Tom O'Bedlam

by Robert Silverberg

Overview

A tortured man’s visions hold the key to mankind’s future in Robert Silverberg’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece
 
Life in the blasted wasteland of 2103 California is nasty, brutish, and short. If the savage “scratchers” don’t kill you, the poisoned environment will. But one man wanders this desolate landscape and sees beauty: glorious visions of impossible places and majestic beings not of Earth. Scorned and mocked as a madman, Tom doubts his sanity until his visions mysteriously begin to spread to others and a returning star probe offers evidence that they are real. Now, as a new religion is born, with Tom as its reluctant messiah, violent forces are unleashed—forces that have the power to transform humanity . . . or destroy it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504014298
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Publication date:	07/28/2015
Pages:	436
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Robert Silverberg is one of science fiction’s most beloved writers, and the author of such contemporary classics as  Dying Inside ,  Downward to the Earth,  and  Lord Valentine’s Castle . He is a past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and the winner of five Nebula Awards and five Hugo Awards. In 2004 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America presented him with the Grand Master Award. Silverberg is one of twenty-nine writers to have received that distinction. 

Read an Excerpt

Tom O'Bedlam

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By Robert Silverberg

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 2001 Agberg Ltd.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1421-2

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CHAPTER 1

ONE

This time something had told Tom to try going westward. West was a good direction, he figured. You head for the sunset, maybe you can walk right off the edge into the stars.

Late on a July afternoon he came struggling up the slope of a steep dry wash and paused in a parched field to catch his breath and look around. This was about a hundred, hundred-fifty miles east of Sacramento, on the thirsty side of the mountains, in the third year of the new century. They said this was the century in which all the miseries were supposed finally to end. Maybe they really would, Tom thought. But you couldn't count on it.

Just up ahead he saw seven or eight men in ragged clothes, gathered around an old ground-effect van with jagged red-and-yellow lightning bolts painted on its rusting flanks. It was hard to tell whether they were repairing the van or stealing it, or both. Two of them were underneath, with their heads and shoulders poking into the propeller gearbox, and one was fiddling with the air intake filter. The rest were leaning against the van's rear gate in a cozy proprietary way. All of them were armed. No one paid any attention to Tom at all.

"Poor Tom," he said tentatively, testing the situation. "Hungry Tom." There didn't seem to be any danger, though out here in the wild country you could never be sure. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, hoping one of them would notice him. He was a tall, lean, sinewy man with dark, tangled hair, somewhere around thirty-three, thirty-five years old: he gave various answers when he was asked, which wasn't often. "Anything for Tom?" he ventured. "Tom's hungry."

Still no one as much as glanced toward him. He might as well have been invisible. He shrugged and took his finger-piano from his pack, and began to strum the little metal keys. Quietly he sang:

Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away —

They went on ignoring him. That was all right with Tom. It was a lot better than being beaten up. They could see he was harmless, and most likely they'd help him out, sooner or later, if only to get rid of him. People generally did, even the really wild ones, the killer bandidos: not even they would want to hurt a poor crazy simpleton. Sooner or later, he figured, they'd let him have a bit of bread and a gulp or two of beer, and he'd thank them and move onward, westward, toward San Francisco or Mendocino or one of those places. But five minutes more went by, and they continued not to acknowledge his presence. It was almost like a game they were playing with him.

Just then a hot, biting wind rose up suddenly out of the east. They paid attention to that. "Here comes the bad news breeze," muttered a short thick-featured red-haired man, and they all nodded and swore. "God damn, just what we need, a wind full of hard garbage," the red-haired man said. Scowling glaring, he hunched himself down into his shoulders as if that would protect him from whatever radioactivity the wind might be carrying.

"Turn on the props, Charley," said one with blue eyes and rough, pitted skin. "Let's blow the fucking stuff back into Nevada where it came from, hey?"

"Yeah. Sure," one of the others said, a little sour-faced Latino. "That's what we oughta do. Sure. Christ, blow it right back there."

Tom shivered. The wind was a mean one. The east wind always was. But it felt clean to him. He could usually tell when radiation was sailing on the wind that blew out of the dusted places. It set up a tingling sensation inside his skull, from an area just above his left ear to the edge of his eyebrow-ridge. He didn't feel that now.

He felt something else, though, something that was getting to be very familiar. It was a sound deep in his brain, the roaring rush of sound that told him that one of his visions was starting to stir in him. And then cascades of green light began to sweep through his mind.

He wasn't surprised that it was happening here, now, in this place, at this hour, among these men. An east wind could do it to him, sometimes. Or a particular kind of light late in the day, or the coming of cold, clear air after a rainstorm. Or when he was with strangers who didn't seem to like him. It didn't take much. It didn't take anything at all, a lot of the time. His mind was always on the edge of some sort of vision. They were boiling inside him, ready to seize control when the moment came. Strange images and textures forever churned in his head. He never fought them any longer. At first he had, because he thought they meant he was going crazy. But by now he didn't care whether he was crazy or not, and he knew that fighting the visions would give him a headache at best, or if he struggled really hard he might get knocked to his knees, but in any case there was nothing he could do to keep the visions from coming on. It was impossible to hold them back, only to bang and jangle them around a little, and when he tried that he was the one who got most of the banging and jangling. Besides, the visions were the best thing that had ever happened to him. By now he loved his visions.

One was happening now, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Coming on now, for sure. The green world again. Tom smiled. He relaxed and yielded himself to it.

Hello, green world! Coming for to carry me home?

Golden-green sunlight glimmered on smooth alien hills. He heard the surging and crashing of a distant turquoise sea. The heavy air was thick as velvet, sweet as wine. Shining elegant crystalline forms, still indistinct but rapidly coming into sharp focus, were beginning to glide across the screen of Tom's soul: tall fragile figures that seemed to be fashioned of iridescent glass of many colors. They moved with astonishing grace. Their bodies were long and slender, with mirror-bright limbs sharp as spears. Their faceted eyes, glittering with wisdom, were set in rows of three on each of the four sides of their tapering diamond-shaped heads. It wasn't the first time Tom had seen them. He knew who they were: the aristocrats, the princes and dukes and countesses and such, of that lovely green place.

Through the vision he could still dimly make out the seven or eight scruffy men clustered around the ground-effect van. He had to tell them what he was seeing. He always did, whenever he was with other people when a vision struck. "It's the green world," he said. "You see the light? Can you? Can you? It's like a flood of emeralds pouring down from the sky." He stood with his legs braced far apart, his head thrown back, his shoulders curving around as if they were trying to meet behind him. Words spilled from his lips. "Look, there are seven crystallines walking toward the Summer Palace. Three females, two males, two of the other kind. Jesus, how beautiful! Like diamonds all up and down their skins. And their eyes, their eyes! Oh, God, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?"

"Hey, what kind of nut do we have here?" someone asked.

Tom barely heard. These ragged strangers hardly seemed real to him now. What was real were the lords and ladies of the green world, strolling in splendor through glades and mists. He gestured toward them. "That's the Misilyne Triad, d'ye see? The three in the center, the tallest. And that's Vuruun, who was ambassador to the Nine Suns under the old dynasty. And that one — oh, look there, toward the east! It's the green aurora starting! Jesus, it's like the sky's on fire burning green, isn't it? They see it too. They're all pointing, staring — you see how excited they are? I've never seen them excited before. But something like this —"

"A nut, all right. A real case. You could tell, right away, first thing when he walked up."

"Some of these crazies, they can get damn ugly when the fit's on them. I heard stories. They bust loose, you can't even tie them down, they're so strong."

"You think he's that bad?"

"Who the fuck knows? You ever see anybody this crazy?"

"Hey, crazy man! Hey, you hear me?"

"Let him be, Stidge."

"Hey, crazy man! Hey, nutso!"

Voices. Faint, far-off, blurred. Ghost-voices, buzzing and droning about him. What they were saying didn't matter. Tom's eyes were glowing. The green aurora whirled and blazed in the eastern sky. Lord Vuruun was worshipping it, holding his four translucent arms outstretched. The Triad was embracing. Music was coming from somewhere, now, a heavenly music resonating from world to world. The voices were only a tiny scratching sound lost somewhere within that great mantle of music.

Then someone hit him hard in the stomach, and he doubled over, gagging and gasping and coughing. The green world whirled wildly around him and the image began to break up. Stunned, Tom rocked back and forth, not knowing where he was.

"Stidge! Let him be!"

Another punch, even harder. It dizzied him. Tom dropped to his knees and stared with unfocused eyes at brown wisps of withered grass. A thin stream of puke erupted from him. It felt like his guts ripping loose and spewing out of his mouth. It was a mistake to have let himself fall down, he knew. They were going to start kicking him now. Something like this had happened to him last year up in Idaho, and his ribs had been six weeks healing.

"Dumb — crazy — nut —"

"Stidge! Damn you, Stidge!"

Three kicks. Tom huddled low, fighting the pain. In some corner of his mind one last fragment of the vision remained, a sleek and gleaming crystalline shape, unrecognizable, vanishing. Then he heard shouts, curses, threats. He was aware that a fight was going on around him. He kept his eyes closed and drew his breath carefully, listening for the inner scrape of bone on bone. But nothing appeared to be broken.

"Can you stand up?" a quiet voice asked, a little while later. "Come on. Nobody's going to hurt you now. Look at me. Hey, guy, look at me."

Hesitantly Tom opened his eyes. A man whose face he did not know, a man with a short-cropped dense black beard and deep dark rings under his eyes — one of those who had been working inside the gearbox before, most likely — was crouching beside him. He looked just about as mean and rough as the others, but somehow there seemed to be something gentler about him. Tom nodded, and the man put his hands to Tom's elbows and delicately lifted him.

"Are you all right?"

"I think so. Just shook, some. More than some."

Tom glanced around. The red-haired man was slumped down by the side of the van, spitting up blood and glaring. The others were standing back in a loose semicircle, frowning uneasily.

"Who are you?" the black-bearded man asked.

"He's just a fucking nut!" the red-haired one said.

"Shut up, Stidge." To Tom the man said again, "What's your name?"

"Tom."

"Just Tom?"

Tom shrugged. "Just Tom, yeah."

"Tom from where?"

"Idaho, last. Heading for California."

"You're in California," the black-bearded man said. "You going toward San Francisco?"

"Maybe. I'm not sure. Doesn't matter a whole lot, does it?"

"Get him out of here," Stidge said. He was on his feet again. "God damn you, Charley, get that nut out of here before I —"

The black-bearded man turned. "Christ, Stidge, you're asking for a whole lot of trouble." He brought his right arm up across his chest and cocked it. There was a laser bracelet on his wrist with the yellow "ready" light glowing. Stidge looked at it in astonishment.

"Jesus, Charley!"

"Just sit back down over there, man."

"Jesus, he's only a nut!"

"Well, he's my nut now. Anybody hurt him, he's gonna get hard light through his belly. Okay, Stidge?"

The red-haired man was silent.

Charley said to Tom, "You hungry?"

"You bet."

"We'll give you something. You can stay with us a few days, if you like. We'll be going toward Frisco if we can ever get this van moving." His dark-ringed eyes scanned Tom closely. "You carrying anything?"

Tom patted his backpack uncertainly. "Carrying?"

"Weapons. Knife, gun, spike, bracelet, anything?"

"No. Nothing."

"Walking around unarmed out here? Stidge is right. You got to be crazy." Charley flicked a finger toward the blue-eyed pitted-faced man. "Hey, Buffalo, lend Tom a spike or something, you hear? He needs to be carrying something."

Buffalo held out a thin shining metal strip with a handle at one end and a teardrop-shaped point at the other. "You know how to use a spike?" he asked. Tom simply stared at it. "Go on," Buffalo said. "Take it."

"I don't want it," Tom said. "Someone wants to hurt me, I figure that's his problem, not mine. Poor Tom doesn't hurt people. Poor Tom doesn't want any spike. But thanks. Thanks anyway."

Charley studied him a long moment. "You sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Okay," Charley told him, shaking his head. "Okay. Whatever you say."

"They don't come no crazier, do they?" the little Latino asked. "We give him a spike, he smiles and says no thanks. Out of his head crazy. Out of his fucking head."

"There's crazy and crazy," said Charley. "Maybe he knows what he's doing. You carry a spike, you likely to annoy somebody who's got a bigger spike. You don't carry any, maybe they let you pass. You see?" Charley grinned. He clapped his hand down on Tom's bony shoulder, hard, and squeezed. "You're my man, Tom. You and me, we going to learn a lot from each other, I bet. Anyone here touches you, you let me know, I'll make him sorry."

Buffalo said, "You want to finish on the van now, Charley?"

"To hell with it. Be too dark to work, another couple hours. Let's get us some jackasses for dinner and we can do the van in the morning. You know how to build a fire, Tom?"

"Sure."

"All right, build one. Don't start no conflagration, though. We don't want to call attention to ourselves."

Charley began pointing, sending his men off in different directions. Plainly they were his men. Stidge was the last to go, limping off sullenly, pausing to glower at Tom as though telling him that the only thing keeping him alive was Charley's protection, but that Charley wouldn't always be there to protect him. Tom took no notice. The world was full of men like Stidge; so far Tom had managed to cope with them well enough.

He found a bare place in the dry grass that looked good for making a fire and began to arrange twigs and other bits of kindling. He had been working for about ten minutes, and the fire was going nicely, when he became aware that Charley had returned and was standing behind him, watching.

"Tom?"

"Yeah, Charley?"

The black-bearded man hunkered down next to him and tossed a narrow log on the fire. "Good job," he said. "I like a neat fire, everything lined up straight like this." He moved a little closer to Tom and peered around this way and that as if making sure no one else was nearby. "I heard what you were saying when you were in that fit," Charley went on. His voice was low, barely more than a whisper. "About the green world. About the crystal people. Their shining skins. Their eyes, like diamonds. How did you say the eyes were arranged?"

"In rows of three, on each side of their heads."

"Four sides to the head?"

"Four, yes."

Charley was silent a while, poking at the fire. Then he said, in an even quieter voice, "I dreamed of a place just like that, about six nights ago. And then again night before last. Green sky, crystal people, eyes like diamonds, four rows of three around their heads. I saw it like I was seeing it in a show. And now you come along talking about the same place, shouting it out like you're possessed, and it's just the same place I saw. How in hell is that possible, that we could both have the same crazy dream? You tell me: How in hell is that possible?"

2

The sun was still half an hour on the far side of the Sierra Nevada when Elszabet awoke and stepped out on the porch of her cabin, naked, just the way she had slept. The coolness of the summer morning enfolded her. A soft blanket of fog lingered on out of the night, shrouding the tops of the redwoods and drifting more thinly down to ground level.

Beautiful, she thought. From all sides came the quiet plunking sounds of condensation, clear cool droplets falling from the lofty branches and hitting the soft carpet of deep brown duff. The hundreds of sword-ferns on the hillside in front of her cabin glistened as though they had been polished. Beautiful. Beautiful. Even the bluejays, shrieking as they started their day's work, seemed beautiful.

An altogether gorgeous morning. There was no other kind here, winter or summer. You had to like to be an early riser, here at the Nepenthe Center, because all the useful mindpick work necessarily was done before breakfast. But that was all right. Elszabet couldn't imagine not liking to awaken at dawn, when the dawn was a dawn like this. And there was no reason not to go to sleep early. What was there to do in the evenings, out here in the boonies hundreds of miles north of San Francisco?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Tom O'Bedlam by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 2001 Agberg Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Powerful and evocative . . . Intricately plotted . . . Magnificent.” — The   Washington Post Book World
 
“Brilliant . . . Intertwines the classic themes of science fiction . . . Succeeds as both science fiction and social commentary.” — The New York Times Book Review
 
“In this well-written and compelling novel, master stylist Robert Silverberg examines insanity, the messianic phenomenon and the nature of godhood—and still manages to tell a great story.” — The   Baltimore Sun 
 
“Brilliantly imagined . . . One of the finest writers ever to work in science fiction.” — The   Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Deserves the attention of readers interested in both adventure and philosophy—a rare mix.” — Los Angeles Herald Examiner

From the Publisher

Some bibliophiles might argue that a book written less than 20 years ago hasn't quite yet earned the title of "classic," but Robert Silverberg's "world in chaos" novel Tom O'Bedlam is being touted as such, here reprinted and updated by the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning author. It's the "definitive text," Silverberg writes, minus its original editor's revisions, and it tells a haunting tale of wisdom masked as madness and the search for answers to life's great questions. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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