Ancient Shadows

3. A Social Lunch at the End of Time

"Look, mama! Look at the food!" The boy shuddered in his passion. "Oh, look! Look!"

They descended from the reproduction time machine. They were in a long broad meadow of blue and white grass. The city lay several miles away, upon the horizon.

"An illusion, my dear." Her voice softened in awe. "Perhaps your desires project…"

He began to move forward, tugging at her hand, through the patchwork grass, with Sweet Orb Mace, bemused, behind, to where the long table stood alone, spread with dishes, with meats and fruits, pastes and breads. "Food, mama! I can almost smell it. Oh, mama!"

He whimpered.

"Could it be real?" he entreated.

"Real or false, we cannot eat." No amount of self-control could stem the saliva gathering upon her palate. She had never seen so much food at one time. "We cannot remove our helmets, Snuffles." For a second, her visor clouded at her breath. "Oh…"

In the distance the city danced to a sudden fanfaronade, as if exulting in their wonderment.

"If you wish to begin…" murmured their guide, and he gestured at the food with his cane.

Her next word was moaned: "Temptation…" It became a synonym, on her lips, for fulfilment. To eat — to eat and be replete for the first time in her life! To sit back from that table and note that there was still more to eat — more food than the whole of the Armatuce, if they ate absolutely nothing of their rations for a month, could save between them. "Oh, such wickedness of over-production!"

"Mother?" Snuffles indicated the centre of the table.

"A pie."

They stared. As the voices of the Sirens entranced the ancient Navigators, so were they entranced by flans.

"A vewy simple meal, I thought," said Sweet Orb Mace, uncomfortable. "You do not eat so much, in yoah age?"

"We would not," she replied. "To consume it, even if we produced it, would be disgusting to us." Her knees were weak; resistance wavered. Of all the terrors she had anticipated in the future, this was one she could not possibly have visualized, so fearsome was it. She tried to avert her eyes. But she was human. She was only one woman, without the moral strength of the Armatuce to call on. The Armatuce and the world of the Armatuce lay a million or more years in the past. Her will drooped at this knowledge. A tear started.

"You cannot pwoduce it? Some disastah?"

"We could. Now, we could. But we do not. It would be the depths of decadence to do so!" She spoke through clenched teeth.

She and the boy remained transfixed, even when others arrived and spoke in reference to them.

"Time travellers. Their uniforms proclaim their calling."

"They could be from space."

"They are hungry, it seems. Let them eat. You were speaking of your son, maternal Orchid. This other self, what?"

"He lives through her. He tells me that he lives for her, Jagged! Where does he borrow these notions? I fear for his — 'health', is it?"

"You mean that you disapprove of his behaviour?"

"I suppose so. Jherek 'goes too far'."

"I relish the sound of your words, Iron Orchid. I never thought to hear them here."

"In Djer?"

"In any part of our world. My theories are confirmed. One small change in the accepted manners of a society and the result is hugely rich."

"I cannot follow you, allusive lord. Neither shall I try … The strangers do not eat! They only stare!"

"The twanslatahs," cautioned Mace. "They opahwate even now."

"I fear our visitors find us rude."

Dafnish Armatuce felt a soft touch upon her shoulder and turned, almost with relief, from the food to look up into the patrician features of a very tall man, clothed in voluminious lemon-coloured lace which rose to his strong chin and framed his face. The grey eyes were friendly, but she would not respond (daughter to father) as her emotions dictated. She drew away. "You, too, are real?"

"Ah. Call me so."

"You are not one of the illusions of that city?"

"I suspect that I am at least as real as Sweet Orb Mace. He convinces you?"

She was mute.

"The city is old," said the newcomer. "Its whimsicalities proliferate. Yet, once, it had the finest of minds. During those agitated centuries, when beings rushed willy-nilly about the universe, all manner of visitors came to learn from it. It deserves respect, my dear time traveller, if anything deserves it. Its memory is uncertain, of course, and it lacks a good sense of its identity, its function, but it continues to serve what remains of our species. Without it, I suspect that we should be extinct."

"Perhaps you are," she said quietly.

His shoulders moved in a lazy shrug and he smiled. "Oh, perhaps, but there is better evidence supporting more entertaining theories." His companion came closer, a woman. "This is my friend the Iron Orchid. We await other friends. For lunch and so on. It is our lunch that you are admiring."

"The food is real, then? So much?"

"You are obsessed with the question. Are you from one of the religious periods?"

She trusted that the child had not heard and continued hastily. "The profusion."

"We thought it simple."

"Mama!" Tugging, Snuffles whispered, "The lady's hand."

The Iron Orchid, long-faced with huge brown eyes, hair that might have been silver filigree, peacock quills sprouting from shoulder blades and waist, had one hand of the conventional, five-fingered sort, but the other (which she flourished) was a white-petalled, murmuring goldimar poppy, having at the centre scarlet lips like welts of blood.

"And I am called here Lord Jagged of Canaria," said the man in yellow.

"Mama!" An urgent hiss. But no, she would not allow the lapse, though it was with difficulty she redirected her own gaze away from the goldimar. "Your manners, lad," she said, and then, to the pair, "This is my boy, Snuffles."

The Iron Orchid was rapturous. "A boy! What a shame you could not have arrived earlier. He would have been a playmate for my own son, Jherek."

"He is not with you?"

"He wanders Time. The womb, these days, cannot make claims. He is off about his own affairs and will listen to no-one, his mother least of all!"

"How old is your son?"

"Two hundred — three hundred — years old? Little more. Your own boy?"

"He is but sixty. My name is Dafnish Armatuce. Of the Armatuce. We…"

"And you have travelled through Time to lunch with us." Smiling, the Orchid bent her head towards the child. Stroking him with the hand that was a goldimar, she cooed. He scarcely flinched.

"We cannot lunch." Dafnish Armatuce was determined to set an example, if only to herself. "I thank you, however."

"You are not hungry?"

"We dare not breathe your atmosphere, let alone taste your food. We wish merely to find our machine and depart."

"If the atmosphere does not suit you, madam," said Lord Jagged kindly, and with gentleness, "it can be adapted."

"And the food, too. The food, too!" eagerly declared the Iron Orchid, adding, sotto voce , "though I thought it reproduced perfectly. You eat such things? In your own Age?"

"Such things are eaten, yes."

"The selection is not to your satisfaction?"

"Not at all." Dafnish Armatuce permitted her curiosity a little rein. "But how did you gather so much? How long did it take?"

The Iron Orchid was bewildered by the question. "Gather? How long? It was made a few moments before we arrived."

"Wustically wavishing!" carolled Sweet Orb Mace. "A wondahfully wipping wuwal wepast!" He giggled.

"Two or three other time travellers join us soon," explained Lord Jagged. "The choice of feast is primarily to please them."

"Others?"

"They are inclined to accumulate here, you know, at the End of Time. From what Age have you come?"

"The year was 1922."

"Aha. Then Ming will be ideal." He hesitated, looking deep into her face. "You do not find us — sinister?"

"I had not expected to encounter people at all." The perfection of his manners threw her into confusion. She was bent on defying his charm, yet the concern in his tone, the acuteness of his understanding, threatened to melt resolve. These characteristics were in conflict with the childish decadence of his costume, the corrupt grotesquerie of his surroundings, the idle insouciance of his conversation; she could not judge him, she could not sum him up. "I had expected, at most, sterility…"

He had detected the tension in her. Another touch, upon her arm, and some of that tension dissipated. But she recovered her determination almost at once. Her own hand took her son's. How could such a creature of obvious caprice impress her so strongly of his respect both for her and for himself?

Watching them without curiosity, the Iron Orchid plucked up a plum and bit into it, the fruit and her lips a perfect match. Droplets of juice fell upon the gleaming grass, and clung.

Her eyes lifted; she smiled. "This must be the first entrant."

In the sky circled four gauzy, rainbow shapes, dipping and banking.

"Mine weah the fiwst," said Sweet Orb Mace, aggrieved, "but they escaped. Or melted."

"We play flying conceits today," explained Lord Jagged. "Aha, it is undoubtably Doctor Volospion. See, he has erected his pavilion."

The large, be-flagged tent had not been on the far side of the field a moment ago, Dafnish Armatuce was sure; she would have marked its gaudy red, white and purple stripes.

"The entertainment begins." Lord Jagged drew her attention to the table. "Will you not trust us, Dafnish Armatuce? You cannot die at the End of Time, or at least cannot remain dead for very long. Try the atmosphere. You can always return to your armour." He took a backward pace.

Good manners dictated her actions, she knew. But did he seduce her? Again Snuffles eagerly made to remove his helmet, but she restrained him, for she must be the first to take the risk. She raised hesitant hands. A sidelong glance at the dancing city, distant and, she thought, expectant, and then a decision. She twisted.

A gasp as air mingled with air, and she was breathing spice, her balance at risk. Three breaths and she was convinced; from the table drifted the aroma of pie, of apricots and avocados; she failed to restrain a sob, and tingling melancholy swept from toe to tight brown curl. Such profound feeling she had experienced only once before, at the birth of her Snuffles. The lad was even now wrenching his own helmet free — even as he was drawn towards the feast.

She cried, "Caution!" and stretched a hand, but he had seized a fowl and sunk soft, juvenile teeth into the breast. How could she refuse him? Perhaps this would be the only time in his life when he would know the luxury of abundance, and he must become an adult soon enough. She relented for him, but not for herself, yet even her indulgence of the child went hard against instinct.

Chewing, Snuffles presented her with a shining face, a greasy mouth, and eyes containing fires which had no business burning in one of his years. Feral, were they?

The Orchid trilled (artificial in all things, so thought Dafnish Armatuce): "Children! Their appetites!" (Or was it irony Dafnish Armatuce detected? She dismissed any idea of challenge, placing her hands on her boy's shoulders, restraining her own lust): "Food is scarce in Armatuce just now."

"For how long?" Casually polite, the Iron Orchid raised a brow.

"The current shortage has lasted for about a century."

"You have found no means of ending the shortage?"

"Oh, we have the means. But there is the moral question. Is it good for us to end the shortage?"

For a second there came a faint expression of puzzlement upon the Iron Orchid's face, and then, with a polite wave of an ortolan leg, she turned away.

" 'Fatness Is Faithlessness'," quoted Dafnish Armatuce. " 'The Lean Alone Learn'." She realized then that these maxims were meaningless to them, but the zeal which touched the missionary touched her, and she continued: "In Armatuce we believe that it is better to have less than to have enough, for those who have enough always feel the need for too much, whereas we only quell the yearning for sufficient, do you see?" She explained: " 'Greed Kills'. 'Self-indulgence Is Suicide'. We stay hungry so that we shall never be tempted to eat more than we need and thus risk, again, the death of the planet. 'Austerity Is Equilibrium'."

"Your world recovers from disaster, then?" said Lord Jagged sympathetically.

"It has recovered, sir." She was firm. "Thanks to the ancestors of the Armatuce. Now the Armatuce holds what they achieved in trust. 'Stable Is He Who Stoic Shall Be'."

"You fear that without this morality you would reproduce the disaster?"

"We know it," she said.

"Yet —" he spread his hands — "you find a world still here when you did not expect it and no evidence that your philosophy has survived."

She scarcely heard the words, but she recognized the sly, pernicious tone. She squared her shoulders. "We would return now, if you please. The boy has eaten."

"You will have nothing?"

"Will you show me to my ship?"

"Your ship will not work."

"What? You refuse to let me leave?"

As succinctly as possible, Lord Jagged explained the Morphail Effect, concluding, "Therefore you can never really return to your own Age and, if you left this one, might well be killed or at very least stranded in a less congenial era."

"You think I lack courage? That I would not take the risk?"

He pursed his lips and let his gaze fall upon the gorging boy. She followed his meaning and put two fingers softly upon her cheek.

"Eat now," said the tall lord with a tender gesture.

Absently, she touched a morsel of mutton to her tongue.

A shadow moved across the field, cast by a beast, porcine and grey, which with lumbering grace performed a somersault or two in the sky. Overhead there were now several more objects and creatures pirouetting, diving, spiralling — a small red biplane, a monstrous mosquito, a winged black and white cat, a pale green stingray — while below the owners of these entrants jostled, laughed and talked: a motley of races (some Earthly beasts, others extraterrestrial; but mostly humanoid), clothed and decorated in all manner of fanciful array. On the edges of the blue and white field there had sprouted marquees, flagpoles, lines of bunting, crowded together and waving boisterously, so that she could no longer see beyond their confines. She let the mutton melt, took one plum and consumed it, drank an inch of water from a goblet, and her meal was done, though the effort of will involved in resisting a leaf of lettuce only by a fraction succeeded in balancing the guilt experienced at having allowed herself to eat the second half of the fruit. Meanwhile Snuffles' jaws continued to move with dedicated precision.

Several large, fiery wheels went by, a score of feet above her head, drowning with their hissing the loud babble of the crowd.

"Cwumbs!" exclaimed Sweet Orb Mace, with a knowing wink at her, as if they shared a secret. "Goah Blimey!"

The words were meaningless, but he appeared to be under the impression that she would understand them.

Deliberately, she guided her glance elsewhere. Everyone was applauding.

"Chariots of Fire!" bellowed a deep, proprietorial voice. "Chariots of Fire! Number Seventy-Eight!"

"We shan't forget, dear Duke of Queens," sang a lady whose gilded skin clashed sickeningly with her green mouth and glowing, emerald eyes.

"My Lady Charlotina of Below the Lake," murmured Lord Jagged. "Would you like to meet her?"

"Can she be of help to me? Can she give me practical advice?" The rhetoric rang false, even in her own ears.

"She is the Patron of Brannart Morphail, our greatest, maddest scientist, who knows more about the Nature of Time than anyone else in history, so he tells us. He will probably want to interview you shortly."

"Why should one of your folk require a Patron?" she asked with genuine interest.

"We seek traditions wherever we can find them. We are glad to get them. They help us order our lives, I suppose. Doubtless Brannart dug his tradition up from some ancient tape and took a fancy to it. Of late, because of the enthusiasm of the Iron Orchid's son, Jherek, we have all become obsessed with morality…"

"I see little evidence of that."

"We are still having difficulty defining what it is," he told her. "My Lady Charlotina — our latest time travellers — Mother and Son — Dafnish and Snuffles Armatuce."

"How charming. How unusual. Tell me, delightful Dafnish, are you claimed yet?"

"Claimed?" Dafnish Armatuce looked back at the departing Jagged.

"We vie with one another to be hosts to new arrivals," he called. His wave was a little on the airy side. "You are 'claimed', however, as my guests. I will see you anon."

"Greedy Jagged! Does he restock his menagerie?" My Lady Charlotina of Below the Lake stroked her crochet snood as her eyes swept up from Dafnish's toes and locked with Dafnish's eyes for a moment. "Your figure? Is it your own, my dear?"

"I fail to understand you."

"Then it is! Ha, ha!" Mood changed, My Lady Charlotina made a curtsey. "I will find you some friends. My talent, they say, is as a Catalyst!"

"You are modest, cherubic Charlotina! You have all the talents in the catalogue!" In doublet and hose reminiscent of pre-cataclysm decadence, extravagantly swollen, catechrestically slashed and galooned, bearing buttons the size of cabbages, the shoes with toes a yard or two long and curled to the knees, the cap peaked to jut more than a foot from the face, beruffed and bedecked with thin brass chains, a big-buckled belt somewhere below the waist so as, in whole, to make Sweet Orb Mace seem mother naked, a youth bent a calculated leg before continuing with his catechism of compliment. "Let me cast myself beneath the cataract of your thousand major virtues, your myriad minor qualities, O mistress of my soul, for though I am considered clever, I am nought but your lowliest catechumen, seeking only to absorb the smallest scraps of your wisdom so that I may, for one so small, be whole!" Whereupon he flung himself to the grass on velvet knees and raised powdered, imploring hands.

"Good afternoon, Doctor Volospion." She relished the flattery, but paused no longer, saying over her shoulder, "You smell very well today."

Unconcerned, Doctor Volospion raised himself to his feet, his cap undulating, his chains jingling, and his rouged lips curved in a friendly smile as he saw Dafnish Armatuce.

"I seek a lover," he explained, peeling a blade of blue grass from his inner thigh. "A woman to whom I can give my All. It is late in the season to begin, perhaps, with so many exquisite Romances already under way or even completed (as in Werther's case), but I am having difficulty in finding a suitable recipient." His expression, as he stared at her, became speculative. "May I ask your sex, at present?"

"I am a woman, sir, and a mother. An Armatuce, mate to a cousin of the Armatuce, sworn to suffer and to serve together until my son shall be ready to suffer and to serve in my place."

"You would not like to link your fate with mine, to give yourself body and soul to me until the End of Time (which, of course, is not far off, I hear)?"

"I would not."

"I came late to the fashion, you see, and now most are already bored with it, I understand. But there is, surely, the fulfilment of abandonment. Is it not delicious to throw oneself upon another's mercy — to make him or her the absolute master of one's fate?" He took a step closer, peering into her immobile countenance, his eye sparkling. "Ah! Do I tempt you? I see that I do!"

"You do not!"

"Your tone lacks conviction."

"You are deceived, Doctor Volospion."

"Could we have our bodies so engineered as to produce another child?"

"My operation is past. I have my child. No more can bloom."

She turned to search for Snuffles, fearing suddenly for the safety of his person as well as for his mind, for she was now aware that this folk had no scruples, no decency, no proper inhibitions even where that most sacrosanct of subjects was concerned. "Snuffles!"

"Here, mama!"

The boy was in conversation with a tall, thin individual wearing a crenellated crown as tall as himself.

"To me!"

He came reluctantly, waddling, snatching a piece of pastry from the table as he passed, wheezing, his little protective suit bearing a patina of creams and gravies, his hair sticky with confectionery, his face rich with the traces of his feast.

Someone had begun to build cloud-shapes, interweaving colours and kinds and creating the most unlikely configurations. She seized his sweetened hand, tempted to remonstrate, to read him a lesson, to forbid further food, but she knew the dangers of identifying her own demands upon herself with what she expected from her son. Too often, she had learned, had ancient parents forbidden their children food merely because they could not or would not eat themselves, forbidden children childish pleasures because those pleasures tempted them, too. She would not transfer. Let the boy, at least, enjoy the experience. His training would save him, should they ever return. A lesson would be learned. And if they did not return, well, it would not profit him to retain habits which put him at odds with the expectations of society. And should it seem inevitable that they were permanently marooned, she could decide when he would be mature enough to become an adult, grant him that status herself and so put an end to her own misery.

The crowd seemed to close in on her. Doctor Volospion had already wandered away, but there were others — every one of whom was a living, mocking parody of all she held to be admirable in Man. Her heart beat faster, at last unchecked. She sought for the only being in that whole unnatural, fatuous farrago who might help her escape, but Lord Jagged was gone.

And My Lady Charlotina broke through the throng, Death's Harlequin grinning and triumphant, drawing another woman with her. "A contemporary, dear Dafnish. Mutual reminiscence is now possible!"

"I must go…" began the time traveller. "Snuffles wearies. We can sleep in our ship."

"No, no! The air fete is hardly begun. You shall stay and converse with Miss Ming."

Miss Ming, at first bored, brightened, giving Dafnish Armatuce a quick glance which was at once questioning and appraising, warm and calculating. Miss Ming was a heavily built young woman whose long fair hair had been carefully brushed but had acquired no more of a lustre than her pale, unwholesome skin. She wore, for this Age, a simple costume, tight dungarees of glowing orange and a shirt and short jacket of pale blue. Now Dafnish Armatuce had her whole attention, was granted Miss Ming's smile of knowing and insincere sympathy.

"Your year?" My Lady Charlotina creased her golden forehead. "You said…"

"1922."

"Miss Ming is from 2067. Until recently she lived at Doctor Volospion's menagerie. One of the few human survivors, in fact."

Miss Ming's abrupt, monotonous voice might have seemed surly had it not been for the eagerness with which she imparted meaningless (to Dafnish Armatuce) confidences, coming closer than was necessary and placing intimate fingers upon her shoulder to say: "Some of Mongrove's diseases escaped and struck down half the inhabitants of Doctor Volospion's menagerie. By the time the discovery was made, resurrection was out of the question. Mongrove refuses to apologize. Doctor Volospion shuns him. I didn't know time travel was discovered in 1922. And," a girlish pout, "they told me that I was the first woman to go into Time."

Surely, Dafnish thought, she sensed aggression here.

"An all-woman team launched the craft." Miss Ming spoke significantly. "I was the first."

And Dafnish Armatuce, her boy hard alongside, chanted at this threat: "Time travel, Miss Ming, is the creation and the copyright of the Armatuce. We built the first backward-shifting ships two years ago, in 1920. This year, in 1922, I was chosen to go forward."

Miss Ming pursed lips which became thin and down-turned at the corners, giving her a slight leonine look, but she did not seek conflict. "Can we both be deluded? I am an historian, after all! I cannot be wrong. Aha! Illumination. A.D.?"

"I regret…"

"From what event does your calendar run?"

"From the First Birth."

"Of Christ?"

"Of a child, following the catastrophe in which all became barren. A method was discovered whereby —"

"There you have the answer! We are not even from the same millennium. Nonetheless," Miss Ming linked an arm through hers before she could react, and held it tight, "it needn't stop friendship. How delicate you are. How exquisite. Almost," insinuatingly, "a child yourself."

Dafnish pulled free. "Snuffles." She began to dab at his face with her wetted glove. The little boy turned resigned eyes upward and watched the circling machines and beasts. The crowd sighed and swayed, and they were jostled.

"You are married?" implacably continued Miss Ming. "In your own Age?"

"To a cousin of the Armatuce, yes." Dafnish's manner became more distant as she tried to move on, but Miss Ming's warm hand slipped again into the crook of her elbow. The fingers pressed into her flesh. She was chilled.

Three white bats swooped by, performing acrobatics in unison, their twenty-foot wings making the air hiss. A trumpet sounded. There was applause.

"I was divorced, before my journey." Miss Ming paused, perhaps in the hope of some morbid revelation from her new friend, then continued, girl-to-girl: "His name was Donny Stevens. He was well thought of as a scientist — a popular and powerful family too — very old — in Iowa. Rich. But he was like all men. You know. They think they're doing you a favour if they can get to your cubicle once a month, and if it's once a week, they're Casanova! No thanks! Someone said — Betty Stern, I think — that he had that quality of aggressive stupidity which so many women find attractive in a man: they think it's strength of character and, once they've committed themselves to that judgement, maintain it against all the evidence. Betty said dozens of the happiest marriages are based on it. (I idolized Betty). Unfortunately, I realized my mistake. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here, though. I joined an all-woman team — know what I mean? — anyway we got the first big breakthrough and made those dogs look sick when they saw what the bitches could do. And this Age suits me now. Anything goes, if you know what I mean — I mean, really! Wow! What kind of guys do you like, honey?"

She did not want Miss Ming's attentions. Again she cast about for Jagged and, as a rent appeared for a second in the ranks, saw him talking to a small, serious-faced yellow man, clad in discreet denim (the first sensible costume she had observed thus far). Hampered both by reluctant, sleepy son and clinging Ming, she pushed her way through posturing gallants and sparkling frillocks, to home slowly on Jagged, who saw her and smiled, bending to murmur a word or two to his companion. Then, as she closed: "Li Pao, this is Dafnish Armatuce of the Armatuce. Dafnish, I introduce Li Pao from the 27th century."

"She won't know what you're talking about!" crowed the unshakeable Miss Ming. "Her dates go from something she calls the First Birth. 1922. I was baffled myself."

Lord Jagged's eyes became hooded.

Li Pao bowed a neat bow. "I gather you find this Age disturbing, Comrade Armatuce?"

Her expression confirmed his assumption.

Li Pao's small mouth moved with soft, sardonic deliberation. "I, too, found it so, upon arrival. But there is little need to feel afraid, for, as you will discover, the rich are never malevolent, unless their security is threatened, and here there is no such threat. If they seem to waste their days, do not judge them too harshly; they know no better. They are without hungers or frustrations. Nature has long since been conquered by Art. Their resources are limitless, for they feed upon the whole universe (what remains of it). These cities suck power from any available part of the galaxy and transfer it to them so that they may play. Stars die so that on old Earth someone might change the colour of his robe." There was irony in his tone, but he spoke without censure.

Snuffles cried out as something vast and metallic appeared to drop upon the throng, but it stopped a few feet up, hovered, then drifted away, and the crowd became noisy again.

"The First Birth period?" Lord Jagged made a calculation. "That would place you in the year 9,478 A.D. We find the Dawn Age reckoning most convenient here. I understand your dismay. You are reconstituting your entire planet, are you not? From the core, virtually, outward, eh?"

She was grateful for his erudition. Now he and Li Pao seemed allies in this fearful world. She was able to steady her heart and recover something of her self-possession. "It has been hard work, Lord Jagged. The Armatuce have been fortunate in winning respect for their several sacrifices."

"Sacrifice!" Li Pao was nostalgic. "A joy impossible to experience here, where the gift of the self to the common cause would go unremarked. They would not know."

"Then they are, indeed, unfortunate," she said. "There is a price they pay for their pleasure, after all."

"You find our conceits shallow, then?" Lord Jagged wished to know.

"I do. I grieve. Everywhere is waste and decay — the last stages of the Romantic disease whose symptoms are a wild, mindless seeking after superficial sensation for its own sake, effect piled upon effect, until mind and body disintegrate completely, whose cure is nothing else but death. Here, all is display — your fantasies appear the harmless play of children, but they disguise the emptiness of your lives. You colour corpses and think yourselves creative. But I am not deceived."

"Well," he replied equably enough, "visions vary. To one who cannot conceive of such things, another's terrors and appetites, his day-to-day phantasms, are, indeed, poor conceits, intended merely to display their possessor's originality and to dismay his fellows. But some of us have our joys, even our profundities, you know, and we cherish them."

She felt a little shame. She had offended him, perhaps, with her candour. She lowered her eyes.

"Yet," continued Jagged, "to one of us (one who bothers to contemplate such things at all, and there are few) your way of life might seem singularly dull, denying your humanity. He could claim that you are without any sort of real passion, that you deliberately close your consciousness to the glowing images which thrive on every side, thus making yourself less than half alive. He might not realize that you, or this dour fellow Li Pao here, have other excitements. Li Pao celebrates Logic! A clearly stated formula is, for him, exquisite delight. He feels the same frisson from his theorems that I might feel for a well-turned aphorism. I am fulfilled if I give pleasure with a paradox, while he would seek fulfilment if he could order a silly world, build, comfort, complete a pattern and fix it, to banish the very Chaos he has never tasted but which is our familiar environment, and precious to us as air, or as water to the fish. For to us it is not Chaos. It is Life, varied, stimulating, rich with vast dangers and tremendous consolations. Our world sings and shimmers. Its light can blind with a thousand shapes and colours. Its darkness is always populated, never still, until death's own darkness swoops and obliterates all. We inhabit one sphere, but that sphere contains as many worlds as there are individuals on its surface. Are we shallow because we refuse to hold a single point of view?"

Li Pao was appreciative of the argument, but something puzzled him. "You speak, Lord Jagged, as you sometimes do, as one from an earlier Age than this, for few here think in such terms, though they might speak as you did if they bothered to consider their position at all."

"Oh, well. I have travelled a little, you know."

"Are there none here," asked Dafnish Armatuce, "who have the will to work, to serve others?"

Lord Jagged laughed. "We seek to serve our fellows with our wit, our entertainments. But some would serve in what you would call practical ways." He paused, serious for a second, as if his thoughts had become a little private. He drew breath, continuing: "Werther de Goethe, perhaps, might have had such a will, had he lived in a different Age. Li Pao's, for instance. Where another sees dreams and beauty, Li Pao sees only disorder. If he could, or dared, he would make our rotting cities stable, clarify and formalize the architecture, populate his tidy buildings with workers, honest and humane, to whom Peace of Mind is a chance of worthy promotion and the prospect of an adequate pension, to whom Adventure is a visit to the sea or a thunderstorm during a picnic — and Passion is Comfort's equal, Prosperity's cohort. But shall I judge his vision dull? No! It is not to him, or to those who think as he, in his own Age, in your own Age, Dafnish Armatuce." Lord Jagged teased at his fine nose. "We are all what our society makes of us."

"When in Rome…" murmured Miss Ming piously. Something flapped by and received a cheer.

Jagged was impatient with Miss Ming. "Indeed." His cloak billowed in a wind of his own subtle summons, and he looked kindly down on Dafnish Armatuce. "Explore all attitudes, my dear. Honour them, every one, but be slippery — never let them hold you, else you fail to enjoy the benefits and be saddled only with the liabilities. It's true that canvas against the skin can be as sensual as silk, and milk a sweeter drink than wine, but feel everything, taste everything, for its own sake, and for your own sake, then no one thing shall be judged better or worse than another, no person shall be so judged, and nothing can ensnare you!"

"Your advice is well-meant, sir, I know," said Dafnish Armatuce, "and would probably be good advice if I intended to stay in your world. But I do not."

"You have no choice," said Miss Ming with satisfaction.

He shrugged. "I have told you of the Morphail Effect."

"There are other means of escape."

Miss Ming, by her superior smirk, felt she had found a flaw in Lord Jagged's argument. "Cancer?" she demanded. "Could we love cancer?"

He rose to it willingly enough, replying lightly: "You are obscure, Miss Ming, for there is no physical disease at the End of Time. But, yes, we could — for what it taught us — the comparisons it offered. Perhaps that is why some of our number seek discomfort — in order to comfort their souls."

Miss Ming simpered. "You argue cunningly, Lord Jagged, but I suspect your logic."

"Is it so dignified, my conversation, as to be termed Logic? I am flattered." One hand pressed gently against Dafnish Armatuce's back and the other against Li Pao's, rescuing them both. Miss Ming hesitated and then retreated at last.

Eight dragons waltzed the skies above while far away music played; the crowd grew quieter as it watched, and even Dafnish Armatuce admitted, to herself, that it was a delicate beauty they witnessed.

She sighed. "So this is Utopia, Lord Jagged, for you? You are satisfied?"

"Could I expect more? Many think the days of our universe numbered. Yet, do you find concern amongst us?"

"You sport to forget the inevitable?"

He shook his head. "We sported thus before we knew. We have not changed our lives at all, most of us."

"You must sense tension. You cannot live so mindlessly."

"I do not think we live as you describe. Do you not strive, in your Age, for a world without fear?"

"Of course."

"There is no fear here, Dafnish Armatuce, even of total extinction."

"Which suggests you are far divorced from reality. You speak of the atrophy of natural instinct."

"I suppose that I do. There are few such instincts to be found among those who are native to the End of Time. You have no philosophers among your own folk who argue that those natural instincts might be the cause of the tragedy once described, I believe, as the Human Condition?"

"Of course. It is part of our creed. But we ensure that the tragedy shall never be played again, for we encourage the virtues of self-sacrifice and consideration of the common good, and we discourage the vices."

"Which suggests that they continue to exist. Here, they do not; there is no necessity for either vice or virtue."

"Yet if Hate dies, surely Love dies, too?"

"I think it has been rediscovered, lately. Love."

"A fad. I spoke with your Doctor Volospion. An affectation, nothing more." She gasped and shut her eyes, for two great suns had appeared, side by side, glaring scarlet, and drenched the gathering with their light.

Almost at once the suns began to grow smaller, rising away from the Earth. She blinked and recovered her composure, though weariness threatened her thoughts. "And Love of the sort you describe is no Love at all, for its attendants are Jealousy and Despair, and in Despair lies the most destructive quality of all, Cynicism."

"You think us cynical, then?"

She looked about her at the chattering press. One of their number, tall, bulky and bearded, festooned in feathers and furs, was being congratulated for what doubtless had been his display. "I thought so at first."

"And now?"

She changed the subject. "I have the impression, Lord Jagged, that you are trying to make this world palatable to me. What if I agree that there is something to be said for your way of life and turn the conversation to a problem rather closer to my heart? My husband, cousin to the Armatuce, and a Grinash on his mother's side, cares for me, as he cares for Snuffles, our son, and eagerly awaits our return, as does the committee which I serve (and which elected me to accomplish my voyage). I would go back to that Age, which you would find grim, no doubt, but which is home, familiar, security for us. You tell me that I cannot, so I must consider my position accordingly. Could I not send a message, at least, or return for a second to assure them of my physical safety?"

"You speak of caring for the common cause," interrupted Li Pao. "If you do, you will not make the attempt, for Time disrupts. Morphail warns us. And you risk death. If you tried to go back you might succeed, but you would in all probability flicker for only a moment, unseen, before being flung out again. The time stream would suck you up and deposit you anywhere in your future, in any one of a million less pleasant ages than this, or you could be killed outright (which has happened more than once). The Laws of Time are cruel."

"I would risk any danger," she said, "were it not for —"

"— the child," softly said Lord Jagged.

"We are used to sacrifice, the Armatuce. But our children are precious. We exist for them."

Darkness fell and ivory clashed and rattled above her as a great ship, made all of bone, its sections strung loosely together, its wings beating erratically, staggered upon a sea of faintly glowing clouds.

"What a splendid ending," she heard Lord Jagged say.