Robert Silverberg - In Another Country

The summer had been Capri, at the villa of Augustus, the high summer of the emperor at the peak of his reign, and the autumn had been the pilgrimage to golden Canterbury. Later they would all go to Rome for Christmas, to see the coronation of Charlemagne. But now it was the springtime of their wondrous journey, that glorious May late in the twentieth century that was destined to end in sudden roaring death and a red smoking sky. In wonder and something almost like ecstasy Thimiroi watched the stone walls of Canterbury fade into mist and this newest strange city take on solidity around him. The sight of it woke half-formed poems in his mind. He felt amazingly young, alive, open…vulnerable.

“Thimiroi’s in a trance,” Denvin said in his light, mocking way, and winked and grinned. He stood leaning casually against the rail of the embankment, a compact, elegant little man, looking back at his two companions.

“Let him alone,” said Laliene sharply. In anger she ran her hands over the crimson nimbus of her hair and down the sides of her sleek tanned cheeks. Her gray-violet eyes flashed with annoyance. “Can’t you see he’s overwhelmed by what he sees out there?”

“By the monstrous ugliness of it?”

“By its beauty,” Laliene said, with some ferocity. She touched Thimiroi’s elbow. “Are you all right?” she whispered.

Thimiroi nodded.

She gestured toward the city. “How wonderfully discordant it is! How beautifully strident! No two buildings alike. And the surfaces of everything so flat. But colors, shapes, sizes, textures, all different. Not even the trees showing any sort of harmony.”

“And the noise,” said Denvin. “Don’t forget the noise, if you’re delighted by discordance. Machinery screeching and clanging and booming, and giving off smelly fumes besides—oh, it’s marvelous, Laliene! Those painted things are vehicles, aren’t they? Those boxy-looking machines. Honking and bellowing like crazed oxen with wheels. That thing flying around up there, too, the shining thing with wings—listen to it! Just listen!”

“Stop it,” Laliene said. “You’re going to upset him.”

“No,” Thimiroi said. “He’s not bothering me. But I do think it’s very beautiful. Beautiful in its ugliness. Beautiful in its discordance. There’s energy here. Whatever else this place may be, it’s a place of tremendous energy. And energy is always beautiful.” His heart was pounding. It had not pounded like this when they had arrived at any of the other places of their tour through antiquity. But the twentieth century was special: an apocalyptic time, a time of such potent darkness that it cast an eerie black radiance across half a dozen centuries to come. And this was its most poignant moment, when the century was at its highest point, all its earlier turmoil far behind—the moment when splendor and magnificence would be transformed in an instant, by nature’s malevolent prank, into stunning catastrophe. “Besides,” he said, “not everything here is ugly or discordant anyway. Look at the sky.”

“Yes,” Laliene said. “That’s a sky to remember. It’s a sky that absolutely demands a great artist to capture, wouldn’t you say? Someone on the order of Nivander, or even Sathimon. Those blues, and the white of the clouds. And then those streaks of gold and purple and red.”

“You mean the pollution?” Denvin asked.

She glowered at him. “Don’t. Please. If you don’t want to be here, tell Kadro when he shows up, and he’ll send you home. But don’t spoil it for the rest of us.”

“Sorry,” said Denvin, in a chastened tone. “I do have to admit that that sky is fantastic.”

“So intense,” Laliene said. “It comes right down and wraps itself around the tops of the buildings like a shimmering blue cloak. And everything so sharp, so vivid, so clear. The sun was brighter back in these days, someone said. That must be why. And the air more transparent, a different mix of elements. Of course, this was an unusual season even for here. That’s well known. They say there had never been a month like this one, a magical springtime, everything perfect, almost as if it had been arranged that way for maximum contrast with—with—”

Her voice trailed away.

Thimiroi shook his head. “You both talk too much. Can’t you simply stand here and let it all come flooding into your souls? We came here to experience this place, not to talk about it. We’ll have the rest of our lives to talk about it.”

They looked abashed. He grasped their hands in his and laughed—his rich, exuberant, pealing laugh, which some people thought was too much for their delicate sensibilities—to take the sting out of the rebuke. Denvin, after a moment, managed a smile. Laliene gave Thimiroi a curiously impenetrable stare; but then she too smiled, a warmer and more sincere one than Denvin’s. Thimiroi nodded and released them, and stepped forward to peer over the edge of the embankment.

They had materialized just a few moments earlier, in what seemed to be a park on the highest slopes of a lush green hillside overlooking a broad, swiftly flowing river. The city was on the far side, stretching out before them in dizzying vastness. Where they stood was in a sort of overlook point, jutting out of the hill, protected by a dark metal railing. Their luggage was beside them. The hour appeared to be midday; the sun was high; the air was mild, and very still and clear. The park was almost empty, though Thimiroi could see a few people strolling on the paths below. Natives of this time and place, he thought. His heart went out to them. He would have run down to them and embraced them, if he could. He longed to know what they were really like, these ancients, these rough earthy primitives, these people of lost antiquity.

Primitives, he thought? Well, yes, what else could they be called? They lived so long ago. But this city is no trifling thing. This is no squalid village of mud-and-wattle huts that lies before us.

In silence Thimiroi stared across the river at the massive blocky gray towers and wide, busy streets of the great metropolis, and at the shimmering silvery bridges to his right and to his left, and at the endless rows of small white and pink houses that rose up and up and up through the green hills on the other side. The weight and size and power of the place were extraordinary. His soul quivered with—what? Joy? Amazement? Fear?—at such immensity. How many people lived here? A million? Five million? He could scarcely conceive of such a number, all packed into a single place. The other ancient cities they had visited on this tour, imperial capitals though they were, were mere citylets—towns, even; piddling little medieval settlements—however grand they might have imagined themselves to be. But the great cities of the twentieth century, he had always been told, marked the high point in human urban concentration: cities of ten million, fifteen million, twenty million people. Unimaginable. This one before him was not even the biggest one, not even close to the biggest. Never before in history had cities grown to this size—and never again, either. Never again. What an extraordinary sight! What an astounding thing to contemplate, this great humming throbbing hive of intense human activity, especially when one knew—when one knew—when one knew the fate that was soon to befall it—

“Thimiroi?” Laliene called. “Kadro’s here!”

He turned. The tour leader, a small, fragile-looking man with thick flame-red hair and eerie blue-violet eyes, held out his arms to them. He could only just have arrived himself—they had all been together mere minutes before, in Canterbury—but he was dressed already in twentieth-century costume, curious and quaint and awkward-looking, but oddly elegant on him. Thimiroi had no idea how that trick had been accomplished, but he accepted it untroubledly: The Travel was full of mysteries of all sorts, detours and overlaps and side-jaunts through time. It was Kadro’s business to understand such things, not his.