The Masks Of Time Part 11

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 jaunt, 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 G.o.d, 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 s.h.a.ggy 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 pa.s.sion 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 animalswere 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 amba.s.sador from posterity, that prediction had come to pa.s.s.

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 animalsdo 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 termssuperior orinferior.

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 s.e.xual 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 embarra.s.sed 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 andentrecote 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 plates.

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 gla.s.sy 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 appet.i.te 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-a-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 pa.s.sed before them.

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 a.s.sembled 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 s.e.xual 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 coa.r.s.e 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 facade 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 l.u.s.ted after Helen and had been turned away; he had l.u.s.ted after Aster and had failed utterly. Since Helen practiced a kind of professional nymphomania, operating under the a.s.sumption that a lady anthropologist had a duty to studyall 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.signment, 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 s.e.xual 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 facades 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 a.s.signment. 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 c.l.i.toris among North African tribeswomen or on ceremonial scarification in New Guinea p.u.b.erty 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 s.e.xes, 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 ent.i.ty 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 subjects 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 pa.s.senger."

"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."

"a.s.suming 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 couldsee 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 a.s.signment as a mere joyride, a relaxing way to pa.s.s a winter that might otherwise have to be endured in the grayness of Morningside Heights. But in Denver one s...o...b..und 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. "d.a.m.n," he muttered. "By everlasting eternal d.a.m.n!" Striding across the room, he stood for a while at the window, peering out at snowcapped skysc.r.a.pers, 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 gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 G.o.d! My G.o.d! 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 pa.s.sed 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 j.a.panese. 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 havepreface and foreword, we have perceive andknow, power and might. Both streams, though, they flow from the same source, the old Indo-Europeanmutter -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 tofind 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 ma.s.saged 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 understand, 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. G.o.d help me, I did notwant 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 ana 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?"