Multiples: A Short Story

By Robert Silverberg

For some people, one personality is just never enough. A story of duplicity from the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Lord Valentine’s Castle.
 
Slowly, a climate of acceptance has been growing for people with divided personalities, especially in big cities like San Francisco. There are clubs with mirrors and lights that help people to switch and double, maybe even triple. When, like Cleo, you feel your world has become stale and cramped, they’re the perfect place to meet someone.
 
But first Cleo has to pretend that she’s a multiple, because they’re notoriously indifferent to singletons and their bland, overly simple selves. When she meets Van, she’s able to pull off her masquerade for a week of bliss with him (and Paul, and Hal, and . . .). Or so she thinks. When Cleo is caught in her lie, she attempts to bow out gracefully. But Van doesn’t want to lose her. In fact, he wants more of her. There could be a whole horde of selves inside of her—and he knows just how to get them out . . .
 
“In the thoughtful and emotionally evocative title story, ‘Multiples,’ multiple personality ‘disorder’ is normal, and indeed a desired state, creating an effective metaphor for the loneliness experienced by socially isolated individuals.” —SF Site
 
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
 
“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: 9781504086509

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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Multiples

A Short Story

Robert Silverberg

Introduction

This one dates from the summer of 1983. I had just finished writing the novel Valentine Pontifex, which turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to write, and I wasn’t really looking to get back to the keyboard for a while. But then the idea for this one popped into my head, and I sat down and wrote it in what was essentially one long take, did a little minor editing, and sent it off to Ellen Datlow, the editor of Omni, who bought it right away. They should all be so easy. From time to time I get letters from actual multiple-personality people, who ask me if I am one myself, or married to one. (The answers are No and No—so far as I know.)

Multiples

There were mirrors everywhere, making the place a crazyhouse of dizzying refraction: mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the walls, mirrors in the angles where the walls met the ceiling and the floor, even little eddies of mirror-dust periodically blown on gusts of air through the room, so that all the bizarre distortions, fracturings, and dislocations of image that were bouncing around the place would from time to time coalesce in a shimmering haze of chaos right before your eyes. Colored globes spun round and round overhead, creating patterns of ricocheting light. It was exactly the way Cleo had expected a multiples club to look.

She had walked up and down the whole Fillmore Street strip from Union to Chestnut and back again for half an hour, peering at this club and that, before finding the courage to go inside one that called itself Skits. Though she had been planning this night for months, she found herself paralyzed by fear at the last minute: afraid they would spot her as a fraud the moment she walked in, afraid they would drive her out with jeers and curses and cold mocking laughter. But now that she was within, she felt fine—calm, confident, ready for