The Dead Man's Eyes: A Short Story

By Robert Silverberg

Guilt is in the eye of the beholder in this futuristic crime story from the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Lord Valentine’s Castle.
 
A lot of women were wearing Marianne’s face that season, which made it hard for Loren Frazier to forget that he killed his world-famous wife’s lover. The world wouldn’t forget it either; the image of his murderous impulse was caught forever in his victim’s brain—an eyeflash picture readily recovered by law enforcement.  
 
But a man of Frazier’s money and power has options: aliases, overseas accounts, the ability to change his appearance. Heartbreak and regret are his constant companions through the continents and the years—until he can truly see what he has become . . . 
 
Praise for Robert Silverberg and his short stories
 
“When Silverberg is at the top of his form, no one is better.” —George R. R. Martin, #1 New York Times–bestselling author
 
“Silverberg’s creative story premises are matched by a remarkable ability to make his characters sympathetic, whether human or not.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“The short stories in Robert Silverberg’s First-Person Singularities are inventive, sublime, and endlessly entertaining.” —Foreword Reviews
 
“Decades after being originally published, most of these stories are still just as entertaining and powerful as they were when first released. A singularly unique collection.” —Kirkus Reviews
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781504086455

Robert Silverberg

<p>Robert Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and the prestigious <em>Prix Apollo.</em> He is the author of more than one hundred science fiction and fantasy novels -- including the best-selling Lord Valentine trilogy and the classics <em>Dying Inside</em> and <em>A Time of Changes</em> -- and more than sixty nonfiction works. Among the sixty-plus anthologies he has edited are <em>Legends</em> and <em>Far Horizons,</em> which contain original short stories set in the most popular universe of Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, and virtually every other bestselling fantasy and SF writer today. Mr. Silverberg's Majipoor Cycle, set on perhaps the grandest and greatest world ever imagined, is considered one of the jewels in the crown of speculative fiction.</p>

Book preview

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The Dead Man’s Eyes

A Short Story

Robert Silverberg

Introduction

I wrote some crime stories when I was young, because in the early years of my career I wrote just about everything, but most of my fictional output, of course, has been science fiction. Crime fiction has never interested me much as a reader, let along as a writer. I’ve read the Sherlock Holmes stories with pleasure, yes, and a lot of Simenon, and quite a while back I read seven or eight Elmore Leonard book in one unceasing burst. I like the hitman stories of my friend Lawrence Block, too. But I never managed to get interested in the work of Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald or other masters of the genre whose praise I have heard, which is not to say that they are not masters, but only that the thing they are said to do so well is a thing that basically doesn’t speak to me. Doubless a lot of mystery writers feel the same way about science fiction. The Dead Man’s Eyes isn’t a detective story, but it is crime fiction, to the extent that it was actually in the running for the Edgar away given by the Mystery Writers of America the year after it was published by Playboy. It’s also science fiction, though, built as it is around a concept of detection that exists today only as the wildest speculation.

I wrote it in a moment of agreeable ease and fluency in the summer of 1987, and Alice Turner of Playboy, an editor for whom I had the highest respect, bought it in an equally uncomplicated way and ran it in the August, 1988 issue. Alice was an extremely demanding editor who often had me jumping