Robert Silverberg - Sailing to Byzantium

He felt oppressed by the party gaiety all about him. “I need some air,” he said to Cantilena, and headed toward the window. It was the merest crescent, but a breeze came through. He looked out at the strange city below.

New Chicago had nothing in common with the old one but its name. They had built it, at least, along the western shore of a large inland lake that might even be Lake Michigan, although when he had flown over it had seemed broader and less elongated than the lake he remembered. The city itself was a lacy fantasy of slender pastel-hued buildings rising at odd angles and linked by a webwork of gently undulating aerial bridges. The streets were long parentheses that touched the lake at their northern and southern ends and arched gracefully westward in the middle. Between each of the great boulevards ran a track for public transportation—sleek aquamarine bubble-vehicles gliding on soundless wheels—and flanking each of the tracks were lush strips of park. It was beautiful, astonishingly so, but insubstantial. The whole thing seemed to have been contrived from sunbeams and silk.

A soft voice beside him said, “Are you becoming ill?”

Phillips glanced around. The celadon man stood beside him: a compact, precise person, vaguely Oriental in appearance. His skin was of a curious gray-green hue like no skin Phillips had ever seen, and it was extraordinarily smooth in texture, as though he were made of fine porcelain.

He shook his head. “Just a little queasy,” he said. “This city always scrambles me.”

“I suppose it can be disconcerting,” the little man replied. His tone was furry and veiled, the inflection strange. There was something feline about him. He seemed sinewy, unyielding, almost menacing. “Visitor, are you?”

Phillips studied him a moment. “Yes,” he said.

“So am I, of course.”

“Are you?”

“Indeed.” The little man smiled. “What’s your locus? Twentieth century? Twenty-first at the latest, I’d say.”

“I’m from 1984. A.D. 1984.”

Another smile, a self-satisfied one. “Not a bad guess, then.” A brisk tilt of the head. “Y’ang-Yeovil.”

“Pardon me?” Phillips said.

“Y’ang-Yeovil. It is my name. Formerly Colonel Y’ang-Yeovil of the Third Septentriad.”

“Is that on some other planet?” asked Phillips, feeling a bit dazed.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Y’ang-Yeovil said pleasantly. “This very world, I assure you. I am quite of human origin. Citizen of the Republic of Upper Han, native of the city of Port Ssu. And you—forgive me—your name—?”

“I’m sorry. Phillips. Charles Phillips. From New York City, once upon a time.”

“Ah, New York!” Y’ang-Yeovil’s face lit with a glimmer of recognition that quickly faded. “New York—New York—it was very famous, that I know—”

This is very strange, Phillips thought. He felt greater compassion for poor bewildered Francis Willoughby now. This man comes from a time so far beyond my own that he barely knows of New York—he must be a contemporary of the real New Chicago, in fact; I wonder whether he finds this version authentic—and yet to the citizens this Y’ang-Yeovil too is just a primitive, a curio out of antiquity—

“New York was the largest city of the United States of America,” Phillips said.

“Of course. Yes. Very famous.”

“But virtually forgotten by the time the Republic of Upper Han came into existence, I gather.”

Y’ang-Yeovil said, looking uncomfortable, “There were disturbances between your time and mine. But by no means should you take from my words the impression that your city was—”

Sudden laughter resounded across the room. Five or six newcomers had arrived at the party. Phillips stared, gasped, gaped. Surely that was Stengard—and Aramayne beside him—and that other woman, half hidden behind them—

“If you’ll pardon me a moment—” Phillips said, turning abruptly away from Y’ang-Yeovil. “Please excuse me. Someone just coming in—a person I’ve been trying to find ever since—”

He hurried toward her.

“Gioia?” he called. “Gioia, it’s me! Wait! Wait!”

Stengard was in the way. Aramayne, turning to take a handful of the little vapor-sniffers from Cantilena, blocked him also. Phillips pushed through them as though they were not there. Gioia, halfway out the door, halted and looked toward him like a frightened deer.

“Don’t go,” he said. He took her hand in his.

He was startled by her appearance. How long had it been since their strange parting on that night of mysteries in Chang-an? A year? A year and a half? So he believed. Or had he lost all track of time? Were his perceptions of the passing of the months in this world that unreliable? She seemed at least ten or fifteen years older. Maybe she really was; maybe the years had been passing for him here as in a dream, and he had never known it. She looked strained, faded, worn. Out of a thinner and strangely altered face her eyes blazed at him almost defiantly, as though saying, See? See how ugly I have become?

He said, “I’ve been hunting for you for—I don’t know how long it’s been, Gioia. In Mohenjo, in Timbuctoo, now here. I want to be with you again.”

“It isn’t possible.”

“Belilala explained everything to me in Mohenjo. I know that you’re a short-timer—I know what that means, Gioia. But what of it? So you’re beginning to age a little. So what? So you’ll only have three or four hundred years, instead of forever. Don’t you think I know what it means to be a short-timer? I’m just a simple ancient man of the twentieth century, remember? Sixty, seventy, eighty years is all we would get. You and I suffer from the same malady, Gioia. That’s what drew you to me in the first place. I’m certain of that. That’s why we belong with each other now. However much time we have, we can spend the rest of it together, don’t you see?”

“You’re the one who doesn’t see, Charles,” she said softly.

“Maybe. Maybe I still don’t understand a damned thing about this place. Except that you and I—that I love you—that I think you love me—”

“I love you, yes. But you don’t understand. It’s precisely because I love you that you and I—you and I can’t—”

With a despairing sigh she slid her hand free of his grasp. He reached for her again, but she shook him off and backed up quickly into the corridor.

“Gioia?”

“Please,” she said. “No. I would never have come here if I knew you were here. Don’t come after me. Please. Please.”

She turned and fled.

He stood looking after her for a long moment. Cantilena and Aramayne appeared, and smiled at him as if nothing at all had happened. Cantilena offered him a vial of some sparkling amber fluid. He refused with a brusque gesture. Where do I go now, he wondered? What do I do? He wandered back into the party.

Y’ang-Yeovil glided to his side. “You are in great distress,” the little man murmured.

Phillips glared. “Let me be.”

“Perhaps I could be of some help.”

“There’s no help possible,” said Phillips. He swung about and plucked one of the vials from a tray and gulped its contents. It made him feel as if there were two of him, standing on either side of Y’ang-Yeovil. He gulped another. Now there were four of him. “I’m in love with a citizen,” he blurted. It seemed to him that he was speaking in chorus.

“Love. Ah. And does she love you?”

“So I thought. So I think. But she’s a short-timer. Do you know what that means? She’s not immortal like the others. She ages. She’s beginning to look old. And so she’s been running away from me. She doesn’t want me to see her changing. She thinks it’ll disgust me, I suppose. I tried to remind her just now that I’m not immortal either, that she and I could grow old together, but she—”