The Masks of Time

by Robert Silverberg

  Somehow we got out of the restaurant without any unpleasant incident. The weather was so frigid that there were only a few stragglers in the street. We sped past them and into the waiting cars. Blank-faced chauffeurs convoyed us to our hotel. Here, as in New York, we had a string of connected rooms in the most secluded part of the building. Vornan excused himself at once when we came to our floor. He had been sleeping with Helen McIlwain for the past few nights, but it seemed that our trip to the brothel had left him temporarily without interest in women, not too surprisingly. He disappeared into his room. The guards sealed it at once. Kralick, looking drained and pale, went off to file his nightly report to Washington. The rest of us assembled in one of the suites to unwind a bit before going to bed.

  The committee of six had been together long enough now for a variety of patterns to manifest themselves. We were still divided on the question of Vornan’s authenticity, but not as sharply as before. Kolff, an original skeptic, was still positive of Vornan’s phoniness, though he admired Vornan’s technique as a confidence man. Heyman, who had also come out against Vornan at the outset, was not so sure now; it clearly went against his nature to say so, but he was wavering in Vornan’s direction, mainly on the basis of a few tantalizing hints Vornan had dropped on the course of future history. Helen McIlwain continued to accept Vornan as authentic. Morton Fields, on the other hand, was growing disgruntled and backing away from his original positive appraisal. I think he was jealous of Vornan’s sexual prowess and was trying to get revenge by disavowing his legitimacy.

  The original neutral, Aster, had chosen to wait until more evidence was in. Evidence had come in. Aster now was wholly of the opinion that Vornan came from further along the human evolutionary track, and she had biochemical proof that satisfied her of that. As I have noted, I too had been swayed toward Vornan, though purely on emotional grounds; scientifically he remained an impossibility for me. Thus we now had two True Believers, two vacillating ex-skeptics inclined to take Vornan’s story at face value, one former believer moving to the opposite pole, and one remaining diehard apostate. Certainly the movement had been to Vornan’s benefit. He was winning us.

  So far as the emotional crosscurrents within our group went, they were strong and violent. We agreed on just one thing: that we were all heartily sick of F. Richard Heyman. The very sight of the historian’s coarse reddish beard had become odious to me. We were weary of his pontificating, his dogmatism, and his habit of treating the rest of us as not-too-bright undergraduates. Morton Fields, too, was outlasting his welcome in our midst. Behind his ascetic faзade he had revealed himself as a mere lecher, which I did not really mind, and as a conspicuously unsuccessful one, which I found objectionable. He had lusted after Helen and had been turned away; he had lusted after Aster and had failed utterly. Since Helen practiced a kind of professional nymphomania, operating under the assumption that a lady anthropologist had a duty to study all of mankind at the closest possible range, her rejection of Fields was the most cutting kind of rebuff. Before our tour was a week old, Helen had bedded down with all of us at least once, except for Sandy Kralick, who was too much in awe of her to think of her in sexual terms, and for poor Fields. Small wonder that his soul was souring. I suppose Helen had some private scholarly disagreement with him, dating back prior to the Vornan assignment, that motivated her unsubtle psychological castration of him. Fields’ next move had been toward Aster; but Aster was as unworldly as an angel, and blithely fended him off without seeming even to comprehend what he wanted from her. (Even though Aster had taken that shower with Vornan, none of us could believe that anything carnal had taken place between them. Aster’s crystalline innocence seemed proof even against Vornan’s irresistible masculine charm, we felt.)

  Thus Fields had the sexual problems of a pimply adolescent, and as you might imagine, those problems erupted in many ways during ordinary social discussions. He expressed his frustrations by erecting opaque faзades of terminology behind which he glowered and raged and spat. This drew the disapproval of Lloyd Kolff, who in his Falstaffian heartiness could see Fields only as something to be deplored; when Fields got annoying enough, Kolff tended to slap him down with a jovial growl that only made matters worse. With Kolff I had no quarrel; he swilled his way pleasantly from night to night and made a cheerfully ursine companion on what might otherwise have been a more dreary assignment. I was grateful, too, for Helen McIlwain's company, and not only in bed. Monomaniac though she might be on the subject of cultural relativism, she was lively, well-informed, and enormously entertaining: she could always be depended on to puncture some immense procedural debate with a few choice words on the amputation of the clitoris among North African tribeswomen or on ceremonial scarification in New Guinea puberty rites. As for Aster the unfathomable, Aster the impenetrable, Aster the inscrutable, I could not honestly say that I liked her, but I found her an agreeable quasi-feminine enigma. It troubled me that I had seen her bareness via that spy pickup; enigmas should remain total enigmas, and now that I had looked upon Aster bare, I felt that her mystery had in part been breached. She seemed deliciously chaste, a Diana of biochemistry, magically sustained at the age of sixteen forever. In our frequent debates over ways and means of dealing with Vornan, Aster seldom spoke, but what she did have to say was invariably reasonable and just.

  Our traveling circus moved along, forging westward from Chicago as January ebbed. Vornan was as indefatigable a sightseer as he was a lover. We took him to factories, power plants, museums, highway interchanges, weather-control stations, transportation monitor posts, fancy restaurants, and a good deal more, some of it at official request, some of it at Vornan’s insistence. He managed to stir up a good deal of trouble for us nearly everywhere. Perhaps by way of establishing that he was beyond “medieval” morality, he abused the hospitality of his hosts in a variety of delicately outrageous ways: seducing victims of all available sexes, flagrantly insulting sacred cows, and indicating unmistakably that he regarded the gadgety, formidably scientific world in which we lived as quaintly primitive. I found his thumb-to-nose insolence cheerfully refreshing; he fascinated as well as repelled. But others, both in and out of our group, did not think so. Nevertheless, the very outrageousness of his behavior seemed to guarantee the authenticity of his claim, and there were surprisingly few protests at his antics. He was immune, the guest of the world, the wanderer out of time; and the world, though baffled and uncertain, received him cordially.

  We did our best to head off calamities. We learned how to shield Vornan from pompous, easily vulnerable individuals who would surely call forth some mischief from him. We had seen him stare in playful awe at the immense bosom of a matronly patron of the arts who was guiding us through the splendid museum in Cleveland; he regarded the deep valley between the two upthrust white peaks with such keen concentration that we should have anticipated trouble, but we failed to intervene when Vornan abruptly reached out a finger, gaily plunged it into that cosmic cleavage, and produced the mildest of his puzzling repertoire of electric shocks. After that we kept busty middle-aged women in low-cut dresses away from him. We learned to shunt him away from other such targets for the puncturing of vanity, and if we had one success for each dozen failures, that was sufficient.

  Where we did not do so well was in extracting information from him about the epoch from which he said he came or about anything that had taken place between then and now. He let us have a morsel occasionally, such as his vague reference to an undescribed political upheaval that he referred to as the Time of Sweeping. He mentioned visitors from other stars, and talked a bit about the political structure of the ambiguous national entity he called the Centrality, but in essence he told us nothing. There was no substance to his words; he gave us only sketchy outlines.

  Each of us had ample opportunity to question him. He submitted in obvious boredom to our interrogations, but slid away from any real grilling. I spoke to him for several hours one afternoon in St. Louis, trying to pump him on the subje
cts of most immediate interest to me. I drew blanks.

  “Won’t you tell me a little about how you reached our time, Vornan? The actual transport mechanism?”

  “You want to know about my time machine?”

  “Yes. Yes. Your time machine.”

  “It’s not really a machine, Leo. That is, you mustn’t think of it as having levers and dials and such.”

  “Will you describe it for me?”

  He shrugged. “That isn’t easy. It’s — well, more of an abstraction than anything else. I didn’t see much of it. You step into a room, and a field begins to operate, and—” His voice trailed off. “I’m sorry. I’m not a scientist. I just saw the room, really.”

  “Others operated the machine?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I was only the passenger.”

  “And the force that moves you through time—”

  “Honestly, love, I can’t imagine what it’s like.”

  “Neither can I, Vornan. That’s the whole trouble. Everything I know about physics shrieks out that you can’t send a living man back through time.”

  “But I’m here, Leo. I’m the proof.”

  “Assuming that you ever traveled through time.”

  He looked crestfallen. His hand caught mine; his fingers were cool and oddly smooth. “Leo,” he said, wounded, “are you expressing suspicion?”

  “I’m simply trying to find out how your time machine works.”

  “I’d tell you if I knew. Believe me, Leo, I have nothing but the warmest feelings for you personally, and for all the earnest, struggling, sincere individuals I’ve found here in your time. But I just don’t know. Look, if you got into your car and drove back into the year 800, and someone asked you to explain how that car works, would you be able to do it?”

  “I’d be able to explain some fundamental principles. I couldn’t build an automobile myself, Vornan, but I know what makes it move. You aren’t even telling me that.”

  “It’s infinitely more complex.”

  “Perhaps I could see the machine.”

  “Oh, no,” said Vornan lightly. “It’s a thousand years up the line. It tossed me here, and it will bring me back when I choose to leave, but the machine itself, which I tell you is not exactly a machine, stays up there.”

  “How,” I asked, “will you give the signal to be taken back?” He pretended not to have heard. Instead he began questioning me about my university responsibilities; his trick was standard, to meet an awkward question with his own line of interrogation. I could not wring a drop of information from him. I left the session with my basic skepticism reborn. He could not tell me about the mechanics of travel in time because he had not traveled in time. Q.E.D.: phony. He was just as evasive on the subject of energy conversion. He would not tell me when it had come into use, how it worked, who was credited with its invention.

  The others, though, occasionally had better luck with Vornan. Most notably Lloyd Kolff, who, probably because he had voiced doubts of Vornan’s genuineness to Vornan himself, was treated to a remarkable disquisition. Kolff had not troubled much to interrogate Vornan in the early weeks of our tour, possibly because he was too lazy to bother. The old philologist had revealed an awesomely broad streak of indolence; he was quite clearly coasting on professional laurels earned twenty or thirty years before, and now preferred to spend his time wenching and feasting and accepting the sincere homage of younger men in his discipline. I had discovered that old Lloyd had not published a meaningful paper since 1980. It began to seem as if he regarded our current assignment as a mere joyride, a relaxing way to pass a winter that might otherwise have to be endured in the grayness of Morningside Heights. But in Denver one snowbound February night Kolff finally decided to tackle Vornan from the linguistic angle. I don’t know why.

  They were closeted a long time. Through the thin walls of the hotel we could hear Kolff’s booming voice chanting rhythmically in a language none of us understood: reciting Sanskrit erotic verse for Vornan, maybe. Then he translated, and we could catch an occasional salacious word, even a wanton line or two about the pleasures of love. We lost interest after a while: we had heard Kolff’s recitals before. When I bothered to eavesdrop again, I caught Vornan’s light laughter cutting like a silver scalpel through Kolff’s earthy boomings, and then I dimly detected Vornan speaking in an unknown tongue. Matters seemed serious in there. Kolff halted him, asked a question, recited something of his own, and Vornan spoke again. At that point Kralick came into our room to give us copies of the morning’s itinerary — we were taking Vornan to a gold mine, no less — and we ceased to pay attention to Kolff’s interrogation.

  An hour later Kolff came into the room where the rest of us sat. He looked flushed and shaken. He tugged heavily at a meaty earlobe, clutched the rolls of flesh on the back of his neck, cracked his knuckles with a sound like that of ricocheting bullets. “Damn,” he muttered. “By everlasting eternal damn!” Striding across the room, he stood for a while at the window, peering out at snowcapped skyscrapers, and then he said, “Is there what to drink?”

  “Rum, Bourbon, Scotch,” Helen said. “Help yourself.”

  Kolff barreled over to the table where the half-empty bottles stood, picked up the Bourbon, and poured himself a slug that would paralyze a hippo. He downed it straight, in three or four greedy gulps, and let the glass drop to the spongy floor. He stood with feet firmly planted, worrying his earlobe. I heard him cursing in what might have been Middle English.

  At length Aster said. “Did you learn anything from him?”

  “Yah. Very much.” Kolff sank into an armchair and switched the vibrator on. “I learned from him that he is no phony!”

  Heyman gasped. Helen looked astonished, and I had never seen her poise shaken before. Fields blurted, “What the hell do you mean, Lloyd?”

  “He talked to me… in his own language,” Kolff said thickly. “For half an hour. I have taped it all. I’ll give it to the computer tomorrow for analysis. But I can tell it was not faked. Only a genius of linguistics could have invented a language like that, and he would not have done it so well.” Kolff smacked his forehead. “My God! My God! A man out of time! How can it be?”

  “You understood him?” Heyman asked.

  “Give me more to drink,” said Kolff. He accepted the Bourbon bottle from Aster and put it to his lips. He scratched his hairy belly. He passed his hand before his eyes as though trying to sweep away cobwebs. Eventually he said, “No, I did not understand him. I detected only patterns. He speaks the child of English… but it is an English as far from our time as the language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is full of Asian roots. Bits of Mandarin, bits of Bengali, bits of Japanese. There is Arabic in it, I am sure. And Malay. It is a chop suey of language.” Kolff belched. “You know, our English. it is already a big stew. It has Danish, Norman French, Saxon, a mess of things, two streams, a Latin and a Teutonic. So we have duplicate words, we have preface and foreword, we have perceive and know, power and might. Both streams, though, they flow from the same source, the old Indo-European mutter-tongue.Already in Vornan’s time they have changed that. They have taken in words from other ancestral groups. Stirred everything all around. Such a language! You can say anything in a language like that. Anything! But the roots only are there. The words are polished like pebbles in a stream, all roughness smoothed away, the inflections gone. He makes ten sounds and he conveys twenty sentences. The grammar — it would take me fifty years more to find the grammar. And five hundred to understand it. The withering away of grammar — a bouillabaisse of sounds, a pot-au-feu of language — incredible, incredible! There has been another vowel shift, far more radical than the last one. He speaks… like poetry. Dream poetry no one can understand. I caught bits, only pieces…” Kolff fell silent. He massaged the huge bowl of his belly. I had never seen him serious before. It was a profoundly moving moment.

  Fields shattered it. “Lloyd, how can you be sure you aren’t imagining all this? A language you can’t und
erstand, how can you interpret it? If you can’t detect a grammar, how do you know it isn’t just gibberish he was drooling?”

  “You are a fool,” Kolff replied easily. “You should take your head and have the poison pumped out of it. But then your skull would collapse.”

  Fields sputtered. Heyman stood up and walked back and forth in quick penguinlike strides; he seemed to be going through a new internal crisis. I felt great uneasiness myself. If Kolff had been converted, what hope remained that Vornan might not be what he claimed to be? The evidence was mounting. Perhaps all this was a boozy figment of Kolff’s decaying brain. Perhaps Aster had misread the data of Vornan’s medical examination. Perhaps. Perhaps. God help me, I did not want to believe Vornan was real, for where would that leave my own scientific accomplishments, and it pained me to know that I was violating that fuzzy abstraction, the code of science, by setting up an a priori structure for my own emotional convenience. Like it or not, that structure was toppling. Maybe. How long, I wondered, would I try to prop it up? When would I accept, as Aster had accepted, as Kolff had now accepted? When Vornan made a trip in time before my eyes?

  Helen said sweetly, “Why don’t you play us the tape, Lloyd?”

  “Yes. Yes. The tape.” He produced a small recording cube, and fumbling a bit, managed to press it into the pickup slot of a playback unit. He thumbed for sonic and suddenly there flowed through the room a stream of soft, eroded sounds. I strained to hear. Vornan spoke liltingly, playfully, artfully, varying pitch and timbre, so that, his speech was close to song, and now and then a tantalizing fragment of a comprehensible word seemed to whirl past my ears. But I understood nothing. Kolff made steeples of his thick fingers, nodded and smiled, waved his shoe at some particularly critical moment, murmured now and then, “Yes? You see? You see?” but I saw not, neither did I hear: it was pure sound, now pearly, now azure, now deep turquoise, all of it mysterious, none of it intelligible. The cube whirled to its finish, and when it was over we sat silently, as if the melody of Vornan’s words still lingered, and I knew that nothing had been proven, not to me, though Lloyd might choose to accept these sounds as the child of English. Solemnly Kolff rose and pocketed the cube. He turned to Helen McIlwain, whose features were transfigured as though she had attended some incredibly sacred rite. “Come,” he said, and touched her bony wrist. “It is the time for sleeping, and not a night for sleeping alone. Come.” They went together. I still heard Vornan’s voice, gravely declaiming some lengthy passage in a language centuries unborn, or possibly rattling off a skein of nonsense, and I felt lulled to dreaminess by the sound of the future or the sound of ingenious fraud.