher, and early in 1971 was published in a hardcover edition by the Science Fiction Book Club, with the first paperback edition appearing that summer from New American Library. In April of 1972 the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America awarded it the Nebula as the year’s best novel—and, not very long after I had begun my new existence in the San Francisco Bay Area, I flew down to the awards ceremony in Los Angeles to collect my handsome Lucite trophy. There was something deliciously appropriate, I think, about being handed a Nebula for A Time of Changes almost immediately after I had broken from my old confined life in New York to breathe the fresher, stranger air of California.
By now, of course, almost forty years later, I’ve lived more than half my life as a Californian. The upheavals and weirdnesses of the era in which A Time of Changes was
—Robert Silverberg
April 2008
A TIME OF
CHANGES
ONE
I AM KINNALL DARIVAL and I mean to tell you all about myself.
That statement is so strange to me that it screams in my eyes. I look at it on the page, and I recognize the hand as my own—narrow upright red letters on the coarse gray sheet—and I see my name, and I hear in my mind the echoes of the brain-impulse that hatched those words. I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. Incredible.
This is to be what the Earthman Schweiz would call an autobiography. Which means an account of one’s self and deeds, written by one’s self. It is not a literary form that we understand on our world—I must invent my own method of narrative, for I have no precedents to guide me. But this is as it should be. On this my planet I stand alone, now. In a sense, I have invented a new way of life; I can surely invent a new sort of literature. They have always told me I have a gift for words.
So I find myself in a clapboard shack in the Burnt Lowlands, writing obscenities as I wait for death, and praising myself for my literary gifts.
I am Kinnall Darival.
Obscene! Obscene! Already on this one sheet I have used the pronoun “I” close to twenty times, it seems. While also casually dropping such words as “my,” “me,” “myself,” more often than I care to count. A torrent of shamelessness. I I I I I. If I exposed my manhood in the Stone Chapel of Manneran on Naming Day, I would be doing nothing so foul as I am doing here. I could almost laugh. Kinnall Darival practicing a solitary vice. In this miserable lonely place he massages his stinking ego and shrieks offensive pronouns into the hot wind, hoping they will sail on the gusts and soil his fellow men. He sets down sentence after sentence in the naked syntax of madness. He would, if he could, seize you by the wrist and pour cascades of filth into your unwilling ear. And why? Is proud Darival in fact insane? Has his sturdy spirit entirely collapsed under the gnawing of mindsnakes? Is nothing left but the shell of him, sitting in this dreary hut, obsessively titillating himself with disreputable language, muttering “I” and “me” and “my” and “myself,” blearily threatening to reveal the intimacies of his soul?
No. It is Darival who is sane and all of you who are sick, and though I know how mad that sounds, I will let it stand. I am no lunatic muttering filth to wring a feeble pleasure from a chilly universe. I have passed through a time of changes, and I have been healed of the sickness that affects those who inhabit my world, and in writing what I intend to write I hope to heal you as well, though I know you are on your way into the Burnt Lowlands to slay me for my hopes.
So be it.
I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself.
TWO
LINGERING VESTIGES OF THE customs against which I rebel still plague me. Perhaps you can begin to comprehend what an effort it is for me to frame my sentences in this style, to twist my verbs around in order to fit the first-person construction. I have been writing ten minutes and my body is covered with sweat, not the hot sweat of the burning air about me but the dank, clammy sweat of mental struggle. I know the style I must use, but the muscles of my arm rebel against me, and fight to put down the words in the old fashion, saying, One has been writing for ten minutes and one’s body is covered with sweat, saying, One has passed through a time of changes, and he has been healed of the sickness that affects those who inhabit his world. I suppose that much of what I have written could have been phrased in the old way, and no harm done; but I do battle against the self-effacing grammar of my world, and if I must, I will joust with my own muscles for the right to arrange my words according to my present manner of philosophy.
In any case, however my former habits trick me into mis-constructing my sentences, my meaning will blaze through the screen of words. I may say, “I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself,” or I may say, “One’s name is Kinnall Darival and he means to tell you all about himself,” but there is no real difference. Either way, the content of Kinnall Darival’s statement is—by your standards, by the standards I would destroy—disgusting, contemptible, obscene.
THREE
ALSO I AM TROUBLED, at least in these early pages, by the identity of my audience. I assume, because I must, that I will have readers. But who are they? Who are you? Men and women of my native planet, perhaps, furtively turning my pages by torchlight, dreading the knock at the door. Or maybe other-worlders, reading for amusement, scanning my book for the insight it may give into an alien and repellent society. I have no idea. I can establish no easy relationship with you, my unknown reader. When I first conceived my plan of setting down my soul on paper, I thought it would be simple, a mere confessional, nothing but an extended session with an imaginary drainer who would listen endlessly and at last give me absolution. But now I realize I must take another approach. If you are not of my world, or if you are of my world but not of my time, you may find much here that is incomprehensible.
Therefore I must explain. Possibly I will explain too much, and drive you off by pounding you with the obvious. Forgive me if I instruct you in what you already know. Forgive me if my tone and mode of attack show lapses of consistency and I seem to be addressing myself to someone else. For you will not hold still for me, my unknown reader. You wear many faces for me. Now I see the crooked nose of Jidd the drainer, and now the suave smile of my bondbrother Noim Condorit, and now the silkiness of my bondsister Halum, and now you become the tempter Schweiz of pitiful Earth, and now you are my son’s son’s son’s son’s son, not to be born for a cluster of years and eager to know what manner of man your ancestor was, and now you are some stranger of a different planet, to whom we of Borthan are grotesque, mysterious, and baffling. I do not know you, and so I will be clumsy in my attempts to talk to you.
But, by Salla’s Gate, before I am done you will know me, as no man of Borthan has ever been known by others before!
FOUR
I AM A MAN of middle years. Thirty times since the day of my birth has Borthan traveled around our golden-green sun, and on our world a man is considered old if he has lived through fifty such circuits, while the most ancient man of whom I ever heard died just short of his eightieth. From this you may be able to calculate our spans in terms of yours, if otherworlder you happen to be. The Earthman Schweiz claimed an age of forty-three years by his planet’s reckoning, yet he seemed no older than I.
My body is strong. Here I shall commit a double sin, for not only shall I speak of myself without shame, but I shall show pride and pleasure in my physical self. I am tall: a woman of normal height reaches barely to the lower vault of my chest. My hair is dark and long, falling to my shoulders. Lately streaks of gray have appeared in it, and likewise in my beard, which is full and thick, covering much of my face. My nose is prominent and straight, with a wide bridge and large nostrils; my lips are fleshy and give me, so it is said, a look of sensuality; my eyes are deep brown and are set somewhat far apart in my skull. They have, I am given to understand, the appearance of the eyes of one that has been accustomed all his life to commanding other men.
