Robert Silverberg - In Another Country

“Where shall we go?” she asked him.

“This is your city. I don’t know the good places.”

“We could walk in Baxter Park, I suppose.”

Thimiroi frowned. “Isn’t that all the way on the other side of the river?”

“Baxter Park? Oh, no, you must be thinking of Butterfield Gardens. Up on the high ridge, you mean, over there opposite us? The very big park, with the botanical gardens and the zoo and everything? Baxter Park’s right near here, just a few blocks up the hill. We could be there in ten minutes.”

Actually it was more like fifteen, and no easy walk, but none of that mattered to Thimiroi. Simply being close to Christine awoke unfamiliar sensations of contentment in him. They climbed the steep streets side by side, saying very little as they made the difficult ascent, pausing now and again to catch their breaths. The city was like a giant bowl, cleft by the great river that ran through its middle, and they were nearing its rim.

Baxter Park, like its counterpart across the river that Thimiroi had seen when he first arrived in the twentieth century, occupied a commanding position looking out and down toward the heart of the urban area. But apart from that the two parks were very different, for the other was intricately laid out, with roads and amusement sectors scattered through it, and this one seemed nothing more than a strip of rough, wild semi-forest that had been left undeveloped at the top of the city. Simple paths crudely paved led through its dense groves and tangles of underbrush.

“It isn’t much, I know—” Christine said.

“It’s beautiful here. So wild, so untamed. And so close to the city. We can look down and see houses and office buildings and bridges, and yet back here it’s just as it must have been ten thousand years ago. There is nothing like this where I come from.”

“Do you mean that?”

“We took our wilderness away a long time ago. We should have kept a little—just a little, a reminder, the way you have here. But it’s too late now. It has been gone so long, so very long.” Thimiroi peered into the hazy distance. Shimmering in the midafternoon heat, the city seemed a fairytale place, enchanted, wondrous. Shading his eyes, he peered out and downward, past the residential district to the metropolitan center by the river, and beyond it to the bridges, the suburbs on the far side, the zone of parks and recreational areas barely visible on the opposite slope. How beautiful it all was, how majestic, how grand! The thought that it all must perish in just a matter of days brought the taste of bile to his mouth, and he turned away, coughing, sputtering.

“Is something the matter?” Christine asked.

“Nothing—no—I’ll be all right—”

He wondered how far they were right now from the path along which the meteor would travel.

As he understood it, it was going to come in from this side of the city, traveling low across the great urban bowl like a stone that a boy has sent skimming across a stream and striking somewhere midway down the slope, between the zone of older houses just below the Montgomery House hotel and the business district farther on. At the point of impact, of course, everything would be annihilated for blocks around. But the real devastation would come a moment later, so Kadro had explained: when the shock wave struck and radiated outward, flattening whole neighborhoods in a steadily widening circle, as if they had been swatted by a giant’s contemptuous hand.

And then the fires, springing up everywhere—

And then, a few days later, when the invading microbes had had a chance to spread through the contaminated water supply of the shattered city, the plague—

“You look so troubled, Thimiroi,” Christine said, nestling up beside him, sliding her arm through his.

“Do I?”

“You must miss your homeland very much.”

“No. No, that isn’t it.”

“Why so sad, then?”

“I find it extremely moving,” he said, “to look out over your whole city this way. Taking it all in in a single sweep. Seeing it in all its magnificence, all its power.”

“But it’s not even the most important city in the—”

“I know. But that doesn’t matter. The fact that there may be bigger cities takes nothing away from the grandeur of this one. Especially for me. Where I come from, there are no cities of any size at all. Our population is extremely small… extremely small.”

“But it must be a very wealthy country, all the same.”

Thimiroi shrugged. “I suppose it is. But what does that mean? I look at your city here and I think of the transience of all that is splendid and grand. I think of all the great empires of the past, and how they rose, and fell, and were swept away and forgotten. All the empires that ever were, and all those that will ever be.”

To his surprise, she laughed. “Oh, how strange you are!”

“Strange?”

“So terribly solemn. So philosophical. Brooding about the rise and fall of empires on a glorious spring day like this. Standing here with the most amazing sunlight pouring down on us and telling me in those elocution-school tones of yours that empires that don’t even exist yet are already swept away and forgotten. How can something be forgotten that hasn’t yet even happened? And how can you even bother to think about anything morbid in a season like this one?” She moved closer to him, nuzzling against his side almost like a cat. “Do you know what I think, standing here right this minute looking out at the city? I think that the warmth of the sun feels wonderful and that the air is as fresh as new young wine and that the city has never seemed more sparkling or prosperous and that this is the most beautiful spring day in at least half a million years. And the last thing that’s going to cross my mind is that the weather may not hold or that the time of prosperity may not last or that great empires always crumble and are forgotten. But perhaps you and I are just different, Thimiroi. Some people are naturally gloomy, and always see the darkest side of everything, and then there are the people who couldn’t manage to be moody and broody even if their lives depended on—” She broke off suddenly. “Oh, Thimiroi, I don’t mean to offend you. You know that.”

“You haven’t offended me.” He turned to her. “What’s an elocution-school voice?”

“A trained one,” she said, smiling. “Like the voice of a radio or TV announcer. You have a marvelous voice, you know. You speak right from the center of your diaphragm, and you always pause for breath in the right places, and the tone is so rich, so perfect—a singer’s voice, really. You can sing very well, can’t you? I know you can. Later, perhaps, I could play for you, and you could sing for me, back at my place, some song of Stiino—of your own country—”

“Yes,” he said. “We could try that, yes.”

He kissed her, then, and it was a different sort of kiss from either of the two kisses of the day before, very different indeed; and as he held her his hands ran across her back, and over the nape of her neck, and down the sides of her arms, and she pressed herself close against him. Then after a long moment they moved apart again, both of them flushed and excited, and smiled, and looked at each other as though they were seeing each other for the first time.

They walked hand in hand through the park, neither of them saying anything. Small animals were everywhere, birds and odd shiny bright-colored little insects and comical four-legged grayish beasts with big shaggy tails lalloping behind them. Thimiroi was amazed by the richness of all this wildlife, and the shrubs and wildflowers dazzling with early bloom, and the huge thick-boled trees that rose so awesomely above them. What an extraordinary place this century was, he told himself: what a fantastic mixture of the still unspoiled natural world and the world of technology and industry. They had these great cities, these colossal buildings, these immense bridges—and yet, also, they still had saved room for flowers, for beetles and birds, for little furry animals with enormous tails. When the thought of the meteor, and the destruction that it would cause, crept back into his mind, he forced it furiously away. He asked Christine to tell him the names of things: this is a squirrel, she said, and this is a maple tree, and this a grasshopper. She was surprised that he knew so little about them, and asked him what kinds of insects and trees and animals they had in his own country.