The Masks of Time Read online

  The Masks of Time

  Robert Silverberg

  Vornan-19 fell from the sky, naked, and landed on the Spanish steps in Rome on Christmas afternoon toward the end of the Millennium. And for Leo Garfield things would never be the same. For he is an acknowledged expert in the time reversal properties of sub-atomic particles... and Vornan-19 claims to come from far in the future. Whether or not he is telling the truth, a nervous and edgy world accepts the charming and magnetically charismatic Vornan as some kind of messiah. Even Garfield and his fellow scientists fall under Vornan's spell. But, has he really traveled across time — or is he just a charlatan and a fraud? A compassionate and powerful novel worthy of comparison to Stranger in a Strange Land.

  It was published in the United Kingdom under the title Vornan-19.

  Nominated for Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1968.

  The Masks of Time

  by Robert Silverberg

  INTRODUCTION

  It was the late winter of 1967 and I was preoccupied with a need to prove to the science fiction community that I was a reformed character. Back in the 1950’s, at the outset of my career, I had allowed some early discouragements in the marketplace to turn me into a purveyor of mass-produced claptrap; I had written (and sold) untold reams of stuff with titles like “Guardians of the Crystal Gate” and “Thunder over Starhaven,” unreconstructed zap-zap pulp adventure fiction. This phase lasted roughly from 1955 to 1958, after which I repented of my literary sins and resolved to write no more formula sf; but I wrote enough in those few years to tarnish my escutcheon for eons to come. When I returned to science fiction in the mid-1960’s, it was with considerably less cynicism and higher ideals, but I faced the severe problem of overcoming my earlier reputation and getting readers (and editors) to take me seriously. First with a handful of short stories, then with the novel To Open the Sky, I tried to demonstrate to my friends and to the readership at large that I had indeed outgrown the bad old days. But nobody much was listening. Just as I, as sophisticated and critical reader, had long ago decided that writers Q and P and R were such hopeless hacks that there was no sense wasting my time on even two sentences of their work, so too had most of my peers come to dismiss my writing out of hand.

  Late in 1966 I wrote a book called Thorns which was so intense, so strong, and so high-pitchedly literary in tone that I was sure it would obliterate my youthful sins. (And it did: it shook everybody’s preconceptions about me, launched what was then known as “the new Silverberg” in a spectacular way, and went to the final balloting for the Hugo and Nebula awards.) But in the early months of 1967 Thorns was still unpublished and I still chafed under the need to make people see that I was a different sort of writer, and a different sort of human being, from the boy of 22 or 23 who had committed “Pirates of the Void” and its myriad companions.

  Thorns, like To Open the Sky, had been published by Ballantine Books. Betty Ballantine, who had known me since the start of my career and had seen me mature and change, already was confident that my work of the new period was going to transcend and render invisible my hackwork, and she gave me virtually carte blanche to write as I pleased. On March 19, 1967, I sent her the outline for The Masks of Time. “As you see,” I told her, “I’ve got satire in mind this time, and while in many ways this book will echo the themes and concerns underlying Thorns, the whole narrative approach will be different: more accessible stylistically, more — well, charming. The element of the grotesque that figured so largely in Thorns won’t be so big here, and the criticism of society will be more explicit, in an implicit sort of way. I figure it’ll be a biggish sort of book, too — maybe about 100,000 words, if it really takes off. It has the sort of structure that can bear a lot of weight, so long as the ideas flow freely once I get my characters in motion through the world of 1999.”

  Thornshad been intended at least in part as a look-at-me kind of book, full of stylistic novelties, literary references, flamboyant little numbers designed to show that its author, past evidence to the contrary, really was a reasonably cultured man whose private tastes were somewhat more elevated than could be determined from examination of what he once had written. Once I got that sort of exhibitionism out of my system, I felt no need to repeat it, but in Masks of Time I set out to demonstrate a different sort of rebellion against my pulp-magazine antecedents. The essence of pulp fiction is pace; incident follows incident remorselessly, with no time out for analysis, rumination, or digression. Although characterization is far from absent in the best pulp fiction, it is manifested through action and dialog rather than through exposition. I had generally followed these precepts closely; but in Masks I was going to allow myself the luxury of writing a more novelistic novel, one in which there was room for discussion, speculation, comment, and other side-matter that was not strictly in the service of advancing the plot. To that end I chose as my narrator that familiar Jamesian figure, an articulate and civilized man who is near but not quite at the center of events, and let him tell the tale at his own pace, never worrying about the editor’s winged chariot hurrying near.

  It was, for me, an entirely new way to write. In the early novels I had fretted constantly about the demands of plot, of keeping the great mechanism ticking away toward its appointed resolution. In Thorns the need for constant verbal pyrotechnics made me tense. Here everything was unhurried. I enjoyed the novelty of not having to compress myself into the self-conceived 55,000-word mold of the early novels. Masks, when I finished it in June of 1967, was 80,000 words long, the longest novel I had written. Many years later, one (almost totally hostile) study of my work would criticize it for having been too long, over-wordy, facile, and undisciplined; facile perhaps, but one man’s undisciplined writing is another’s very much needed relaxation of arbitrary confines, and in the progression of my work it was vital to learn how to sprawl, to ramble, to explore side avenues.

  A couple of months after I finished Masks, Thorns was published and achieved the effect I had hoped for: I was rehabilitated and respectable again within my field. By the time Ballantine issued Masks of Time in the spring of 1968 I no longer had to feel motivated by any need to atone for ancient literary sins, and could produce my books with care only for themselves in themselves, not as warriors in some battle I was waging against my own past. The change in my work drew an eloquently puzzled essay from Algis Budrys, then the book columnist in Galaxy, who noted, “How curious to see that Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books like Thorns, or like his latest, The Masks of Time. Did he plan to become this way all along, or did we persuade him?” Budrys too objected to the pacing, to the presence of crowds of apparently superfluous characters, to “incidents that could easily have been left out,” but shrewdly observed, “Its defects are the opposite of those Silverberg’s work used to have… This is very much like what you’d expect from a Silverberg looking up over his shoulder and saying: (Here. Here. I’m an artist. See — here’s a piece of evidence to prove it. And another. And another.) But Silverberg has never betrayed the slightest trace of giving a damn what anybody said or thought. So maybe he was planning it this way all along. Maybe in the old days he’d whisper to a character: (All right, I’m making you out of cardboard, but what I’ve omitted I’m going to pack into somebody else, some day, and he won’t just be round, he’ll be dense!)”

  Exactly so. All except the part about my not giving a damn what anybody said or thought. Igave more than a damn, possibly cared too much, and set out quite consciously to change what people were saying, what they were thinking. And succeeded. People who know only the last decade of my work find it hard to believe that I am the very same writer who committed “The Overlord of Colony Eight” and all that other early
junk. He is not only nearly forgotten but almost mythical these days, except to me. Except to me.

  At any rate, Masks of Time, in a glossy new edition. Here I am, midway between “Pirates of the Void” and Shadrach in the Furnace, trying out my real voice in public and liking the way it sounds.

  — Robert Silverberg

  Oakland, California

  November 1977

  ONE

  A memoir of this sort should begin with some kind of statement of personal involvement, I suppose: I was the man, I was there, I suffered. And in fact my involvement with the improbable events of the past twelve months was great. I knew the man from the future. I followed him on his nightmare orbit around our world. I was with him at the end.

  But not at the beginning. And so, if I am to tell a complete tale of him, it must be a more-than-complete tale of me. When Vornan-19 arrived in our era, I was so far removed from even the most extraordinary current matters that I did not find out about it for several weeks. Yet eventually I was drawn into the whirlpool he created… as were you, all of you, as was each of us everywhere.

  I am Leo Garfield. My age is fifty-two as of tonight, the fifth of December, 1999. I am unmarried — by choice — and in excellent health. I live in Irvine, California, and hold the Schultz Chair of Physics at the University of California. My work concerns the time-reversal of subatomic particles. I have never taught in the classroom. I have several young graduate students whom I regard, as does the University, as my pupils, but there is no formal instruction in the usual sense in our laboratory. I have devoted most of my adult life to time-reversal physics, and I have succeeded mainly in inducing a few electrons to turn on their tails and flee into the past. I once thought that a considerable achievement.

  At the time of Vornan-19’s arrival, a little less than one year ago, I had reached an impasse in my work and had gone into the desert to scowl myself past the blockage point. I don’t offer that as an excuse for my failure to be in on the news of his coming. I was staying at the home of friends some fifty miles south of Tucson, in a thoroughly modern dwelling equipped with wallscreens, dataphones, and the other expectable communications channels, and I suppose I could have followed the events right from the first bulletins. If I did not, it was because I was not in the habit of following current events very closely, and not because I was in any state of isolation. My long walks in the desert each day were spiritually quite useful, but at nightfall I rejoined the human race.

  When I retell the story of how Vornan-19 came among us, then, you must understand that I am doing it at several removes. By the time I became involved in it, the story was as old as the fall of Byzantium or the triumphs of Attila, and I learned of it as I would have learned of any historical event.

  He materialized in Rome on the afternoon of December 25, 1998.

  Rome? On Christmas Day? Surely he chose it for deliberate effect. A new Messiah, dropping from heaven on that day in that city? How obvious! How cheap!

  But in fact he insisted it had been accidental. He smiled in that irresistible way, drew his thumbs across the soft skin just beneath his eyelids, and said softly, “I had one chance in three hundred sixty-five to land on any given day. I let the probabilities fall where they chose. What is the significance of this Christmas Day, again?”

  “The birthday of the Savior,” I said, “A long time ago.”

  “The savior of what, please?”

  “Of mankind. He who came to redeem us from sin.”

  Vornan-19 peered into that sphere of emptiness that always seemed to lurk a few feet before his face. I suppose he was meditating on the concepts of salvation and redemption and sin, attempting to stuff some content into the sounds. At length he said, “This redeemer of mankind was born at Rome?”

  “Bethlehem.”

  “A suburb of Rome?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “As long as you showed up on Christmas Day, you should have arrived in Bethlehem, though.”

  “I would have,” Vornan replied, “if I had planned it for its effect. But I knew nothing of your holy one, Leo. Neither his birthday nor his birthplace nor his name.”

  “Is Jesus forgotten in your time, Vornan?”

  “I am a very ignorant man, as I must keep reminding you. I have never studied ancient religions. It was chance that brought me to that place at that time.” And mischief flickered like playful lightning across his elegant features.

  Perhaps he was telling the truth. Bethlehem might have been more effective if he had wanted to manipulate the Messiah effect. At the very least, choosing Rome, he might have come down in the piazza in front of St. Peter’s, say at the moment that Pope Sixtus was delivering his blessing to the multitudes. A silvery shimmer, a figure drifting downward, hundreds of thousands of the devout on their knees in awe, the messenger from the future alighting gently, smiling, making the sign of the Cross, sending across the multitude the silent current of good will and repose best befitting this day of celebration. But he did not. He appeared instead at the foot of the Spanish Stairs, by the fountain, in that street usually choked by prosperous shoppers surging toward the boutiques of the Via Condotti. At noon on Christmas Day the Piazza di Spagna was all but empty, the shops of Via Condotti were closed, the Stairs themselves were cleared of their traditional loungers. On the top steps were a few worshippers heading for the church of Trinitа dei Monti. It was a cold wintry day, with flecks of snow circling in the gray sky; a sour wind was blowing off the Tiber. Rome was uneasy that day. The Apocalyptists had rioted only the night before; rampaging mobs with painted faces had gone streaming through the Forum, had danced an out-of-season Walpurgisnacht ballet around the tattered walls of the Colosseum, had scrambled up the hideous bulk of the Victor Emmanuel Monument to desecrate its whiteness with fierce copulations. It was the worst of the outbreaks of unreason that had swept through Rome that year, although it was not as violent as the customary Apocalyptist outburst in London, say, or for that matter in New York. Yet it had been quelled only with great difficulties by carabinieri wielding neural whips and wading into the screaming, gesticulating cultists in complete ruthlessness. Toward dawn, they say, the Eternal City still echoed with the saturnalian cries. Then came the morning of the Christ Child, and at noon, while I still slept in Arizona’s winter warmth, there appeared out of the iron-hard sky the glowing figure of Vornan-19, the man from the future.

  There were ninety-nine witnesses. They agreed in all the fundamental details.

  He descended from the sky. Everyone interviewed reported that he appeared on an arc coming in over Trinitа dei Monti, soared past the Spanish Stairs, and alighted in the Piazza di Spagna a few yards beyond the boat-shaped fountain. Virtually all of the witnesses said that he left a glowing track through the air as he came down, but none claimed to have seen any sort of vehicle. Unless the laws of falling bodies have been repealed, Vornan-19 was traveling at a velocity of several thousand feet per second at the moment of impact, based on the assumption that he was released from some hovering vehicle just out of sight above the church.

  Yet he landed upright, on both feet, with no visible sign of discomfort. He later spoke vaguely of a “gravity neutralizer” that had cushioned his descent, but he gave no details, and now we are not likely to discover any.

  He was naked. Three of the witnesses asserted that a glittering nimbus or aura enfolded him, exposing the contours of his body but opaque enough in the genital region to shield his nakedness. A loin-halo, so to speak. It happens that these three witnesses were nuns on the steps of the church. The remaining ninety-six witnesses insisted on Vornan-19’s total nudity. Most of them were able to describe the anatomy of his external reproductive system in explicit detail. Vornan was an exceptionally masculine man, as we all came to know, but those revelations were still in the future when the eyewitnesses described how well hung he was.

  Problem: Did the nuns collectively hallucinate the nimbus that supposedly protected Vornan’s modesty? Did the nuns deliberately invent the ex
istence of the nimbus to protect their own modesty? Or did Vornan arrange things so that most of the witnesses saw him entire, while those who might suffer emotional distress from the sight had a different view of him?

  I don’t know. The cult of the Apocalypse has given us ample evidence that collective hallucinations are possible, so I don’t discount the first suggestion. Nor the second, for organized religion has provided us with two thousand years of precedent for the cold statement that its functionaries don’t always tell the truth. As for the idea that Vornan would go out of his way to spare the nuns from looking upon his nakedness, I’m skeptical. It was never his style to protect anyone from any kind of jolt, nor did he really seem aware that human beings needed to be shielded from anything so astonishing as the body of a fellow human. Besides, if he hadn’t even heard of Christ, how would he have known anything about nuns and their vows? But I refuse to underestimate his deviousness. Nor do I think it would have been technically impossible for Vornan to appear one way to ninety-six onlookers and another way to the other three.

  We do know that the nuns fled into the church within moments after his arrival. Some of the others assumed that Vornan was some kind of Apocalyptist maniac and ceased to pay attention to him. But a good many watched in fascination as the nude stranger, having made his dramatic appearance, wandered about the Piazza di Spagna, inspecting first the fountain, then the shop windows on the far side, and then the row of parked automobiles at the curb. The wintry chill had no apparent effect on him. When he had seen all he wished to see at that side of the piazza, he sauntered across and began to mount the stairs. He was on the fifth step and moving without hurry when a frenzied-looking policeman rushed up and shouted at him to come down and get into the wagon.