The Masks of Time

SEVEN

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…”

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.

I thought of falling bodies and pink thighs in a Tivoli dance hall. “They’re likely to be disappointed,” I said, “if they think that Vornan’s going to help them. From what I’ve seen, he’s strictly on the side of entropy.”

“He may change when he sees what power he can wield over them.”

Of all the many frightening things I saw and heard those first days, Helen McIlwain’s calm words were, as I look back, the most terrifying of all.

Of course, the government had had long experience in importing celebrities. Vornan’s arrival was announced for one runway, and then he came in on another, at the far end of the airport, while a dummy rocket sent up for the purpose from Mexico City glided in for a landing where the man from 2999 was supposed to come down. The police contained the mob fairly well, considering. But as the two groups rushed forth onto the field, they coalesced, the Apocalyptists mingling with the disciples of Vornan, and then, abruptly, it was impossible to know which group was which. The camera zeroed in on one throbbing mass of humanity and retreated just as quickly upon the discovery that a rape was in progress beneath all the confusion. Thousands of figures swarmed about the rocket, whose dull blue sides gleamed temptingly in the feeble January sunlight; meanwhile Vornan was quietly being extracted from the true rocket a mile away. Via helicopter and transportation pod he came to us, while tanks of foam were emptied on the strugglers surrounding the blue rocket. Kralick phoned ahead to let us know that they were bringing Vornan to the hotel suite that was serving as our New York headquarters.

I felt a moment of sudden blinding panic as Vornan-19 approached the room.

How can I convey the intensity of that feeling in words? Can I say that for an instant the moorings of the universe seemed to loosen, so that the Earth was drifting free in the void? Can I say that I felt myself wandering in a world without reason, without structure, without coherence? I mean this quite seriously: it was a moment of utter fear. My various ironic, wry, mocking, detached poses deserted me; and I was left without the armor of cynicism, naked in a withering gale, facing the prospect that I was about to meet a wanderer out of time.

The fear I felt was the fear that abstraction was turning to reality. One can talk a great deal about time-reversal, one can even shove a few electrons a brief distance into the past, and yet it all remains essentially abstract. I have not seen an electron, nor can I tell you where one finds the past. Now, abruptly, the fabric of the cosmos had been ripped apart and a chilly wind blew upon me out of the future; though I tried to recapture my old skepticism, I found it was impossible. God help me. I believed that Vornan was authentic. His charisma preceded him into the room, converting me in advance. What price hardheadedness? I was jelly before he appeared. Helen McIlwain stood enraptured. Fields fidgeted; Kolff and Heyman looked troubled; even Aster’s icy shield was penetrated. Whatever I was feeling, they were feeling it too.

Vornan-19 entered.

I had seen him on the screens so often in the past two weeks that I felt I knew him; but when he came among us, I found myself in the presence of a being so alien that he was unknowable. And traces of that feeling lingered during the months that followed, so that Vornan was always something apart.

He was even shorter than I had expected him to be, no more than an inch or two taller than Aster Mikkelsen. In a room of big men he looked overwhelmed, with towering Kralick at one side and mountainous Kolff at the other. Yet he was in perfect command. He drew his eyes over all of us in one smooth gesture and said, ”This is most kind of you, to take this trouble for me. I am flattered.”

God help me. I believed.

We are each of us the summaries of the events of our time, the great and the small. Our patterns of thought, our clusters of prejudices, these things are determined for us by the distillate of happenings that we inhale with our every breath. I have been shaped by the small wars of my lifetime, by the detonations of atomic weapons in my childhood, by the trauma of the Kennedy assassination, by the extinction of the Atlantic oyster, by the words my first woman spoke to me in her moment of ecstasy, by the triumph of the computer, by the tingle of Arizona sunlight on my bare skin, and much else. When I deal with other human beings, I know that I have a kinship with them, that they have been shaped by some of the events that fashioned my soul, that we have at least certain points of common reference.

What had shaped Vornan?

None of the things that had shaped me. I found grounds for awe in that. The matrix from which he came was wholly different from mine. A world that spoke other languages, that had had ten centuries of further history, that had undergone unimaginable alterations of culture and motive — that was the world from which he came. Through my mind flashed an imagined view of Vornan’s world, an idealized world of green fields and gleaming towers, of controlled weather and vacations in the stars, of incomprehensible concepts and inconceivable advances; and I knew that whatever I imagined would fall short of the reality, that I had no points of reference to share with him at all.

I told myself that I was being a fool to give way to such fear.

I told myself that this man was of my own time, a clever manipulator of his fellow mortals.

I fought to recover my defensive skepticism. I failed.

We introduced ourselves to Vornan. He stood in the middle of the room, faintly supercilious, listening as we recited our scientific specialties to him. The philologist, the biochemist, the anthropologist, the historian, and the psychologist announced themselves in turn. I said, “I’m a physicist specializing in time-reversal phenomena,” and waited.

Vornan-19 replied, “How remarkable. You’ve discovered time-reversal so early in civilization! We must talk about this some time soon, Sir Garfield.”

Heyman stepped forward and barked, “What do you mean, ‘so early in civilization’? If you think we’re a pack of sweaty savages, you—”

“Franz,” Kolff muttered, catching Heyman’s arm, and I found out what the F. in “F. Richard Heyman” stood for. Heyman subsided stonily. Kralick scowled at him. One did not welcome a guest, however suspect a guest, by snarling defiance.

Kralick said, “We’ve arranged for a tour of the financial district for tomorrow morning. The rest of this day, thought, could be spent at liberty, just relaxing. Does that sound all—”

Vornan was paying no attention. He had moved in a curious gliding way across the room and was eye-to-eye with Aster Mikkelsen. Quite softly he said, “I regret that my body is soiled from long hours of traveling. I wish to cleanse myself. Would you do me the honor of bathing with me?”

We gaped. We were all braced for Vornan’s habit of making outrageous requests, but we hadn’t expected him to try anything so soon, and not with Aster. Morton Fields went rigid and swung around like a man of flint, clearly groping for a way to rescue Aster from her predicament. But Aster needed no rescuing. She accepted Vornan’s invitation to share a bathroom with him gracefully and with no sign of hesitation. Helen grinned. Kolff winked. Fields spluttered. Vornan made a little bow — flexing his knees as well as his spine, as though he did not really know how bows were accomplished — and ushered Aster briskly from the room. It had happened so fast that we were totally stunned.

Fields managed to say finally, “We can’t let him do that!”

“Aster didn’t object.” Helen pointed out. “It was her decision.”

Heyman pounded his hand into his fist. “I resign!” he boomed. “This is an absurdity! I withdraw entirely!”

Kolff and Kralick turned to him at once. “Franz, keep your temper,” Kolff roared, and Kralick said simultaneously, “Dr. Heyman. I beg of you—”

“Suppose he had asked me to take a bath with him?” Heyman demanded. “Are we to grant him every whim? I refuse to be a party to this idiocy!”

Kralick said, “No one’s asking you to yield to obviously excessive requests, Dr. Heyman. Miss Mikkelsen was under no pressure to agree. She did it for the sake of harmony, for — well, for scientific reasons. I’m proud of her. Nevertheless, she didn’t have to say yes, and I don’t want you to feel that you—”

Helen McIlwain cut in serenely, “I’m sorry you chose to resign this quickly, Franz, love. Wouldn’t you have wanted to discuss the shape of the next thousand years with him? You’ll never get a chance, now. I doubt that Mr. Kralick can let you interview him as you wish if you don’t cooperate, and of course there are so many other historians who’d be happy to take your place, aren’t there?”

Her ploy was devilishly effective. The thought of letting some despised rival get first crack at Vornan left Heyman devastated: and soon he was muttering that he hadn’t really resigned, he had only threatened to resign. Kralick let him wiggle on that hook for a while before agreeing to forget the whole unhappy incident, and in the end Heyman promised none too gracefully to take a more temperate attitude toward the assignment.

Fields, during all this, kept looking toward the door through which Aster and Vornan had vanished. At length he said edgily, “Don’t you think you ought to find out what they’re doing?”

“Taking a bath, I imagine,” said Kralick.

“You’re very calm about it!” Fields said. “But what if you’ve sent her off with a homicidal maniac? I detect certain signs in that man’s posture and facial expression that lead me to believe he’s not to be trusted.”

Kralick lifted a thick eyebrow. “Really, Dr. Fields? Would you care to dictate a report on that?”

“Not just yet,” he said sullenly. “But I think Miss Mikkelsen ought to be protected. It’s too early for us to begin assuming that this future-man is motivated in any way by the mores and taboos of our society. and—”

“That’s right,” said Helen. “It may be his custom to sacrifice a dark-haired virgin every Thursday morning. The important thing for us to remember is that he doesn’t think like us, not in any of the big ways nor in the small ones.”

It was impossible to tell from her deadpan tone whether she meant it, although I suspected she didn’t. As for Fields’ distress, that was simple enough to explain: having been frustrated in his own designs on Aster, he was upset to find Vornan spiriting her away so readily. He was so upset, in fact, that he triggered an exasperated Kralick into revealing something that he had plainly not intended to tell us.

“My staff is monitoring Vornan at all times,” Kralick snapped at the psychologist. “We’ve got a complete audio, video, and tactile pickup on him, and I don’t believe he knows it, and I’ll thank you not to let him know it. Miss Mikkelsen is in no danger whatever.”

Fields was taken aback. I think we all were.

“Do you mean your men are watching them — right now?”

“Look,” said Kralick in obvious annoyance. He snatched up the house phone and dialed a transfer number. Instantly the room’s wallscreen lit up with a relay of what his pickup devices were seeing. We were given a view in full color and three dimensions of Aster Mikkelsen and Vornan-19.

They were stark naked. Vornan’s back was to the camera; Aster’s was not. She had a lean, supple, narrow-hipped body and the breasts of a twelve-year-old.

They were under a molecular shower together. She was scrubbing his back.

They appeared to be having a fine time.