“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
“We should order first. Are you familiar with our foods? A salad might be nice on a beautiful warm day like this—and then perhaps the cold salmon plate, or—” She stopped abruptly. “Is something wrong?”
Thimiroi struggled to fight back nausea. “Not a salad, no, please. It is—not good for me. And in my country we do not eat fish of any sort, not ever.”
“Forgive me.”
“But how could you have known?”
“Even so—you looked so distressed—”
“Not really. It was only a moment’s uneasiness.” He scanned the menu desperately. Nothing on it made sense to him. At home, he would only have to touch the screen beside anything that seemed to be of interest, and he would get a quick flavor-analog appercept to guide his choice. But that was at home. Here he had been taking most of his meals in his room, meals prepared many centuries away by his own autochef and sent to him down the time conduit. On those few occasions when he ate in the hotel dining room with his fellow travelers, he relied on Kadro to choose his food for him. Now, plunging ahead blindly, he selected something called carpaccio for his starter, and vichyssoise to follow.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything warm?” Christine asked gently.
“Oh, I think not, not on such a mild day,” Thimiroi said casually. He had no idea what he had ordered; but he was determined not to seem utterly ignorant of her era.
The carpaccio, though, turned out to be not merely cold but raw: red raw meat, very thinly sliced, in a light sauce. He stared at it in amazement. His whole body recoiled at the thought of eating raw meat. His bones themselves protested. He saw Christine staring at him, and wondered how much of his horror his expression was revealing to her. But there was no helping it: he slipped his fork under one of the paper-thin slices and conveyed it to his mouth. To his amazement it was delicious. Forgetting all breeding, he ate the rest without pausing once, while she watched in what seemed like a mixture of surprise and amusement.
“You liked that, didn’t you?” she said.
“Carpaccio has always been one of my favorites,” he told her shamelessly.
Vichyssoise turned out to be a cold dish too, a thick white soup, presumably made from some vegetable. It seemed harmless and proved to be quite tasty. Christine had ordered the salmon, and he tried not to peer at her plate, or to imagine what it must be like to put chunks of sea-creatures in one’s mouth, while she ate.
“You promised to tell me something about yourself,” he reminded her.
She looked uneasy. “It’s not a very interesting story, I’m afraid.”
“But you must tell me a little of it. Are you a musician by profession? Surely you are. Do you perform in the concert hall?”
Her look of discomfort deepened. “I know you don’t mean to be cruel, but—”
“Cruel? Of course not. But when I was listening there outside the window I could feel the great gift that you have.”
“Please.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t, do you?” she said gently. “You weren’t trying to be funny, or to hurt me. But I’m not any sort of gifted pianist, Thimiroi. Believe me. I’m just a reasonably good amateur. Maybe when I was ten years old I dreamed of having a concert career some day, but I came to my senses a long time ago.”
“You are too modest.”
“No. No. I know what I am. And what the real thing is like. Even they don’t have an easy time of it. You can’t believe how many concert-quality pianists my age there are in this country. With so many genuine geniuses out there, there’s no hope at all for a decent third-rater like me.”
He shook his head in amazement, remembering the magical sounds that had come from her window. “Third-rater!”
“I don’t have any illusions about that,” she said. “I’m the sort of pianist who winds up giving piano lessons, not playing in Carnegie Hall. I have a couple of pupils. They come and go. It’s not possible to earn a living that way. And the job that I did have, with an export-import firm—well, they say that this is the most prosperous time this country has seen in the past forty years, but somehow I managed to get laid off last week anyway. That’s why I’m downtown today—another job interview. You see? Just an ordinary woman, an ordinary life, ordinary problems—”
“There is nothing ordinary about you,” said Thimiroi fervently. “Not to me! To me you are altogether extraordinary, Christine!” She seemed almost about to weep as he said that. Compassion and tenderness overwhelmed him, and he reached out to take her hand in his, to comfort her, to reassure her. Her eyes widened and she pulled back instantly, catching her breath sharply, as though he had tried to stab her with his fork.
Thimiroi looked at her sadly. The quickness and vehemence of her reaction mystified him.
“That was wrong?” he said. “To want to touch your hand?”
Awkwardly Christine said, “You surprised me, that’s all. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—it was rude of me, actually—oh, Thimiroi, I can’t explain—it was just automatic, a kind of dumb reflex—”
Puzzled, he turned his hand over several times, examining it, searching for something about it that might have frightened or repelled her. He saw nothing. It was simply a hand. After a moment she took it lightly with her own, and held it.
He said, “You have a husband? Is that why I should not have done that?”
“I’m not married, no.” She glanced away from him, but did not release his hand. “I’m not even—involved. Not currently.” Her fingers were lightly stroking his wrist. “I have to confess something,” she said, after a moment. “I saw you at Symphony Hall last week. The De Santis concert.”
“You did?”
“In the lobby. With your—friends. I watched you all, wondering who you were. There was a kind of glow about the whole group of you. The women were all so beautiful, every one of them. Immaculate. Perfect. Like movie stars, they were.”
“They are nothing compared with you.”
“Please. Don’t say any more things like that. I don’t like to be flattered, Thimiroi. Not only does it make me uncomfortable but it simply isn’t effective with me. Whatever else I am, I’m a realistic woman. Especially about myself.”
“And I am a truthful man. What I tell you is what I feel, Christine.” Her hand tightened on his wrist at that. He said, “So you knew who I was, when I approached you in the plaza up above just now.”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“But pretended you did not.”
“I was frightened.”
“I am not frightening, Christine.”
“Not frightened of you. Of me. When I saw you that first day, standing outside my house—I felt—I don’t know, I felt something strange, just looking at you. Felt that I had seen you before somewhere, that I had known you very well in some other life, perhaps, that—oh, Thimiroi, I’m not making any sense, am I? But I knew you had been important to me at some other time. Or would be important. It’s crazy, isn’t it? And I don’t have any room in my life for craziness. I’m just trying to hold my own, don’t you see? Trying to maintain, trying to hang on and not get swept under. In these wonderful prosperous times, I’m all alone, Thimiroi, I’m not sure where I’m heading, what’s going to come next for me. Everything seems so uncertain. And so I don’t want any extra uncertainties in my life.”
“I will not bring you uncertainty,” he said.
She stared and said nothing. Her hand still touched his.
“If you are finished with your food,” he said, “perhaps you would like to come back to the hotel with me.”
There was a long tense silence. After a time she drew her hand away from him and knotted her fingers together, and sat very still, her expression indecipherable.
“You think it was inappropriate of me to have extended such an invitation,” he said finally.
“No. Not really.”
“I want only to be your friend.”
“And I thought, since you live so close to the hotel, I could offer you some refreshment, and show you some treasures of my own country that I have brought with me. I meant nothing more than that, Christine. Please. Believe me.”
She seemed to shed some of her tension. “I’d love to stop off at your hotel with you for a little while,” she said.
He had no doubt at all that it was much too soon for them to become lovers. Not only was he completely unskilled in this era’s sociosexual rituals and procedures, so that it was probably almost impossible for him to avoid offending or displeasing her by this or that unintentional violation of the accepted courtship customs of her society, but also at this point he was still much too uncertain of the accuracy of his insight into her own nature. Once he knew her better, perhaps he would be less likely to go about things incorrectly, particularly since she already gave him the benefit of many doubts because she knew he came from some distant land.
There was also the not inconsiderable point to consider that it was a profound violation of the rules of The Travel to enter into any kind of emotional or physical involvement with a native of a past era.
That, somehow, seemed secondary to Thimiroi just now. He knew all about the importance of avoiding distortion or contamination of the time-line; they drilled it into you endlessly before you ever started to Travel. But suddenly such issues seemed unreal and abstract to him. What mattered was what he felt: the surge of delight, eagerness, passion, that ran through him when he turned to look at this woman of a far-off time. All his life he had been a stranger among his own people, a prisoner within his own skin; now, here, at last, it seemed to him that he had a chance of breaking through the net of brittle conventions that for so long had bound his spirit, and touching, at last, the soul of another human being. He had read about love, of course—who had not?—but here, he thought, he might actually experience it. Was that a reckless ambition? Well, then, he would be reckless. The alternative was to condemn himself to a lifetime of bitter regret.
Therefore he schooled himself to patience. He dared not be too hasty, for fear of ruining everything.
Christine appeared astounded by what she saw in his rooms. She wandered through them like a child in a wonderland, hardly breathing, pausing here and there to look, to reach out hesitantly, to hold her hand above this or that miraculous object as though afraid actually to touch it but eager to experience its texture.
“You brought all this from your own country?” she asked. “You must have had fifty suitcases!”
“We get homesick very easily. We wish to have our familiar things about us.”
“The way a sultan would travel. A pasha.” Her eyes were shining with awe. “These little tables—I’ve never seen anything like them. I try to follow the weave, but the pattern won’t stand still. It keeps sliding around its own corners.”
“The woodworkers of Sipulva are extremely ingenious,” Thimiroi said.
“Sipulva? Is that a city in your country?”
“A place nearby,” he said. “You may touch them if you wish.”
She caressed the intricately carved surfaces, fingers tracing the weave as it went through its incomprehensible convolutions. Thimiroi, smiling, turned the music sphere on—one of Mirtin’s melodikias began to come from it, a shimmering crystalline piece—and set about brewing some tea. Christine drifted onward, examining the draperies, the glistening carpets, the pulsating esthetikon that was sending waves of color through the room, the simso screens with their shifting views of unknown worlds. She was altogether enthralled. It would certainly be easy enough to seduce her now, Thimiroi realized. A little sensuous music, a few sips of euphoriac, perhaps some surreptitious adjustments of the little subsonic so that it sent forth heightened tonalities of anticipation and excitation—yes, that was all that it would take, he knew. But easy conquest was not what he wanted. He did not intend to pass through her soul like a frivolous tourist drifting through a museum in search of an hour’s superficial diversion.
One cup of tea for each of them, then, and no more. Some music, some quick demonstrations of a few of the little wonders that filled his rooms. A light kiss, finally, and then one that was more intense: but a quick restoration, afterward, of the barriers between them. Christine seemed no more willing to breach those barriers today than he was. Thimiroi was relieved at that, and pleased. They seemed to understand each other already.
“I’ll walk you home,” he said, when they plainly had reached the time when she must either leave or stay much longer.
“You needn’t. It’s just down the street.” Her hand lingered in his. Her touch was warm, her skin faintly moist, pleasantly so. “You’ll call me? Here’s my number.” She gave him a smooth little yellow card. “We could have dinner, perhaps. Or a concert—whatever you’d like to see—”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll call you.”
“You’ll be here at least a few more days, won’t you?”
“Until the end of the month.”
She nodded. He saw the momentary darkening of her expression, and guessed at the inward calculations: reckoning the number of days remaining to his visit, the possibilities that those days might hold, the rashness of embarking on anything that would surely not extend beyond the last day of May. Thimiroi had already made the same calculations himself, though tempered by information that she could not conceivably have, information which made everything inconceivably more precarious. After the smallest of pauses she said, “That’s plenty of time, isn’t it? But call me soon, Thimiroi. Will you? Will you?”
A little while later there was a light knocking at the door, and Thimiroi, hoping with a startling rush of eagerness that Christine had found some pretext for returning, opened it to find Laliene. She looked weary. The perfection of her beauty was unmarred, of course, every shining strand of hair in its place, her tanned skin fresh and glistening. But beneath the radiant outer glow there was once again something drawn and tense and ragged about her, a subliminal atmosphere of strain, of fatigue, of devitalization, that was not at all typical of the Laliene he had known. This visit to the late twentieth century did not seem to be agreeing with her.
“May I come in?” she asked. He nodded and beckoned to her. “We’ve all just returned from the Courtney birthplace,” she said. “You really should have gone with us, Thimiroi. You can feel the aura of the man everywhere in the place, even this early, so many years before he even existed.” Taking a few steps into the room, Laliene paused, sniffed the air lightly, smiled. “Having a little tea by yourself just now, were you, Thimiroi?”
“Just a cup. It was a long quiet afternoon.”
“Poor Thimiroi. Couldn’t find anything at all interesting to do? Then you certainly should have come with us.” He saw her glance flicking quickly about, and felt pleased and relieved that he had taken the trouble to put the teacups away. It was in fact no business of Laliene’s that he had had a guest in here this afternoon, but he did not want her, all the same, to know that he had.
“Can I brew a cup for you?” he asked.
“I think not. I’m so tired after our outing—it’ll put me right to sleep, I would say.” She turned toward him, giving him a direct inquisitorial stare that he found acutely discomforting. In a straightforward way that verged on bluntness she said, “I’m worried about you, you know, Thimiroi. Keeping off by yourself so much. The others are talking. You really should make an effort to join the group more often.”
“Maybe I’m bored with the group, Laliene. With Denvin’s snide little remarks, with Hollia’s queenly airs, with Hara’s mincing inanity, with Omerie’s arrogance, with Klia’s vacuity—”
“And with my presumptuousness?”
“You said that. Not I.”
But it was true, he realized. She was crowding him constantly, forever edging into his psychic space, pressing herself upon him in a strange, almost incomprehensible way. It had been that way since the beginning of the trip: she never
seemed to leave him alone. Her approach toward him was an odd mix of seductiveness, protectiveness, and—what?—inquisitiveness? She was like that strangest of antique phenomena, a jealous lover, almost. But jealous of what? Of whom? Surely not Christine. Christine had not so much as existed for him, except as a mysterious briefly-glimpsed face in a window, until this afternoon, and Laliene had been behaving like this for many weeks. It made no sense. Even now, covertly snooping around his suite, all too obviously searching for some trace of the guest who had only a short while before been present here—what was she after?
He took two fresh cups from his cabinet. “If you don’t mind, Laliene, I’ll put up a little more tea for myself. And it would be no trouble to make some for you.”
“I said I didn’t want any, Thimiroi. I don’t enjoy gulping the stuff down, you know, the way Kleph does.”
“Kleph?”
“Certainly you know how heavily she indulges. She’s euphoric more often than not these days.”
Thimiroi shrugged. “I didn’t realize that. I suppose Omerie can get on anyone’s nerves. Even Kleph’s.”
Laliene studied him for a long moment. “You don’t know about Kleph, then?” she asked finally. “No, I suppose you don’t. Keeping to yourself this way, how would you?”
This was maddening. “What about Kleph?” he said, his voice growing tight.
“Perhaps you should fix some tea for me after all,” Laliene said. “It’s quite a nasty story. It’ll be easier for me with a little euphoriac.”
“Very well.”
He busied himself over the tiny covered cups. In a short while the fragrant coiling steam began to rise through the fine crescent opening. His hands trembled, and he nearly swept the cups from the tray as he reached for them; but he recovered quickly and brought them to the table. They sipped the drug in silence. Watching her, Thimiroi was struck once more by the inhuman superfluity of Laliene’s elegance. Laliene was much too perfect. How different from Christine, whose skin had minute unimportant blemishes here and there, whose teeth were charmingly irregular, whose hair looked like real hair and not like something spun by machines. Christine probably perspired, he thought. She endured the messiness of menstruation. She might even snore. She was wonderfully real, wonderfully human in every regard. Whereas Laliene—Laliene seemed—scarcely real at all—
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark Page 19