“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, shining 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 shells 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 glassy 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 spawned 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 Mцbius strip. One could walk that wall, pass 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.
“Remarkable!” Lloyd Kolff boomed. “Incredible! What do you think of it, eh?” he asked Vornan.
Vornan smiled palely. “Quite amusing. Does the therapy work well?”
“Therapy?”
“This is a house for the curing of the disturbed? A bedlam, is that the word?”
“This is the home of one of the world’s wealthiest men,” Heyman said stiffly, “designed by the talented young architect Albert Ngumbwe. It’s considered a landmark of artistic accomplishment.”
“Charming,” said Vornan-19 devastatingly.
The vestibule rotated and we moved along the clammy surface until abruptly we were in another room. The party was in full swing. At least a hundred people were clustered in a diamond-shaped hall of immense size and unfathomable dimensions; the din they made was fearful, although by some clever prank of acoustical engineering we had not heard a thing until we had passed the critical zone of the Mцbius strip. Now we were among a horde of elegant guests who clearly had been celebrating the night’s event long before the arrival of the guest of honor.
They danced, they sang, they drank, they puffed clouds of multi-hued smoke. Spotlights played upon them. I recognized dozens of faces in one dazzled sweep across the room: actors, financiers, political figures, playboys, spacemen. Bruton had cast a wide net through society, capturing only the distinguished, the lively, the remarkable. It surprised me that I could put names to so many of the faces, and I realized that it was a measure of Bruton’s success that he could gather under one multiplicity of roofs so many individuals that a cloistered professorial sort like myself could recognize.
A torrent of sparkling red wine flowed from a vent high on one wall and ran in a thick, bubbly river diagonally across the floor like water in a pig trough. A dark-haired girl clad only in silver hoops stood under it, giggling as it drenched her. I groped for her name and Helen said, “Deona Sawtelle. The computer heiress.” Two handsome young men in mirror-surface tuxedos tugged at her arms, trying to pull her free, and she eluded them to frolic in the flowing wine. In a moment they joined her. Nearby a superb dark-skinned woman with jeweled nostrils screamed happily in the grip of a titanic metal figure that was rhythmically clutching her to its chest. A man with a shaven and polished skull lay stretched full length on the floor while three girls scarcely out of their teens sat astride him and, I think, tried to undo his trousers. Four scholarly gentlemen with dyed beards sang raucously in a language unknown to me, and Lloyd Kolff strode across to greet them with whoops of mysteriously expressed pleasure. A woman with golden skin wept quietly at the base of a monstrous whirling construction of ebony, jade, and brass. Through the smoky air soared mechanical creatures with clanking metal wings and peacock tails, shrieking stridently and casting glittering droppings upon the guests. A pair of apes chained with loops of interlocked ivory gaily copulated near the intersection of two acute angles of the wall. This was Nineveh; this was Babylon. I stood dazzled, repelled by the excess of it all and yet delighted, as one is delighted by cosmic audacity of any kind. Was this a typical Wesley Bruton party? Or had it all been staged for the benefit of Vornan-19? I could not imagine people behaving like this under normal circumstances. They all seemed quite natural, though; it would take only some layers of dirt and a change of scene, and this could be an Apocalyptist riot, not a gathering of the elite. I caught sight of Kralick — appalled, he stood to one side of the vanished entrance, huge and bleak-faced, his ugly features no longer looking charming as dismay filtered through his flesh. He had not intended to bring Vornan into such a place.
Where was our visitor, anyway? In the first shock of our plunge into the madhouse we had lost sight of him. Vornan had been right: this was bedlam. And there he was in the midst of it. I saw him now, alongside the river of wine. The girl in the silver hoops, the computer heiress, rose on her knees, body stained deep crimson, and ran her hand lightly down her side. The hoops opened to the gentle command and dropped away. She offered one to Vornan, who accepted it gravely, and hurled the rest into the air. The mechanical birds snapped them up in midflight and began to devour them. The computer heiress, wholly bare now, clapped her hands in delight. One of the young men in the mirror tuxedos produced a flask from his pocket and sprayed the girl’s breasts and loins, leaving a thin plastic coating. She thanked him with a curtsy
, and turning again to Vornan-19, scooped up wine with her hands and offered him a drink. He sipped. The whole left half of the room went into a convulsion, the floor rising twenty feet to reveal an entirely new group of revelers emerging from a cellar somewhere. Kralick, Fields, and Aster were among those of our group who vanished from view in this rotation of the main floor. I decided I should keep close to Vornan, since no other member of our committee was assuming the responsibility. Kolff was in paroxysms of laughter with his four bearded savants; Helen stood as if in a daze, trying to record every aspect of the scene; Heyman went swirling away in the arms of a voluptuous brunette with talons affixed to her fingers. I shouldered my way across the floor. A waxen young man seized my hand and kissed it. A tottering dowager sent a swirl of vomit within six inches of my shoes, and a buzzing golden-hued metallic beetle a foot in diameter emerged from the floor to clean the mess, emitting satisfied clicks; I saw the gears meshing beneath its wings when it scuttled away. A moment later I was beside Vornan.
His lips were smeared with wine, but his smile was still magnificent. As he caught sight of me, he disengaged himself from the Sawtelle girl, who was trying to pull him into the rivulet of wine, and said to me, “This is excellent, Sir Garfield. I am having a splendid evening.” His forehead furrowed. “Sir Garfield is the wrong form of address, I remember. You are Leo. It is a splendid evening, Leo. This house — it is comedy itself!”
All around us the bacchanal raged more furiously. Blobs of living light drifted at eye level; I saw one distinguished guest capture one and eat it. A fist-fight had begun between the two escorts of a bloated-looking woman who was, I realized in awe and distaste, a beauty queen of my youth. Near us two girls rolled on the floor in a vehement wrestling match, ripping away handfuls of each other’s clothing. A ring of onlookers formed and clapped rhythmically as the zones of bare flesh were revealed; suddenly pink buttocks flashed and the quarrel turned into an uninhibited sapphic embrace. Vornan seemed fascinated by the flexed legs of the girl beneath, by the thrusting pelvis of her conqueror, by the moist sucking sounds of their joined lips. He inclined his head to get a better view. Yet at the same moment a figure approached us and Vornan said to me, “Do you know this man?” I had the unsettling impression that Vornan had been looking in two directions at once, taking in a different quadrant of the room with each of his eyes. Was it so?
The newcomer was a short, chunky man no taller than Vornan-19, but at least twice as wide. His immensely powerful frame was the support for a massive dolichocephalic head that rose, without virtue of a neck, from his enormous shoulders. He had no hair, not even eyebrows or lashes, which made him look far more naked than the various nude and seminude caperers reeling about in our vicinity. Ignoring me, he pushed a vast paw at Vornan-19 and said. “So you’re the man from the future? Pleased to know you. I’m Wesley Bruton.”
“Our host, Good evening.” Vornan gave him a variant of the smile, less dazzling, more urbane, and almost at once the smile flicked away and the eyes came into play: keen, cool, penetrating. Nodding gently in my direction he said. “You know Leo Garfield, of course?”
“Only by reputation,” Bruton roared. His hand was still outstretched. Vornan had not taken it. The look of expectancy in Bruton’s eyes slowly curdled into bewildered disappointment and barely suppressed fury. Feeling I had to do something, I seized the hand myself, and as he mangled me I shouted, “So good of you to invite us, Mr. Bruton. It’s a miraculous house.” I added in a lower voice, “He doesn’t understand all of our customs. I don’t think he shakes hands.”
The utilities magnate looked mollified. He released me and said. “What do you think of the place. Vornan?”
“Delightful. Lovely in its delicacy. I admire the taste of your architect, his restraint, his classicism.”
I couldn’t be sure whether that was meant as sincere praise or as derision. Bruton appeared to take the compliments at face value. He seized Vornan by one wrist, clamped his other hand about me, and said, “I'd like to show you some of the behind-the-scenes stuff, fellows. This ought to interest you, Professor. And I know Vornan here will go for it. Come on!”
I feared that Vornan would make use of that shock technique he had demonstrated on the Spanish Stairs and send Bruton flying a dozen yards for having dared to lay hands on him. But, no, our guest let himself be manhandled. Bruton bulled his way through the swirling chaos of the party, towing us in his wake. We reached a dais in the center of the room. An invisible orchestra sounded a terrifying chord and burst forth with a symphony I had never heard before, bringing loops of sound spurting from every corner of the room. A girl in the garb of an Egyptian princess was dancing atop the dais. Bruton clamped one hand on each of her bare thighs and lifted her out of the way as though she were a chair. We mounted the dais beside him; he signaled and we sank abruptly through the floor.
“We’re two hundred feet down.” Bruton announced. “This is the master control room. Look!”
He waved his arms grandly. All about us were screens relaying images of the party. The action unfolded kaleidoscopically in a dozen rooms at once. I saw poor Kralick wobbling unsteadily while some femme fatale climbed on his shoulders. Morton Fields was coiled in a compromising position about a portly woman with a broad, flat nose; Helen McIlwain was dictating notes into the amulet at her throat, a task that required her to give a good imitation of the fellative act, while Lloyd Kolff was enjoying the act itself not far away, laughing cavernously as a wide-eyed girl crouched before him. I could not find Heyman at all. Aster Mikkelsen stood in the midst of a room with moist, palpitating walls, looking serene as the frenzy raged about her. Tables laden with food moved seemingly of their own will through each room; I watched the guests seizing tidbits, stuffing themselves, hurling tender morsels at one another. There was a room in which spigots of (I presume) wine or liquor dangled from the ceiling for anyone to grasp and squeeze and draw comfort from; there was a room that was in total darkness, but not unoccupied; there was a room in which the guests took turns donning the headband of some sensory-disruptive device.
“Watch this!” Bruton cried.
Vornan and I watched, he with mild interest, I in distress, as Bruton yanked switches, closed contacts, tapped out computer orders in maniacal glee. Lights flickered on and off in the upper rooms; floors and ceilings changed places; small artificial creatures flew insanely among the shrieking, laughing guests. Shattering sounds too terrifying to be called music resounded through the building. I thought the Earth itself would erupt in protest, and molten lava engulf us all.
“Five thousand kilowatts an hour,” Bruton proclaimed.
He splayed his hands against a counterbalanced silvery globe a foot in diameter and nudged it forward on a jeweled track. Instantly one wall of the control room folded out of sight, revealing the giant shaft of a magnetohydrodynamic generator descending into yet another subbasement. Monitor needles did a madman’s dance; dials flashed green and red and purple at us. Perspiration rolled down Wesley Bruton’s face as he recited, almost hysterically, the engineering specifications of the power plant on which his palace was founded. He sang us a wild song of kilowatts. He set his grip on thick cables and massaged them in frank obscenity. He beckoned us down to see the core of his generator, and we followed, led ever deeper into the pit by this gnomish tycoon. Wesley Bruton, I remembered vaguely, had put together the holding company that distributed electricity across half the continent, and it was as though all the generating capacity of that incomprehensible monopoly were concentrated here, beneath our feet, harnessed for the sole purpose of maintaining and sustaining the architectural masterpiece of Albert Ngumbwe. The air was fiercely hot at this level. Sweat rolled down my cheeks. Bruton ripped open his jacket to bare a hairless chest banded by thick cords of muscle. Vornan-19 alone remained untroubled by the heat; he danced along beside Bruton, saying little, observing much, quite uninfected by the feverish mood of his host.
We reached the bottom. Bruton fondled the sw
elling flank of his generator as though it were a woman’s haunch. Suddenly it must have dawned on him that Vornan-19 was less than ecstatic over this parade of wonders. He whirled and demanded, “Do you have anything like this where you come from? Is there a house that can match my house?”
“I doubt it,” said Vornan gently.
“How do people live up there? Big houses? Small?”
“We tend toward simplicity.”
“So you’ve never seen a place like mine! Nothing to equal it in the next thousand years!” Bruton paused. “But — doesn’t my house still exist in your time?”
“I am not aware of that.”
“Ngumbwe promised me it would last a thousand years! Five thousand! No one would tear a place like this down! Listen, Vornan, stop and think. It must be there somewhere. A monument of the past — a museum of ancient history—”
“Perhaps it is,” said Vornan indifferently. “You see, this area lies outside the Centrality. I have no firm information on what may be found there. However, I believe the primitive barbarity of this structure might have been offensive to those who lived in the Time of Sweeping, when many things changed. Much perished then through intolerance.”
“Primitive — barbarity—” Bruton muttered. He looked apoplectic. I wished I had Kralick on hand to get me out of this.
Vornan went on planting barbs in the billionaire’s unexpectedly thin hide. “It would have been charming to retain a place like this,” he said. “To stage festivals in it, curious ceremonies in honor of the return of spring.” Vornan smiled. “We might even have winters again, if only so we could experience the return of spring. And then we would dance and frolic in your house, Sir Bruton. But I think it is lost. I think it has gone, hundreds of years ago. I am not sure. I am not sure.”
“Are you making fun of me?” Bruton bellowed. “Laughing at my house? Am I just a savage to you? Do—”
The Masks of Time Page 11