The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  At the end of July 1 was notified that Vornan was returning and that my services would again be needed. I was instructed to go to the San Francisco spaceport to await Vornan’s landing a week hence. A day later I received a copy of an unpleasant little pamphlet which I’m sure did not improve the flavor of Sandy Kralick’s mood. It was a glossy-covered thing bound in red to imitate The New Revelation; its title was The Newest Revelation and its author was Morton Fields. A signed copy came to me compliments of the author. Before long, millions were in circulation, not because the booklet had any inherent interest but because it was mistaken by some for its original, and because it was coveted by others who collected any scrap of printed matter dealing with the advent of Vornan-19.

  The Newest Revelationwas Fields’ ugly memoir of his experiences on tour with Vornan. It was his way of venting his spleen against Aster, mainly. It did not name her — for fear of the libel laws, I suppose — but no one could fail to identify her, since there were only two women on the committee and Helen McIlwain was mentioned by name. The portrait of Aster that emerged was not one that corresponded to the Aster Mikkelsen I had known; Fields showed her as a treacherous, sly, deceitful, and above all else amoral minx who had prostituted herself to the members of the committee, who had driven Lloyd Kolff into his grave with her insatiable sexual appetite, and who had committed every abomination known to man with Vornan-19. Among her lesser crimes was her deliberate sadistic torment of the one virtuous and sane member of our group, who was of course Morton Fields. Fields had written:

  “This vicious and wanton woman took a strange delight in sharpening her claws on me. I was her easiest victim. Because I made it clear from the start that I disliked her, she set out to snare me into her bed — and when I rebuffed her, she grew more determined to add me to her collection of scalps. Her provocations grew flagrant and shameful, until in a weak moment I found myself about to yield to them. Then, of course, with great glee she denounced me as a Don Juan, callously humiliating me before the others, and…”

  And so on. The whining tone was maintained consistently throughout. Fields ticked each of us off unsparingly. Helen McIlwain was a giddy post-adolescent, somewhat overripe; Lloyd Kolff was a superannuated dodderer making his way through gluttony, lechery, and the shrewd use of a mind that contained nothing but erotic verse; F. Richard Heyman was an arrogant stuffed shirt. (I did not find Fields’ characterization of Heyman unjust.) Kralick was dismissed as a Government flunkey, trying hard to save everyone’s face at once, and willing to make any compromise at all to avoid trouble. Fields was quite blunt about the Government’s role in the Vornan affair. He said openly that the President had ordered complete acceptance of Vornan’s claims in order to deflate the Apocalyptists; this of course was true, but no one had admitted it publicly before, certainly not anyone so highly placed in the circles around Vornan as was Fields. Luckily he buried his complaint in a long, clotted passage devoted to a paranoid flaying of the national psyche, and I suspect the point was overlooked by most readers.

  I came off fairly well in Fields’ assessments. He described me as aloof, superficial, falsely profound, a mock-philosopher who invariably recoiled in terror from any hard issue. I am not pleased with those indictments, but I suspect that I must plead guilty to the charges. Fields touched on my excessive venery, on my lack of real commitment to any cause, and on my easy tolerance of the defects of those about me. Yet there was no venom in his paragraph on me; to him, I seemed neither fool nor villain, but rather a neutral figure of little interest. So be it.

  Fields’ nasty gossip about his fellow committeemen alone would not have won his book much of a following outside academic circles, nor would I be speaking of it at such great length. The core of his essay was his “newest revelation” — his analysis of Vornan-19. Muddled, mazy, stilted, and dreary though it was, this section managed to carry enough of Vornan’s charisma to gain it readership. And thus Fields’ foolish little book achieved an influence out of all proportion to its real content.

  He devoted only a few paragraphs to the question of Vornan’s authenticity. Over the course of the past six months Fields had held a variety of contradictory views on that subject, and he managed to pile all the contradictions into a short space here. In effect he said that probably Vornan was not an impostor, but that it would serve us all right if he were, and in any case it did not matter. What counted was not the absolute truth concerning Vornan, but only his impact on 1999. In this I think Fields was correct. Fraud or not, Vornan’s effect on us was undeniable, and the power of his passage through our world was genuine even if Vornan-as-time-traveler may not have been.

  So Fields dispensed with that problem in a cluster of blurred ambiguities and moved on to an interpretation of Vornan’s culture-role among us. It was very simple, said Fields. Vornan was a god. He was deity and prophet rolled into one, an omnipotent self-advertiser, offering himself as the personification of all the vague, unfocused yearnings of a planet whose people had had too much comfort, too much tension, too much fear. He was a god for our times, giving off electricity that may or may not have been produced by surgically implanted power-packs; a god who Zeus-like took mortals to his bed; a trouble maker of a god; a slippery, elusive, evasive, self-indulgent god, offering nothing and accepting much. You must realize that in summarizing Fields’ thoughts I am greatly compressing them and also untangling them, cutting away the brambles and thorns of excessive dogmatism and leaving only the inner theory with which I myself wholly agree. Surely Fields had caught the essence of our response to Vornan.

  Nowhere in The Newest Revelation did Fields claim that Vornan-19 was literally divine, any more than he offered a final opinion on the genuineness of his claim to have come from the future. Fields did not care whether or not Vornan was genuine, and he certainly did not think that he was in any way a supernatural being. What he was really saying — and I believe it wholeheartedly — was that we ourselves had made Vornan into a god. We had needed a deity to preside over us as we entered our new millennium, for the old gods had abdicated; and Vornan had come along to fill our need. Fields was analyzing humanity, not assessing Vornan.

  But of course humanity in the mass is not capable of absorbing such subtle distinctions. Here was a book bound in red which said that Vornan was a god! Never mind the hedgings and fudgings, never mind the scholarly obfuscations. Vornan’s divine status was officially proclaimed! And from “he is a god” to “He is God” is a very short journey. The Newest Revelation became a sacred scripture. Did it not say in words, in printed words, that Vornan was divine? Could one ignore such words?

  The magical process followed expectations. The little red pamphlet was translated into every language of mankind, serving as it did as the holy justification of the madness of Vornan-worship. The faithful had an additional talisman to carry about. And Morton Fields became the St. Paul of the new creed, the press agent of the prophet. Although he never saw Vornan again, never took an active part in the movement he unwittingly helped to encourage, Fields through his foul little book has already become an invisible presence of great significance in the movement that now sweeps the world. I suspect that he is due to be elevated to a lofty place in the canon of saints, once the new hagiologies have been written.

  Reading my advance copy of Fields’ book at the beginning of August, I failed to guess the impact it would have. I read it quickly and with the sort of cold fascination one feels upon lifting a boulder at the seashore to disclose squirming white things beneath; and then I tossed it aside, amused and repelled, and forgot all about it until its importance became manifest. Duly I reported to San Francisco to greet Vornan when he landed from space. The usual subterfuges and precautions were in effect at the spaceport. While a roaring crowd waved The New Revelation aloft under a gray fogbound sky, Vornan moved through a subterranean channel to a staging area at the edge of the spaceport.

  He took my hand warmly. “Leo, you should have come,” he said. It was pure delight. The t
riumph of your age, I’d say, that resort on the Moon. What have you been doing?”

  “Reading, Vornan. Resting. Working.”

  “To good effect?”

  “To no effect whatever.”

  He looked sleek, relaxed, as confident as always. Some of his radiance had transferred itself to Aster, who stood beside him in a frankly possessive way, no longer the blank, absent, crystalline Aster I remembered, but a warmly passionate woman fully awakened to her own soul at last. However he had worked this miracle, it was undoubtedly his most impressive achievement. Her transformation was remarkable. My eyes met hers and in their liquid depths I saw a secret smile. On the other hand, Helen McIlwain looked old and drained, her features slack, her hair coarse, her posture slumped. For the first time she seemed to be a woman in middle age. Later I discovered what had harrowed her: she felt defeated by Aster, for she had assumed all along that Vornan regarded her as a kind of consort, and quite clearly that role had passed to Aster. Heyman, too, seemed weakened. The Teutonic heaviness I so disliked was gone from him. He said little, offered no greeting, and appeared remote, distracted, dislocated. He reminded me of Lloyd Kolff in his final weeks. Prolonged exposure to Vornan obviously had its dangers. Even Kralick, tough and resilient, looked badly overextended. His hand was shaking as he held it toward mine, and the fingers splayed apart from one another, requiring of him a conscious effort to unite them.

  On the surface, though, the reunion was a pleasant one. Nothing was said about any strains that might have developed, nor about the apostasy of the odious Fields. I rode with Vornan in a motorcade to downtown San Francisco, and cheering multitudes lined the route, occasionally blocking it, just as though someone of the highest importance had arrived.

  We resumed the interrupted tour.

  Vornan had by now seen about as much of the United States as was deemed a representative sample, and the itinerary called for him to go abroad. Theoretically the responsibility of our Government should have ended at that point. We had not shepherded Vornan about in the earliest days of his visit to the twentieth century, when he had been exploring (and demoralizing) the capitals of Europe; we should have handed him on to others now that he was moving westward. But responsibilities have a way of institutionalizing themselves. Sandy Kralick was stuck with the job of conveying Vornan from place to place, for he was the world’s leading authority on that chore; and Aster, Heyman and myself were swept along in Vornan’s orbit. I did not object. I was blatantly eager to escape from the need to confront my own work.

  So we traveled. We headed into Mexico, toured the dead cities of Chichйn Itzб and Uxmal, prowled Mayan pyramids at midnight, and cut over to Mexico City for a view of the hemisphere’s most vibrant metropolis. Vornan took it all in quietly. His chastened mood, first in evidence in the spring, had remained with him here at the end of summer. No longer did he commit verbal outrages, no longer did he utter unpredictably scabrous comments, no longer could he be depended on to upset any plan or program in which he was involved. His actions seemed perfunctory and spasmodic now. He did not bother to infuriate us. I wondered why. Was he sick? His smile was as dazzling as ever, but there was no vitality behind it; he was all faзade, now. He was going through the idle motions of a global tour and responding in a purely mechanical way to all he saw. Kralick seemed concerned. He, too, preferred Vornan the demon to Vornan the automaton, and wondered why the animation had gone out of him.

  I spent a good deal of time with Vornan as we whirled westward from Mexico City to Hawaii, and on from there to Tokyo, Peking, Angkor, Melbourne, Tahiti, and Antarctica. I had not entirely given up my hope of getting hard information from him on the scientific points that were of concern to me; but although I failed in that, I learned a bit more about Vornan himself. I discovered why he was so flaccid these days.

  He had lost interest in us.

  We bored him. Our passions, our monuments, our foolishnesses, our cities, our foods, our conflicts, our neuroses — he had sampled everything, and the taste had palled. He was, he confessed to me, deathly weary of being hauled to and fro on the face of our world.

  “Why don’t you go back to your own time, then?” I asked.

  “Not yet, Leo.”

  “But if we’re so tiresome to you—”

  “I think I’ll stay, anyhow. I can endure the boredom a while longer. I want to see how things turn out.”

  “What things?”

  “Things,” he said.

  I repeated this to Kralick, who merely shrugged. “Let’s hope he sees how things turn out fast,” Kralick said. “He’s not the only one who’s tired of traveling around.”

  The pace of our journey was stepped up, as though Kralick wished to sicken Vornan thoroughly of the twentieth century. Sights and textures blurred and swirled; we zigzagged out of the white wastes of the Antarctic into the tropic swelter of Ceylon, and darted through India and the Near East, went by felucca up the Nile, trekked into the heart of Africa, sped from one shining capital to the next. Wherever we went, even in the most backward countries, the reception was a frenzied one. Thousands turned out to hail the visiting deity. By now — it was nearly October — the message of The Newest Revelation had had time to sink in. Fields’ analogies were transformed into assertions; there was no Vornanite Church in any formal sense, but quite plainly the unfocused mass hysteria was coalescing into a religious movement.

  My fears that Vornan would try to take hold of this movement proved unfounded. The crowds bored him as much as laboratories and power plants now did. From enclosed balconies he hailed the roaring throngs like a Caesar, with upraised palm; but I did not fail to notice the flicker of the nostrils, the barely suppressed yawn. “What do they want from me?” he asked, almost petulantly.

  “They want to love you,” Helen said.

  “But why? Are they so empty?”

  “Terribly empty,” Helen murmured.

  Heyman said distantly, “If you went among them, you’d feel their love.”

  Vornan seemed to shiver. “It would be unwise. They would destroy me with their love.”

  I remembered Vornan in Los Angeles six months before, gleefully plunging into a mad mob of Apocalyptists. He had shown no dread of their desperate energies then. True, he had been masked, but the risks had still been great. The image of Vornan with a pile of stunned cultists forming a living barricade came to me. What joy he had felt in the midst of that chaos! Now he feared the love of the mobs that yearned for him. This was a new Vornan, then, a cautious one. Perhaps at last he was aware of the forces he had helped to unleash, and had grown more serious in his appraisal of danger. That freewheeling Vornan of the early days was gone.

  In mid-October we were in Johannesburg, scheduled to hop the Atlantic for a tour of South America. South America was primed and ready for him. The first signs of organized Vornanism were appearing there: in Brazil and Argentina there had been prayer meetings attended by thousands; and we heard that churches were being founded, though the details were fragmentary and uninformative. Vornan showed no curiosity about this development. Instead he turned to me suddenly late one afternoon and said, “I wish to rest for a while, Leo.”

  “To take a nap?”

  “No, to rest from traveling. The crowds, the noise, the excitement — I have had enough. I want quietness now.”

  “You’d better talk to Kralick.”

  “First I must talk to you. Some weeks ago, Leo, you spoke to me of friends of yours in a quiet place. A man and a woman, a former pupil of yours, do you know the ones I mean?”

  I knew. I went rigid. In an idle moment I had told Vornan about Jack and Shirley, about the pleasure it gave me to flee to them at times of internal crisis or fatigue. In telling him, I had hoped to draw from him some parallel declaration, some detail of his own habits and relationships in that world of the future that seemed yet so unreal to me. But I had not anticipated this.

  “Yes,” I said tensely. “I know who you mean.”

  “Perhap
s we could go there together, Leo. You and I, and these two people, without the others, without the guards, the noise, the crowds. We could quietly disappear. I must renew my energies. This trip has been a strain for me, you know. And I want to see people of this era in day-to-day life. What I have seen so far has been a show, a pageant. But just to sit quietly and talk — I would like it very much. Could you arrange it for me, Leo?”

  I was taken off balance. The sudden warmth of Vornan’s appeal disarmed me; and automatically I found myself calculating that we might learn much about Vornan this way, yes, that Jack, Shirley, and I, sipping cocktails in the Arizona sunlight, might pry from the visitor facts that had remained concealed during his highly public progress around the world. I was aware of what we might try to get from Vornan; and deluded by the undemanding Vornan of recent months, I failed to take into account what Vornan might try to get from us. “I’ll talk to my friends,” I promised. “And to Kralick. I’ll see what I can do about it, Vornan.”

  SIXTEEN

  Kralick was bothered at first by the disruption of the carefully balanced itinerary; South America, he said, would be very disappointed to learn that Vornan’s arrival would be postponed. But the positive aspects of the scheme were apparent to him as well. He thought it might be useful to get Vornan-19 off into a different kind of environment, away from the crowds and the cameras. I think he welcomed the chance to escape from Vornan for a while himself. In the end he approved the proposal.