The Eater Of Dreams

By

Robert Silverberg

“This is the shortest, by a good many thousands of words, of the two dozen or so stories I’ve had in Asimov’s over the years. But that doesn’t mean it’s insignificant, at least not to me, because writing it qualified me for a place in this very special issue. It’s an honor to be here, no matter what the length of the story.”

—Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg’s new story collection, To Be Continued, was published by Subterranean Press late last year. It’s the first volume in what is intended as a nine-volume set of Bob’s collected (not complete!) science fiction stories. This first volume covers stories written between 1953 and 1958. Obviously, it will take a while before we see the volume that includes this latest tale by our resident Grand Master.

The Queen-Goddess feels another dream coming to her tonight, and she knows it will be a dark one. So I am summoned to her, masked in the mask of my profession, and I crouch by her pallet, awaiting the night. The Queen-Goddess sleeps, lying asprawl like a child’s discarded doll. At the foot of the bed lurks the Vizier in his horned mask: our chaperone. No man, not even the royal Eater of Dreams, may enter the Queen-Goddess’ bedchamber unescorted.

Her spirit flutters and trembles. Her eyes move quickly beneath their lids. She is reaching the dream-world now. Her dreams are always true visions. Therefore she suffers when a dark one comes, for such dreams acquaint her with pain and grief, and we suffer when she suffers, since all things flow to us through the spirit of the Queen-Goddess. What she will bring us after such a dream is pain and grief. We cannot abide pain or grief; and so I must take her dark dreams from her as swiftly as I can.

Last night she dreamed—she could not communicate it well to me—of ashes and ruin, of ugliness and shame, of strife and sadness. From her vague description, I knew that she has been ranging through ancient times again. She often makes contact with some epoch of the distant pre-Imperial past, that era of apocalyptic nightmare out of which our own shining civilization emerged. Last night’s dream, for which, alas, I was not summoned in time, has cast its shadow over today’s flow of beneficial energy. If another like it comes tonight, I will be here to guard her majesty against it.

And, yes, yes, the dream is coming, and it is the same.

Surely her majesty has slipped once more into the black abyss of time past. I say the words that unlock the portals of her spirit, link my mind with hers, and see a fearful strangeness. The stars, of which she gives me just the most fleeting of glimpses before her gaze turns away from them, seem to have an unfamiliar look: the constellations I so quickly see do not appear to be the constellations we know today. They must be those of some long-ago epoch. The stars in their courses travel great distances over time.

And what I behold under these strange skies is bleakness and horror. We are in a hideous city. It is an era I have never seen in her dreams before, an awful one. The buildings are brutal towers, looming inexorably. On myriad interlacing roadways, vehicles move like swarming beetles. I see an ashen sky; I see stunted trees with blackened leaves; I see hordes of people with faces twisted in anguish. The air itself has a poisonous-looking pall. It is the past, yes; it is one of those dark predecessor civilizations, ridden with pain and error, out of which we have emerged into sunlight and joy. What can this terrible ancient era be, if not the dreadful world of eight, ten, twelve thousand years ago, that grim time so proud of the frenzied, furious industriousness that its builders mistook for wealth, from which the benevolence of her majesty’s dynasty has emancipated us all forever?

“Majesty,” I say softly. “Give me this dream.”

I utter the words of transfer and the dream enters me in all its fury. For a moment I recoil; but I am skilled in my art, and quickly I engulf the images, neutralize them, dissipate them, and then it is over and I am rising, trembling, drenched in sweat, fighting nausea. It will take me a while to recover. But I am used to that. Her majesty’s face is tranquil. She sleeps like a happy child. The Vizier comes to me and we embrace, mask against mask. “Well done,” he says. “But I fear this is not the last of them.”

The day that follows is a happy one. Strength and joy flow from her majesty from dawn to dusk. It is a day of golden sunlight, of cloudless skies, of unfolding blossoms and rising fragrance. The great lawns sweeping down to the river have never looked greener; the river’s pure flow is a celestial blue. We are a blessed people. We will not make the mistakes of yesteryear. Our civilization will endure eternally.

But at midnight the Vizier summons me again.

“Another,” he says. “The third night. This one will be the worst.”

Smiling, I tell him, “Whatever it is, I am ready.”

Indeed I am. For sixty years now I have guarded her majesty against the terrors of the night, and we have moved together from triumph to triumph. In the privacy of my soul I flatter myself with the thought that I am essential to the realm—that, without my diligence and skill, the Queen-Goddess would be ridden nightly by horror and torment and all the world would be the worse for that.

I don my mask. The Vizier dons his. The Queen, ever youthful, ever beautiful, is asleep. Signs of tension are visible on her brow. The dream is coming. I say the words. The link is formed.

It comes now, the dream.

Her wandering mind has entered that same ancient era, but this night there are significant differences. The brutal towers now are shattered: charred stumps are everywhere. Those interlacing roads are twisted and broken. Vehicles lie piled in rusting heaps along their margins. The air is black and oily. The citizens—there are just a few in the ruined streets—have a dazed, stunned look. Some dreadful thing has happened. The dreaming mind of the Queen-Goddess must have found the very end of the former era, the disastrous climactic time of the Great Collapse, when all assumptions were overthrown and the corrosive prosperity of the day tumbled overnight into that dreary poverty out of which, after so many centuries, our Imperial government created the serene, lovely epoch in which we live today.

It is a much more powerful vision than last night’s, and I know that afterward I will reverberate with it for hours, but so be it. I will take it from her and all will be well. “Majesty,” I say, as ever. “Give me—”

But then her head shifts, and she murmurs in her sleep, and the perspective changes and she shows me the sky, not the brief glimpse of last night but a long, slow, clear view, and everything is wrong. The moon, our familiar pockmarked moon, is a chipped and broken thing, and the stars whose patterns I have studied so well are not the stars of some vanished yesterday nor the stars of today but stars strung across the sky in some utterly unknown configuration. And in that moment all my strength leaves me, for I know this dream to be too huge to swallow. It is the future, not the past, through which the Queen-Goddess walks tonight, and what it shows is that the cycle of destruction will come round again, that our green and golden era that we thought to be invulnerable will not last eternally after all, that we too will be swept away as all earlier civilizations of Earth have been swept away. I can protect her against the past, but there is no way I can stave off the onrushing future, and I fling my mask aside and crouch and weep while the Vizier, maskless and stunned as well, comes hurrying to my side.

Copyright © 2007 Robert Silverberg