Robert Silverberg - The Masks of Time

She was dressed — well — flamboyantly. A plastic bar encircled her shoulders, and from it descended a black fiber cunningly designed to look like human hair. Perhaps it was human hair. It formed a thick cascade reaching to mid-thigh, a fetishist’s delight, long and silken and dense. There was something fierce and primordial about this tent of hair in which Helen was encased; all that was missing was the bone through the nose and the ceremonial scarifications on the cheeks. Beneath the mass of hair she was nude, I think. As she moved across the room, one caught sight of glints of pinkness peeping through the hairy curtain. I had the momentary illusion that I was seeing the tip of a rosy nipple, the curve of a smooth buttock. Yet so cohesive was the sensual sweep of the long sleek satin-smooth strands of hair that it cloaked her body almost entirely, granting us only those fleeting views which Helen intended us to have. Her graceful, slender arms were bare. Her neck, swanlike, rose triumphantly out of the hirsuteness, and her own hair, auburn and glossy, did not suffer by comparison with her garment. The effect was spectacular, phenomenal, awesome, and absurd. I glanced at Aster Mikkelsen as Helen made her grand entrance, and saw Aster’s lips flicker briefly in amusement.

“I’m sorry I was late,” Helen boomed in that magnificent contralto of hers. “I’ve been at the Smithsonian. They’ve been showing me a magnificent set of ivory circumcision knives from Dahomey!”

“And letting you practice with them?” Lloyd Kolff asked.

“We didn’t get that far. But after this silly meeting, Lloyd, darling, if you’d like to come back there with me, I’d be delighted to demonstrate my technique. On you.”

“It is sixty-three years too late for that,” Kolff rumbled, “as you should know. I’m surprised your memory is so short, Helen.”

“Oh, yes, darling! Absolutely right! A thousand apologies. I quite forgot!” And she rushed over to Kolff, hairy garment aflutter, to kiss him on his broad cheek. Sanford Kralick bit his lip. Obviously that was something his computer had missed. F. Richard Heyman looked uncomfortable. Fields smiled, and Aster seemed bored. I began to see that we were in for a lively time.

Kralick cleared his throat. “Now that we’re all here, if I could have your attention a moment…”

He proceeded to brief us on our job. He used screens, data cubes, sonic synthesizers, and a battery of other up-to-the-minute devices by way of conveying to us the urgency and necessity of our mission. Basically, we were supposed to help make Vornan-19’s visit to 1999 more rewarding and enjoyable: but also we were under instructions to keep a close watch on the visitor, tone down his more outrageous behavior if possible, and determine secretly to our own satisfaction whether he was genuine or a clever fraud.

It turned out that our own group was split on that last point. Helen McIlwain believed firmly, even mystically, that Vornan-19 had come from 2999. Morton Fields was of the same opinion, although he wasn’t so vociferous about it. It seemed to him that there was something symbolically appropriate about having a messiah-figure come out of the future to aid us in our time of travail; and since Vornan fit the criteria, Fields was willing to accept him. On the other side, Lloyd Kolff thought the idea of taking Vornan seriously was too funny for words, while F. Richard Heyman seemed to grow purple in the face at the mere thought of embracing any notion so irrational. I likewise was unable to buy Vornan’s claims. Aster Mikkelsen was neutral, or perhaps agnostic is the better word. Aster had true scientific objectivity: she wasn’t going to commit herself on the time traveler until she’d had a chance to see him herself.

Some of this genteel academic bickering took place under Kralick’s nose. The rest occurred at dinner that night. Just the six of us at the table in the White House, with noiseless servants gliding in and out to ply us with delicacies at the taxpayer’s expense. We did a lot of drinking. Certain polarities began to expose themselves in our ill-assorted little band. Kolff and Helen clearly had slept together before and meant to do so again; they were both so uninhibited about their lustiness that it plainly upset Heyman, who seemed to have a bad case of constipation from his cranial vault clear to his insteps. Morton Fields apparently had some sexual interest in Helen too, and the more he drank the more he tried to express it, but Helen wasn’t having any; she was too involved with that fat old Sanskrit-spouting Falstaff, Kolff. So Fields turned his attention to Aster Mikkelsen, who, however, seemed as sexless as the table, and deflected his heavy-handed advances with the cool precision of a woman long accustomed to such tasks. My own mood was a detached one, an old vice: I sat there, the disembodied observer, watching my distinguished colleagues at play. This was a group carefully selected to eliminate personality conflicts and other flaws, I thought. Poor Sandy Kralick believed he had assembled six flawless savants who would serve the nation with zealous dedication. We hadn’t been convened for eight hours yet, and already the lines of cleavage were showing up. What would happen to us when we were thrust into the presence of the slick, unpredictable Vornan-19? I feared much.

The banquet ended close to midnight. A row of empty wine bottles crisscrossed the table. Government flunkies appeared and announced that they would conduct us to the tunnels.

It turned out that Kralick had distributed us in hotels all around town. Fields made a boozy little scene about seeing Aster to her place, and she sidestepped him somehow. Helen and Kolff went off together, arm in arm; as they got into the elevator I saw his hand slide deep under the shroud of hair that enveloped her. I walked back to my hotel. I did not turn on the screen to find out what Vornan-19 had been up to this evening in Europe. I suspected, quite justly, that I’d get enough of his antics as the weeks unrolled, and that I could do without tonight’s news.

I slept poorly. Helen McIlwain haunted my dreams. I had never before dreamed that I was being circumcised by a redheaded witch garbed in a cloak of human hair. I trust I don’t have that dream again… ever.

At noon the next day the six of us — and Kralick — boarded the intercity tube for New York, nonstop. An hour later we arrived, just in time for an Apocalyptist demonstration at the tube terminal. They had heard that Vornan-19 was due to land in New York shortly, and they were doing a little preliminary cutting up.

We ascended into the vast terminal hall and found it a sea of sweaty, shaggy figures. Banners of living light drifted in the air, proclaiming gibberish slogans or just ordinary obscenities. Terminal police were desperately trying to keep order. Over everything came the dull boom of an Apocalyptist chant, ragged and incoherent, a cry of anarchy in which I could make out only the words “doom… flame… doom…”

Helen McIlwain was enthralled. Apocalyptists were at least as interesting to her as tribal witch doctors, and she tried to rush out to the terminal floor to soak up the experience at close range. Kralick asked her to come back, but it was too late: she rushed toward the mob. A bearded prophet of doom clutched at her and ripped the network of small plastic disks that was her garment this morning. The disks popped in every direction, baring a swath of Helen eight inches wide down the front from throat to waist. One bare breast jutted into view, surprisingly firm for a woman her age, surprisingly well developed for a woman of her lean, lanky build. Helen looked glassy-eyed with excitement; she clutched at her new swain, trying to extract the essence of Apocalyptism from him as he shook and clawed and pummeled her. Three burly guards went out there at Kralick’s insistence to rescue her. Helen greeted the first one with a kick in the groin that sent him reeling away; he vanished under a tide of surging fanatics and we did not see him reappear. The other two brandished neural whips and used them to disperse the Apocalyptists. Howls of outrage went up; there were sharp shrill cries of pain, riding over the undercurrent of “doom… flame… doom…” A troop of half-naked girls, hands to hips, paraded past us like a chorus line, cutting off my view; when I could see into the mob again, I realized that the guards had cut an island around Helen and were bringing her out. She seemed transfigured by the experience. “Marvelous,” she kept saying, “marvelous, marvelous, such orgasmic frenzy!” The walls echoed with “doom… flame… doom…”