Robert Silverberg: The Masks of Time

“Where’s Jack?” I asked.

“He’s writing. He’ll come out in a little while. Here, let me get you moved in. You look terrible, darling!”

“So they’ve been telling me.”

“We’ll fix that.”

She snatched my suitcase and hurried into the house. The saucy twitching of her bare rump reassured and refreshed me. and I grinned at the two firm cheeks as they vanished from sight. I was among friends. I had come home. At the moment, I felt that I might stay among them for months.

I went to my room. Shirley had everything ready for me: fresh linens, a few spools beside the reader, a nightglow on the table, a pad and stylus and recorder if I wanted to set down any ideas. Jack appeared. He pressed a flask of beer into my hand and I thumbed it open. We winked in mutual delight.

That evening Shirley conjured a magical dinner, and afterwards, as warmth fled from the desert on this winter evening, we sprawled in their living room to talk. They said nothing whatever of my work, bless them both. Instead we discussed the Apocalyptists, for they had come to be fascinated by the cult of doom that now was infesting so many minds.

“I’ve been studying them closely,” said Jack. “Do you follow it at all?”

“Not really.”

“It happens every thousand years, it seems. As the millennium comes to its close, a conviction spreads that the world is about to end. It was very bad toward 999. At first only peasants believed it, but then some very sophisticated churchmen began to catch the fever, and that did it. There were orgies of prayer and also the other sorts of orgies.”

“And when A.D. 1000 came?” I asked. “The world survived, and what happened to the cult?”

Shirley laughed. “It was quite disillusioning for them. But people don’t learn.”

“How do the Apocalyptists think the world is going to perish?”

“By fire,” said Jack.

“The scourge of God?”

“They expect a war. They believe that the world leaders have already ordained it and that hellfires will be loosed on the first day of the new century.”

“We haven’t had a war of any size in fifty-odd years,” I said. “The last time an atomic weapon was used in anger was 1945. Isn’t it safe to assume that we’ve developed techniques for sidestepping the apocalypse by now?”

“Law of accumulating catastrophe,” Jack said. “Static builds toward a discharge. Look at all the little wars: Korea, Vietnam, the Near East, South Africa, Indonesia—”

“Mongolia and Paraguay,” Shirley offered.

“Yes. On the average, one minor war every seven or eight years. Each one creating sequences of reflexive response that help to motivate the next, because everybody’s eager to put into practice the lessons of the last war. Building up a mounting intensity that’s bound to explode into the Final War. Which is due to begin and end on January 1, 2000.”

“Do you believe this?” I asked.

“Myself? Not really,” Jack said. “I’m simply stating the theory. I don’t detect any signs of imminent holocaust in the world, though I admit that all I know is what comes over the screen. Nevertheless, the Apocalyptists catch the imagination. Shirley, run those tapes of the Chicago riot, will you?”

She slipped a capsule into the slot. The entire rear wall of the room blossomed with color as the playback of the telecast began. I saw the towers of Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Boulevard; I saw bizarre figures spilling out over the highway, onto the beach, cavorting beside the icy lake. Most of them were painted in gaudy stripes like mummers on the loose. Most were partly naked, and this was not the innocent, natural nudity of Jack and Shirley on a hot day, but something ugly and raw and deliberately obscene, a wanton flaunting of jiggling breasts and paint-daubed buttocks. This was a display calculated to shock: Hieronymus Bosch grotesques set loose, waggling their nakedness in the face of a world regarded as doomed. I had not paid attention to the movement before. I was startled to see a girl hardly adolescent rush before the camera, whirl, flip up her skirt, crouch and urinate in the face of another reveler who had fallen in stupor. I watched the open fornication, the grotesque tangles of bodies, the complex couplings that were more accurately triplings and quadruplings. An immensely fat old woman waddled across the beach, cheering the younger rioters on. A mountain of furniture went up in flames. Policemen, bewildered, sprayed foam on the mob but did not enter it.

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” I muttered. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since July, Leo,” said Shirley quietly. “You didn’t know?”

“I’ve been very busy.”

Jack said, “There’s a distinct crescendo. At first it was a movement of crackpots in the Midwest — around ’93, ’94 — a thousand members or so, convinced that they’d better pray hard because Doomsday was less than a decade away. They got the proselytizing bug and started to preach doom, only this time the message came across. And the movement got out of hand. For the last six months the idea has been building that it’s foolish to waste time in anything but fun, because there’s not much time left.”

I shuddered. “Universal madness?”

“Quite so. On every continent the profound conviction that the bombs fall a year from January 1. Eat, drink, and be merry. It’s spreading. I hate to think of what the hysteria will be like a year from now in the supposed final week of the world. We three may be the only survivors, Leo.”

I stared at the screen for a few moments more, appalled.

“Shut that thing off,” I said at length.

Shirley chuckled. “How could you not have heard of this, Leo?”

“I’ve been out of touch with everything.” The screen darkened. The painted demons of Chicago still leaped obscenely through my brain. The world is going mad, I thought, and I have not noticed it. Shirley and Jack saw how rocked I was by this revelation of the Apocalyptist apocalypse, and they deftly shifted the subject, talking of the ancient Indian ruins they had discovered in the desert a few miles away. Long before midnight I showed my weariness and they saw me to bed. Shirley returned to my room a few minutes later; she had undressed, and her bare body glowed like a holiday candle in the doorway.

“Can I get you anything, Leo?”

“I’m fine,” I told her.

“Merry Christmas, darling. Or have you forgotten that too? Tomorrow’s Christmas Day.”

“Merry Christmas, Shirley.”

I blew her a kiss, and she turned out my light. While I slept, Vornan-19 entered our world six thousand miles away, and nothing would be quite the same for any of us, ever again.

I awoke late on Christmas morning. Jack and Shirley had clearly been up for hours. There was a bitter taste in my mouth and I did not want company, not even theirs; as was my privilege, I went into the kitchen and silently programmed my breakfast. They sensed my mood and stayed away. Orange juice and toast came from the output panel of the autochef. I devoured them, punched the black coffee, then dumped the dishes in the cleaner, started the cycle, and went out. I walked by myself for three hours. When I returned I felt purged. It was too cool a day for sunbathing or gardening; Shirley showed off some of her sculptures, Jack read me a little of his poetry, and I spoke hesitantly about the obstacle to my work. That evening we dined magnificently on roast turkey and chilled Chablis.

The days that followed were soothing ones. My nerves uncoiled. Sometimes I walked alone in the desert; sometimes they came with me. They took me to their Indian ruin. Jack knelt to show me the potsherds in the sand: triangular wedges of white pottery marked by black bars and dots. He indicated the sunken contours of a pit-dwelling; he showed me the fragmentary foundations of a building wall made of rough stone mortared with mud.