Robert Silverberg - In Another Country

“Very few,” he told her. “All our wild things went from us long ago.”

“Not even squirrels left? Grasshoppers?”

“Nothing like that,” he said. “Nothing at all. That is why we travel—to experience life in places such as this. To experience squirrels. To experience grasshoppers.”

“Of course. Everyone travels to see things different from what they have at home. But it’s hard to believe that there’s any country that’s done such ecological damage to itself that it doesn’t even have—”

“Oh, the problem is not ecological damage,” said Thimiroi. “Not as you understand the term. Our country is very beautiful, in its way, and we care for it extremely well. The problem is that it is an extremely civilized place. Too civilized, I think. We have everything under control. And one thing that we controlled, a very long time ago, is the very thing that this park is designed to provide: the world of nature, as it existed before the cities ever were.”

She stared. “Not even a squirrel.”

“Not even a squirrel, no.”

“Where is this country of yours? Did you say it was in Arabia? One of the oil kingdoms?”

“No,” he said. “Not in Arabia.”

They went onward. The afternoon’s heat was at its peak, now, and Thimiroi felt the moisture of the air clinging close against his skin, a strange and unusual sensation for him. Again they paused, after a while, to kiss, even more passionately than before.

“Come,” Christine said. “Let’s go home.”

They hurried down the hillside, taking it practically at a jog. But they slowed as the Montgomery House came into view. Thimiroi thought of inviting her to his room once again, but the thought of Laliene hovering nearby—spying on him, scowling her disapproval as he entered into the same transgression for which she had so sternly censured Kleph—displeased him. Christine reminded him, though, that she had offered to play the piano for him, and wanted him to sing for her. Gladly, eagerly, Thimiroi accepted the invitation to go with her to her house.

But as they approached it he was dismayed to see Kleph standing on the steps of a big, rambling old house just opposite Christine’s, on the uphill side of the street. She was talking to a sturdy square-shouldered man with a good-natured, open face, and she did not appear to notice Thimiroi.

Christine said, “Do you want to say hello to her?”

“Not really.”

“She’s one of your friends, isn’t she? Someone from your country?”

“She’s from my country, yes. But not exactly a friend. Just someone who’s taking the same tour I am. Is that the house where she’s staying?”

“Yes,” Christine said. “She and another woman, and a tall somber-looking man. I saw them all with you, that night at the concert hall. They’ve rented the house for the whole month. That man’s the owner, Oliver Wilson.”

“Ah.” Thimiroi drew his breath in sharply.

So that was the one. Oliver. Kleph’s twentieth-century lover. Thimiroi felt a stab of despair. Looking across the way now at Kleph, deep in conversation with this Oliver, it seemed to him suddenly that Laliene’s scorn for Kleph had not been misplaced, that it was foolish and pathetic and even a little sordid for any Traveler to indulge in such doomed and absurd romances as this. And yet he was on the verge of embarking on the same thing Kleph was doing. Was that what he really wanted? Or should he not leave such adventures to shallow, trivial people like Kleph?

Christine said, “You’re looking troubled again.”

“It’s nothing. Nothing.” Thimiroi gazed closely at her, and her warmth, her directness, her radiant joyous eyes, swept away all the sudden doubts that had come to engulf him. He had no right to condemn Kleph. And in any case what he might choose to do, or Kleph, was no concern of Laliene’s. “Come,” he said. He caught Christine lightly by the arm. “Let’s go inside.”

Just as he turned, Kleph did also, and for an instant their eyes met as they stood facing each other on opposite sides of the street. She gave him a startled look. Thimiroi smiled to her; but Kleph merely stared back intently in a curiously cold way. Then she was gone. Thimiroi shrugged.

He followed Christine into her house.

It was an old, comfortable-looking place with a great many small, dark, high-ceilinged rooms on the ground floor and a massive wooden staircase leading upstairs. The furnishings looked heavy and unstylish, as though they were already long out of date, but everything had an appealing, well-worn feel.

“My family’s lived in this house for almost a hundred years,” Christine said, as though reading his mind. “I was born here. I grew up here. I don’t know what it’s like to live anywhere else.” She gestured toward the staircase. “The music room is upstairs.”

“I know. Do you live here by yourself?”

“Basically. My sister and I inherited the house when my mother died, but she’s hardly ever here. The last I heard from her, she was in Oaxaca.”

“Wah-ha-ka?” Thimiroi said carefully.

“Oaxaca, yes. In Mexico, you know? She’s studying Mexican handicrafts, she says. I think she’s actually studying Mexican men, but that’s her business, isn’t it? She likes to travel. Before Mexico she was in Thailand, and before that it was Portugal, I think.”

Mexico, Thimiroi thought. Thailand. Portugal. So many names, so many places. Such a complex society, this world of the twentieth century. His own world had fewer places, and they had different names. So much had changed, after the time of the Blue Death. So much had been swept away, never to return.

Christine said, “It’s a musty old house, I know. But I love it. And I could never have afforded to buy one of my own. Everything’s so fantastically expensive these days. If I hadn’t happened to have lived here all along, I suppose I’d be living in one of those poky little studio apartments down by the river, paying umpty thousand dollars a month for one bedroom and a terrace the size of a postage stamp.”

Desperately he tried to follow what she was saying. His implant helped, but not enough. Umpty thousand dollars? Studio apartment? Postage stamp? He got the sense of her words, but the literal meanings eluded him. How much was umpty? How big was a postage stamp?

The music room on the second floor was bright and spacious, with three large windows looking out into the garden and the street beyond. The piano itself, against the front wall between two of the windows, was larger than he expected, a splendid, imposing thing, with ponderous, ornately carved legs and a black, gleaming wooden case. Obviously it was old and very valuable and well cared for; and as he studied it he realized suddenly that this must not be any ordinary home musical instrument, but more likely one that a concert performer would use; and therefore Christine’s lighthearted dismissal of his question about her having a musical career must almost certainly conceal bitter defeat, frustration, the deflection of a cherished dream. She had wanted and expected more from her music than life had been able to bring her.

“Play for me,” he said. “The same piece you were playing the first time, when I happened to walk by.”

“The Debussy, you mean?”

“I don’t know its name.”

Thimiroi hummed the melody that had so captured him. She nodded and sat down to play.

It was not quite as magical, the second time. But nothing ever was, he knew. And it was beautiful all the same, haunting, mysterious in its powerful simplicity.

“Will you sing for me now?” Christine asked.

“What should I sing?”

“A song of your own country?”

He thought a moment. How could he explain to her what music was like in his own time—not sound alone, but a cluster of all the arts, visual, olfactory, the melodic line rising out of a dozen different sensory concepts? But he could improvise, he supposed. He began to sing one of his own poems, putting a tune to it as he went. Christine, listening, closed her eyes, nodded, turned to the keyboard, played a few notes and a few more, gradually shaping them into an accompaniment for him. Thimiroi was amazed at the swiftness with which she caught the melody of his tune—stumbling only once or twice, over chordal structures that were obviously alien to her—and traveled along easily with it. By the time he reached the fifth cycle of the song, he and she were joined in an elegant harmony, as though they had played this song together many times instead of both improvising it as they went. And when he made the sudden startling key-shift that in his culture signalled the close of a song, she adapted to it almost instantaneously and stayed with him to the final note.