The Masks Of Time Part 7

"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 d.a.m.ned 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 l.u.s.ty 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 l.u.s.t, 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 ma.s.s of Apocalyptists, but that was not surprising; these days there seemed to be a ma.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+p. The camera played lovingly over their faces. They were not bedizened lunatics like the Apocalyptists; no, they were very middle cla.s.s, 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 ma.s.s 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. G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+eld 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."

G.o.d help me. Ibelieved.

We are each of us the summaries of the events of our time, the great and the small. Our patterns of thought, our cl.u.s.ters 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 a.s.sa.s.sination, 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 kins.h.i.+p with them, that they have been shaped by some of the events that fas.h.i.+oned 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 theF. 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 askedme 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'thave 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 onlythreatened 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 att.i.tude toward the a.s.signment.

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 a.s.suming 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 arewatching them-right now?"

"Look," said Kralick in obvious annoyance. He s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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.

EIGHT.

That evening Kralick had arranged to have Vornan-19 attend a party in his honor at the Hudson River mansion of Wesley Bruton, the utilities tyc.o.o.n. Bruton's place had been completed only two or three years back; it was the work of Albert Ngumbwe, the brilliant young architect who is now designing the Pan-African capital city in the Ituri Forest. It was so much of a showplace that even I had heard of it in my California isolation: the outstanding representative of contemporary design, it was said. My curiosity was piqued. I spent most of the afternoon going over a practically opaque book by one of the architectural critics, setting the Bruton house in its context-my homework, so to say. The helicopter fleet would depart at 6:30 from the heliport atop our hotel, and we'd travel under the tightest of security arrangements. The problem of logistics was going to be a severe one in this tour, I could see, and we would have to be infiltrated from place to place like contraband. Several hundred reporters and other media pests attempted to follow Vornan everywhere, even though it was agreed that coverage would be restricted to the daily pool of six journalists. A cloud of angry Apocalyptists trailed Vornan's movements, shouting their disbelief in him. And now there was the additional headache of a gathering force of disciples, a countermob of the sleek and respectable not-quite-middle-cla.s.s burghers who saw in him the apostle of law and order, and who trampled on law and order in their hectic desire to wors.h.i.+p him. With all these to contend with, we had to move swiftly.

Toward six we began to collect in our main suite. I found Kolff and Helen there when I arrived. Kolff was dressed in high style, and he was awesome to behold: a s.h.i.+mmering tunic enfolded his monumental bulk, sparkling in a whole spectrum of colors, while a gigantic c.u.mmerbund in midnight blue called attention to his jutting middle. He had slicked his straggly white hair across his dome of a skull. On his vast breast were mounted a row of academic medals conferred by many governments. I recognized only one, which I also have been awarded: France's Legion des Curies. Kolff flourished a full dozen of the silly things.

Helen seemed almost restrained by comparison. She wore a sleek flowing gown made of some coy polymer that was now transparent, now opaque; viewed at the proper angle, she seemed nude, but the view lasted only an instant before the long chains of slippery molecules changed their orientation and concealed her flesh. It was cunning, attractive, and even tasteful in its way. Around her throat she wore a curious amulet, blatantly phallic, so much so that it negated itself and ultimately seemed innocent. Her makeup consisted of a green lipglow and dark halos around her eyes.

Fields entered shortly, wearing an ordinary business suit, and then came Heyman, dressed in a tight evening outfit at least twenty years out of style. Both of them looked uneasy. Not long afterward Aster stepped into the room, clad in a simple thigh-length robe, and adorned by a row of small tourmalines across her forehead. Her arrival stirred tension in the room.

I jerked about guiltily, hardly able to meet her eyes. Like all the rest, I had spied on her; even though it had not been my idea to switch on that espionage pickup and peer at her in the shower, I had looked with all the others, I had put my eye to the knothole and stolen a peek. Her tiny b.r.e.a.s.t.s and flat, boyish b.u.t.tocks were no secret to me now. Fields went rigid once again, clenching his fists; Heyman flushed and scuffed at the sponge-gla.s.s floor. But Helen, who did not believe in such concepts as guilt or shame or modesty, gave Aster a warm, untroubled greeting, and Kolff, who had transgressed so often in a long life that he had no room left for a minor bit of remorse over some unintentional voyeurism, boomed happily, "Did you enjoy your clean-getting?"

Aster said quietly, "It was amusing."

She offered no details. I could see Fields bursting to know if she had been to bed with Vornan-19. It seemed a moot point to me; our guest had already demonstrated a remarkable and indiscriminate s.e.xual voracity, but on the other hand Aster appeared well able to guard her chast.i.ty even from a man she had bathed with. She looked cheerful and relaxed and not at all as though she had suffered any fundamental violation of her personality in the last three hours. I rather hoped shehad slept with him; it might have been a healthy experience for her, cool and isolated woman that she was.

Kralick arrived a few minutes later, Vornan-19 in tow. He led us all to the roof heliport, where the copters were waiting. There were four of them: one for the six members of the news pool, one for the six of us and Vornan, one for a batch of White House people, and one for our security guard. Ours was the third to take off. With a quiet whir of turbines it launched itself into the night sky and sped northward. We could not see the other copters at any time during the flight. Vornan-19 peered with interest through his window at the glowing city beneath.

"What is the population of this city, please?" he asked.

"Including the surrounding metropolitan area, about thirty million people," said Heyman.

"All of them human?"

The question baffled us. After a moment Fields said, "If you mean, do any of them come from other worlds, no. We don't have any beings from other worlds on Earth. We've never discovered any intelligent life forms in this solar system, and we don't have any of our star probes back yet."

"No," said Vornan, "I am not talking about otherworlders. I speak of natives to Earth. How many of your thirty million here are full-blood human, and how many are servitors?"

"Servitors? Robots, you mean?" Helen asked.

"In the sense of synthetic life-forms, no," said Vornan patiently. "I refer to those who do not have full human status because they are genetically other than human. You have no servitors yet? I have trouble finding the right words to ask. You do not build life out of lesser life? There are no-no-" He faltered.

"I cannot say. There are no words."

We exchanged troubled glances. This was practically the first conversation any of us had had with Vornan-19, and already we were wallowing in communication dilemmas. Once again I felt that chill of fear, that awareness that I was in the presence of something strange. Every skeptical rationalist atom in my being told me that this Vornan was nothing but a gifted con-man, and yet when he spoke in this random way of an Earth populated by humans and less-than-humans, there was powerful conviction in his groping attempts to explain what he meant. He dropped the subject. We flew onward. Below us the Hudson wound sluggishly to the sea. In a while the metropolitan zone ebbed and we could make out the dark areas of the public forest, and then we were descending toward the private landing strip of Wesley Bruton's hundred-acre estate, eighty miles north of the city. Bruton owned the largest tract of undeveloped privately held land east of the Mississippi, they said. I believed it.

The house was radiant. We saw it from a distance of a quarter of a mile as we left the helicopters; it breasted a rise overlooking the river, s.h.i.+ning with an external green light that sent streams of brightness toward the stars. A covered glidewalk carried us up the grade, through a winter garden of sculptured ice, tinted fantasies done by a master hand. Coming closer, we could make out Ngumbwe's structural design: a series of concentric translucent sh.e.l.ls comprising a peaked pavilion taller than any of the surrounding trees. Eight or nine overlapping arches formed the roof, revolving slowly so that the shape of the house continually changed. A hundred feet above the highest arch hung a great beacon of living light, a vast yellow globe that turned and writhed and swirled on its tenuous pedestal. We could hear music, high-pitched, vibrant, coming from festoons of tiny speakers draped along the icy limbs of gaunt, monumental trees. The glidewalk guided us toward the house; a door yawned like a mouth, gaping sideways to engulf us. I caught a glimpse of myself mirrored in the gla.s.sy surface of the door, looking solemn, a bit plump, ill at ease.

Within the house chaos reigned. Ngumbwe clearly was in league with the powers of darkness; no angle was comprehensible, no line met another. From the vestibule where we stood dozens of rooms were visible, branching in every direction, and yet it was impossible to discern any pattern, for the rooms themselves were in motion, constantly rearranging not only their individual shapes but their relation to one another. Walls formed, dissolved, and were reincarnated elsewhere. Floors rose to become ceilings while new rooms were sp.a.w.ned beneath them. I had a sense of colossal machinery grinding and clanking in the bowels of the earth to achieve these effects, but all was done smoothly and noiselessly. In the vestibule itself the structure was relatively stable, but the oval alcove had pink, clammy walls of skinlike material which swooped down at a sharp declivity, rising again just beyond where we stood, and twisting in midair so that the seamless surface was that of a Mobius strip. One could walk that wall, pa.s.s the turnover point, and leave the room for another, yet there were no apparent exits. I had to laugh. A madman had designed this house, another madman lived in it; but one had to take a certain perverse pride in all this misplaced ingenuity.