The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  “Tell me how it seems to you.”

  “Fewer people than we have today,” I said. “Very sleek, very orderly. Gadgets kept in the background, yet anything at all available when needed. No wars. No nations. A simple, pleasant, happy world. It’s hard for me to believe in it.”

  “You’ve described it well.”

  “But how did it come to get that way, Vornan? That’s what we want to know! Look at the world you’ve been visiting. A hundred suspicious nations. Superbombs. Tension. Hunger and frustration. Millions of hysterical people hunting for a receptacle for their faith. What happened? How did the world settle down?”

  “A thousand years is a long time, Leo. Much can happen.”

  “What did happen, though? Where did the present nations go? Tell me about the crises, the wars, the upheavals.”

  We halted under a lamppost. Instantly its photosensors detected us and stepped up the output of light. Vornan said. “Suppose you tell me, Leo, about the organization, rise, and decline of the Holy Roman Empire.”

  “Where’d you hear about the Holy Roman Empire?”

  “From Professor Heyman. Tell me what you know about the Empire, Leo.”

  “Why — next to nothing, I guess. It was some kind of European confederation seven or eight hundred years ago. And — and—”

  “Exactly. You know nothing about it at all.”

  “I’m not claiming to be a practicing historian, Vornan.”

  “Neither am I,” he said quietly. “Why do you think I should know anything more about the Time of Sweeping than you do about the Holy Roman Empire? It’s ancient history to me. I never studied it. I had no interest in learning about it.”

  “But if you were planning to come back on a time trip, Vornan, you should have made it your business to study history the way you studied English.”

  “I needed English in order to communicate. I had no need of history. I am not here as a scholar, Leo. Only as a tourist.”

  “And you know nothing of the science of your era either, I suppose?”

  “Nothing at all,” he said cheerfully.

  “What do you know? What do you do in 2999?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  “You have no profession?”

  “I travel. I observe. I please myself.”

  “A member of the idle rich?”

  “Yes, except we have no idle rich. I guess you’d call me idle, Leo. Idle and ignorant.”

  “And is everyone in 2999 idle and ignorant? Are work and scholarship and effort obsolete?”

  “Oh. no, no, no,” Vornan said. “We have many diligent souls. My somatic brother Lunn-31 is a collector of light impulses, a ranking authority. My good friend Mortel-91 is a connoisseur of gestures. Pol-13, whose beauty you would appreciate, dances in the psychodrome. We have our artists, our poets, our learned ones. The celebrated Ekki-89 has labored fifty years on his revivification of the Years of Flame. Sator-11 has assembled a complete set of crystal images of the Seekers, all of his own making. I am proud of them.”

  “And you, Vornan?”

  “I am nothing. I do nothing. I am quite an ordinary man, Leo.” There was a note in his voice I had not heard before, a throb that I took for sincerity. “I came here out of boredom, out of the lust for diversion. Others are possessed by their commitment to the endeavors of the spirit. I am an empty vessel, Leo. I can tell you no science, no history. My perceptions of beauty are rudimentary. I am ignorant. I am idle. I search the worlds for my pleasures, but they are shallow pleasures.” Through the mask came the filtered gleam of his wondrous smile. “I am being quite honest with you, Leo. I hope this explains my failure to answer the questions of you and your friends. I am quite unsatisfactory, a man of many shortcomings. Does my honesty distress you?”

  It did more than that. It appalled me. Unless Vornan’s sudden burst of humility was merely a ploy, he was labeling himself a dilettante, a wastrel, an idler — a nobody out of time, diverting himself among the sweaty primitives because his own epoch had momentarily ceased to amuse him. His evasiveness, the voids in his knowledge, all seemed comprehensible now. But it was hardly flattering to know that this was our time traveler, that we had merited nothing better than Vornan. And I found it ominous that a self-proclaimed shallow floater had the power over our world that Vornan had effortlessly gained. Where would his quest for amusement lead him? And what, if any, restraints would he care to impose on himself?

  I said as we walked on, “Why have no other visitors from your era come to us?”

  Vornan chuckled. “What makes you think I am the first?”

  “We’ve never — no one has — there hasn’t been—” I paused, dithering, once more the victim of Vornan’s gift for opening trapdoors in the fabric of the universe.

  “I am no pioneer,” he said gently. “There have been many here before me.”

  “Keeping their identity secret?”

  “Of course. It pleased me to reveal myself. More serious-minded individuals go about things surreptitiously. They do their work in silence and depart.”

  “How many have there been?”

  “I scarcely could guess.”

  “Visiting all eras?”

  “Why not?”

  “Living among us under assumed identities?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Vornan said lightly. “Often holding public office, I believe. Poor Leo! Did you think that I was blazing a trail, a miserable fool like me?”

  I swayed, more sickened by this than anything. Our world honeycombed by strangers out of time? Our nations perhaps guided by these wanderers? A hundred, a thousand, fifty thousand travelers popping in and out of history? No. No. No. My mind rebelled at that. Vornan was playing with me now. There could be no alternative. I told him I did not believe him. He laughed. He said, “I give you my permission not to believe me. Do you hear that sound?”

  I heard a sound, yes. It was a sound like that of a waterfall, coming from the direction of Pershing Square. There are no waterfalls in Pershing Square. Vornan sprinted forward. I hurried after him, my heart pounding, my skull throbbing. I could not keep up. He halted after a block and a half to wait for me. He pointed ahead, “Quite a number of them,” he said. “I find this very exciting!”

  The dispersed mob had regrouped, milling about Pershing Square and now beginning to overflow. A phalanx of capering humanity rolled toward us, filling the street from edge to edge. I could not tell for a moment which mob it was, the Apocalyptists or those who sought Vornan to worship him, but then I saw the crazily painted faces, the baleful banners, the zigging metal coils held high overhead as symbols of heavenly fire, and I knew that these were the prophets of doom bearing down on us.

  I said, “We’ve got to get out of here. Back to the hotel!”

  “I want to see this.”

  “We’ll be trampled, Vornan!”

  “Not if we’re careful. Stay with me, Leo. Let the tide sweep over us.”

  I shook my head. The vanguard of the Apocalyptist mob was only a block from us. Wielding flares and sirens, the rioters were streaming in a wild rush toward us, screams and shrieks puncturing the air. Merely as bystanders, we might suffer at the hands of the mob; if we were recognized through our masks, we were dead. I caught Vornan’s wrist and tugged in anguish, trying to drag him down a side street that led to the hotel. For the first time I felt his electrical powers. A low-voltage jolt made my hand leap back. I clamped it to him again, and this time he transmitted a burst of stunning energy that sent me reeling away, muscles twitching in a dislocated dance. I dropped to my knees and crouched half dazed while Vornan gaily raced toward the Apocalyptists, his arms spread wide.

  The bosom of the mob enfolded him. I saw him slip between two of the front runners and vanish into the core of the surging, shouting mass. He was gone. I struggled dizzily to my feet, knowing that I had to find him, and took three or four uncertain steps forward. An instant later the Apocalyptists were upon me.

  I managed to stay on my fe
et long enough to throw off the effects of the shock Vornan had given me. About me moved the cultists, faces thick with red and green paint; the acrid tang of sweat was in the air, and mysteriously, I spied one Apocalyptist to whose chest was strapped the hissing little globe of an ion-dispersal deodorant; this was strange territory for the fastidious. I was whirled around. A girl with bare jiggling breasts, whose nipples glowed with luminescence, hugged me. “The end is coming!” she shrilled. “Live while you can!” She clawed at my hands and pressed them to her breasts. I clutched warm flesh for a moment, before the current of the mob whirled her away from me; when I looked down at my palms I saw the luminescent imprints gleaming in them, like watchful eyes. Musical instruments of indeterminate ancestry honked and blared. Three high-stepping boys, arms locked, paraded before me, kicking at anyone who came close. A towering man in a goat’s mask exposed his maleness jubilantly, and a heavy-thighed woman rushed toward him, offered herself, and clung tight. An arm snaked around my shoulders. I whirled and saw a gaunt, bony, grinning figure leaning toward me; a girl, I thought, from the costume and the long snarled silken hair, but then “her” blouse fell open and I saw the flat shining hairless chest with the two small dark circlets.

  “Have a drink,” the boy said, and thrust a squeezeflask at me. I could not refuse. The snout of the flask went between my lips and I tasted something bitter and thin. Turning away, I spat it out, but the flavor remained like a stain on my tongue.

  We were marching fifteen or twenty abreast in several directions at once, though the prevailing movement was back toward the hotel. I fought my way against the tide, hunting for Vornan. Hands clutched at me again and again. I stumbled over a couple locked in lust on the sidewalk; they were inviting destruction and did not seem to mind. It was like a carnival, but there were no floats, and the costumes were wildly individualistic.

  “Vornan!” I bellowed. And the mob took it up, magnifying the cry. “Vornan… Vornan… Vornan… kill… Vornan… doom… flame… doom… Vornan…” It was the dance of death. A figure loomed before me, face marked with pustulent sores, dripping lesions, gaping cavities; a woman’s hand rose to caress it and the makeup smeared so that I could see the handsome unmarred face beneath the artificial horrors.

  Here came a young man nearly seven feet high, waving a smoky torch and yelling of the Apocalypse; there was a flat-nosed girl drenched in sweat, rending her garments; two pomaded young men tweaked her breasts, laughed, kissed one another, and catapulted on. I called out again, “Vornan!”

  Then I caught sight of him. He was standing quite still, like a boulder in a flowing stream, and curiously the rampaging mob was passing on either side of him as it roared forward. Several feet of open space remained inviolate around him, as though he had carved a private pocket in the throng. He stood with arms folded, surveying the madness about him. His mask had been ripped, so that his cheek showed through it, and he was daubed with paint and glowing substances. I struggled toward him, was carried away by a sudden inner surge within the main flow, and fought my way back to him with elbows and knees, hammering a route through tons of flesh. When I was within a few feet of him I understood why the rioters were bypassing him. Vornan had created a little dike all around himself out of stacked human bodies, piling them two or three high on each side. They seemed dead, but as I watched, a girl who had been lying to Vornan’s left stumbled to her feet and went reeling away. Vornan promptly reached toward the next Apocalyptist to come along, a cadaverous man whose bald skull was stained deep blue. A touch of Vornan’s hand and the man collapsed, falling neatly into place to restore the rampart. Vornan had built a living wall with his electricity. I jumped over it and thrust my face close to his.

  “For God’s sake let’s get out of here!” I yelled.

  “We are in no danger, Leo. Keep calm.”

  “Your mask’s ripped. What if you’re recognized?”

  “I have my defenses.” He laughed. “What delight this is!”

  I knew better than to try to seize him again. In his careless rapture he would stun me a second time and add me to his rampart, and I might not survive the experience. So I stood beside him, helpless. I watched a heavy foot descend on the hand of an unconscious girl who lay near me; when the foot moved on, the shattered fingers quivered convulsively, bending at the joints in a way that human hands do not normally bend. Vornan turned in a full circle, taking everything in.

  He said to me, “What makes them believe the world is going to end?”

  “How would I know? It’s irrational. They’re insane.”

  “Can so many people be insane at once?”

  “Of course.”

  “And do they know the day the world ends?”

  “January 1, 2000.”

  “Quite close. Why that day in particular?”

  “It’s the beginning of a new century,” I said, “of a new millennium. Somehow people expect extraordinary things to happen then.”

  With lunatic pedantry Vornan said, “But the new century does not begin until 2001. Heyman has explained it to me. It is not correct to say that the century starts when—”

  “I know all that. But no one pays attention to it. Damn you. Vornan, let’s not stand here debating calendrics! I want to get away from here!”

  “Then go.”

  “With you.”

  “I’m enjoying this. Look there, Leo!”

  I looked. A nearly naked girl garbed as a witch rode on the shoulders of a man with horns sprouting from his forehead. Her breasts were painted glossy black, the nipples orange. But the sight of such grotesquerie did nothing to me now. I did not even trust Vornan’s improvised barricade. If things got any wilder—

  Police copters appeared abruptly. Long overdue, too. They hovered between the buildings, no more than a hundred feet up and the whirr of their rotors sent a chilling draft upon us. I watched the dull gray nozzles extrude from the white globular bellies above us; then came the first spurts of the antiriot foam. The Apocalyptists seemed to welcome it. They rushed forward, trying to get into position under the nozzles; some of them stripped off what few garments they wore and bathed in it. The foam came bubbling down, expanding as it met the air, forming a thick viscous soapiness that filled the street and made movement almost impossible. Moving now in angular jerks like machines running down, the demonstrators lurched to and fro, fighting their way through the layers of foam. Its taste was oddly sweet. I saw a girl get a jolt of it in the face and stumble, blinded, mouth and nostrils engulfed in the stuff. She fell to the pavement and disappeared totally, for by now at least three feet of foam rose from the ground, cool, sticky, cutting all of us off at our thighs. Vornan knelt and drew the girl back into view, although she would not suffocate where she was. He cleared the foam tenderly from her face and ran his hands over her moist, slippery flesh. When he gripped her breasts, her eyes opened and he said quietly to her, “I am Vornan-19.” His lips went to hers. When he released her, she scrambled away on her knees, burrowing through the foam. To my horror I saw Vornan was without his mask.

  We could scarcely move at all, now. Police robots were in the street, great shining domes of metal that buzzed easily through the foam, seizing the trapped demonstrators and hustling them into groups of ten or twelve. Sanitation mechs were already out to suck up the excess foam. Vornan and I stood near the outer border of the scene; slowly we sloshed through the foam and reached an open street. No one seemed to notice us. I said to Vornan, “Will you listen to reason now? Here’s our chance to get back to the hotel without any more trouble.”

  “We have had little trouble so far.”

  “There’ll be big trouble if Kralick finds out what you’ve been up to. He’ll restrict your freedom, Vornan. He’ll keep an army of guards outside your door and put a triple seal on it.”

  “Wait,” he said. “I want something. Then we can go.”

  He darted back into the mob. By now the foam had hardened to a doughy consistency, and those in it were wallowing precar
iously. In a moment Vornan returned. He was dragging a girl of about seventeen who seemed dazed and terrified. Her costume was of transparent plastic, but flecks of foam were clinging to it, conveying a probably unwanted modesty. “Now we can go to the hotel,” he said to me. And to the girl he whispered, “I am Vornan-19. The world does not end in January. Before dawn I will prove it to you.”

  FOURTEEN

  We did not have to sneak back into the hotel. A cordon of searchers had spread out for blocks around it; within moments after we had escaped from the foam, Vornan tripped an identity signal and some of Kralick’s men picked us up. Kralick was in the hotel lobby, monitoring the detector screens and looking half berserk with anxiety. When Vornan strode up to him, still tugging the quivering Apocalyptist girl, I thought Kralick would have a fit. Blandly Vornan apologized for any trouble he might have caused and asked to be conducted to his room. The girl accompanied him. I had an uncomfortable session with Kralick when they were out of sight.

  “How did he get out?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. He gimmicked the seal on his room, I suppose.” I tried to persuade Kralick that I had meant to give an alarm when Vornan left the hotel, but had been prevented by circumstances beyond my control. I doubt that I convinced him, but at least I got across to him the fact that I had done my best to keep Vornan from becoming involved with the Apocalyptists, and that the entire exploit had been none of my doing.

  There was a noticeable tightening of security in the weeks that followed. In effect, Vornan-19 became the prisoner and not merely the guest of the United States Government. Vornan had been more or less an honored prisoner all along, for Kralick had suspected it was unwise to let him move about freely; but aside from sealing his room at night and posting guards, no attempt had been made to exert physical restraint on him. Somehow he had coped with the seal and drugged his guards, but Kralick prevented a repetition by using better seals, self-tripping alarms, and more guards.