The Man in the Maze by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg
Language: ara, eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2015-05-29T21:55:24+00:00

SEVEN

Muller had often been alone for long periods. In drawing up the contract for his first marriage he had insisted on a withdrawal clause, the standard one; and Lorayn had not objected, for she knew that his work might occasionally take him to places where she would not or could not go. During the eight years of that marriage he had enforced the clause three times for a total of four years.

When they let the contract run out, Muller’s absences were not really a contributing factor. He had learned in those years that he could stand solitude, and even that he thrived on it in a strange way. We develop everything in solitude except character, Stendhal had written; Muller was not sure of that but, in any case, his character had been fully formed before he began accepting assignments that took him unaccompanied to empty dangerous worlds. He had volunteered for those assignments. In a different sense he had volunteered to immure himself on Lemnos, and this exile was more painful to him than those other absences. Yet he got along. His own adaptability astonished and frightened him. He had not thought he could shed his social nature so easily. The sexual part was difficult, but not as difficult as he had imagined it would be; and the rest—the stimulation of debate, the change of surroundings, the interplay of personalities—had somehow ceased quickly to matter. He had enough cubes to keep him diverted, and enough challenges surviving in this maze. And memories.

He could summon remembered scenes from a hundred worlds. Man sprawled everywhere, planting the seed of Earth on colonies of a thousand stars. Delta Pavonis VI, for example: twenty light-years out, and rapidly going strange. They called the planet Loki, which struck Muller as a whopping misnomer, for Loki was agile, shrewd, slight of build, and the settlers on Loki, fifty years isolated from Earth, went in for a cult of artificial obesity through glucostatic regulation. Muller had visited them a decade before his ill-starred Beta Hydri journey. It was essentially a troubleshooting mission to a planet that had lost touch with its mother world. He remembered a warm planet, habitable only in a narrow temperate belt. Passing through walls of green jungle bordering a black river; watching beasts with jeweled eyes jostling on the swampy banks; coming at last to the settlement, where sweaty Buddhas weighing a few hundred kilograms apiece sat in stately meditation before thatched huts. He had never seen so much flesh per cubic meter before. The Lokites meddled with their peripheral glucoreceptors to induce accumulation of body fat. It was a useless adaptation, unrelated to any problem of their environment; they simply liked to be huge. Muller recalled arms that looked like thighs, thighs that looked like pillars, bellies that curved and recurved in triumphant excess.

They had hospitably offered a woman to the spy from Earth. For Muller, it was a lesson in cultural relativity; for there were in the village two or three

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