Robert Silverberg - The Masks of Time

Kralick offered Helen his jacket, and she waved it away, not caring about the bare flesh or perhaps caring very much to keep it in view. Somehow they got us out of there. As we hustled through the door, I heard one terrible cry of pain rising above everything else, the sound that I imagine a man would make as he was being drawn before quartering. I never found out who screamed that way, or why.

“… doom…” I heard, and we were outside.

Cars waited. We were taken to a hotel in mid-Manhattan. On the 125th floor we had a good view of the downtown renewal area. Helen and Kolff shamelessly took a double room; the rest of us received singles. Kralick supplied each of us with a thick sheaf of tapes dealing with suggested methods of handling Vornan. I filed mine without playing anything. Looking down into the distant street, I saw figures moving in a frantic stream on the pedestrian level, patterns forming and breaking, occasionally a collision, gesticulating arms, the movements of angry ants. Now and then a flying wedge of rowdies came roaring down the middle of the street. Apocalyptists, I assumed. How long had this been going on? I had been out of touch with the world; I had not realized that at any given moment in any given city one was vulnerable to the impact of chaos. I turned away from my window.

Morton Fields came into the room. He accepted my offer of a drink, and I punched the programming studs on my room service board. We sat quietly sipping filtered rums. I hoped he wouldn’t babble at me in psychology jargon. But he wasn’t the babbling kind: direct, incisive, sane, that was his style.

“Like a dream, isn’t it?” he asked.

“This man from the future thing?”

“This whole cultural environment. The fin de siиcle mood.”

“It’s been a long century, Fields. Maybe the world is happy to see it out. Maybe all this anarchy around us is a way of celebration, eh?”

“You could have a point,” he conceded. “Vornan-19’s a sort of Fortinbras, come to set the time back into joint.”

“You think so?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“He hasn’t acted very helpful so far,” I said. “He seems to stir up trouble wherever he goes.”

“Unintentionally. He’s not attuned to us savages yet, and he keeps tripping over tribal taboos. Give him some time to get to know us and he’ll begin to work wonders.”

“Why do you say that?”

Fields solemnly tugged his left ear. “He has charismatic powers, Garfield. Numen. The divine power. You can see it in that smile of his, can’t you?”

“Yes. Yes. But what makes you think he’ll use that charisma rationally? Why not have some fun, stir up the mobs? Is he here as a savior or just as a tourist?”

“We’ll find that out ourselves, in a few days. Mind if I punch another drink?”

“Punch three,” I said airily. “I don’t pay the bills.”

Fields regarded me earnestly. His pale eyes seemed to be having trouble focusing, as though he were wearing a pair of corneal compressors and didn’t know how to use them yet. After a long silence he said. “Do you know anyone who’s ever been to bed with Aster Mikkelsen?”

“Not really. Should I?”

“I was just wondering. She might be a Lesbian.”

“I doubt it,” I said, “somehow. Does it matter?”

Fields laughed thinly. “I tried to seduce her last night.”

“So I noticed.”

“I was quite drunk.”

“I noticed that too.”

Fields said, “Aster told me an odd thing while I was trying to get her into bed. She said she didn’t go to bed with men. She put it in a kind of flat declarative uninflected way, as though it ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone but a damned idiot. I was just wondering if there was something about her I ought to know and didn’t.”

“You might ask Sandy Kralick,” I suggested. “He’s got a dossier on all of us.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I mean — it’s a little unworthy of me—”

“To want to sleep with Aster?”

“No, to go around to that bureaucrat trying to pick up tips. I’d rather keep the matter between us.”

“Between us professors?” I amplified.

“In a sense.” Fields grinned, an effort that must have cost him something. “Look, old fellow, I didn’t mean to push my concerns onto you. I just thought — if you know anything about — about—”

“Her proclivities?”

“Her proclivities.”

“Nothing at all. She’s a brilliant biochemist,” I said. “She seems rather reserved as a person. That’s all I can tell you.”

Fields finally went away after a while. I heard Lloyd Kolff’s lusty laughter roaring through the hallways. I felt like a prisoner. What if I phoned Kralick and asked him to send me Martha Sidney at once? I stripped and got under the shower, letting the molecules do their buzzing dance, peeling away the grime of my journey from Washington. Then I read for a while. Kolff had given me his latest book, an anthology of metaphysical love lyrics he had translated from the Phoenician texts found at Byblos. I had always thought of Phoenicians as crisp Levantine businessmen, with no time for poetry, erotic or otherwise; but this was startling stuff, raw, fiery. I had not dreamed there were so many ways of describing the female genitalia. The pages were festooned with long streamers of adjectives: a catalog of lust, an inventory of stock-in-trade. A little of it went a very long way. I wondered if he had given a copy to Aster Mikkelsen.

I must have dozed. About five in the afternoon I was awakened by a few sheets sliding out of the data slot in the wall. Kralick was sending around Vornan-19’s itinerary. Standard stuff: the New York Stock Exchange, the Grand Canyon, a couple of factories, an Indian reservation or two, and — pencilled in as tentative — Luna City. I wondered if we were expected to accompany him to the Moon if he went there. Probably.

At dinner that evening Helen and Aster went into a long huddle about something. I found myself stranded next to Heyman, and was treated to a discourse on Spenglerian interpretations of the Apocalyptist movement. Lloyd Kolff told scabrous tales in several languages to Fields, who listened dolefully and drank a good deal once again. Kralick joined us for dessert to say that Vornan-19 was boarding a rocket for New York the following morning and would be among us by noon, local time. He wished us luck.

We did not go to the airport to meet Vornan. Kralick expected trouble there, and he was right; we stayed at the hotel, watching the scene of the arrival on our screens. Two rival groups had gathered at the airport to greet Vornan. There was a mass of Apocalyptists, but that was not surprising; these days there seemed to be a mass of Apocalyptists everywhere. What was a little more unsettling was the presence of a group of a thousand demonstrators whom, for lack of a better word, the announcer called Vornan’s “disciples.” They had come to worship. The camera played lovingly over their faces. They were not bedizened lunatics like the Apocalyptists; no, they were very middle class, most of them, very tense, under tight control, not Dionysian revelers at all. I saw the pinched faces, the clamped lips, the sober mien — and I was frightened. The Apocalyptists represented the froth of society, the drifters, the rootless. These who had come to bow the knee to Vornan were the dwellers in small suburban apartments, the depositors in savings institutions, the goers to sleep at early hours, the backbone of American life. I remarked on this to Helen McIlwain.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s the counterrevolution, the coming reaction to Apocalyptist excess. These people see the man from the future as the apostle of order restored.” Fields had said much the same thing.