The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  “If I ever do, I certainly will,” I said, meaning it. “That’s a solemn promise.”

  She helped me dress. Then she vanished through her door, disappearing into the depths of the building to perform some rite of purification before taking on her next assignment. The screen came to life again, notifying me that my credit account would be billed at the standard rate, and requesting me to leave by the rear door of my cubicle. I stepped out onto the glidewalk and found myself drawn through a region of misty perfumed loveliness, a vaulted gallery whose high ceiling was festooned with strips of shimmertape; so magical was this realm that I scarcely noticed anything until I discovered that I was descending once more, gliding into a vestibule as large as the one through which I had entered, but at the opposite side of the building.

  Vornan? Where was Vornan?

  I emerged into the feeble light of a winter afternoon, feeling faintly foolish. The visit had been educational and recreational for me, but it had hardly served the purpose of keeping watch over our unpredictable charge. I paused on the wide plaza, wondering if I should go back inside and search out Vornan. Was it possible to ask the computer for information on a customer? While I hesitated, a voice from behind said, “Leo?”

  It was Kralick, sitting in a gray-green limousine from whose hood projected the blunt snouts of a communications rig’s antennae. I walked toward the car.

  “Vornan’s still inside,” I said. “I don’t know what—”

  “It’s all right. Get in.”

  I slipped through the door that the Government man held open for me. To my discomfort I found Aster Mikkelsen in the rear of the car, her head bent low over some sort of data sheets. She smiled briefly at me and went back to what she was analyzing. It troubled me to step directly from the brothel into the company of the pure Aster.

  Kralick said, “I’ve got a full pickup running on our friend. It might interest you to know that he’s on his fourth woman now, and shows no sign of running out of pep. Would you like to look?”

  “No, thanks,” I told him as he started to activate the screen. “That’s not my kick. Is he making any trouble in there?”

  “Not in his usual fashion. He’s just using up a lot of girls. Going down the roster, trying out positions, capering like a goat.” Muscles clenched suddenly in Kralick’s cheeks. He swung about to face me and said, “Leo, you’ve been with this guy for nearly two weeks, now. What’s your opinion? Real or fake?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Sandy. There are times when I’m convinced that he’s absolutely authentic. Then I stop and pinch myself and say that nobody can come back in time, that it’s a scientific impossibility, and that in any case Vornan’s just a charlatan.”

  “A scientist,” said Kralick heavily, “ought to begin with the evidence and construct a hypothesis around it, leading to a conclusion, right? Not start with a hypothesis and judge the evidence in terms of it.”

  “True,” I conceded. “But what do you regard as evidence? I have experimental knowledge of time-reversal phenomena, and I know that you can’t send a particle of matter back half a second without reversing its charge. I have to judge Vornan against that.”

  “All right. And the man of A.D. 999 also knew that it was impossible to fly to Mars. We can’t venture to say what’s possible a thousand years on and what isn’t. And it happens that we’ve acquired some new evidence today.”

  “Which is?”

  Kralick said, “Vornan consented to undergo the standard medical examination in there. The computer got a blood sample from him and a lot of other stuff, and relayed it all to us out here, and Aster’s been going over it. She says he’s got blood of a type she’s never seen before, and that it’s full of weird antibodies unknown to modern science — and that there are fifty other physical anomalies in Vornan’s medical checkout. The computer also picked up traces of unusual electrical activity in his nervous system, the gimmick that he uses to shock people he doesn’t like. He’s built like an electric eel. I don’t think he comes from this century at all, Leo. And I can’t tell you how much it costs me to say a thing like that.”

  From the back seat Aster said in her lovely flutelike voice, “It seems strange that we should be doing fundamental research by sending him into a whorehouse, doesn’t it, Leo? But these findings are very odd. Would you like to see the tapes?”

  “I wouldn’t be able to interpret them, thanks.”

  Kralick swiveled around. “Vornan’s finished with Number Four. He’s requesting a fifth.”

  “Can you do me a favor? There’s a girl in there named Esther, a slim pretty little redhead. I’d like you to arrange things with your friend the computer, Sandy. See to it that Esther is his next sweetheart.”

  Kralick arranged it. Vornan had requested a tall, curvy brunette for his next romance, but the computer slipped Esther in on him instead, and he accepted the substitution, I suppose, as a forgivable defect in our medieval computer technology. I asked to watch the video pickup, and Kralick switched it on. There was Esther, wide-eyed, timid, her professional poise ragged as she found herself in the presence of the man of her dreams. Vornan spoke to her elegantly, soothing her, calming her. She removed her smock and they moved toward the bed, and I had Kralick cut off the video.

  Vornan was with her a long while. His insatiable virility seemed to underline his alien origin. I sat brooding, looking into nowhere, trying to let myself accept the data Kralick had collected today. My mind refused to make the jump. I could not believe, even now, that Vornan-19 was genuine, despite the chill I had felt in Vornan’s presence and all the rest.

  “He’s had enough,” Kralick said finally. “He’s coming out. Aster, clean up all the equipment, fast.”

  While Aster concealed the monitoring pickups, Kralick sprinted from the car, got Vornan, and led him swiftly across the plaza. In the brutal winter weather there were no disciples about to throw themselves before him, nor any rampaging Apocalyptists, so for once we were able to make a clean, quick exit.

  Vornan was beaming. “Your sexual customs are fascinating,” he said, as we drove away. “Fascinating! So wonderfully primitive! So full of vigor and mystery!” He clapped his hands in delight. I felt the odd chill again creeping through my limbs, and it had nothing to do with the weather outside the car. I hope Esther is happy now, I thought. She’ll have something to tell her grandchildren. It was the least I could have done for her.

  ELEVEN

  We dined that evening at a very special restaurant in Chicago, a place whose distinction is that it serves meats almost impossible to obtain elsewhere: buffalo steak, filet of bear, moose, elk, such birds as pheasant, partridge, grouse. Vornan had heard about it somehow and wanted to sample its mysterious delights. It was the first time we had gone to a public restaurant with him, a point that troubled us; already an ominous tendency was developing for uncontrollable crowds to gather about him everywhere, and we feared what might happen in a restaurant. Kralick had asked the restaurant management to serve its specialties at our hotel, and the restaurant was willing — for a price. But Vornan would have none of that. He wished to dine out, and dine out we did.

  Our escort of Government people took precautions. They were learning fast how to cope with Vornan’s unpredictable ways. It turned out that the restaurant had both a side entrance and a private dining room upstairs, so we were able to sweep our guest into the place and past the regular diners without problems. Vornan seemed displeased to find himself in an isolated room, but we pretended that in our society it was the acme of luxury to eat away from the vulgar throng, and Vornan took the story for what it was worth.

  Some of us did not know the nature of the restaurant. Heyman thumbed the menu cube, peered at it for a long moment, and delivered a thick Teutonic hiss. He was sizzling in wrath over the bill of fare. “Buffalo!” he cried. “Moose! These are rare animals! We are to eat valuable scientific specimens? Mr. Kralick, I protest! This is an outrage!”

  Kralick had suffered much on this ja
unt, and Heyman’s testiness had been nearly as much of a bother to him as Vornan’s flamboyance. He said, “I beg your pardon, Professor Heyman. Everything on the menu is approved by the Department of the Interior. You know, even the herds of rare animals need to be thinned occasionally, for the good of the species. And—”

  “They could be sent to other conservation preserves,” Heyman rumbled, “not slaughtered for their meat! My God, what will history say of us? We who live in the last century when wild animals are found on the earth, killing and eating the priceless few survivors of a time when—”

  “You want the verdict of history?” Kolff asked. “There sits history, Heyman! Ask its opinion!” He waved a beefy hand at Vornan-19, in whose authenticity he was not a believer, and guffawed until the table shook.

  Serenely Vornan said, “I find it quite delightful that you should be eating these animals. I await my chance to share in the pleasure of doing so.”

  “But it isn’t right!” Heyman spluttered. “These creatures — do any of them exist in your time? Or are they all gone — all eaten?”

  “I am not certain. The names are unfamiliar. This buffalo, for example: What is it?”

  “A large bovine mammal covered with shaggy brown fur,” said Aster Mikkelsen. “Related to the cow. Formerly found in herds of many thousands on the western prairies.”

  “Extinct,” said Vornan. “We have some cows, but no relatives of cows. And moose?”

  “A large-horned animal of the northern forests. That’s a moose head mounted on the wall, the one with the huge antlers and the long, drooping snout,” said Aster.

  “Absolutely extinct. Bear? Grouse? Partridge?”

  Aster described each. Vornan replied gleefully that no such animals were known to exist in his era. Heyman’s face turned a mottled purple. I had not known he harbored conservationist leanings. He delivered a choppy sermon on the extinction of wildlife as a symbol of a decadent civilization, pointing out that it is not barbarians who eliminate species but rather the fastidious and cultured, who seek the amusements of the hunt and of the table, or who thrust the outposts of civilization into the nesting grounds of strange and obscure creatures. He spoke with passion and even some wisdom; it was the first time I had heard the obstreperous historian say anything of the faintest value to an intelligent person. Vornan watched him with keen interest as he spoke. Gradually a look of pleasure spread across our visitor’s face, and I thought I knew why: Heyman was arguing that extinction of species comes with the spread of civilization, and Vornan, who privately regarded us as little more than savages, doubtless thought that line of reasoning extremely funny.

  When Heyman finished, we were eyeing one another and our menu cubes in shamefaced fashion, but Vornan broke the spell. “Surely,” he said, “you will not deny me the pleasure of cooperating in the great extinction that makes my own time so barren of wildlife? After all, the animals we are about to eat tonight are already dead, are they not? Let me take back to my era the sensation of having dined on buffalo and grouse and moose, please.”

  Of course there was no question of dining somewhere else that night. We would eat here feeling guilty or we would eat here without guilt. As Kralick had observed, the restaurant used only licensed meat obtained through Government channels, and so was not directly causing the disappearance of any endangered species. The meat it served came from rare animals, and the prices showed it, but it was idle to blame a place like this for the hardships of twentieth-century wildlife. Still, Heyman had a point: the animals were going. I had seen somewhere a prediction that in another century there would be no wild animals at all except those in protected preserves. If we could credit Vornan as a genuine ambassador from posterity, that prediction had come to pass.

  We ordered. Heyman chose roast chicken; the rest of us dipped into the rarities. Vornan requested and succeeded in getting a kind of smorgasbord of house specialties: a miniature filet of buffalo, a strip of moose steak, breast of pheasant, and one or two of the other unusual items.

  Kolff said, “What animals do you have in your — ah — epoch?”

  “Dogs. Cats. Cows. Mice.” Vornan hesitated. “And several others.”

  “Nothing but domestic creatures?” asked Heyman, aghast.

  “No,” said Vornan, and propelled a juicy slab of meat to his mouth. He smiled pleasantly. “Delicious! What a loss we have suffered!”

  “You see?” Heyman cried. “If only people had—”

  “Of course,” said Vornan sweetly, “we have many interesting foods of our own. I must admit there’s a pleasure in putting a bit of meat from a living creature into one’s mouth, but it’s a pleasure that only the very few might enjoy. Most of us are rather fastidious. It takes a strong stomach to be a time traveler.”

  “Because we are filthy, depraved, hideous barbarians?” Heyman asked loudly. “Is that your opinion of us?”

  Not at all discomfited, Vornan replied, “Your way of life is quite different from my own. Obviously. Why else would I have taken the trouble to come here?”

  “Yet one way of life is not inherently superior or inferior to the other,” Helen McIlwain put in, looking up fiercely from a huge slab of what I recall as elk steak. “Life may be more comfortable in one era than in another, it may be healthier, it may be more tranquil, but we may not use the terms superior or inferior. From the viewpoint of cultural relativism—”

  “Do you know,” said Vornan, “that in my time such a thing as a restaurant is unknown? To eat food in public, among strangers — we find it inelegant. In the Centrality, you know, one comes in contact with strangers quite often. This is not true in the outlying regions. One is never hostile to a stranger, but one would not eat in his presence, unless one is planning to establish sexual intimacy. Customarily we reserve eating for intimate companions alone.” He chuckled. “It’s quite wicked of me to want to visit a restaurant. I regard you all as intimate companions, you must realize—” His hand swept the whole table, as though he would be willing to go to bed even with Lloyd Kolff if Kolff were available. “But I hope that you will grant me the pleasure of dining in public one of these days. Perhaps you were trying to spare my sensibilities by arranging for us to eat in this private room. But I ask you to let me indulge my shamelessness a bit the next time.”

  “Wonderful,” Helen McIlwain said, mainly to herself. “A taboo on public eating! Vornan, if you’d only give us more insight into your own era. We’re so eager to know anything you tell us!”

  “Yes,” Heyman said. “This period known as the Time of Sweeping, for instance—”

  “—some information on biological research in—”

  “—problems of mental therapy. The major psychoses, for example, are of great concern to—”

  “—a chance to confer with you on linguistic evolution in—”

  “—time-reversal phenomena. And also some information on the energy systems that—” It was my own voice, weaving through the thickened texture of our table talk. Naturally Vornan replied to none of us, since we were all babbling at once. When we realized what we were doing, we fell into embarrassed silence, awkwardly letting bits of words tumble over the brink of our discomfort to shatter in the abyss of self-consciousness. For an instant, there, our frustrations had broken through. In our days and nights of merry-go-round with Vornan-19, he had been infuriatingly elliptical about his own alleged era, dropping a hint here, a clue there, never delivering anything approaching a formal discourse on the shape of that future society from which he claimed to be an emissary. Each of us overflowed with unanswered questions.

  They were not answered that night. That night we dined on the delicacies of a waning era, breast of phoenix and entrecфte of unicorn, and listened closely as Vornan, more conversationally inclined than usual, dropped occasional nuggets about the feeding habits of the thirtieth century. We were grateful for what we could learn. Even Heyman grew so involved in the situation that he ceased to bewail the fate of the rarities that had graced our p
lates.

  When the time came to leave the restaurant, we found ourselves in an unhappily familiar kind of crisis. Word had circulated that the celebrated man from the future was here, and a crowd had gathered. Kralick had to order guards armed with neural whips to clear a path through the restaurant, and for a while it looked as though the whips might have to be used. At feast a hundred diners left their tables and shuffled toward us as we came down from the private room. They were eager to see, to touch, to experience Vornan-19 at close range. I eyed their faces in dismay and alarm. Some had the scowls of skeptics, some the glassy remoteness of the idle curiosity-seeker; but on many was that eerie look of reverence that we had seen so often in the past week. It was more than mere awe. It was an acknowledgment of an inner messianic hunger. These people wanted to drop on their knees before Vornan. They knew nothing of him but what they had seen on their screens, and yet they were drawn to him and looked toward him to fill some void in their own lives. What was he offering? Charm, good looks, a magnetic smite, an attractive voice? Yes, and alienness, for in word and deed he was stamped with strangeness. I could almost feel that pull myself. I had been too close to Vornan to worship him; I had seen his colossal esurience, his imperial self-indulgence, his gargantuan appetite for sensual pleasure of all sorts, and once one has seen a messiah coveting food and impaling legions of willing women, it is hard to feel truly reverent toward him. Nevertheless, I sensed his power. It had begun to transform my own evaluation of him. I had started as a skeptic, hostile and almost belligerent about it; that mood had softened, until I had virtually ceased to add the inevitable qualifier, “if he is genuine,” to everything I thought about Vornan-19. It was not merely the evidence of the blood sample that swayed me, but every aspect of Vornan’s conduct. I found it now harder to believe he might be a fraud than that he had actually come to us out of time, and this of course left me in an untenable position vis-а-vis my own scientific specialty. I was forced to embrace a conclusion that I still regarded as physically impossible: doublethink in the Orwellian sense. That I could be trapped like this was a tribute to Vornan’s power; and I believed I understood something of what these people desired as they pressed close, straining to lay hands on the visitor as he passed before them.