The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  It worked, in the sense that Vornan did not go on any further unauthorized expeditions. But I think that that was more a matter of Vornan’s own choice than of Kralick’s added precautions. After his experience with the Apocalyptists, Vornan seemed to subside considerably; he became a more orthodox tourist, looking at this and that but holding back his more demoniacal comments. I feared this subdued version of our guest the way I would fear a quiescent volcano. But in fact he committed no new outrageous transgressions of propriety, stepped on no toes, was in many ways the model of tact. I wondered what he was storing up for us.

  And so the weeks of the tour dragged on. We looked at Disneyland with Vornan, and although the place had been visibly refurbished, it plainly bored him. He was not interested in seeing synthetic reconstructions of other times and other places; he wanted to experience the United States of 1999 at first hand. At Disneyland he paid more attention to the other customers than to the amusements themselves. We swept him through the park unheralded, moving in a small close-knit group, and for once he attracted little attention. It was as if anyone who saw Vornan at Disneyland assumed that what he saw was part of the park, a clever plastic imitation of the man out of time, and passed by with no more than a nod and a smile.

  We took him to Irvine and showed him the trillion-volt accelerator. That was my idea: I wanted a chance to get back to the campus for a few days, to visit my office and my house and be sure that all was still well. Letting Vornan near the accelerator was something of a calculated risk, I thought, remembering the havoc he had produced at Wesley Bruton’s villa; but we saw to it that Vornan never came within reach of any of the control equipment. He stood beside me, gravely watching the screens, as I smashed atoms for him. He seemed interested, but it was the superficial interest a child might have shown: he liked the pretty patterns.

  For a moment I forgot everything except the joy of manipulating the huge machine. I stood at the operating panel, with billions of dollars of equipment stretching above and before me, pulling switches and levers with the same glee Wesley Bruton had displayed while making his house work wonders. I pulverized atoms of iron and sent neutrons spraying madly about. I sent a stream of protons along the track and cut in the neutron injector so that the screen was spattered with the bright bursts of demolition lines. I conjured up quarks and antiquarks. I went through my entire repertoire, and Vornan nodded innocently, smiling, pointing. He could have deflated me as he had done the Stock Exchange man, simply by asking what the point of all this cumbersome apparatus might be, but he did not. I am not sure if his restraint was a matter of courtesy toward me — for I flattered myself that Vornan was closer to me than to any of the others who traveled with him — or if it was simply that for the moment his vein of impishness was played out, and he was content to stand and watch respectfully.

  We took him next to the fusion plant on the coast. Again, this was my doing, though Kralick agreed it might be useful. I still had hopes, however flickering, of squeezing from Vornan some data on the energy sources of his era. Jack Bryant’s too-sensitive conscience spurred me on. But the attempt was a failure. The manager of the plant explained to Vornan how we had captured the fury of the sun itself, setting up a proton-proton reaction within a magnetic pinch, and tapping power from the transmutation of hydrogen to helium. Vornan was permitted to enter the relay room where the plasma was regulated by sensors operating above the visible spectrum. What we were seeing was not the raging plasma itself — direct viewing of that was impossible — but a simulation, a re-creation, a curve following peak for peak every fluctuation of the soup of stripped-down nuclei within the pinch tank. It had been years since I had visited the plant myself, and I was awed. Vornan kept his own counsel. We waited for disparaging remarks; none came. He did not bother to compare our medieval scientific accomplishments with the technology of his own age. This new Vornan lacked bite.

  Next we doubled back through New Mexico, where Pueblo Indians dwell in a living museum of anthropology. This was Helen McIlwain's big moment. She led us through the dusty mud village trailing anthropological data. Here in early spring the regular tourist season had not yet begun, and so we had the pueblo to ourselves; Kralick had arranged with the local authorities to close the reservation to outsiders for the day, so that no Vornan-seekers would come up from Albuquerque or down from Santa Fe to make trouble. The Indians themselves came shuffling out of their flat-roofed adobes to stare, but I doubt that many of them knew who Vornan was, and I doubt that any of them cared. They were pudgy people, round-faced, flat-nosed, not at all the hawk-featured Indians of legend. I felt sorry for them. They were Federal employees, in a sense, paid to stay here and live in squalor. Although they are permitted television and automobiles and electricity, they may not build houses in the modern styles, and must continue to grind corn meal, perform their ceremonial dances, and turn out pottery for sale to visitors. Thus we guard our past.

  Helen introduced us to the leaders of the village: the governor, the chief, and the heads of two of the so-called secret societies. They seemed like sharp, sophisticated men, who could just as easily be running automobile agencies in Albuquerque. We were taken around, into a few of the houses, even down into the kiva, the town religious center, formerly sacrosanct. Some children did a ragged dance for us. In a shop at the edge of the plaza we were shown the pottery and turquoise-and-silver jewelry that the women of the village produced. One case held older pottery, made in the first half of the twentieth century, handsome stuff with a smooth finish and elegant semi-abstract patterns of birds and deer; but these pieces were priced at hundreds of dollars apiece, and from the look on the face of the salesgirl I gathered that they were not really for sale at all; they were tribal treasures, souvenirs of happier times. The real stock-in-trade consisted of cheap, flimsy little jugs. Helen said with scorn, “You see how they put the paint on after the pot’s been fired, now? It’s deplorable. Any child can do it. The University of New Mexico is trying to revive the old ways, but the people here argue that the tourists like the fake stuff better. It’s brighter, livelier — and cheaper.” Vornan drew a sour glare from Helen when he expressed his opinion that the so-called touristware was more attractive than the earlier pottery. I think he said it only to tease her, but I am not sure; Vornan’s esthetic standards were always unfathomable, and probably to him the debased current work seemed as authentic a product of the remote past as the really fine pottery in the display case.

  We had only one minor Vornan incident at the pueblo. The girl running the showroom was a slim adolescent beauty with long soft shining black hair and fine features that looked more Chinese than Indian; we were all quite taken by her, and Vornan seemed eager to add her to his collection of conquests. I don’t know what would have happened if he had asked the girl to stage a command performance in his bed that night. Luckily, he never got that far. He was eyeing the girl in obvious lust as she moved about the showroom; I saw it, and so did Helen. When we left the building, Vornan turned as if to go back in and announce his desire. Helen blocked his way, looking more like a witch than ever, her eyes blazing against her flaming mop of red hair.

  “No,”she said fiercely. “You can’t!”

  That was all. And Vornan obeyed. He smiled and bowed to Helen and walked away. I hadn’t expected him to do that.

  The new meek Vornan was a revelation to us all, but the public at large preferred the revelations of the Vornan it had come to know in January and February. Against all likelihood, interest in Vornan’s deeds and words grew more passionate with each passing week; what might have been a nine-days’ wonder was on its way toward becoming the sensation of the age. Some clever huckster assembled a quick, flimsy book about Vornan and called it The New Revelation. It contained transcripts of all of Vornan-19’s press conferences and media appearances since his arrival at Christmastime, with some choppy commentary tying everything together. The book appeared in the middle of March, and some measure of its significance can be gathered from the
fact that it came out not only in tape, cube, and facsim editions, but also in a printed text — a book, that is, in the old sense. A California publisher produced it as a slim paperbound volume with a bright red jacket and the title in incandescent ebony letters; an edition of a million copies sold out within a week. Very shortly, pirated editions were emerging from underground presses everywhere, despite the frantic attempts of the copyright owner to protect his property. Uncountable millions of The New Revelation flooded the land. I bought one myself, as a keepsake. I saw Vornan reading a copy. Both the genuine edition and the various ersatz ones had the same black-on-red color scheme, so that at a glance they were indistinguishable, and in the early weeks of spring those paperbound books covered the nation like a strange red snowfall.

  The new creed had its prophet, and now it had its gospel too. I find it hard to see what sort of spiritual comfort could be derived from The New Revelation, and so I suppose the book was more of a talisman than a scripture; one did not take counsel from it, one merely carried it about, drawing sustenance from the feel of the shiny covers against the hands. Whenever we traveled with Vornan and a crowd assembled, copies of the book were held aloft like flashcards at a college football game, creating a solid red backdrop speckled with the dark letters of the title.

  There were translations. The Germans, the Poles, the Swedes, the Portuguese, the French, the Russians, all had their own versions of The New Revelation. Someone on Kralick’s staff was collecting the things and forwarding them to us wherever we went. Kralick usually turned them over to Kolff, who showed a weird bitter interest in each new edition. The book made its way into Asia, and reached us in Japanese, in several of the languages of India, in Mandarin, and in Korean. Appropriately, a Hebrew edition appeared, the right language for any holy book. Kolff liked to arrange the little red books in rows, shifting the patterns about. He spoke dreamily of making a translation of his own, into Sanskrit or perhaps Old Persian; I am not sure if he was serious.

  Since the episode of his interview with Vornan, Kolff had been slipping into some kind of senile decay. He had been badly shocked by the computer’s views on Vornan’s speech sample; the ambiguity of that report had punctured his own buoyant conviction that he had heard the voice of the future, and now, chastened and humiliated, he had fallen back from his first enthusiastic verdict. He was not at all sure that Vornan was genuine or that he had really heard the ghosts of words in the liquid flow of Vornan’s prattle. Kolff had lost faith in his own judgment, his own expertise, and we could see him crumbling now. This great Falstaff of a man was at least partly a humbug, as we had discovered during our tour; though his gifts were great and his learning was vast, he knew that his lofty reputation had been undeserved for decades, and abruptly he stood exposed as an uncertain maunderer. In pity for him I asked Vornan to grant Kolff a second interview and to repeat whatever it was he had recited the first time. Vornan would not do it.

  “It is useless,” he said, and, refused to be prodded.

  Kolff subdued seemed hardly to be Kolff at all. He ate little, said less, and by the beginning of April had lost so much weight that he seemed unrecognizable. His clothes and his skin itself hung slack on his shrunken frame. He moved along with us from place to place, but he was shambling blindly, hardly aware of what was happening about him. Kralick, concerned, wanted to relieve Kolff of his assignment and send him home. He discussed the matter with the rest of us, but Helen’s opinion was decisive. “It’ll kill him,” she said. “He’ll think he’s being fired for incompetence.”

  “He’s a sick man,” said Kralick. “All this traveling—”

  “It’s a useful function.”

  “But he isn’t being useful any more,” Kralick pointed out. “He hasn’t contributed anything in weeks. He just sits there playing with those copies of the book. Helen, I can’t take the responsibility. He belongs in a hospital.”

  “He belongs with us.”

  “Even if it kills him?”

  “Even if it kills him,” Helen said vigorously. “Better to die in harness than to creep away thinking you’re an old fool.”

  Kralick let her win the round, but we were fearful, for we could see the inward rot spreading through old Lloyd day by day. Each morning I expected to be told that he had slipped away in his sleep; but each morning he was there, gaunt, gray-skinned, his nose now jutting like a pyramid in his diminished face. We journeyed to Michigan so that Vornan could see Aster’s life-synthesis project; and as we walked the aisles of that eerie laboratory, Kolff clumped along behind us, a delegate from the walking dead witnessing thc spawning of artificial life.

  Aster said, “This was one of our earliest successes, if you can call it a success. We never could figure out what phylum to put it in, but there’s no doubt that it’s alive and that it breeds true, so in that sense the experiment was successful.”

  We peered into a huge tank in which a variety of underwater plants grew. Between the green fronds swam slender azure creatures, six to eight inches long; they were eyeless, propelled themselves by ripplings of a dorsal fin that ran their entire length, and were crowned by gaping mouths rimmed with agile translucent tentacles. At least a hundred of them were in the tank. A few appeared to be budding; smaller representatives of their kind protruded from their sides.

  “We intended to manufacture coelenterates,” Aster explained. “Basically, that’s what we have here; a giant free-swimming anemone. But coelenterates don’t have fins, and this one does, and knows how to use it. We didn’t engineer that fin. It developed spontaneously. There’s the phantom of a segmented body structure, too, which is an attribute belonging to a higher phylum. Metabolically, the thing is capable of adapting to its environment far more satisfactorily than most invertebrates; it lives in fresh or salt water, gets along in a temperature spectrum of about a hundred degrees, and handles any sort of food. So we’ve got a super-coelenterate. We’d like to test it in natural conditions, perhaps dump a few in a pond nearby, but frankly we’re afraid to let the thing loose.” Aster smiled self-consciously. “We’ve also been trying vertebrate synthesis lately, with rather less to show for it. Here…”

  She indicated a tank in which a small brown creature lay limply on the bottom, moving in an occasional random twitch. It had two boneless-looking arms and a single leg; the missing leg did not seem ever to have been there. A whiplike tail drifted feebly about. To me it looked like a sad salamander. Aster seemed quite proud of it, though, for it had a well-developed skeletal structure, a decent nervous system, a surprisingly good set of eyes, and a full complement of internal organs. It did not, however, reproduce itself. They were still working on that. In the meantime, each of these synthetic vertebrates had to be built up cell by cell from the basic genetic material, which very much limited the scope of the experiment. But this was awesome enough.

  Aster was in her element, now, and she led us on tirelessly, down one avenue of the long, brightly lit room and up the next, past giant frosted flasks and looming, sinister centrifuges, along alcoves occupied by fractionating columns, into annexes where mechanical agitators chuttered busily in reaction vats containing somber iridescent amber fluids. We peered through long fiber telescopes to spy on sealed rooms in which light, temperature, radiation, and pressure were meticulously controlled. We saw blowups of electron photomicrographs and garnet holograms that showed us the internal structures of mysterious cellular groups. Aster sprinkled her running commentary liberally with words laden with symbolic significance, a lab jargon that had its own mystic rhythm; we heard of photometric titrators, platinum crucibles, hydraulic plethysmographs, rotary microtomes, densitometers, electrophoresis cells, collodion bags, infrared microscopes, flowmeters, piston burettes, cardiotachometers: an incomprehensible and wonderful vocabulary. Painstakingly Aster revealed how the protein chains of life were put together and made to replicate themselves; she spelled everything out simply and beautifully, and there were the wriggling mock-coelenterates and the flabby pseudosalamande
rs to tell us of achievement. It was altogether marvelous.

  As she drew us along, Aster fished for what concerned her most: Vornan’s comments. She knew that some sort of not-quite-human life existed in Vornan’s time, for he had spoken in ambiguous terms at one of our early meetings of “servitors,” which did not have full human status because they were genetically unhuman, life-forms built out of “lesser life.” From what he had said, these servitors did not seem to be synthetic creations, but rather some kind of composites constructed of humbler germ plasm drawn from living things: dog-people, cat-people, gnu-people. Naturally Aster wished to know more, and she had just as naturally learned not a shred more from Vornan-19. Now she probed again, getting nowhere. Vornan remained distantly polite. He asked a few questions: How soon, he wanted to know, would Aster be able to synthesize imitation humans? Aster looked hazy. “Five, ten, fifteen years,” she said.

  “If the world lasts that long,” said Vornan slyly.

  We all laughed, more an explosion of tensions than any real show of amusement. Even Aster, who had never displayed anything like a sense of humor, flashed a thin, mechanical smile. She turned away and indicated a tank mounted in a pressure capsule.

  “This is our latest project,” she said. “I’m not quite sure how it stands now, since as you all know I’ve been away from the laboratory since January. You see here an effort to synthesize a mammalian embryo. We have several embryos in various stages of development. If you’ll come closer…”

  I looked and saw a number of fishlike things coiled within small membrane-bounded cells. My stomach tightened in nervous response to the sight of these big-headed little creatures, born from a mess of amino acids, ripening toward who knew what kind of maturity. Even Vornan looked impressed.

  Lloyd Kolff grunted something in a language I did not understand: three or four words, thick, harsh, guttural. His voice carried an undertone of anguish. I looked toward him and saw him standing rigid, one arm brought up at an acute angle across his chest, the other pointing straight out from his side. He seemed to be performing some extremely complex ballet step and had become frozen in mid-pirouette. His face was deep blue, the color of Ming porcelain; his red-rimmed eyes were wide and frightful. He stood that way a long moment. Then he made a little chittering noise in the back of his throat and pitched forward onto the stone top of a laboratory table. He clutched convulsively; flasks and burners went sliding and crashing to the floor. His thick hands seized the rim of a small tank and pulled it over, spilling a dozen sleek little synthetic coelenterates. They flapped and quivered at our feet. Lloyd sagged slowly, losing his grip on the table and toppling in several stages, landing flat on his back. His eyes were still open. He uttered one sentence, with marvelously distinct diction: Lloyd Kolff’s valedictory to the world. It was in some ancient language, perhaps. None of us could identify it afterward or repeat even a syllable. Then he died.