The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, pulp, short stories, classic, space opera
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY

Originally published in Infinity Science Fiction (1970).

He was the only man aboard the ship, one man inside a sleek shining cylinder heading away from Bradley’s World at ten thousand miles a second, and yet he was far from alone. He had wife, father, daughter, son for company, and plenty of others, Ovid and Hemingway and Plato, and Shakespeare and Goethe, Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great, a stack of fancy cubes to go with the family ones. And his old friend Juan was along, too, the man who had shared his dream, his utopian fantasy, Juan who had been with him at the beginning and almost until the end. He had a dozen fellow voyagers in all. He wouldn’t be lonely, though he had three years of solitary travel ahead of him before he reached his landfall, his place of exile.

It was the third hour of his voyage. He was growing calm, now, after the frenzy of his escape. Aboard ship he had showered, changed, rested. The sweat and grime of that wild dash through the safety tunnel were gone, now, though he wouldn’t quickly shake from his mind the smell of that passageway, like rotting teeth, nor the memory of his terrifying fumbling with the security gate’s copper arms as the junta’s storm-troopers trotted toward him. But the gate had opened, and the ship had been there, and he had escaped, and he was safe. And he was safe.

I’ll try some cubes, he thought.

The receptor slots in the control room held six cubes at once. He picked six at random, slipped them into place, actuated the evoker. Then he went into the ship’s garden. There were screens and speakers all over the ship.

The air was moist and sweet in the garden. A plump, toga-clad man, clean-shaven, big-nosed, blossomed on one screen and said, “What a lovely garden! How I adore plants! You must have a gift for making things grow.”

“Everything grows by itself. You’re—”

“Publius Ovidius Naso.”

“Thomas Voigtland. Former President of the Citizens’ Council on Bradley’s World. Now president-in-exile, I guess. A coup d’etat by the military.”

“My sympathies. Tragic, tragic!”

“I was lucky to escape alive. I may never be able to return. They’ve probably got a price on my head.”

“I know how terrible it is to be sundered from your homeland. Were you able to bring your wife?”

“I’m over here,” Lydia said. “Tom? Tom, introduce me to Mr. Naso.”

“I didn’t have time to bring her,” Voigtland said. “But at least I took a cube of her with me.”

Lydia was three screens down from Ovid, just above a clump of glistening ferns. She looked glorious, her auburn hair a little too deep in tone but otherwise quite a convincing replica. He had cubed her two years before; her face showed none of the lines that the recent troubles had engraved on it. Voigtland said to her, “Not Mr. Naso, dear. Ovid. The poet Ovid.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. How did you happen to choose him?”

“Because he’s charming and civilized.

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