Beyond the Safe Zone by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Donald I. Fine
Published: 1986-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

The wind grew chillier. No one spoke. Beasts howled on the desert. Breckenridge lay back, feeling an ache in his shoulders, and wriggled against the cold stone floor.

Merry my wife, Cassandra my daughter, Noel my son—

SPACE—TIME-SPACE—

His eyes hurt from the aurora’s frosty glow. He felt himself stretched across the cosmos, torn between then and now, breaking, breaking, ripping into fragments like the moon—

The stars had come out. He contemplated the early constellations. They were unfamiliar; no matter how often Scarp or Horn pointed out the patterns to him, he saw only random sprinklings of light. In his other life he had been able to identify at least the more conspicuous constellations, but they did not seem to be here. How long does it take to effect a complete redistribution of the heavens? A million years? Ten million? Thank God Mars and Jupiter still were visible, the orange dot and the brilliant white one, to tell him that this place was his own world, his own solar system. Images danced in his aching skull. He saw everything double, suddenly. There was Pegasus, there was

Orion, there was Sagittarius. An overlay, a mask of realities superimposed on realities.

“Listen to this music,” Horn said after a long while, producing a fragile device of wheels and spindles from beneath his cloak. He caressed it and delicate sounds came forth: crystalline, comforting, the music of dreams, sliding into the range of audibility with no perceptible instant of attack. Shortly Scarp began a wordless song, and one by one the others joined him—first Horn, then Militor, and lastly, in a dry, buzzing monotone, Arios.

“What are you singing?” Breckenridge asked.

“The hymn of Oedipus King of Thieves,” Scarp told him.

Had it been such a bad life? He had been healthy, prosperous, and beloved. His father was managing partner of Falkner, Breckenridge & Company, one of the most stable of the Wall Street houses, and Breckenridge, after coming up through the ranks in the family tradition, putting in his time as a customer’s man and his time in the bond department and his time as a floor trader, was a partner too, only ten years out of Dartmouth. What was wrong with that? His draw in 1972 was $83,500—not as much as he had hoped for out of a partnership, but not bad, not bad at all, and next year might be much better. He had a wife and two children, an apartment on East 73rd Street, a country cabin on Candlewood Lake, a fair-size schooner that he kept in a Gulf Coast marina, and a handsome young mistress in an apartment of her own on the Upper West Side. What was wrong with that? When he burst through the fabric of the continuum and found himself in an unimaginably altered world at the end of time, he was astonished not that such a thing might happen but that it had happened to someone as settled and well established as himself.

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