The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  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.

  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 tycoon. 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-class burghers who saw in him the apostle of law and order, and who trampled on law and order in their hectic desire to worship 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 shimmering tunic enfolded his monumental bulk, sparkling in a whole spectrum of colors, while a gigantic cummerbund 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 breasts and flat, boyish buttocks were no secret to me now. Fields went rigid once again, clenching his fists; Heyman flushed and scuffed at the sponge-glass 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 lif
e 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 sexual voracity, but on the other hand Aster appeared well able to guard her chastity 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 she had 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.”