In Another Country

The summer had been Capri, at the villa of Augustus, the high summer of the emperor at the peak of his reign, and the autumn had been the pilgrimage to golden Canterbury. Later they would all go to Rome for Christmas, to see the coronation of Charlemagne. But now it was the springtime of their wondrous journey, that glorious May late in the twentieth century that was destined to end in sudden roaring death and a red smoking sky. In wonder and something almost like ecstasy Thimiroi watched the stone walls of Canterbury fade into mist and this newest strange city take on solidity around him. The sight of it woke half-formed poems in his mind. He felt amazingly young, alive, open…vulnerable.

“Thimiroi’s in a trance,” Denvin said in his light, mocking way, and winked and grinned. He stood leaning casually against the rail of the embankment, a compact, elegant little man, looking back at his two companions.

“Let him alone,” said Laliene sharply. In anger she ran her hands over the crimson nimbus of her hair and down the sides of her sleek tanned cheeks. Her gray-violet eyes flashed with annoyance. “Can’t you see he’s overwhelmed by what he sees out there?”

“By the monstrous ugliness of it?”

“By its beauty,” Laliene said, with some ferocity. She touched Thimiroi’s elbow. “Are you all right?” she whispered.

Thimiroi nodded.

She gestured toward the city. “How wonderfully discordant it is! How beautifully strident! No two buildings alike. And the surfaces of everything so flat. But colors, shapes, sizes, textures, all different. Not even the trees showing any sort of harmony.”

“And the noise,” said Denvin. “Don’t forget the noise, if you’re delighted by discordance. Machinery screeching and clanging and booming, and giving off smelly fumes besides—oh, it’s marvelous, Laliene! Those painted things are vehicles, aren’t they? Those boxy-looking machines. Honking and bellowing like crazed oxen with wheels. That thing flying around up there, too, the shining thing with wings—listen to it! Just listen!”

“Stop it,” Laliene said. “You’re going to upset him.”

“No,” Thimiroi said. “He’s not bothering me. But I do think it’s very beautiful. Beautiful in its ugliness. Beautiful in its discordance. There’s energy here. Whatever else this place may be, it’s a place of tremendous energy. And energy is always beautiful.” His heart was pounding. It had not pounded like this when they had arrived at any of the other places of their tour through antiquity. But the twentieth century was special: an apocalyptic time, a time of such potent darkness that it cast an eerie black radiance across half a dozen centuries to come. And this was its most poignant moment, when the century was at its highest point, all its earlier turmoil far behind—the moment when splendor and magnificence would be transformed in an instant, by nature’s malevolent prank, into stunning catastrophe. “Besides,” he said, “not everything here is ugly or discordant anyway. Look at the sky.”

“Yes,” Laliene said. “That’s a sky to remember. It’s a sky that absolutely demands a great artist to capture, wouldn’t you say? Someone on the order of Nivander, or even Sathimon. Those blues, and the white of the clouds. And then those streaks of gold and purple and red.”

“You mean the pollution?” Denvin asked.

She glowered at him. “Don’t. Please. If you don’t want to be here, tell Kadro when he shows up, and he’ll send you home. But don’t spoil it for the rest of us.”

“Sorry,” said Denvin, in a chastened tone. “I do have to admit that that sky is fantastic.”

“So intense,” Laliene said. “It comes right down and wraps itself around the tops of the buildings like a shimmering blue cloak. And everything so sharp, so vivid, so clear. The sun was brighter back in these days, someone said. That must be why. And the air more transparent, a different mix of elements. Of course, this was an unusual season even for here. That’s well known. They say there had never been a month like this one, a magical springtime, everything perfect, almost as if it had been arranged that way for maximum contrast with—with—”

Her voice trailed away.

Thimiroi shook his head. “You both talk too much. Can’t you simply stand here and let it all come flooding into your souls? We came here to experience this place, not to talk about it. We’ll have the rest of our lives to talk about it.”

They looked abashed. He grasped their hands in his and laughed—his rich, exuberant, pealing laugh, which some people thought was too much for their delicate sensibilities—to take the sting out of the rebuke. Denvin, after a moment, managed a smile. Laliene gave Thimiroi a curiously impenetrable stare; but then she too smiled, a warmer and more sincere one than Denvin’s. Thimiroi nodded and released them, and stepped forward to peer over the edge of the embankment.

They had materialized just a few moments earlier, in what seemed to be a park on the highest slopes of a lush green hillside overlooking a broad, swiftly flowing river. The city was on the far side, stretching out before them in dizzying vastness. Where they stood was in a sort of overlook point, jutting out of the hill, protected by a dark metal railing. Their luggage was beside them. The hour appeared to be midday; the sun was high; the air was mild, and very still and clear. The park was almost empty, though Thimiroi could see a few people strolling on the paths below. Natives of this time and place, he thought. His heart went out to them. He would have run down to them and embraced them, if he could. He longed to know what they were really like, these ancients, these rough earthy primitives, these people of lost antiquity.

Primitives, he thought? Well, yes, what else could they be called? They lived so long ago. But this city is no trifling thing. This is no squalid village of mud-and-wattle huts that lies before us.

In silence Thimiroi stared across the river at the massive blocky gray towers and wide, busy streets of the great metropolis, and at the shimmering silvery bridges to his right and to his left, and at the endless rows of small white and pink houses that rose up and up and up through the green hills on the other side. The weight and size and power of the place were extraordinary. His soul quivered with—what? Joy? Amazement? Fear?—at such immensity. How many people lived here? A million? Five million? He could scarcely conceive of such a number, all packed into a single place. The other ancient cities they had visited on this tour, imperial capitals though they were, were mere citylets—towns, even; piddling little medieval settlements—however grand they might have imagined themselves to be. But the great cities of the twentieth century, he had always been told, marked the high point in human urban concentration: cities of ten million, fifteen million, twenty million people. Unimaginable. This one before him was not even the biggest one, not even close to the biggest. Never before in history had cities grown to this size—and never again, either. Never again. What an extraordinary sight! What an astounding thing to contemplate, this great humming throbbing hive of intense human activity, especially when one knew—when one knew—when one knew the fate that was soon to befall it—

“Thimiroi?” Laliene called. “Kadro’s here!”

He turned. The tour leader, a small, fragile-looking man with thick flame-red hair and eerie blue-violet eyes, held out his arms to them. He could only just have arrived himself—they had all been together mere minutes before, in Canterbury—but he was dressed already in twentieth-century costume, curious and quaint and awkward-looking, but oddly elegant on him. Thimiroi had no idea how that trick had been accomplished, but he accepted it untroubledly: The Travel was full of mysteries of all sorts, detours and overlaps and side-jaunts through time. It was Kadro’s business to understand such things, not his.

“You’d better change,” Kadro said. “There’s a transport vehicle on the way up here to take you into town.”

He touched something at his hip and a cloud of dark mist sprang up around them. Under its protective cover they opened their suitcases—their twentieth-century clothes were waiting neatly inside, and some of the strange local currency—and set about the task of making themselves look like natives.

“Oh, how wonderful!” Laliene cried, holding a gleaming, iridescent green robe in front of herself and dancing around with it. “How did they think of such things? Look at how it’s cut! Look at the way it’s fitted together!”

“I’ve seen you wearing a thousand things more lovely than those,” said Denvin sourly.

She made a face at him. Denvin himself had almost finished changing: he was clad now in gray trousers, scarlet shirt open at the throat, charcoal-colored jacket cut with flaring lapels. Like Kadro, he looked splendid in his costume. But Kadro and Denvin looked splendid in anything they wore. The two of them were men of the same sort, Thimiroi thought, both of them dandyish, almost dainty. Perfect men of fashion. He himself, much taller than they and very muscular, almost rawboned, had never quite mastered their knack of seeming at utter ease in all situations. He often felt out of place among such smooth types as they, almost as though he were some sort of throwback, full of hot, primordial passions and drives rarely seen in the refined era into which he had happened to be born. It was, perhaps, his creative intensity, he often thought. His artistic nature. He was too earthy for them, too robust of spirit, too much the primitive. As he slipped into his twentieth-century clothes, the tight yellow pants, the white shirt boldly striped in blue, the jet-black jacket, the tapering black boots, he felt a curious sense of having returned home at last, after a long journey.

“Here comes the car,” Kadro said. “Hold out your hands, quickly! I have your implants.”

Thimiroi extended his arm. Something silvery-bright, like a tiny gleaming beetle, sparkled between two of Kadro’s fingers. He pressed it gently against Thimiroi’s skin, just above the long rosy scar of the inoculation, and it made the tiniest of whirring sounds.

“This is their language,” said Kadro. He touched it to Denvin’s arm also, and to Laliene’s. “And this one, the technology and social customs. And this is your medical booster, just in case.” Buzz, buzz, buzz. Kadro smiled. He was very efficient. “You’re all ready for the twentieth century now. And just in time, too.”

A vehicle had pulled up in the roadway behind them, yellow with black markings, and odd projections on its roof. Thimiroi felt a quick faint stab of nausea as a breeze, suddenly stirring out of the quiescent air, swept a whiff of the vehicle’s greasy fumes past his face.

The driver hopped out. He was very big, bigger even than Thimiroi, with immense heavy shoulders and a massive column of a neck. His face was unusual, the lips strongly pronounced, the cheekbones broad and jutting like blades. His hair was black and woolly and grew very close to his skull. But the most surprising thing about him was the color of his skin. It was dark brown, almost black: his eyes were bright as beacons against that astonishing chocolate-hued backdrop. Thimiroi had never imagined that anyone might have skin of such a color. Was that what they all were like in the twentieth century? Skin the color of night? No one on Capri had looked like that, or in Canterbury.

“You the people called for a taxi?” the driver asked. “Here—let me put those suitcases in the trunk—”

Perhaps it is a form of ornamentation, Thimiroi thought. They have it artificially done. They think it makes them look more beautiful when they change their skins, when they change their faces, so that they are like this.

And it was beautiful. There was a brooding somber power about this black man’s face. He was like something carved from a block of some precious and recalcitrant stone.

“I’ll ride up front,” Kadro said. “You three get in back.” He turned to the driver. “The Montgomery House is where we are going. You know where that is?”

The driver laughed. “Ain’t no one in town who don’t know the Montgomery House. But you sure you don’t want a hotel that’s a little cheaper?”

“The Montgomery House will do,” said Kadro.

They had ridden in mule-drawn carts on the narrow winding paths of hilly Capri, and in wagons drawn by oxen on the rutted road to Canterbury. That had been charming and pretty, to ride in such things, to feel the jouncing of the wheels and see the sweat glistening on the backs of the panting animals. There was nothing charming or pretty about traveling in this squat glass-walled wheeled vehicle, this taxi. It rumbled and quivered as if it were about to explode. It careered alarmingly around the sharp curves of the road, threatening at any moment to break free of the driver’s tenuous control and go spurting over the edge of the embankment in a cataclysmic dive through space. It poured forth all manner of dark noxious gases. It was an altogether terrifying thing.

And yet fascinating and wonderful. Crude and scary though the taxi was, it was not really very different in fundamental concept or design from the silent, flawless vehicles of Thimiroi’s world. Contemplating that, Thimiroi had a keen sense of the kinship of this world to his own. We are not that far beyond them in time, he thought. They exist at the edge of the modern era, really. The Capri of the Romans, the Canterbury of the pilgrimage—those are truly alien places, set deep back in the pre-technological past. But there is not the same qualitative difference between our epoch and this twentieth century. The gulf is not so great. The seeds of our world can be found in theirs. Or so it seems to me, Thimiroi told himself, after five minutes’ acquaintance with this place.

Kadro said, “Omerie and Kleph and Klia are here already. They’ve rented a house just down the street from the hotel where you’ll be staying.”

Laliene smiled. “The Sanciscos! Oh, how I look forward to seeing them again! Omerie is such a clever man. And Kleph and Klia—how beautiful they are, how refreshing to spend time with them!”

“The place they’ve taken is absolutely perfect for the end of the month,” said Kadro. “The view will be supreme. Hollia and Hara wanted to buy it, you know. But Omerie got to it ahead of them.”

“Hollia and Hara are going to be here?” Denvin said, sounding surprised.

“Everyone will be here. Who would miss it?” Kadro’s hands moved in a quick playful gesture of malicious pleasure. “Hollia was beside herself, of course. She couldn’t believe that Omerie had beaten her to that house. But, as you say, Laliene, Omerie is such a clever man.”

“Hollia is ruthless,” said Denvin. “If the place is that good, she’ll try to get it away from the Sanciscos. Mark my words, Kadro. She’ll try some slippery little trick.”

“She may very well. Not that there’s any real reason to. I understand that the Sanciscos are planning to invite all of us to watch the show from their front window. Including Hollia and Hara, naturally. So they won’t be the worse for it. Except that Hollia would have preferred to be the hostess herself. Cenbe will be coming, you know.”

“Cenbe!” Laliene cried.

“Exactly. To finish his symphony. Hollia would have wanted to preside over that. And instead it will be Omerie’s party, and Kleph’s and Klia’s, and she’ll just be one of the crowd.” Kadro giggled. “Dear Hollia. My heart goes out to her.”

“Dear Hollia,” Denvin echoed.

“Look there,” said Thimiroi, pointing out the side window of the taxi. He spoke brusquely, his voice deliberately rough. All this gossipy chatter bored and maddened him. Who cared whether it was Hollia who gave the party, or the Sanciscos, or the Emperor Augustus himself? What mattered was the event that was coming. The experience. The awesome, wondrous, shattering calamity. “Isn’t that Lutheena across the street?” he asked.

They had emerged from the park, had descended to the bank of the river, were passing through a district of venerable-looking three-story wooden houses. One of the bridges was just ahead of them, and the towers of the downtown section rose like huge stone palisades on the other side of the river. Now they were halted at an intersection, waiting for the colored lights that governed the flow of traffic to change; and in the group of pedestrians waiting also to cross was an unmistakably regal figure—yes, it was Lutheena, who else could it be but Lutheena?—who stood among the twentieth-century folk like a goddess among mortals. The difference was not so much in her clothes, which were scarcely distinguishable from the street clothes of the people around her, nor in her features or her hair, perfect and flawless though they were, as in the way she bore herself: for though she was slender and of a porcelain frailty, and no more than ordinary in height, she held herself with such self-contained majesty, such imperious grace, that she seemed to tower above the others, coarse and clumsy with a thick-ankled peasant cloddishness about them, who waited alongside her.

“I thought she was coming here after Charlemagne,” Denvin said. “And then going on to Canterbury.”

Thimiroi frowned. What was he talking about? Whether she came here first and then went to Canterbury, or journeyed from Canterbury to here as they had done, would they not all be here at the same time? He would never understand these things. This was another of the baffling complexities of The Travel. Surely there was only one May like this one, and one 1347 November, and one 800 December? Though everyone seemed to make the tour in some private order of his own, some going through the four seasons in the natural succession, others hopping about as they pleased, certainly they must all converge on the same point in time at once—was that not so?

“Perhaps it’s someone else,” he suggested uneasily.

“But of course that’s Lutheena,” said Laliene. “I wonder what she’s doing all the way out here by herself.”

“Lutheena is like that,” Denvin pointed out.

“Yes,” Laliene said. “She is, yes.” She rapped on the window. Lutheena turned, and stared gravely, and after a moment burst into that incandescent smile of hers, though her luminous eyes remained mysteriously solemn. Then the traffic light changed, the taxi moved forward, Lutheena was lost in the distance. In a few minutes they were on the bridge, and then passing through the heart of the city, alive in all its awesome afternoon clangor, and then upward, up into the hills, up to the lofty street, green with the tender new growth of this heartbreakingly perfect springtime, where they would all wait out that glorious skein of May days that lay between this moment and the terrible hour of doom’s arrival.

After the straw-filled mattresses and rank smells of the lodges along the way to Canterbury, and the sweltering musty splendors of their whitewashed villas on the crest of Capri, the Montgomery House was almost palatial.

The rooms had a curious stiffness and angularity about them that Thimiroi was already beginning to associate with twentieth-century architecture in general, and of course there was no sweepdamping, no mood insulation, no gravity gradients, none of the little things that one took for granted when one was in one’s own era. All the same, everything seemed comfortable in its way, and with the proper modifications he knew he would have no trouble feeling at home here. The rooms were spacious, the ceilings were high, the windows were clean, no odors invaded from neighboring chambers. There was indoor plumbing: a blessing, after Canterbury. He had a suite of three rooms, furnished in the strange but pleasant late-twentieth-century way that he had seen in museums. There was a box in the main sitting-room that broadcast images in color, flat ones, with no sensory augmentation other than sonics. There were paintings on the wall, maddeningly motionless. The walls themselves were painted—how remarkable!—with some thick substance so porous that he could almost make out its molecular structure if he looked closely.

Laliene’s suite was down the hall from his; Denvin was on a different floor. That struck him as odd. He had assumed they were lovers and would be sharing accommodations. But, he reflected, it was always risky to assume things like that.

Thimiroi spent an hour transforming his rooms into a more familiar and congenial environment. From his suitcase he drew carpeting and draperies and coverlets of his own time, all of them supple with life and magic, to replace the harsh, flat, dead ones that they seemed to prefer here. He pulled out the three little tripod tables of fine, intricately worked Sipulva marquetry that went with him everywhere: he would read at the golden one, sip his euphoriac at the copper-hued one, write his poetry at the one that was woven in scarlet and amber. He hung an esthetikon on the wall opposite the window and set it going, filling the room with warm, throbbing color. He sat a music sphere on the dresser. To provide some variation in psychological tonality he activated a little subsonic that he had carried with him, adjusting it to travel through the entire spectrum of positive moods over a twenty-four hour span, from anticipation through excitation to culmination in imperceptible gradations. Then he stood back, surveying the results, and nodded. That would do for now. The room had been made amiable; the room was civilized now. He could bring out other things later. The suitcase was infinitely capacious. All it was, after all, was a pipeline to his own era. At the far end they would put anything in it that he might requisition.

Now at last he could begin to explore the city.

That evening they were supposed to go to a concert. Denvin had arranged it; Denvin was going to take care of all the cultural events. The legendary young violinist Sandra di Santis was playing, in what would turn out to be her final performance, though of course no one of this era could know that yet. But that was hours away. It was still only early afternoon. He would go out—he would savor the sights, the sounds, the smells of this place—

He felt just a moment of hesitation.

But why? Why? He had wandered by himself, unafraid, through the trash-strewn alleys of medieval Canterbury, though he knew that cut-throats and roisterers lurked everywhere. He had scrambled alone across the steep gullied cliffs of Capri, looking down without fear at the blue rock-rimmed Mediterranean, far below, into which a single misstep could plunge him. What was there to be cautious about here? The noisy cars racing so swiftly through the streets, perhaps. But surely a little caution and common sense would keep him from harm. If Lutheena had been out by herself, why not he? But still—still, that nagging uneasiness—

Thimiroi shrugged and left his room, and made his way down the hall to the elevator, and descended to the lobby.

At every stage of his departure wave upon wave of unsettling strangeness assailed him. The simplest act was a challenge. He had to call upon the resources of his technology implant in order to operate the lock of his room door, to summon the elevator, to tell it to take him to the lobby. But he met each of these minor mysteries in turn with a growing sense of accomplishment. By the time he reached the lobby he was moving boldly and confidently, feeling almost at home in this strange land, this unfamiliar country, that was the past.

The lobby, which Thimiroi had seen only briefly when he had arrived, was a somber, cavernous place, intricately divided into any number of smaller open chambers. He studied, as he walked calmly through it toward the brightness at the far end, the paintings, the furnishings, the things on display. Everything had that odd stiffness of form and flatness of texture that seemed to be the rule in this era: nothing appeared to have any inner life or movement. Was that how they had really liked it to be? Or was this curious deadness merely a function of the limitations of their materials? Probably some of each, Thimiroi decided. These were an artful, sophisticated folk. Of course, he thought, they had not had the advantage of many of our modern materials and devices. All the same, they would not have made everything so drab unless their esthetic saw beauty in the drabness. He would have to examine that possibility more deeply as this month went along, studying everything with an artist’s shrewd and sympathetic eye, not interested in finding fault, only in understanding.

People were standing about here and there in the lobby, mainly in twos and threes, talking quietly. They paid no attention to him. Most of them, he noticed, had fair skin much like his own. A few, Thimiroi noticed, were black-skinned like the taxi driver, but others had skin of still another unusual tone, a kind of pale olive or light yellow, and their features too were unusual, very delicate, with an odd tilt to the eyes.

Once again he wondered if this skin-toning might be some sort of cosmetic alteration: but no, no, this time he queried his implant and it told him that in fact in this era there had been several different races of humanity, varying widely in physical appearance.

How lovely, Thimiroi thought. How sad for us that we are all so much alike. Another point for further research: had these black and yellow people, and the other unusual races, been swept away by the great calamity, or was it rather that all mankind had tended toward a uniformity of traits as the centuries went by? Again, perhaps, some of each. Whatever the reason, it was a cause for regret.

He reached the grand doorway that led to the street. A woman said, entering the hotel just as he was leaving it, “How I hate going indoors in weather like this!”

Her companion laughed. “Who doesn’t? Can it last much longer, I wonder?”

Thimiroi stepped past them, into the splendor of the soft golden sunlight.

The air was miraculous: amazingly transparent, clear with a limpidity almost beyond belief, despite all the astonishing impurities that Thimiroi knew were routinely poured into it by the unthinking people of this era. It was as though for the long blessed moment of this one last magnificent May all the ordinary rules of nature had been suspended, and the atmosphere had become invulnerable to harm. Beyond that sublime zone of clarity rose the blue shield of the sky, pulsingly brilliant; and from its throne high in the distance the sun sent forth a tranquil, steady radiance that was like no sunlight Thimiroi had ever seen. Small wonder that those who had planned the tour had chosen this time and this place to be the epitome of springtime, he thought. There might never have been such beauty before. There might never be again.

He turned to his left and began to walk, hardly knowing or caring where he might be going.

From all sides came powerful sensory signals: the honking of horns, the sharp spicy scent of something cooking nearby, the subtler fragrance of the light breeze. Great gray buildings soared far into the dazzling sky. Billboards and posters blared their messages in twenty colors. The impact was immediate and profound. Thimiroi beheld everything in wonder and joy.

What richness! What complexity!

And yet there was a paradox here. What he took to be complexity in this street scene was really only a studied lack of harmony. As it had in the hotel lobby, a second glance revealed the true essence of this world’s vocabulary of design: a curious rough-hewn plainness, even a severity, that made clear to him how far in the past he actually was. The extraordinary May light seemed to dance along the rooftops, giving the buildings an intricacy of texture they did not in fact possess. These ancient styles were fundamentally simple and harsh, and could all too easily be taken to be primitive and crude. In Thimiroi’s own era every surface vibrated in at least half a dozen different ways, throbbing and rippling and pulsating and shimmering and gleaming and quivering. Here everything was flat, stolid, static. The strangeness of that seemed oppressive at first encounter; but now, as he ventured deeper and deeper into this unfamiliar world, Thimiroi came to see the underlying majesty of it. What he had mistaken for deadness was in fact strength. The people of this era were survivors: they had come through monstrous wars, tremendous technological change, immense social upheaval. Those who had outlasted the brutal tests of this taxing century were rugged, hearty, deeply optimistic. Their style of building and decoration showed that plainly. Nothing quivering and shimmery for them—oh, no! Great solid slabs of buildings, constructed out of simple, hard, unadorned materials that looked you straight in the eye—that was the way of things, here in the late twentieth century, in this time of assurance and robust faith in even better things to come.

Of course, Thimiroi thought, there was savage irony in that, considering what actually was to come. For a moment he was swept by deep and shattering compassion that brought him almost to tears. But he forced himself to fight the emotion back. Would Denvin weep for these people? Would Omerie, would Cenbe, would Kadro? The past is a sealed book, Thimiroi told himself forcefully. What has happened has happened. The losses are totalled, the debits are irretrievable. We have come here to experience the joys of jarring contrasts, as Denvin might say, not to cry over spilled milk.

He crossed the street. The next block was one of older-looking single-family houses, each set apart in a little garden plot where bright flowers bloomed and the leaves of the trees were just beginning to unfold under springtime’s first warmth.

There was music coming from an upstairs window three houses from the corner. He paused to listen.

It was simple straightforward stuff, monochromatic in tone. The instrument, he supposed, was the piano, the one that made its sound by the action of little mallets striking strings stretched across a resonating board. The melodic line was both sinuous and stark, carried in the treble with a little commentary in the bass: music a child could play. Perhaps a child was indeed playing. The simplicity of it made him smile. It was quaint stuff, charming but naive. He began to move onward.

And yet—yet—

Suddenly he felt himself caught and transfixed by a simple, magical turn of phrase that came creeping almost surreptitiously out of the bass line. It held him. Unexpectedly, it touched him.

He remained still, unable to go on, listening while the lovely phrase fled, waiting in hope for its return. Yes, there it was again! And as it came and went, it cast startling illumination over the entire musical pattern. He saw its beauty and its artfully hidden depth now, and he grew angry at himself for having responded at first in that patronizing way, that snide, condescending Denvin-like way. Quaint? Naive? Hardly. Simple, yes: this music achieved its effects with a minimum of means. But what was naive about that? Was a quartet for strings naive, because it did not make use of the resources of a full symphony orchestra? There was something about this music—its directness, its freedom—that the composers of his own time might well want to study, might even look upon with a certain degree of envy. For all their colossal technical resources, could the best of them—yes, even Cenbe—manage to equal the quiet force, Thimiroi wondered, of that easy, graceful little tune?

He stood listening until the music rolled to a gentle climax and a pleasant resolution and came to a halt. Its sudden absence brought him up short. He looked up imploringly at the open window. Play it again, he begged silently. Play it again! But there was no more music.

Impulsively he burst into applause, thinking that that might encourage an encore.

A woman’s face appeared at the window. Thimiroi was aware of pale skin, long straight golden hair, warm blue-green eyes. “Very lovely,” he called. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

She looked at him in apparent surprise, perhaps frowning a little. Then the frown was replaced for a moment by a quick amiable smile of pleasure; and then, just as quickly, she was gone. Thimiroi remained before her house a while longer, still hoping the music would begin again. But there was no more of it.

He returned to the hotel an hour later, dazzled, awed, weary, his mind full of wonders great and small. Just as he entered his suite, a small machine on the table beside the bed set up a curious insistent tinkling sound: the telephone, it was, so his technology implant informed him. He picked up the receiver.

“This is Thimiroi.”

“Back at last.” The voice was Laliene’s. “Was it an interesting walk?”

“One revelation after another. Certainly this year is going to be the high point of our trip.”

Laliene laughed lazily. “Oh, darling Thimiroi, didn’t you say the same thing when we came to Canterbury? And when we had the audience with the emperor on Capri?”

He did not reply.

“Anyway,” she continued. “We’re all going to gather in my suite before we go to the concert. Would you like to come? I’ve brewed a little tea, of course.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

She, too, had redone her rooms in the style of their own period. Instead of the ponderous hotel bed she had installed a floater, and in the sitting room now was a set of elegant turquoise slopes mounted around a depth baffle, so that one had the illusion of looking down into a long curving valley of ravishing beauty. Her choice of simso screens was, as usual, superb: wondrous dizzying vistas opened to infinity on every wall. Laliene herself looked sumptuous in a brilliant robe of woven silver mesh and a pair of scarlet gliders.

What surprised him was that no one else was there.

“Oh,” she said lightly, “they’ll all be coming along soon. We can get a head start.”

She selected one of the lovely little cups on the table beside her, and offered it to him. And as he took it from her he felt a sudden transformation of the space between them, an intensification, an amplification. Without warning, Laliene was turning up the psychic voltage.

Her face was flushed, her eyes were glistening. The rich gray of them had deepened almost to purple. There was no mistaking the look. He had seen it many times before: Laliene in her best flirtatious mode, verging on the frankly seductive. Here they were, a man, a woman, well known to one another, together in a hotel room in a strange and distant city, about to enjoy a friendly sip or two of euphoriac tea—well, of course, Laliene could be expected to put on her most inviting manner, if only for the sport of it. But something else was going on here besides mere playful flirtation, Thimiroi realized. There was an odd eagerness to the set of her jaw, a peculiar quirk in the corners of her mouth. As though she cared, he thought. As though she were serious.

What was this? Was she trying to change the rules of the game?

Deftly she turned a music sphere on without looking away from him. Some barely audible melodikia came stealing like faint azure vapor into the air, and very gradually began to rise and throb. One of Cenbe’s songs, he wondered? No. No, too voluptuous for Cenbe: more like Palivandrin’s work, or Athaea’s. He sipped his euphoriac. The sweet coiling fumes crept sinuously about him. Laliene stood close beside him, making it seem almost as if the music were coming from her and not the sphere. Thimiroi met her languid invitation with a practiced courteous smile, one which acknowledged her beauty, her grace, the intimacy of the moment, the prospect of delights to come, while neither accepting nor rejecting anything that was being proposed.

Of course they could do nothing now. At any moment the others would come trooping in.

But he wondered where this unexpected offer was meant to lead. He could, of course, put down the cup, draw her close: a kiss, a quick caress, an understanding swiftly arrived at, yes. But that did not seem to be quite what she was after, or at least that was not all she was after. And was the offer, he asked himself, all that unexpected? Thimiroi realized abruptly that there was no reason why he should be as surprised by this as he was. As he cast his mind back over the earlier weeks of their journey across time, he came to see that in fact Laliene had been moving steadily toward him since the beginning—in Canterbury, in Capri, a touch of the hand here, a quick private smile there, a quip, a glance. Her defending him so earnestly against Denvin’s snobbery and Denvin’s sarcasm, just after they had arrived here: what was that, if not the groundwork for some subtle treaty that was to be established subsequently between them? But why? Why? Such romance as could ever have existed for Laliene and him had come and gone long, long ago. Now they were merely friends. Perhaps he was mistaking the nature of this transaction. But no…no. There was no mistake.

Sparring for time, he said, keeping his tone and style carefully neutral, “You should come walking with me tomorrow. I saw marvelous things just a few blocks from here.”

“I’d love to, Thimiroi. I want you to show me everything you’ve discovered.”

“Yes. Yes, of course, Laliene.”

But as he said it, he felt a deep stab of confusion. Everything? There was the house where that music had been playing. The open window, the simple, haunting melody. And the woman’s face, then: the golden hair, the pale skin, the blue-green eyes. Thinking of her, thinking of the music she had played, Thimiroi found himself stirred by powerful and inexplicable forces that made him want to seize Laliene’s music sphere and hurl it, and with it the subtle melodikia that it was playing, into the street. How smug that music sounded to him now, how overcivilized, how empty! And Laliene herself, so perfect in her beauty, the crimson hair, the flawless features, the sleek slender body—she was like some finely crafted statue, some life-sized doll: there was no reality to her, no essence of humanity. That woman in the window had shown more vital force in just her quick little half-frown and half-smile than Laliene displayed in all her repertoire of artful movements and expressions.

He stared at her, astounded, shaken.

She seemed shaken too. “Are you all right, Thimiroi?” she whispered.

“A little—tired, perhaps,” he said huskily. “Stretched myself farther today than I really knew.”

Laliene nodded toward the cup. “The tea will heal you.”

“Yes. Yes.”

He sipped. There was a knocking at the door. Laliene smiled, excused herself, opened it.

Denvin was there, and others behind him.

“Lutheena—Hollia—Hara—come in, come in, come in all of you! Omerie, how good to see you—Kleph, Klia—dear Klia—come in, everyone! How wonderful, how wonderful! I have the tea all ready and waiting for you!”

The concert that night was an extraordinary experience. Every moment, every note, seemed freighted with unforgettable meaning. Perhaps it was the poignancy of knowing that the beautiful young violinist who played so brilliantly had only a few weeks left to live, and that this grand and sumptuous concert hall itself was soon to be a smoking ruin. Perhaps it was the tiny magical phrase he had heard while listening in the street, which had somehow sensitized him to the fine secret graces of this seemingly simple twentieth-century music. Perhaps it was only the euphoriac they had had in Laliene’s room before setting out. Whatever it was, it evoked a mood of unusual, even unique, attentiveness in Thimiroi, and as the minutes went by he knew that this evening at the concert hall would surely resonate joyously in his soul forever after.

That mood was jarred and shaken and irrevocably shattered at intermission, when he was compelled to stand with his stunningly dressed companions in the vestibule and listen to their brittle chirping chatter. How empty they all seemed, how foolish! Omerie stalking around in his most virile and commanding mode, like some sort of peacock, and imperious Lutheena matching him swagger for swagger, and Klia looking on complacently, and Kleph even more complacent, mysteriously lost in mists like some child who has found a packet of narcotic candies. And then of course there was the awesome Miss Hollia, who seemed older than the Pyramids, glowering at Omerie in unconcealed malevolence even while she complimented him on his mastery of twentieth-century costuming, and Hollia’s pretty little playmate Hara as usual saying scarcely anything, but lending his support to his owner by glaring at Omerie also—and Denvin, chiming in with his sardonic, too-too-special insights from time to time—

What a wearying crew, Thimiroi thought. These precious connoisseurs of history, these tireless voyagers of the eons. His head began to ache. He stepped away from them and began to walk back toward the auditorium. For the first time he noticed how the other members of the audience were staring at the little group. Wondering what country they came from, no doubt, and how rich they might be. Such perfection of dress, such precision of movement, such elegance of speech—foreign, obviously foreign, but mystifyingly so, for they seemed to belong to no recognizable nationality, and spoke with no recognizable accent. Thimiroi smiled wearily. “Do you want to know the truth about us?” he imagined himself crying. “We are visitors, yes. Tourists from a far country. But where we live is not only beyond your reach, it is beyond even your imaginations. What would you say, if I revealed to you that we are natives of the year—”

“Bored with the concert?” Laliene asked. She had come up quietly beside him, without his noticing it.

“Quite the contrary.”

“Bored with us, then.” It was not a question.

Thimiroi shrugged. “The intermission’s an unfortunate interruption. I wish the music hadn’t stopped.”

“The music always stops,” she said, and laughed her throatiest, smokiest laugh.

He studied her. She was still offering herself to him, with her eyes, her smile, her slightly sidewise stance. Thimiroi felt almost guilty for his wilful failure to accept the gambit. Was he infuriating her? Was he wounding her?

But I do not want her, he told himself.

Once again, as in her room that afternoon while they were sipping euphoriac together, he was struck by the puzzling distaste and even anger that the perfection of her beauty aroused in him. Why this violent reaction? He had always lived in a world of perfect people. He had been accustomed all his life to Laliene’s sort of flawlessness. There was no need for anyone to have blemishes of face or form any more. One took that sort of thing for granted; everyone did. Why should it trouble him now? What strange restlessness was this century kindling in his soul?

Thimiroi saw the strain, the tension, the barely suppressed impatience in Laliene’s expression, and for a moment he was so abashed by the distress he knew he must be causing her that he came close to inviting her to join him in his suite after the concert. But he could not bring himself to do it. The moment passed; the tension slackened; Laliene made an elegant recovery, smiling and slipping her arm through his to lead him back to their seats, and he moved gratefully into a round of banter with her, and with Kleph, who drifted back up the aisle with them. But the magic and wonder of the concert were forever lost. In the second half he sat in a leaden slump, barely listening, unable to find the patterns that made the music comprehensible.

That night Thimiroi slept alone, and slept badly. After some hours of wakefulness he had to have recourse to one of his drugs. And even that brought him only partial solace, for with sleep came dark dreams of a singularly ominous and disruptive kind, full of hot furious blasts of anguish and panic, and he felt too drained of energy to get up again and rummage through his kit for the drug that banishes dreams. Morning was a long time in coming.

Over the next few days Thimiroi kept mostly to himself. He suspected that his fellow voyagers were talking about him—that they were worried about him—but he shied away from any sort of contact with them. The mere sight of them was something that caused him a perceptible pain, almost like the closing of a clamp about his heart. He longed to recapture that delicious openness to experience, that wonderful vulnerability, that he had felt when he had first arrived here, and he knew that so long as he was with any of them he would never be able to attain it.

By withdrawing from them in this morose way, he realized, he was missing some of the pleasures of the visit. The others were quite serious, as serious as such frivolous people ever could be, about the late twentieth century, and they spent each day moving busily about the city, taking advantage of its wealth of cultural opportunities—many of them obscure even to the natives of the era themselves. Kleph, whose specialty was Golconda studies, put together a small festival of the films of that great actor, and for two days they all, even Hollia, scurried around town seeing him at work in actual original prints. Omerie discovered, and proudly displayed, a first edition of Martin Drexel’s Lyrical Journeys.

“It cost me next to nothing,” Omerie declared in vast satisfaction. “These people don’t have the slightest idea of what Drexel achieved.” A day or two later, Klia organized a river trip to the birthplace of David Courtney, a short way north of the city. Courtney would not be born, of course, for another seventy years, but his birthplace already existed, and who could resist making the pilgrimage? Thimiroi resisted. “Come with us,” Laliene pleaded, with a curious urgency in her voice that he had never heard in it before. “This is one trip you really must not miss.” He told her, calmly at first and then more forcefully, as she continued to press the point, that he had no desire to go. She looked at him in a stricken way, as though he had slapped her; but at that point she yielded. The others went on the river journey and he stayed behind, drifting through the streets of the downtown section without purpose, without goal.

Troubled as he was, he found excitement nevertheless in the things he saw on his solitary walks. The vigor and intensity of this era struck resonances in his own unfashionably robust spirit. The noise here, the smells, the colors, the expansive, confident air of the people, who obviously knew that they were living at one of history’s great peak periods—everything startled and stimulated him in a way that Roman Capri and Chaucerian Canterbury had not been able to do.

Those older places and times had been too remote in spirit and essence from his native epoch to be truly comprehensible: they were interesting the way a visit to an alien planet can be interesting, but they had not moved him as this era moved him. Possibly the knowledge of impending doom that he had here had something to do with that. But there was something else. Thimiroi sensed, as he had not in any way sensed during the earlier stops, that he might actually be able to live in this era, and feel at home in it, and be happy here. For much of his life he had felt somehow out of place in his own world, unable all too often to come to terms with the seamlessness of everything, the impeccability of that immaculate era. Now he thought he understood why. As he wandered the streets of this booming, brawling, far-from-perfect city—taking joy in its curious mixture of earthy marvelous accomplishment and mysterious indifference to its own shortcomings, and finding himself curiously at ease in it—he began to perceive himself as a man of the late twentieth century who by some bewildering prank of the gods had been born long after his own proper time. And with that perception came a kind of calmness in the face of the storm that was to come.

Toward the end of the first week—it was the day when the others made their pilgrimage up the river to David Courtney’s birthplace—Thimiroi encountered the golden-haired woman who had been playing the piano in the house down the block from the hotel. He caught sight of her downtown while he was crossing a plaza paved with pink cobblestones, which linked twin black towers of almost unthinkable height and mass near the river embankment.

Though he had only seen her for a moment, that one other time, and that time only her face and throat at the window, he had no doubt that it was she. Her blue-green eyes and long straight shining hair were unmistakable. She was fairly tall and very slender, with a tall woman’s quick way of walking, ankles close together, shoulders slightly hunched forward. Thimiroi supposed that she was about thirty, or perhaps forty at most. She was young, at any rate, but not very young. He had no clear idea of how quickly people aged in this era. The first mild signs of aging seemed visible on her. In his own time that would mean nothing—there, a woman who looked like this might be anywhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty—but he knew that here they had no significant way of reversing the effects of time, and what she showed was almost certainly an indication that she had left her girlhood behind by some years but had not yet gone very far into the middle of the journey.

“Pardon me,” he said, a little to his own surprise, as she came toward him.

She peered blankly at him. “Yes?”

Thimiroi offered her a disarming smile. “I’m a visitor here. Staying at the Montgomery House.”

The mention of the famous hotel—and, perhaps, his gentle manner and the quality of his clothing—seemed to ease whatever apprehensions she might be feeling. She paused, looking at him questioningly.

He said, “You live near there, don’t you? A few days ago, when I was out for a walk—it was my first day here—I heard you playing the piano. I’m sure it was you. I applauded when you stopped, and you looked out the window at me. I think you must have seen me. You frowned, and then you smiled.”

She frowned now, just a quick flicker of confusion; and then again she smiled.

“Just like that, yes,” Thimiroi said. “Do you mind if we talk? Are you in a hurry?”

“Not really,” she said, and he sensed something troubled behind the words.

“Is there some place near here where we could have a drink? Or lunch, perhaps?” That was what they called the meal they ate at this time of day, he was certain. Lunch. People of this era met often for lunch, as a social thing. He did not think it was too late in the day to be offering her lunch.

“Well, there’s the River Cafe,” she said. “That’s just two or three blocks. I suppose we—” She broke off. “You know, I never ever do anything like this. Let myself get picked up in the street, I mean.”

“Picked up? I do not understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“The phrase,” Thimiroi said. “Pick up? To lift? Am I lifting you?”

She laughed and said, “Are you foreign?”

“Oh, yes. Very foreign.”

“I thought your way of speaking was a little strange. So precise—every syllable perfectly shaped. No one really speaks English that way. Except computers, of course. You aren’t a computer, are you?”

“Hardly.”

“Good. I would never allow myself to be picked up by a computer in First National Plaza. Or anyplace else, as a matter of fact. Are you still interested in going to the River Cafe?”

“Of course.”

She was playful now. “We can’t do this anonymously, though. It’s too sordid. My name’s Christine Rawlins.”

“And I am called Thimiroi.”

“Timmery?”

“Thimiroi,” he said.

“Thim-i-roi,” she repeated, imitating his precision. “A very unusual name, I’d say. I’ve never met anyone named Thimiroi before. What country are you from, may I ask?”

“You would not know it. A very small one, very far away.”

“Iran?”

“Farther away than that.”

“A lot of people who came here from Iran prefer not to admit that that’s where they’re from.”

“I am not from Iran, I assure you.”

“But you won’t tell me where?”

“You would not know it,” he said again.

Her eyes twinkled. “Oh, you are from Iran! You’re a spy, aren’t you? I see the whole thing: they’re getting ready to have a new revolution, there’s another Ayatollah on his way from his hiding place in Beirut, and you’re here to transfer Iranian assets out of this country before—” She broke off, looking sheepish. “I’m sorry. I’m just being weird. Have I offended you?”

“Not at all.”

“You don’t have to tell me where you’re from if you don’t want to.”

“I am from Stiinowain,” he said, astounded at his own daring in actually uttering the forbidden name.

She tried to repeat the name, but was unable to manage the soft glide of the first syllable.

“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it at all. But you’ll tell me all about it, won’t you?”

“Perhaps,” he said.

The River Cafe was a glossy bubble of pink marble and black glass cantilevered out over the embankment, with a semicircular open-air dining area, paved with shining flagstones, that jutted even farther, so that it seemed suspended almost in mid-river. They were lucky enough to find one vacant table that was right at the cafe’s outermost edge, looking down on the swift blue riverflow. “Ordinarily the outdoor section doesn’t open until the middle of June,” Christine told him. “But this year it’s been so warm and dry that they opened it a month early. We’ve been breaking records every day. There’s never been a May like this, that’s what they’re all saying. Just one long run of fabulous weather day after day after day.”

“It’s been extraordinary, yes.”

“What is May like in Stiin—in your country?” she asked.

“Very much like this. As a matter of fact, it is rather like this all the year round.”

“Really? How wonderful that must be!”

It must have seemed like boasting to her. He regretted that. “No,” he said. “We take our mild climate for granted and the succession of beautiful days means nothing to us. It is better this way, sudden glory rising out of contrast, the darkness of winter giving way to the splendor of spring. The warm sunny days coming upon you like—like the coming of grace, shall I say?—like—” He smiled. “Like that heavenly little theme that came suddenly out of the music you were playing, transforming something simple and ordinary into something unforgettable. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think I do.”

He began to hum the melody. Her eyes sparkled, and she nodded and grinned warmly, and after a moment or two she started humming along with him. He felt a tightness at his throat, warmth along his back and shoulders, a throbbing in his chest. All the symptoms of a rush of strong emotion. Very strange to him, very primitive, very exciting, very pleasing.

People at other tables turned. They seemed to notice something also. Thimiroi saw them smiling at the two of them with that unmistakable proprietorial smile that strangers will offer to young lovers in the springtime. Christine must have seen those smiles too, for color came to her face, and for a moment she looked away from him as though embarrassed.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said.

“We should order first. Are you familiar with our foods? A salad might be nice on a beautiful warm day like this—and then perhaps the cold salmon plate, or—” She stopped abruptly. “Is something wrong?”

Thimiroi struggled to fight back nausea. “Not a salad, no, please. It is—not good for me. And in my country we do not eat fish of any sort, not ever.”

“Forgive me.”

“But how could you have known?”

“Even so—you looked so distressed—”

“Not really. It was only a moment’s uneasiness.” He scanned the menu desperately. Nothing on it made sense to him. At home, he would only have to touch the screen beside anything that seemed to be of interest, and he would get a quick flavor-analog appercept to guide his choice. But that was at home. Here he had been taking most of his meals in his room, meals prepared many centuries away by his own autochef and sent to him down the time conduit. On those few occasions when he ate in the hotel dining room with his fellow travelers, he relied on Kadro to choose his food for him. Now, plunging ahead blindly, he selected something called carpaccio for his starter, and vichyssoise to follow.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything warm?” Christine asked gently.

“Oh, I think not, not on such a mild day,” Thimiroi said casually. He had no idea what he had ordered; but he was determined not to seem utterly ignorant of her era.

The carpaccio, though, turned out to be not merely cold but raw: red raw meat, very thinly sliced, in a light sauce. He stared at it in amazement. His whole body recoiled at the thought of eating raw meat. His bones themselves protested. He saw Christine staring at him, and wondered how much of his horror his expression was revealing to her. But there was no helping it: he slipped his fork under one of the paper-thin slices and conveyed it to his mouth. To his amazement it was delicious. Forgetting all breeding, he ate the rest without pausing once, while she watched in what seemed like a mixture of surprise and amusement.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” she said.

“Carpaccio has always been one of my favorites,” he told her shamelessly.

Vichyssoise turned out to be a cold dish too, a thick white soup, presumably made from some vegetable. It seemed harmless and proved to be quite tasty. Christine had ordered the salmon, and he tried not to peer at her plate, or to imagine what it must be like to put chunks of sea-creatures in one’s mouth, while she ate.

“You promised to tell me something about yourself,” he reminded her.

She looked uneasy. “It’s not a very interesting story, I’m afraid.”

“But you must tell me a little of it. Are you a musician by profession? Surely you are. Do you perform in the concert hall?”

Her look of discomfort deepened. “I know you don’t mean to be cruel, but—”

“Cruel? Of course not. But when I was listening there outside the window I could feel the great gift that you have.”

“Please.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” she said gently. “You weren’t trying to be funny, or to hurt me. But I’m not any sort of gifted pianist, Thimiroi. Believe me. I’m just a reasonably good amateur. Maybe when I was ten years old I dreamed of having a concert career some day, but I came to my senses a long time ago.”

“You are too modest.”

“No. No. I know what I am. And what the real thing is like. Even they don’t have an easy time of it. You can’t believe how many concert-quality pianists my age there are in this country. With so many genuine geniuses out there, there’s no hope at all for a decent third-rater like me.”

He shook his head in amazement, remembering the magical sounds that had come from her window. “Third-rater!”

“I don’t have any illusions about that,” she said. “I’m the sort of pianist who winds up giving piano lessons, not playing in Carnegie Hall. I have a couple of pupils. They come and go. It’s not possible to earn a living that way. And the job that I did have, with an export-import firm—well, they say that this is the most prosperous time this country has seen in the past forty years, but somehow I managed to get laid off last week anyway. That’s why I’m downtown today—another job interview. You see? Just an ordinary woman, an ordinary life, ordinary problems—”

“There is nothing ordinary about you,” said Thimiroi fervently. “Not to me! To me you are altogether extraordinary, Christine!” She seemed almost about to weep as he said that. Compassion and tenderness overwhelmed him, and he reached out to take her hand in his, to comfort her, to reassure her. Her eyes widened and she pulled back instantly, catching her breath sharply, as though he had tried to stab her with his fork.

Thimiroi looked at her sadly. The quickness and vehemence of her reaction mystified him.

“That was wrong?” he said. “To want to touch your hand?”

Awkwardly Christine said, “You surprised me, that’s all. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—it was rude of me, actually—oh, Thimiroi, I can’t explain—it was just automatic, a kind of dumb reflex—”

Puzzled, he turned his hand over several times, examining it, searching for something about it that might have frightened or repelled her. He saw nothing. It was simply a hand. After a moment she took it lightly with her own, and held it.

He said, “You have a husband? Is that why I should not have done that?”

“I’m not married, no.” She glanced away from him, but did not release his hand. “I’m not even—involved. Not currently.” Her fingers were lightly stroking his wrist. “I have to confess something,” she said, after a moment. “I saw you at Symphony Hall last week. The De Santis concert.”

“You did?”

“In the lobby. With your—friends. I watched you all, wondering who you were. There was a kind of glow about the whole group of you. The women were all so beautiful, every one of them. Immaculate. Perfect. Like movie stars, they were.”

“They are nothing compared with you.”

“Please. Don’t say any more things like that. I don’t like to be flattered, Thimiroi. Not only does it make me uncomfortable but it simply isn’t effective with me. Whatever else I am, I’m a realistic woman. Especially about myself.”

“And I am a truthful man. What I tell you is what I feel, Christine.” Her hand tightened on his wrist at that. He said, “So you knew who I was, when I approached you in the plaza up above just now.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“But pretended you did not.”

“I was frightened.”

“I am not frightening, Christine.”

“Not frightened of you. Of me. When I saw you that first day, standing outside my house—I felt—I don’t know, I felt something strange, just looking at you. Felt that I had seen you before somewhere, that I had known you very well in some other life, perhaps, that—oh, Thimiroi, I’m not making any sense, am I? But I knew you had been important to me at some other time. Or would be important. It’s crazy, isn’t it? And I don’t have any room in my life for craziness. I’m just trying to hold my own, don’t you see? Trying to maintain, trying to hang on and not get swept under. In these wonderful prosperous times, I’m all alone, Thimiroi, I’m not sure where I’m heading, what’s going to come next for me. Everything seems so uncertain. And so I don’t want any extra uncertainties in my life.”

“I will not bring you uncertainty,” he said.

She stared and said nothing. Her hand still touched his.

“If you are finished with your food,” he said, “perhaps you would like to come back to the hotel with me.”

There was a long tense silence. After a time she drew her hand away from him and knotted her fingers together, and sat very still, her expression indecipherable.

“You think it was inappropriate of me to have extended such an invitation,” he said finally.

“No. Not really.”

“I want only to be your friend.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“And I thought, since you live so close to the hotel, I could offer you some refreshment, and show you some treasures of my own country that I have brought with me. I meant nothing more than that, Christine. Please. Believe me.”

She seemed to shed some of her tension. “I’d love to stop off at your hotel with you for a little while,” she said.

He had no doubt at all that it was much too soon for them to become lovers. Not only was he completely unskilled in this era’s sociosexual rituals and procedures, so that it was probably almost impossible for him to avoid offending or displeasing her by this or that unintentional violation of the accepted courtship customs of her society, but also at this point he was still much too uncertain of the accuracy of his insight into her own nature. Once he knew her better, perhaps he would be less likely to go about things incorrectly, particularly since she already gave him the benefit of many doubts because she knew he came from some distant land.

There was also the not inconsiderable point to consider that it was a profound violation of the rules of The Travel to enter into any kind of emotional or physical involvement with a native of a past era.

That, somehow, seemed secondary to Thimiroi just now. He knew all about the importance of avoiding distortion or contamination of the time-line; they drilled it into you endlessly before you ever started to Travel. But suddenly such issues seemed unreal and abstract to him. What mattered was what he felt: the surge of delight, eagerness, passion, that ran through him when he turned to look at this woman of a far-off time. All his life he had been a stranger among his own people, a prisoner within his own skin; now, here, at last, it seemed to him that he had a chance of breaking through the net of brittle conventions that for so long had bound his spirit, and touching, at last, the soul of another human being. He had read about love, of course—who had not?—but here, he thought, he might actually experience it. Was that a reckless ambition? Well, then, he would be reckless. The alternative was to condemn himself to a lifetime of bitter regret.

Therefore he schooled himself to patience. He dared not be too hasty, for fear of ruining everything.

Christine appeared astounded by what she saw in his rooms. She wandered through them like a child in a wonderland, hardly breathing, pausing here and there to look, to reach out hesitantly, to hold her hand above this or that miraculous object as though afraid actually to touch it but eager to experience its texture.

“You brought all this from your own country?” she asked. “You must have had fifty suitcases!”

“We get homesick very easily. We wish to have our familiar things about us.”

“The way a sultan would travel. A pasha.” Her eyes were shining with awe. “These little tables—I’ve never seen anything like them. I try to follow the weave, but the pattern won’t stand still. It keeps sliding around its own corners.”

“The woodworkers of Sipulva are extremely ingenious,” Thimiroi said.

“Sipulva? Is that a city in your country?”

“A place nearby,” he said. “You may touch them if you wish.”

She caressed the intricately carved surfaces, fingers tracing the weave as it went through its incomprehensible convolutions. Thimiroi, smiling, turned the music sphere on—one of Mirtin’s melodikias began to come from it, a shimmering crystalline piece—and set about brewing some tea. Christine drifted onward, examining the draperies, the glistening carpets, the pulsating esthetikon that was sending waves of color through the room, the simso screens with their shifting views of unknown worlds. She was altogether enthralled. It would certainly be easy enough to seduce her now, Thimiroi realized. A little sensuous music, a few sips of euphoriac, perhaps some surreptitious adjustments of the little subsonic so that it sent forth heightened tonalities of anticipation and excitation—yes, that was all that it would take, he knew. But easy conquest was not what he wanted. He did not intend to pass through her soul like a frivolous tourist drifting through a museum in search of an hour’s superficial diversion.

One cup of tea for each of them, then, and no more. Some music, some quick demonstrations of a few of the little wonders that filled his rooms. A light kiss, finally, and then one that was more intense: but a quick restoration, afterward, of the barriers between them. Christine seemed no more willing to breach those barriers today than he was. Thimiroi was relieved at that, and pleased. They seemed to understand each other already.

“I’ll walk you home,” he said, when they plainly had reached the time when she must either leave or stay much longer.

“You needn’t. It’s just down the street.” Her hand lingered in his. Her touch was warm, her skin faintly moist, pleasantly so. “You’ll call me? Here’s my number.” She gave him a smooth little yellow card. “We could have dinner, perhaps. Or a concert—whatever you’d like to see—”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll call you.”

“You’ll be here at least a few more days, won’t you?”

“Until the end of the month.”

She nodded. He saw the momentary darkening of her expression, and guessed at the inward calculations: reckoning the number of days remaining to his visit, the possibilities that those days might hold, the rashness of embarking on anything that would surely not extend beyond the last day of May. Thimiroi had already made the same calculations himself, though tempered by information that she could not conceivably have, information which made everything inconceivably more precarious. After the smallest of pauses she said, “That’s plenty of time, isn’t it? But call me soon, Thimiroi. Will you? Will you?”

A little while later there was a light knocking at the door, and Thimiroi, hoping with a startling rush of eagerness that Christine had found some pretext for returning, opened it to find Laliene. She looked weary. The perfection of her beauty was unmarred, of course, every shining strand of hair in its place, her tanned skin fresh and glistening. But beneath the radiant outer glow there was once again something drawn and tense and ragged about her, a subliminal atmosphere of strain, of fatigue, of devitalization, that was not at all typical of the Laliene he had known. This visit to the late twentieth century did not seem to be agreeing with her.

“May I come in?” she asked. He nodded and beckoned to her. “We’ve all just returned from the Courtney birthplace,” she said. “You really should have gone with us, Thimiroi. You can feel the aura of the man everywhere in the place, even this early, so many years before he even existed.” Taking a few steps into the room, Laliene paused, sniffed the air lightly, smiled. “Having a little tea by yourself just now, were you, Thimiroi?”

“Just a cup. It was a long quiet afternoon.”

“Poor Thimiroi. Couldn’t find anything at all interesting to do? Then you certainly should have come with us.” He saw her glance flicking quickly about, and felt pleased and relieved that he had taken the trouble to put the teacups away. It was in fact no business of Laliene’s that he had had a guest in here this afternoon, but he did not want her, all the same, to know that he had.

“Can I brew a cup for you?” he asked.

“I think not. I’m so tired after our outing—it’ll put me right to sleep, I would say.” She turned toward him, giving him a direct inquisitorial stare that he found acutely discomforting. In a straightforward way that verged on bluntness she said, “I’m worried about you, you know, Thimiroi. Keeping off by yourself so much. The others are talking. You really should make an effort to join the group more often.”

“Maybe I’m bored with the group, Laliene. With Denvin’s snide little remarks, with Hollia’s queenly airs, with Hara’s mincing inanity, with Omerie’s arrogance, with Klia’s vacuity—”

“And with my presumptuousness?”

“You said that. Not I.”

But it was true, he realized. She was crowding him constantly, forever edging into his psychic space, pressing herself upon him in a strange, almost incomprehensible way. It had been that way since the beginning of the trip: she never seemed to leave him alone. Her approach toward him was an odd mix of seductiveness, protectiveness, and—what?—inquisitiveness? She was like that strangest of antique phenomena, a jealous lover, almost. But jealous of what? Of whom? Surely not Christine. Christine had not so much as existed for him, except as a mysterious briefly-glimpsed face in a window, until this afternoon, and Laliene had been behaving like this for many weeks. It made no sense. Even now, covertly snooping around his suite, all too obviously searching for some trace of the guest who had only a short while before been present here—what was she after?

He took two fresh cups from his cabinet. “If you don’t mind, Laliene, I’ll put up a little more tea for myself. And it would be no trouble to make some for you.”

“I said I didn’t want any, Thimiroi. I don’t enjoy gulping the stuff down, you know, the way Kleph does.”

“Kleph?”

“Certainly you know how heavily she indulges. She’s euphoric more often than not these days.”

Thimiroi shrugged. “I didn’t realize that. I suppose Omerie can get on anyone’s nerves. Even Kleph’s.”

Laliene studied him for a long moment. “You don’t know about Kleph, then?” she asked finally. “No, I suppose you don’t. Keeping to yourself this way, how would you?”

This was maddening. “What about Kleph?” he said, his voice growing tight.

“Perhaps you should fix some tea for me after all,” Laliene said. “It’s quite a nasty story. It’ll be easier for me with a little euphoriac.”

“Very well.”

He busied himself over the tiny covered cups. In a short while the fragrant coiling steam began to rise through the fine crescent opening. His hands trembled, and he nearly swept the cups from the tray as he reached for them; but he recovered quickly and brought them to the table. They sipped the drug in silence. Watching her, Thimiroi was struck once more by the inhuman superfluity of Laliene’s elegance. Laliene was much too perfect. How different from Christine, whose skin had minute unimportant blemishes here and there, whose teeth were charmingly irregular, whose hair looked like real hair and not like something spun by machines. Christine probably perspired, he thought. She endured the messiness of menstruation. She might even snore. She was wonderfully real, wonderfully human in every regard. Whereas Laliene—Laliene seemed—scarcely real at all—

“What’s this about Kleph, now?” Thimiroi said, after a time.

“She’s become involved with the man that the Sanciscos are renting their house from.”

“Involved?”

“An affair,” said Laliene acidly. Her glistening eyes were trained remorselessly on his. “He goes to her room. She gives him too much tea, and has too much herself. She plays music for him, or they watch the simsos. And then—then—”

“How do you know any of this?” Thimiroi asked.

Laliene took a deep draught of the intoxicating tea, and her brow grew less furrowed, her dark rich-hued eyes less troubled. “She told Klia. Klia told me.”

“And Omerie? Does he know?”

“Of course. He’s furious. Kleph can sleep with anyone she cares to, naturally—but such a violation of the Travel rules, to get involved with one of these ancient people! And so stupid, too—spending so much of the precious time of her visit here letting herself get wrapped up in a useless diversion with some commonplace and extremely uninteresting man. A man who isn’t even alive, who’s been dead for all these centuries!”

“He doesn’t happen to be dead right now,” Thimiroi said.

Laliene gave him a look of amazement. “Are you defending her, Thimiroi?”

“I’m trying to comprehend her.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. But certainly Kleph must see that although he may be alive at the present moment, technically speaking, the present moment itself isn’t really the present moment. Not if you see it from our point of view, and what other point of view is appropriate for us to take? What’s past is past, sealed and finished. In absolute reality this person of Kleph’s died long ago, at least so far as we’re concerned.” Laliene shook her head. “No, no, Thimiroi, completely apart from the issue of transgression against the rules of The Travel, it’s an unthinkably foolish adventure that Kleph’s let herself get into. Unthinkably foolish! It’s purely a waste of time. What kind of pleasure can she possibly get from it? She might as well be coupling with—with a donkey!”

“Who is this man?” Thimiroi asked.

“What does that matter? His name is Oliver Wilson. He owns that house where they are, the one that Hollia is trying to buy, and he lives there, too. Omerie neglected to arrange for him to vacate the premises for the month. You may have seen him: a very ordinary-looking pleasant young man with light-colored hair. But he isn’t important. What’s important is the insane, absurd, destructive thing Kleph is doing. Which particular person of this long-gone era she happens to be doing it with is completely beside the point.”

Thimiroi studied her for a time.

“Why are you telling me this, Laliene?”

“Aren’t you interested in what your friends are getting themselves mixed up in?”

“Is Kleph my friend?”

“Isn’t she?”

“We have come to the same place at the same time, Kleph and I,” Thimiroi said. “Does that make us friends? We know each other, Kleph and I. Possibly we were even lovers once, possibly not. My relationship with the Sanciscos in general and with Kleph in particular isn’t a close one nowadays. So far as this matters to me, Kleph can do what she likes with anyone she pleases.”

“She runs the risk of punishment.”

“She was aware of that. Presumably she chooses not to be troubled by it.”

“She should think of Omerie, then. And Klia. If Kleph is forbidden to Travel again, they will be deprived of her company. They have always Traveled together. They are accustomed to Traveling together. How selfish of her, Thimiroi.”

“Presumably she chooses not to be troubled by that, either,” said Thimiroi. “In any case, it’s no concern of yours or mine.” He hesitated. “Do you know what I think should trouble her, Laliene? The fact that she’s going to pay a very steep emotional price for what she’s doing, if indeed she’s actually doing it. That part of it ought to be on her mind, at least a little.”

“What do you mean?” Laliene asked.

“I mean the effect it will have on her when the meteor comes, and this man is killed by it. Or by what comes after the meteor, and you know what that is. If the meteor doesn’t kill him, the Blue Death will take him a week or two later. How will Kleph feel then, Thimiroi? Knowing that the man she loves is dead? And that she has done nothing, nothing at all, to spare him from the fate that she knew was rushing toward him? Poor Kleph! Poor foolish Kleph! What torment it will be for her!”

“The man she loves?”

“Doesn’t she?”

Laliene looked astounded. “What ever gave you that idea? It’s a game, Thimiroi, only a silly game! She’s simply playing with him. And then she’ll move along. He won’t be killed by the meteor—obviously. He’ll be in the same house as all the rest of us when it strikes. And she’ll be at Charlemagne’s coronation by the time the Blue Death breaks out. She won’t even remember his name, Thimiroi. How could you possibly have thought that she—she—” Laliene shook her head. “You don’t understand a thing, do you?”

“Perhaps I don’t.” Thimiroi put his cup down and stared at his fingers. They were trembling. “Would you like some more tea, Laliene?”

“No, I—yes. Yes, another, if you will, Thimiroi.”

He set about the task of brewing the euphoriac. His head was throbbing. Things were occurring to him that he had not bothered to consider before. While he worked, Laliene rose, roamed the room, toyed with this artifact and that, and drifted out into the hall that led to the bedroom. Did she suspect anything? Was she searching for something, perhaps? He wondered whether Christine had left any trace of her presence behind that Laliene might be able to detect, and decided that probably she had not. Certainly he hoped not. Considering how agitated Laliene seemed to be over Kleph’s little fling with her landlord, how would she react if she knew that he, too, was involved with someone of this era?

Involved?

How involved are you, really? he asked himself.

He thought of all that they had said just now about Kleph and her odd little affair with Oliver Wilson. A cold, inescapable anguish began to rise in him. How sorry he had felt for Kleph, a moment ago! The punishment for transgression against the rules, yes—but also the high emotional price that he imagined Kleph would pay for entangling herself with someone who lay under sentence of immediate death—the guilt—the sense of irretrievable loss—

The meteor—the Blue Death—

“The tea is ready,” Thimiroi announced, and as he reached for the delicate cups he knocked one into the other, and both of the pretty things went tumbling from the tray, landing at the carpet’s edge and cracking like eggshells against the wooden floor. A little rivulet of euphoriac came swirling from them. He gasped, shocked and appalled. Laliene, emerging from one of the far rooms, looked down at the wreckage for a moment, then swiftly knelt and began to sweep the fragments together.

“Oh, Thimiroi,” she said, glancing upward at him. “Oh, how sad, Thimiroi, how terribly sad—”

After lunch the next day, he telephoned Christine, certain that she would be out and a little uneasy about that; but she answered on the second ring, and there was an eagerness in her voice that made him think she had been poised beside the phone for some time now, waiting for him to call. Did she happen to be free this afternoon? Yes, yes, she said, she was free. Did she care to—his mind went blank a moment—to go for a walk with him somewhere? Yes, yes, what a lovely idea! She sounded almost jubilant. A perfect day for a walk, yes!

She was waiting outside her house when Thimiroi came down the street. It was a day much like all the other days so far, sharp cloudless sky, brilliant sun, gold blazing against blue. But there was a deeper tinge of warmth in the air, for May was near its end now and spring was relinquishing its hold to the coming summer. Trees which had seemed barely into leaf the week before now unfurled canopies of rich deep green.

“Where shall we go?” she asked him.

“This is your city. I don’t know the good places.”

“We could walk in Baxter Park, I suppose.”

Thimiroi frowned. “Isn’t that all the way on the other side of the river?”

“Baxter Park? Oh, no, you must be thinking of Butterfield Gardens. Up on the high ridge, you mean, over there opposite us? The very big park, with the botanical gardens and the zoo and everything? Baxter Park’s right near here, just a few blocks up the hill. We could be there in ten minutes.”

Actually it was more like fifteen, and no easy walk, but none of that mattered to Thimiroi. Simply being close to Christine awoke unfamiliar sensations of contentment in him. They climbed the steep streets side by side, saying very little as they made the difficult ascent, pausing now and again to catch their breaths. The city was like a giant bowl, cleft by the great river that ran through its middle, and they were nearing its rim.

Baxter Park, like its counterpart across the river that Thimiroi had seen when he first arrived in the twentieth century, occupied a commanding position looking out and down toward the heart of the urban area. But apart from that the two parks were very different, for the other was intricately laid out, with roads and amusement sectors scattered through it, and this one seemed nothing more than a strip of rough, wild semi-forest that had been left undeveloped at the top of the city. Simple paths crudely paved led through its dense groves and tangles of underbrush.

“It isn’t much, I know—” Christine said.

“It’s beautiful here. So wild, so untamed. And so close to the city. We can look down and see houses and office buildings and bridges, and yet back here it’s just as it must have been ten thousand years ago. There is nothing like this where I come from.”

“Do you mean that?”

“We took our wilderness away a long time ago. We should have kept a little—just a little, a reminder, the way you have here. But it’s too late now. It has been gone so long, so very long.” Thimiroi peered into the hazy distance. Shimmering in the midafternoon heat, the city seemed a fairytale place, enchanted, wondrous. Shading his eyes, he peered out and downward, past the residential district to the metropolitan center by the river, and beyond it to the bridges, the suburbs on the far side, the zone of parks and recreational areas barely visible on the opposite slope. How beautiful it all was, how majestic, how grand! The thought that it all must perish in just a matter of days brought the taste of bile to his mouth, and he turned away, coughing, sputtering.

“Is something the matter?” Christine asked.

“Nothing—no—I’ll be all right—”

He wondered how far they were right now from the path along which the meteor would travel.

As he understood it, it was going to come in from this side of the city, traveling low across the great urban bowl like a stone that a boy has sent skimming across a stream and striking somewhere midway down the slope, between the zone of older houses just below the Montgomery House hotel and the business district farther on. At the point of impact, of course, everything would be annihilated for blocks around. But the real devastation would come a moment later, so Kadro had explained: when the shock wave struck and radiated outward, flattening whole neighborhoods in a steadily widening circle, as if they had been swatted by a giant’s contemptuous hand.

And then the fires, springing up everywhere—

And then, a few days later, when the invading microbes had had a chance to spread through the contaminated water supply of the shattered city, the plague—

“You look so troubled, Thimiroi,” Christine said, nestling up beside him, sliding her arm through his.

“Do I?”

“You must miss your homeland very much.”

“No. No, that isn’t it.”

“Why so sad, then?”

“I find it extremely moving,” he said, “to look out over your whole city this way. Taking it all in in a single sweep. Seeing it in all its magnificence, all its power.”

“But it’s not even the most important city in the—”

“I know. But that doesn’t matter. The fact that there may be bigger cities takes nothing away from the grandeur of this one. Especially for me. Where I come from, there are no cities of any size at all. Our population is extremely small…extremely small.”

“But it must be a very wealthy country, all the same.”

Thimiroi shrugged. “I suppose it is. But what does that mean? I look at your city here and I think of the transience of all that is splendid and grand. I think of all the great empires of the past, and how they rose, and fell, and were swept away and forgotten. All the empires that ever were, and all those that will ever be.”

To his surprise, she laughed. “Oh, how strange you are!”

“Strange?”

“So terribly solemn. So philosophical. Brooding about the rise and fall of empires on a glorious spring day like this. Standing here with the most amazing sunlight pouring down on us and telling me in those elocution-school tones of yours that empires that don’t even exist yet are already swept away and forgotten. How can something be forgotten that hasn’t yet even happened? And how can you even bother to think about anything morbid in a season like this one?” She moved closer to him, nuzzling against his side almost like a cat. “Do you know what I think, standing here right this minute looking out at the city? I think that the warmth of the sun feels wonderful and that the air is as fresh as new young wine and that the city has never seemed more sparkling or prosperous and that this is the most beautiful spring day in at least half a million years. And the last thing that’s going to cross my mind is that the weather may not hold or that the time of prosperity may not last or that great empires always crumble and are forgotten. But perhaps you and I are just different, Thimiroi. Some people are naturally gloomy, and always see the darkest side of everything, and then there are the people who couldn’t manage to be moody and broody even if their lives depended on—” She broke off suddenly. “Oh, Thimiroi, I don’t mean to offend you. You know that.”

“You haven’t offended me.” He turned to her. “What’s an elocution-school voice?”

“A trained one,” she said, smiling. “Like the voice of a radio or TV announcer. You have a marvelous voice, you know. You speak right from the center of your diaphragm, and you always pause for breath in the right places, and the tone is so rich, so perfect—a singer’s voice, really. You can sing very well, can’t you? I know you can. Later, perhaps, I could play for you, and you could sing for me, back at my place, some song of Stiino—of your own country—”

“Yes,” he said. “We could try that, yes.”

He kissed her, then, and it was a different sort of kiss from either of the two kisses of the day before, very different indeed; and as he held her his hands ran across her back, and over the nape of her neck, and down the sides of her arms, and she pressed herself close against him. Then after a long moment they moved apart again, both of them flushed and excited, and smiled, and looked at each other as though they were seeing each other for the first time.

They walked hand in hand through the park, neither of them saying anything. Small animals were everywhere, birds and odd shiny bright-colored little insects and comical four-legged grayish beasts with big shaggy tails lalloping behind them. Thimiroi was amazed by the richness of all this wildlife, and the shrubs and wildflowers dazzling with early bloom, and the huge thick-boled trees that rose so awesomely above them. What an extraordinary place this century was, he told himself: what a fantastic mixture of the still unspoiled natural world and the world of technology and industry. They had these great cities, these colossal buildings, these immense bridges—and yet, also, they still had saved room for flowers, for beetles and birds, for little furry animals with enormous tails. When the thought of the meteor, and the destruction that it would cause, crept back into his mind, he forced it furiously away. He asked Christine to tell him the names of things: this is a squirrel, she said, and this is a maple tree, and this a grasshopper. She was surprised that he knew so little about them, and asked him what kinds of insects and trees and animals they had in his own country.

“Very few,” he told her. “All our wild things went from us long ago.”

“Not even squirrels left? Grasshoppers?”

“Nothing like that,” he said. “Nothing at all. That is why we travel—to experience life in places such as this. To experience squirrels. To experience grasshoppers.”

“Of course. Everyone travels to see things different from what they have at home. But it’s hard to believe that there’s any country that’s done such ecological damage to itself that it doesn’t even have—”

“Oh, the problem is not ecological damage,” said Thimiroi. “Not as you understand the term. Our country is very beautiful, in its way, and we care for it extremely well. The problem is that it is an extremely civilized place. Too civilized, I think. We have everything under control. And one thing that we controlled, a very long time ago, is the very thing that this park is designed to provide: the world of nature, as it existed before the cities ever were.”

She stared. “Not even a squirrel.”

“Not even a squirrel, no.”

“Where is this country of yours? Did you say it was in Arabia? One of the oil kingdoms?”

“No,” he said. “Not in Arabia.”

They went onward. The afternoon’s heat was at its peak, now, and Thimiroi felt the moisture of the air clinging close against his skin, a strange and unusual sensation for him. Again they paused, after a while, to kiss, even more passionately than before.

“Come,” Christine said. “Let’s go home.”

They hurried down the hillside, taking it practically at a jog. But they slowed as the Montgomery House came into view. Thimiroi thought of inviting her to his room once again, but the thought of Laliene hovering nearby—spying on him, scowling her disapproval as he entered into the same transgression for which she had so sternly censured Kleph—displeased him. Christine reminded him, though, that she had offered to play the piano for him, and wanted him to sing for her. Gladly, eagerly, Thimiroi accepted the invitation to go with her to her house.

But as they approached it he was dismayed to see Kleph standing on the steps of a big, rambling old house just opposite Christine’s, on the uphill side of the street. She was talking to a sturdy square-shouldered man with a good-natured, open face, and she did not appear to notice Thimiroi.

Christine said, “Do you want to say hello to her?”

“Not really.”

“She’s one of your friends, isn’t she? Someone from your country?”

“She’s from my country, yes. But not exactly a friend. Just someone who’s taking the same tour I am. Is that the house where she’s staying?”

“Yes,” Christine said. “She and another woman, and a tall somber-looking man. I saw them all with you, that night at the concert hall. They’ve rented the house for the whole month. That man’s the owner, Oliver Wilson.”

“Ah.” Thimiroi drew his breath in sharply.

So that was the one. Oliver. Kleph’s twentieth-century lover. Thimiroi felt a stab of despair. Looking across the way now at Kleph, deep in conversation with this Oliver, it seemed to him suddenly that Laliene’s scorn for Kleph had not been misplaced, that it was foolish and pathetic and even a little sordid for any Traveler to indulge in such doomed and absurd romances as this. And yet he was on the verge of embarking on the same thing Kleph was doing. Was that what he really wanted? Or should he not leave such adventures to shallow, trivial people like Kleph?

Christine said, “You’re looking troubled again.”

“It’s nothing. Nothing.” Thimiroi gazed closely at her, and her warmth, her directness, her radiant joyous eyes, swept away all the sudden doubts that had come to engulf him. He had no right to condemn Kleph. And in any case what he might choose to do, or Kleph, was no concern of Laliene’s. “Come,” he said. He caught Christine lightly by the arm. “Let’s go inside.”

Just as he turned, Kleph did also, and for an instant their eyes met as they stood facing each other on opposite sides of the street. She gave him a startled look. Thimiroi smiled to her; but Kleph merely stared back intently in a curiously cold way. Then she was gone. Thimiroi shrugged.

He followed Christine into her house.

It was an old, comfortable-looking place with a great many small, dark, high-ceilinged rooms on the ground floor and a massive wooden staircase leading upstairs. The furnishings looked heavy and unstylish, as though they were already long out of date, but everything had an appealing, well-worn feel.

“My family’s lived in this house for almost a hundred years,” Christine said, as though reading his mind. “I was born here. I grew up here. I don’t know what it’s like to live anywhere else.” She gestured toward the staircase. “The music room is upstairs.”

“I know. Do you live here by yourself?”

“Basically. My sister and I inherited the house when my mother died, but she’s hardly ever here. The last I heard from her, she was in Oaxaca.”

“Wah-ha-ka?” Thimiroi said carefully.

“Oaxaca, yes. In Mexico, you know? She’s studying Mexican handicrafts, she says. I think she’s actually studying Mexican men, but that’s her business, isn’t it? She likes to travel. Before Mexico she was in Thailand, and before that it was Portugal, I think.”

Mexico, Thimiroi thought. Thailand. Portugal. So many names, so many places. Such a complex society, this world of the twentieth century. His own world had fewer places, and they had different names. So much had changed, after the time of the Blue Death. So much had been swept away, never to return.

Christine said, “It’s a musty old house, I know. But I love it. And I could never have afforded to buy one of my own. Everything’s so fantastically expensive these days. If I hadn’t happened to have lived here all along, I suppose I’d be living in one of those poky little studio apartments down by the river, paying umpty thousand dollars a month for one bedroom and a terrace the size of a postage stamp.”

Desperately he tried to follow what she was saying. His implant helped, but not enough. Umpty thousand dollars? Studio apartment? Postage stamp? He got the sense of her words, but the literal meanings eluded him. How much was umpty? How big was a postage stamp?

The music room on the second floor was bright and spacious, with three large windows looking out into the garden and the street beyond. The piano itself, against the front wall between two of the windows, was larger than he expected, a splendid, imposing thing, with ponderous, ornately carved legs and a black, gleaming wooden case. Obviously it was old and very valuable and well cared for; and as he studied it he realized suddenly that this must not be any ordinary home musical instrument, but more likely one that a concert performer would use; and therefore Christine’s lighthearted dismissal of his question about her having a musical career must almost certainly conceal bitter defeat, frustration, the deflection of a cherished dream. She had wanted and expected more from her music than life had been able to bring her.

“Play for me,” he said. “The same piece you were playing the first time, when I happened to walk by.”

“The Debussy, you mean?”

“I don’t know its name.”

Thimiroi hummed the melody that had so captured him. She nodded and sat down to play.

It was not quite as magical, the second time. But nothing ever was, he knew. And it was beautiful all the same, haunting, mysterious in its powerful simplicity.

“Will you sing for me now?” Christine asked.

“What should I sing?”

“A song of your own country?”

He thought a moment. How could he explain to her what music was like in his own time—not sound alone, but a cluster of all the arts, visual, olfactory, the melodic line rising out of a dozen different sensory concepts? But he could improvise, he supposed. He began to sing one of his own poems, putting a tune to it as he went. Christine, listening, closed her eyes, nodded, turned to the keyboard, played a few notes and a few more, gradually shaping them into an accompaniment for him. Thimiroi was amazed at the swiftness with which she caught the melody of his tune—stumbling only once or twice, over chordal structures that were obviously alien to her—and traveled along easily with it. By the time he reached the fifth cycle of the song, he and she were joined in an elegant harmony, as though they had played this song together many times instead of both improvising it as they went. And when he made the sudden startling key-shift that in his culture signalled the close of a song, she adapted to it almost instantaneously and stayed with him to the final note.

They applauded each other resoundingly.

Her eyes were shining with delight. “Oh, Thimiroi—Thimiroi—what a marvelous singer you are! And what a marvelous song!”

“And how cunningly you wove your accompaniment into it.”

“That wasn’t really hard.”

“For you, perhaps. You have a great musical gift, Christine.”

She reddened and looked away.

“What language were you singing in?” she asked, after a time.

“The language of my country.”

“It was so strange. It isn’t like any language I’ve ever heard. Why won’t you tell me anything about where you come from, Thimiroi?”

“I will. Later.”

“And what did the words mean?”

“It’s a poem about—about journeying to far lands, and seeing great wonders. A very romantic poem, perhaps a little silly. But the poet himself is also very romantic and perhaps a little silly.”

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Thimiroi.”

“You?” she said, grinning broadly. “Is that what you are? A poet?”

“I sometimes write poetry, yes,” he said, beginning to feel as uneasy as she had seemed when he was trying to praise her playing. They looked at each other awkwardly. Then he said, “May I try the piano?”

“Of course.”

He sat down, peered at the keys, touched one of the white ones experimentally, then another, another. What were the black ones? Modulators of some sort? No, no, their function was very much like that of the white ones, it seemed. And these pedals here—

He began to play.

He was dreadful at first, but quickly he came to understand the relationship of the notes and the range of the keyboard and the proper way of touching the keys. He played the piece that she had played for him before, exactly at first, then launching into a set of subtle variations that carried him farther and farther from the original, into the musical modes of his own time. The longer he played, the more keenly he appreciated the delicacy and versatility of this ancient instrument; and he knew that if he were to study it with some care, not merely guess his way along as he was doing now, he would be able to draw such wonders from it as even great composers like Cenbe or Palivandrin would find worthwhile. Once again he felt humbled by the achievements of this great lost civilization of the past. Which to brittle, heartless people like Hollia or Omerie must seem a mere simple primitive age. But they understood nothing. Nothing.

He stopped playing, and looked back at Christine.

She was staring at him in horror, her face pale, her eyes wide and stricken, tears streaking her cheeks.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“The way you play—” she whispered. “I’ve never heard anyone play like that.”

“It is all very bad, I know. But you must realize, I have had no formal training in this instrument, I am simply inventing a technique as I go—”

“No. Please. Don’t tell me that. You mustn’t tell me that!”

“Christine?”

And then he realized what the matter was. It was not that he had played badly; it was that he had played so well. She had devoted all her life to this instrument, and played it with great skill, and even so had never been able to attain a level of proficiency that gave her any real satisfaction. And he, never so much as having seen a piano in his life, could sit down at it and draw from it splendors beyond her fondest hope of achieving. His playing was unorthodox, of course, it was odd and even bizarre, but yet she had seen the surpassing mastery in it, and had been stunned and chagrined and crushed by it, and stood here now bewildered and confounded by this stranger she had brought into her own home—

I should have known better, Thimiroi thought. I should have realized that this is her art, and that I, with all the advantages that are mine purely by virtue of my having been born when I was, ought never to have presumed to invade her special territory with such a display of skills that are beyond her comprehension. Without even suspecting what I was doing, I have humiliated her.

“Christine,” he murmured. “No. No, Christine.”

Thimiroi went to her and pulled her close against him, and kissed the tears away, and spoke softly to her, calming her, reassuring her. He could never tell her the truth; but he could make her understand, at least, that he had not meant to hurt her. And after a time he felt the tension leave her, and felt her press herself tight to him, and then their lips met, and she looked up, smiling. And took him lightly by the hand, and drew him from the room and down the hall.

Afterward, as he was dressing, she touched the long, fading red scar on his arm and said, “Were you in some kind of accident?”

“An inoculation,” he told her. “Against disease.”

“I’ve never seen one like that before.”

“No,” he said. “I suppose you haven’t.”

“A disease of your country?”

“No,” he said, after a time. “Of yours.”

“But what kind of disease requires a vaccination like—”

“Do we have to talk of diseases just now, Christine.”

“Of course not,” she said, smiling ruefully. “How foolish of me. How absurd.” She ran her fingers lightly, almost fondly, over the inoculation scar a second time. “Of all things for me to be curious about!” Softly she said, “You don’t have to leave now, you know.”

“But I must. I really must.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose you must.” She accompanied him to the front door. “You’ll call me, won’t you? Very soon?”

“Of course,” Thimiroi said.

Night had fallen. The air was mild and humid, but the sky was clear and the stars glittered brilliantly. He looked for the moon but could not find it.

How many days remain, he wondered?

Somewhere out there in the airless dark a lump of dead rock was falling steadily toward earth, falling, falling, inexorably coming this way. How far away was it now? How soon before it would come roaring over the horizon to bring unimaginable death to this place?

I must find a way of saving her, he told himself.

The thought was numbing, dizzying, intolerably disturbing.

Save her? How? Impossible. Impossible. It was something that he must not even allow himself to consider.

And yet—

Again it came. I must find a way of saving her.

There was a message for him at his hotel, just a few quick scrawled sentences:

Party at Lutheena’s. We’re all going. See you there?

Laliene’s handwriting, which even in her haste was as beautiful as the finest calligraphy. Thimiroi crumpled the note and tossed it aside. Going to a party tonight was very close to the last thing he would want to do. Everyone in glittering clothes, making glittering conversation, trading sparkling anecdotes, no doubt, of their latest adventures among the simple sweaty blotchyskinned folk of this interestingly raucous and crude century—no. No. No. Let them trade their anecdotes without him. Let them sip their euphoriac and exchange their chatter and play their little games. He was going to bed. Very likely, without him there, they would all be talking about him. How oddly he had been behaving, how strange and uncouth he seemed to be becoming since their arrival in this era. Let them talk. What did it matter?

He wished Kleph had not seen him going into Christine’s house, though.

But how would Kleph know whose house it was? And why would Kleph—Kleph, with her own Oliver Wilson entanglement preoccupying her—want to say anything to anyone about having seen some other member of the tour slipping away for an intimate hour with a twentieth-century person? Better for her to be silent. The subject was a delicate one. She would not want to raise it. She of all people would be unlikely to disapprove, or to want to bring down on him the disapproval of the others. No, Thimiroi thought. Kleph will say nothing. We are allies in this business, Kleph and I.

He slept, and dark dreams came that he could not abide: the remorseless meteor crossing the sky, the city aflame and shrieking, Christine’s wonderful old house swept away by a searing blast of destruction, the piano lying tumbled in the street, split in half, golden strings spilling out.

Wearily Thimiroi dosed himself with the drug that banishes dreams, and lay down to sleep again. But now sleep evaded him. Very well: there was the other drug, the one that brings sleep. He hesitated to take it. The two drugs taken in the wrong order exacted a price; he would be jittery and off balance emotionally for the next two or three days. He was far enough off balance as it was already. So he lay still, hoping that he would drift eventually into sleep without recourse to more medication; and gradually his mind grew easier, gradually he began the familiar descent toward unconsciousness.

Suddenly the image of Laliene blazed in his mind.

It was so vivid that it seemed she was standing beside him in the darkness and light was streaming from her body. She was nude, and her breasts, her hips, her thighs, all had a throbbing incandescent glow. Thimiroi sat up, astonished, swept with waves of startling feverish excitement.

“Laliene?”

How radiant she looked! How splendid! Her eyes were glowing like beacons. Her crimson hair stood out about her head like a bright corona. The scent of her filled his nostrils. He trembled. His throat was dry, his lips seemed gummed together.

Wave after wave of intense, overpowering desire swept through him.

Helplessly Thimiroi rose, lurched across the room, reached gropingly toward her. This was madness, he knew, but there was no holding himself back.

The shimmering image retreated as he came near it. He stumbled, nearly tripped, regained his balance.

“Wait, Laliene,” he cried hoarsely. His heart was pounding thunderously. It was almost impossible for him to catch his breath. He was choking with his need. “Come here, will you? Stop edging away like that.”

“I’m not here, Thimiroi. I’m in my own room. Put your robe on and come visit me.”

“What? You’re not here?”

“Down the hall. Come, now. Hurry!”

“You are here. You have to be.”

As though in a daze, brain swathed in thick layers of white cotton, he reached for her again. Like a lovestruck boy he yearned to draw her close, to cup her breasts in his hands, to run his fingers over those silken thighs, those satiny flanks—

“To my room,” she whispered.

“Yes. Yes.”

His flesh was aflame. Sweat rolled down his body. She danced before him like a shining will-o’-the-wisp. Frantically he struggled to comprehend what was happening. A vision? A dream? But he had drugged himself against dreams. And he was awake now. Surely he was awake. And yet he saw her—he wanted her—he wanted her beyond all measure—he was going to slip his robe on, and go to her suite, and she would be waiting for him there, and he would slip into her bed—into her arms—

No. No. No.

He fought it. He caught the side of some piece of furniture, and held it, anchoring himself, struggling to keep himself from going forward. His teeth chattered. Chills ran along his back and shoulders. The muscles in his arms and chest writhed and spasmed as he battled to stay where he was.

He was fully awake now, and he was beginning to understand. He remembered how Laliene had gone wandering around here the other day while he was brewing the tea—examining the works of art, so he had thought. But she could just as easily have been planting something. Which now was broadcasting monstrous compulsions into his mind.

He switched on the light, wincing as it flooded the room. Now Thimiroi could no longer see that mocking, beckoning image of Laliene, but he still felt her presence all around him, the heat of her body, the pungency of her fragrance, the strength of her urgent summons.

Somehow he managed to find the card with Christine’s telephone number on it, and dialed it with tense, quivering fingers. The phone rang endlessly until, finally, he heard her sleepy voice, barely focused, saying, “Yes? Hello?”

“Christine? Christine, it’s me, Thimiroi.”

“What? Who? Don’t you know it’s four in the morn—” Then her tone changed. The sleepiness left it, and the irritation. “What’s wrong, Thimiroi? What’s happening?”

“I’ll be all right. I need you to talk to me, that’s all. I’m having a kind of an attack.”

“No, Thimiroi!” He could feel the intensity of her concern. “What can I do? Shall I come over?”

“No. That’s not necessary. Just talk to me. I need to stir up—cerebral activity. Do you understand? It’s just an—an electrochemical imbalance. But if I talk—even if I listen to something—speak to me, say anything, recite poetry—”

“Poetry,” she said. “All right. Let me think. ‘Four score and seven years ago—’” she began.

“Good,” he said. “Even if I don’t understand it, that’s all right. Say anything. Just keep talking.”

Already Laliene’s aura was ebbing from the room. Christine continued to speak; and he broke in from time to time, simply to keep his mental level up. In a few minutes Thimiroi knew that he had defeated Laliene’s plan. He slumped forward, breathing hard, letting his stiff, anguished muscles uncoil.

He still could feel the waves of mental force sweeping through the room. But they were pallid now, they were almost comical, they no longer were capable of arousing in him the obsessive obedience that they had been able to conjure into his sleeping mind.

Christine, troubled, still wanted to come to him; but Thimiroi told her that everything was fine, now, that she should go back to sleep, that he was sorry to have disturbed her. He would explain, he promised. Later. Later.

Fury overtook him the moment he put the receiver down.

Damn Laliene. Damn her! What did she think she was doing?

He searched through the sitting room, and then the bedroom, and the third room of the suite. But it was almost dawn before he found what he was looking for: the tiny silvery pellet, the minute erotic broadcaster, that she had hidden beneath one of his Sipulva tables. He pulled it loose and crushed it against the wall, and the last faint vestige of Laliene’s presence went from the room like water swirling down a drain. Slowly Thimiroi’s anger receded. He put on some music, one of Cenbe’s early pieces, and listened quietly to it until he saw the first pale light of morning streaking the sky.

Casually, easily, with a wonderful recklessness he had not known he had in him, he said to Christine, “We go anywhere we want. Anywhen. They run tours for us, you see. We were in Canterbury in Chaucer’s time, to make the pilgrimage. We went to Rome and then to Emperor Augustus’ summer palace on the island of Capri, and he invited us to a grand banquet, thinking we were visitors from a great kingdom near India.”

Christine was staring at him in a wide-eyed gaze, as though she were a child and he were telling her some fabulous tale of dragons and princes.

He had gone to her at midday, when the late May sun was immense overhead and the sky seemed like a great curving plate of burnished blue steel. She had let him in without a word, and for a long while they looked at each other in silence, their hands barely touching. She was very pale and her eyes were reddened from sleeplessness, with dark crescents beneath them. Thimiroi embraced her, and assured her that he was in no danger, that with her help he had been able to fight off the demon that had assailed him in the night. Then she took him upstairs, to the room on the second floor where they had made love the day before, and drew him down with her on the bed, almost shyly at first, and then, casting all reserve aside, seizing him eagerly, hungrily.

When finally they lay back, side by side, all passion slaked for the moment, Christine turned toward him and said, “Tell me now where your country is, Thimiroi.”

And at last he began—calmly, unhesitatingly—to tell her about The Travel.

“We went to Canterbury in the autumn of 1347,” he said. “Actually Chaucer was still only a boy, then. The poem was many years away. Of course we read him before we set out. We even looked at the original Old English text. I suppose the language would be strange even to you. ‘When that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.’ I suppose we really should have gone in April ourselves, to be more authentic; but April was wet that year, as it usually is at that time in England, and the autumn was warm and brilliant, a season much like the one you are having here, a true vintage season. We are very fond of warm, dry weather, and rain depresses us.”

“You could have gone in another year, then, and found a warmer, drier April,” Christine said.

“No. The year had to be 1347. It isn’t important why. And so we went in autumn, in beautiful October.”

“Ah.”

“We began in London, gathering in an inn on the south side of the river, just as Chaucer’s pilgrims did, and we set out with a band of pilgrims that must have been much like his, even one who played a bagpipe the way his Miller did, and a woman who might almost have been the Wife of Bath—” Thimiroi closed his eyes a moment, letting the journey come rushing back from memory, sights and sounds, laughter, barking dogs, cool bitter ale, embroidered gowns, the mounds of straw in the stable, falling leaves, warm dry breezes. “And then, before that, first-century Capri. In the time of Augustus. In high summer, a perfect Mediterranean summer, still another vintage season. How splendid Capri is. Do you know it? No? An island off Italy, very steep, a mountaintop in the water, with strange grottos at its base and huge rocks all about. There comes a time every evening when the sky and the sea are the same color, a pale blue-gray, so that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, and you stand by the edge of the high cliff, looking outward into that gray haze, and it seems to you that all the world is completely still, that time is not moving at all.”

“The—first century—?” Christine murmured.

“The reign of the Emperor Augustus, yes. A surprisingly short man, and very gentle and witty, extremely likable, although you can feel the ruthlessness of him just behind the gentleness. He has amazing eyes, utterly penetrating, with a kind of light coming from them. You look at him and you see Rome: the Empire embodied in one man, its beginning and its end, its greatness and its power.”

“You speak of him as though he is still alive. ‘He has amazing eyes,’ you said.”

“I saw him only a few months ago,” said Thimiroi. “He handed me a cup of sweet red wine with his own hands, and recommended it, saying there certainly was nothing like it in my own land. He has a palace on Capri, nothing very grand—his stepson Tiberius, who was there also, would build a much greater one later on, so our guide told us—and he was there for the summer. We were guests under false pretenses, I suppose, ambassadors from a distant land, though he never would have guessed how distant. The year was—let me think—no, not the first century, not your first century, it was what you call B.C., the last century before the first century—I think the year was 19, the 19 before—such a muddle, these dating systems—”

“And in your country?” Christine asked. “What year is it now in your country, Thimiroi? 2600? 3100?”

He pondered that a moment. “We use a different system of reckoning. It is not at all analogous. The term would be meaningless to you.”

“You can’t tell me what year it is there?”

“Not in your kind of numbers, no. There was—a break in the pattern of numbering, long before our time. I could ask Kadro. He is our tour guide, Kadro. He knows how to compute the equivalencies.”

She stared at him. “Couldn’t you guess? Five hundred years? A thousand?”

“Perhaps it is something like that. But even if I knew, I would not tell you the exact span, Christine. It would be wrong. It is forbidden, absolutely forbidden.” Thimiroi laughed. “Everything I have just told you is absolutely forbidden, do you know that? We must conceal the truth about ourselves to those we meet when we undertake The Travel. That is the rule. Of course, you don’t believe a thing I’ve just been telling you, do you?”

Color flared in her cheeks. “Don’t you think I do?” she cried.

Tenderly Thimiroi said, “There are two things they tell us about The Travel, Christine, before we set out for the first time. The first, they say, is that sooner or later you will feel some compulsion to reveal to a person of ancient times that you are a visitor from a future time. The second thing is that you will not be believed.”

“But I believe you, Thimiroi!”

“Do you? Do you really?”

“Of course it all sounds so terribly strange, so fantastic—”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But I want to believe you. And so I do believe you. The way you speak—the way you dress—the way you look—everything about you is foreign, Thimiroi, totally foreign beyond any ordinary kind of foreignness. It isn’t Iran or India or Afghanistan that you come from, it has to be some other world, or some other time. Yes. Yes. Everything about you. The way you played the piano yesterday.” She paused a moment. “The way you touch me in bed. You are like no man I have ever—like no man—” She faltered, reddened fiercely, looked away from him a moment. “Of course I believe that you are what you say you are. Of course I do!”

When he returned to the Montgomery House late that afternoon he went down the hall to Laliene’s suite and rapped angrily at the door. Denvin opened it and peered out at him. He was dressed in peacock splendor, an outfit exceptional even for Denvin, a shirt with brilliant red stripes and golden epaulets, tight green trousers flecked with scarlet checks.

He gave Thimiroi a long cool malevolent glance and exclaimed, “Well! The prodigal returns!”

“How good to see you, Denvin. Am I interrupting anything?”

“Only a quiet little chat.” Denvin turned. “Laliene! Our wandering poet is here!”

Laliene emerged from deeper within. Like Denvin she was elaborately clothed, wearing a pale topaz-hued gown fashioned of a myriad shimmering mirrors, shining metallic eye-shadow, gossamer finger-gloves. She looked magnificent. But for an instant, as her eyes met Thimiroi’s, her matchless poise appeared to desert her, and she seemed startled, flustered, almost frightened. Then, regaining her equilibrium with a superb show of control, she gave him a cool smile and said, “So there you are. We tried to reach you before, but of course there was no finding you. Maitira, Antilimoin, and Fevra are here. We’ve just been with them. They’ve been holding open house all afternoon, and you were invited. I suppose it’s still going on. Lesentru is due to arrive in about an hour, and Kuiane, and they say that Broyal and Hammin will be getting here tonight also.”

“The whole clan,” Thimiroi said. “That will be delightful. Laliene, may I speak with you privately?”

Again a flicker of distress from her. She glanced almost apologetically at Denvin.

“Well, excuse me!” Denvin said theatrically.

“Please,” Laliene said. “For just a moment, Denvin.”

“Certainly. Certainly, Laliene.” He favored Thimiroi with a strange grimace as he went out.

“Very well,” said Laliene, turning to face Thimiroi squarely. Her expression had hardened; she looked steely, now, and prepared for any sort of attack. “What is it, Thimiroi?”

He drew forth the little silvery pellet that he had found attached to the underside of the Sipulva table, and held it out to her in the palm of his hand.

“Do you know what this is, Laliene?”

“Some little broken toy, I assume. Why do you ask?”

“It’s an erotic,” he said. “I found it in my rooms, where someone had hidden it. It began broadcasting when I went to sleep last night. Sending out practically irresistible waves of sexual desire.”

“How fascinating. I hope you were able to find someone to satisfy them with.”

“The images I was getting, Laliene, were images of you. Standing naked next to my bed, whispering to me, inviting me to come down the hall and make love to you.”

She smiled icily. “I had no idea you were still interested, Thimiroi!”

“Don’t play games with me. Why did you plant this thing in my room, Laliene?”

“I?”

“I said, don’t play games. You were in my room the other day. No one else of our group has been. The erotic was specifically broadcasting your image. How can there be any doubt that you planted it yourself, for the particular purpose of luring me into your bed?”

“You’re being absurd, Thimiroi. Anyone could have planted it. Anyone. Do you think it’s hard to get into these rooms? These people have no idea of security. You ask a chambermaid in the right way and you can enter anywhere. As for the images of me that were being broadcast to you, why, you know as well as I do that erotics don’t broadcast images of specific individuals. They send out generalized waves of feeling, and the recipient supplies whatever image seems appropriate to him. In your case evidently it was my image that came up from your unconscious when—”

“Don’t lie to me, Laliene.”

Her eyes flashed. “I’m not lying. I deny planting anything in your room. Why on earth would I, anyway? Could going to bed with you, or anyone else, for that matter, possibly be that important to me that I would connive and sneak around and make use of some kind of mechanical amplifying device in order to achieve my purpose? Is that plausible, Thimiroi?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is that what happened to me during the night happened to me, and that I found this when I searched my rooms.” He thought for a moment to add, And that you’ve been pressing yourself upon me ever since we began this trip, in the most embarrassing and irritating fashion. But he did not have the heart to say that to her. “I believe that you hid this when you visited me for tea. What your reason may have been is something I can’t begin to imagine.”

“Of course you can’t. Because I had no reason. And I didn’t do it.”

Thimiroi made no reply. Laliene’s face was firmly set. Her gaze met his unwaveringly. She was certainly lying: he knew that beyond any question. But they were at an impasse. All he could do was accuse; he could not prove anything; he was stymied by her denial, and there was no way of carrying this further. She appeared to know that also. There was a long tense moment of silence between them, and then she said, “Are you finished with this, Thimiroi? Because there are more important things we should be discussing.”

“Go ahead. What important things?”

“The plans for Friday night.”

“Friday night,” Thimiroi said, not understanding.

She looked at him scornfully. “Friday—tomorrow—is the last day of May. Or have you forgotten that?”

He felt a chill. “The meteor,” he said.

“The meteor, yes. The event which we came to this place to see,” Laliene said. “Do you recall?”

“So soon,” Thimiroi said dully. “Tomorrow night.”

“We will all assemble about midnight, or a little before, at the Sanciscos’ house. The view will be best from there, according to Kadro. From their front rooms, upstairs. Kleph, Omerie, and Klia have invited everyone—everyone except Hollia and Hara, that is: Omerie is adamant about their not coming, because of something slippery that Hollia tried to do to him. Kleph would not discuss it, but I assume it had to do with trying to get the Sanciscos evicted, so that they could have the Wilson house for themselves. But all the rest of us will be there. And you are particularly included, Thimiroi. Kleph made a point of telling me that. Unless you have other plans for the evening, naturally.”

“Is that what Kleph said? Or are you adding that part of it yourself, about my having other plans?”

“That is what Kleph said.”

“I see.”

“Do you have other plans?”

“What other plans could I possibly have, do you think? Where? With whom?”

Christine seemed startled to see him again so soon. She was still wearing an old pink robe that she had thrown on as he was leaving her house two hours before, and she looked rumpled and drowsy and confused. Behind him the sky held the pearl-gray of early twilight on this late spring evening, but she stood in the half-opened doorway blinking at him as though he had awakened her once again in the middle of the night.

“Thimiroi? You’re back?”

“Let me in. Quickly, please.”

“Is there something wrong? Are you in trouble?”

“Please.”

He stepped past her into the vestibule and hastily pushed the door shut behind him. She gave him a baffled look. “I was just napping,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be coming back this evening, and I had so little sleep last night, you know—”

“I know. We need to talk. This is urgent, Christine.”

“Go into the parlor. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She pointed to Thimiroi’s left and vanished into the dim recesses at the rear of the entrance hall. Thimiroi went into the room she had indicated, a long, oppressively narrow chamber hung with heavy brocaded draperies and furnished with the sort of lowslung clumsy-looking couches and chairs, probably out of some even earlier era, that were everywhere in the house. He paced restlessly about the room. It was like being in a museum of forgotten styles. There was something eerie and almost hieratic about this mysterious furniture: the dark wood, the heavy legs jutting at curious angles, the coarse, intricately worked fabrics, the strange brass buttons running along the edges. Someone like Denvin would probably think it hideous. To him it was merely strange, powerful, haunting, wonderful in its way.

At last Christine appeared. She had been gone for what felt like hours: washing her face, brushing her hair, changing into a robe she evidently considered more seemly for receiving a visitor at nightfall. Her vanity was almost amusing. The world is about to come to an end, he thought, and she pauses to make herself fit for entertaining company.

But of course she could have no idea of why he was here.

He said, “Are you free tomorrow night?”

“Free? Tomorrow?” She looked uncertain. “Why—yes, yes, I suppose. Friday night. I’m free, yes. What did you have in mind, Thimiroi?”

“How well do you trust me, Christine?”

She did not reply for a moment. For the first time since that day they had had lunch together at the River Cafe, there was something other than fascination, warmth, even love for him, in her eyes. She seemed mystified, troubled, perhaps frightened. It was as if his sudden breathless arrival here this evening had reminded her of how truly strange their relationship was, and of how little she really knew about him.

“Trust you how?” she said finally.

“What I told you this afternoon, about Capri, about Canterbury, about The Travel—did you believe all that or not?”

She moistened her lips. “I suppose you’re going to say that you were making it all up, and that you feel guilty now for having fed all that nonsense to a poor simple gullible woman like me.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“I wasn’t making anything up. But do you believe that, Christine? Do you?”

“I said I did, this afternoon.”

“But you’ve had a few hours to think about it. Do you still believe it?”

She made no immediate reply. At length she said, glancing at him warily, “I’ve been napping, Thimiroi. I haven’t been thinking about anything at all. But since it seems to be so important to you: Yes. Yes, I think that what you told me, weird as it was, was the truth. There. If it was just a joke, I swallowed it. Does that make me a simpleton in your eyes?”

“So you trust me.”

“Yes. I trust you.”

“Will you go away with me, then? Leave here with me tomorrow, and possibly never come back?”

“Tomorrow?” The word seemed to have struck her like an explosion. She looked dazed. “Never—come—back—?”

“In all likelihood.”

She put the palms of her hands together, rubbed them against each other, pressed them tight: a little ritual of hers, perhaps. When she looked up at him again her expression had changed: the confusion had cleared from her face and now she appeared merely puzzled, and even somewhat irritated.

In a sharp tone she said, “What is all this about, Thimiroi?”

He drew a deep breath. “Do you know why we chose the autumn of 1347 for our Canterbury visit?” he asked. “Because it was a season of extraordinarily fine weather, yes. But also because it was a peak time, looking down into a terrible valley, the last sweet moment before the coming of a great calamity. By the following summer the Black Death would be devouring England, and millions would die. We chose the timing of our visit to Augustus the same way. The year 19—19 B.C., it was—was the year he finally consolidated all imperial power in his grasp. Rome was his; he ruled it in a way that no one had ruled that nation before. After that there would be only anticlimax for him, and disappointments and losses; and indeed just after we went to him he would fall seriously ill, almost to the edge of death, and for a time it would seem to him that he had lost everything in the very moment of attaining it. But when we visited him in 19 B.C., it was the summit of his time.”

“What does this have to do with—”

“This May, here, now, is another vintage season, Christine. This long golden month of unforgettable weather—it will end tomorrow, Christine, in terror, in destruction, a frightful descent from happiness into disaster, far steeper than either of the other two. That is why we are here, do you see? As spectators, as observers of the great irony—visiting your city at its happiest moment, and then, tomorrow, watching the catastrophe.”

As he spoke, she grew pale and her lips began to quiver; and then color flooded into her face, as it will sometimes do when the full impact of terrible news arrives. Something close to panic was gleaming in her eyes.

“Are you saying that there’s going to be nuclear war? That after all these years the bombs are finally going to go off?”

“Not war, no.”

“What then?”

Without answering, Thimiroi drew forth his wallet and began to stack currency on the table in front of him, hundreds of dollars, perhaps thousands, all the strange little strips of green-and-black paper that they had supplied him with when he first had arrived here. Christine gaped in astonishment. He shoved the money toward her.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll get more tomorrow morning, and give you that too. Arrange a trip for us to some other country, France, Spain, England, wherever you’d like to go, it makes no difference which one, so long as it is far from here. You will understand how to do such things, with which I have had no experience. Buy airplane tickets—is that the right term, airplane tickets?—get us a hotel room, do whatever is necessary. But we must depart no later than this time tomorrow. When you pack, pack as though you may never return to this house: take your most precious things, the things you would not want to leave behind, but only as much as you can carry yourself. If you have money on deposit, take it out, or arrange for it to be transferred to some place of deposit in the country that we will be going to. Call me when everything is ready, and I’ll come for you and we’ll go together to the place where the planes take off.”

Her expression was frozen, her eyes glazed, rigid. “You won’t tell me what’s going to happen?”

“I have already told you vastly too much. If I tell you more—and you tell others—and the news spreads widely, and the pattern of the future is greatly changed by the things that those people may do as a result of knowing what is to come—no. No. I do not dare, Christine. You are the only one I can save, and I can tell you no more than I have already told you. And you must tell no one else at all.”

“This is like a dream, Thimiroi.”

“Yes. But it is very real, I assure you.”

Once again she stared. Her lips worked a moment before she could speak.

“I’m so terribly afraid, Thimiroi.”

“I understand that. But you do believe me? Will you do as I ask? I swear to you, Christine, your only hope lies in trusting me. Our only hope.”

“Yes,” she said hesitantly.

“Then will you do as I ask?”

“Yes,” she said, beginning the single syllable with doubt in her voice, and finishing it with sudden conviction. “But there’s something I don’t understand.”

“What is that?”

“If something awful is going to happen here, why must we run off to England or Spain? Why not take me back to your own country, Thimiroi? Your own time.”

“There is no way I can do that,” he said softly.

“When you go back, then, what will happen to me?”

He took her hand in his. “I will not go back, Christine. I will stay here with you, in this era—in England, in France, wherever we may go—for the rest of my life. We will both be exiles. But we will be exiles together.”

She asked him to stay with her at her house that night, and he refused. He could see that the refusal hurt her deeply; but there was much that he needed to do, and he could not do it there. They would have many other nights for spending together. Returning to his hotel, he went quickly to his rooms to contemplate the things that would have to be dealt with.

Everything that belonged to his own era, of course, packed and sent back via his suitcase: no question about that. He could keep some of his clothing with him here, perhaps, but none of the furniture, none of the artifacts, nothing that might betray the technology of a time yet unborn. The room would have to be bare when he left it. And he would have to requisition more twentieth-century money. He had no idea how much Christine might have above what he had already given her, nor how long it would last; but certainly they would need more as they began their new lives. As for the suitcase, his one remaining link to the epoch from which he came, he would have to destroy that. He would have to sever all ties. He would—

The telephone rang. The light jingling of its bell cut across his consciousness like a scream.

Christine, he thought. To tell him that she had reconsidered, that she saw now that this was all madness, that if he did not leave her alone she would call the police—

“Yes?” he said.

“Thimiroi! Oh, I am glad you’re there.” A warm, hearty, familiar masculine voice. “Laliene said I might have difficulty finding you, but I thought I’d ring your room anyway—”

“Antilimoin?”

“None other. We’ve just arrived. Ninth floor, the Presidential suite, whatever that may be. Maitira and Fevra are here with me, of course. Listen, old friend, we’re having a tremendous blast tonight—oh, pardon me, that’s a sick thing to say, isn’t it?—a tremendous gathering, you know, a soiree, to enliven the night before the big night—do you think you can make it?”

“Well—”

“Laliene says you’ve been terribly standoffish lately, and I suppose she’s right. But look, old friend, you can’t spend the evening moping by yourself, you absolutely can’t. Lesentru’ll be here, do you know that? And Kuiane. Maybe even Broyal and Hammin, later on. And a rumor of Cenbe, too, though I suspect he won’t show up until the very last minute, as usual. Listen, there are all sorts of stories to tell. You were in Canterbury, weren’t you? And we’ve just done the Charlemagne thing. We have some splendid tips on what to see and what to avoid. You’ll come, of course. Room 941, the end of the hall.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“Of course you will! Of course!”

Antilimoin’s gusto was irresistible. It always was. The man was a ferociously social being: when he gave a party, attendance was never optional. And Thimiroi realized, after a moment, that it was better, perhaps, for him to go than to lurk here by himself, tensely awaiting the ordeals that tomorrow would bring. He had already brought more than enough suspicion upon himself. Antilimoin’s party would be his farewell to his native time, to his friends, to everything that had been his life.

He spent a busy hour planning what had to be planned.

Then he dressed in his formal best—in the clothes, in fact, that he had planned to wear tomorrow night—and went upstairs. The party was going at full force. Antilimoin, dapper and elegant as always, greeted him with a hearty embrace, and Fevra and Maitira came gliding up from opposite sides of the room to kiss him, and Thimiroi saw, farther away, Lesentru and Kuiane deep in conversation with Lutheena, Denvin, and some others. Everyone seemed buoyant, excited, energetic. There was tension, too, the undercurrent of keen excitement that comes on the eve of a powerful experience.

Voices were pitched a little too high, gestures were a trifle too emphatic. A great screen on one wall was playing one of Cenbe’s finest symphonias, but no one seemed to be watching or listening. Thimiroi glanced at it and shivered. Cenbe, of course: that connoisseur of disaster, assembling his masterpieces out of other people’s tragedies—he was the perfect artist for this event. Doubtless he was in the city already, skulking around somewhere looking for the material he would need to complete his newest and surely finest work.

I will never see any of these people again after tonight, Thimiroi thought, and the concept was so difficult to accept that he repeated it to himself two or three more times, without being able to give it any more reality.

Laliene appeared beside him. There was no sign on her face of the earlier unpleasantness between them; her eyes were glowing and she was smiling warmly, even tenderly, as though they were lovers.

“I’m glad you came,” she murmured. “I hoped you would.”

“Antilimoin is very persuasive.”

“You must have some tea. You look so tense, Thimiroi.”

“Do I?”

“Is it because of our talk before?”

He shrugged. “Let’s forget all about that, shall we?”

Laliene let the tips of her fingers rest lightly on his arm. “I should never have put that transmitter in your room. It was utterly stupid of me.”

“It was, yes. But that’s all ancient history.”

Her face rose toward his. “Come have some tea with me.”

“Laliene—”

Softly she said, “I wanted you to come to me so very badly. That was why I did it. You were ignoring me—you’ve ignored me ever since this trip began—oh, Thimiroi, Thimiroi, I’m trying to do the right thing, don’t you see? And I want you to do the right thing too.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Laliene?”

“Be careful, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Careful of what?”

“Have some tea with me,” she said.

“I’ll have some tea,” he told her. “But not, I think, with you.”

Tears welled in her eyes. She turned her head to the side, but not so quickly that Thimiroi did not see them.

That was new, he thought. Tears in Laliene’s eyes! He had never known her to be so overwrought. Too much euphoriac, he wondered? She kept her grip on his arm for a long moment, and then, smiling sadly, she released him and moved away.

“Thimiroi!” Lesentru called, turning and grinning broadly at him and waving his long thin arms. “How absolutely splendid to see you! Come, come, let’s sip a little together!” He crossed the room as if swimming through air. “You look so gloomy, man! That can’t be allowed. Lutheena! Fevra! Everybody! We must cheer Thimiroi up! We can’t let anyone go around looking as bleak as this, not tonight.”

They swept toward him from every direction, six, eight, ten of them, laughing, whooping, embracing him, holding fragrant cups of euphoriac tea out at him. It began almost to seem that the party was in his honor. Why were they making such a fuss over him? He was starting to regret having come here at all. He drank the tea that someone put in his hand, and almost at once there was another cup there. He drank that too.

Laliene was at his side again. Thimiroi was having trouble focusing his eyes.

“What did you mean?” he asked. “When you said to be careful.”

“I’m not supposed to say. It would be improperly influencing the flow of events.”

“Be improper, then. But stop talking in riddles.”

“Are they such riddles, then?”

“To me they are.”

“I think you know what I’m talking about,” Laliene said.

“I do?”

They might have been all alone in the middle of the room. I have had too much euphoriac, he told himself. But I can still hold my own. I can still hold my own, yes.

Laliene said in a low whisper, leaning close, her breath warm against his cheek, “Tomorrow—where are you going to go tomorrow, Thimiroi?”

He looked at her, astounded, speechless.

“I know,” she said.

“Get away from me.”

“I’ve known all along. I’ve been trying to save you from—”

“You’re out of your mind, Laliene.”

“No, Thimiroi. You are!”

She clung to him. Everyone was gaping at them.

Terror seized him. I have to get out of here, he thought.

Now. Go to Christine. Help her pack, and go with her to the airport. Right now. Whatever time it is, midnight, one in the morning, whatever. Before they can stop me. Before they change me.

“No, Thimiroi,” Laliene cried. “Please—please—”

Furiously he pushed her away. She went sprawling to the floor, landing in a flurried heap at Antilimoin’s feet. Everyone was yelling at once.

Laliene’s voice came cutting through the confusion. “Don’t do it, Thimiroi! Don’t do it!”

He swung around and rushed toward the door, and through it, and wildly down the stairs, and through the quiet hotel lobby and out into the night. A brilliant crescent moon hung above him, and behind it the cold blaze of the stars in the clear darkness. Looking back, he saw no pursuers. He headed up the street toward Christine’s, walking swiftly at first, then breaking into a light trot.

As he reached the corner, everything swirled and went strange around him. He felt a pang of inexplicable loss, and a sharp stab of wild fear, and a rush of anger without motive. The darkness closed bewilderingly around him, like a great glove. Then came a feeling of motion, swift and impossible to resist. He had a sense of being swept down a vast river toward an abyss that lay just beyond.

The effect lasted only a moment, but it was an endless moment, in which Thimiroi perceived the passage of time in sharp discontinuous segments, a burst of motion followed by a deep stillness and then another burst, and then stillness again. All color went from the world, even the muted colors of night: the sky was a startling blinding white, the buildings about him were black.

His eyes ached. His head was whirling.

He tried to move, but his movements were jerky and futile, as though he were fighting his way on foot through a deep tank of water. It must be the euphoriac, he told himself. I have had much too much. But I have had too much before, and I have never felt anything like—like—

Then the strangeness vanished as swiftly as it had come.

Everything was normal again, the whiteness gone from the sky, time flowing as it had always flowed, and he was running smoothly, steadily, down the street, like some sort of machine, arms and legs pumping, head thrown back.

Christine’s house was dark. He rang the bell, and when there was no answer he hammered on the door.

“Christine! Christine, it’s me, Thimiroi! Open the door, Christine! Hurry! Please!”

There was no response. He pounded on the door again.

This time a light went on upstairs.

“Here,” he called. “I’m by the front door!”

Her window opened. Christine looked out and down at him.

“Who are you? What do you want? Do you know what time it is?”

“Christine!”

“Go away.”

“But—Christine—”

“You have exactly two seconds to get away from here, whoever you are. Then I’m calling the police.” Her voice was cold and angry. “They’ll sober you up fast enough.”

“Christine, I’m Thimiroi.”

“Who? What kind of name is that? I don’t know anybody by that name. I’ve never seen you before in my life.” The window slammed shut. The light went out above him. Thimiroi stood frozen, amazed, dumbstruck.

Then he began to understand.

Laliene said, “We all knew, yes. We were told before we ever came here. Nothing is secret to those who operate The Travel. How could it be? They move freely through all of time. They see everything. We were warned in Canterbury that you were going to try an intervention, and that there would be a counter-intervention if you did. So I tried to stop you. To prevent you from getting yourself into trouble.”

“By throwing your body at me?” Thimiroi said bitterly.

“By getting you to fall in love with me,” she said. “So that you wouldn’t want to get involved with her.”

He shook his head in wonder. “All along, throughout the whole trip. Everything you did, aimed at ensnaring me into a romance, just as I thought. What I didn’t realize was that you were simply trying to save me from myself.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you didn’t try hard enough,” Thimiroi said. “No. No, that isn’t it. You tried too hard.”

“Did I?”

“Perhaps that was it. At any rate I didn’t want you, not at any point. I wanted her the moment I saw her. It couldn’t have been avoided, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry, Thimiroi.”

“That you failed?”

“That you have done such harm to yourself.”

He stood there wordlessly for a time. “What will happen to me now?” he asked finally.

“You’ll be sent back for rehabilitation, Kadro says.”

“When?”

“It’s up to you. You can stay and watch the show with the rest of us—you’ve paid for it, after all. There’s no harm, Kadro says, in letting you remain in this era another few hours. Or you can let them have you right now.”

For an instant despair engulfed him. Then he regained his control.

“Tell Kadro that I think I’ll go now,” he said.

“Yes,” said Laliene. “That’s probably the wisest thing.”

He said, “Will Kleph be punished too?”

“I don’t think so.”

He felt a surge of anger. “Why not? Why is what I did any different from what she did? All right, I had a twentieth-century lover. So did Kleph. You know that. That Wilson man.”

“It was different, Thimiroi.”

“Different? How?”

“For Kleph it was just a little diversion, an illicit adventure. What she was doing was wrong, but it didn’t imperil the basic structure of things. She doesn’t propose to save this Wilson. She isn’t going to intervene with the pattern. You were going to run off with yours, weren’t you? Live with her somewhere far from here, spare her from the calamity, possibly change all time to come? That couldn’t be tolerated, Thimiroi. I’m astonished that you thought it would be. But of course you were in love.”

Thimiroi was silent again. Then he said, “Will you do me one favor, at least?”

“What is that?”

“Send word to her. Her name’s Christine Rawlins. She lives in the big old house right across the street from the one where the Sanciscos are. Tell her to go somewhere else tonight—to move into the Montgomery House, maybe, or even to leave the city. She can’t stay where she is. Her house is almost certainly right in the path of—of—”

“I couldn’t possibly do that,” Laliene said quietly.

“No?”

“It would be intervention. It’s the same thing you’re being punished for.”

“She’ll die, though!” Thimiroi cried. “She doesn’t deserve that. She’s full of life, full of hopes, dreams—”

“She’s been dead for hundreds of years,” said Laliene coolly. “Giving her another day or two of life now won’t matter. If the meteor doesn’t get her, the plague will. You know that. You also know that I can’t intervene for her. And you know that even if I tried, she’d never believe me. She’d have no reason to. No matter what you may have told her before, she knows nothing of it now. There’s been a counter-intervention, Thimiroi. You understand that, don’t you? She’s never known you, now. Whatever may have happened between you and she has been unhappened.”

Laliene’s words struck him like knives.

“So you won’t do a thing?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Thimiroi. I tried to save you from this. For friendship’s sake. For love’s sake, even. But of course you wouldn’t be swerved at all.”

Kadro came into the room. He was dressed for the evening’s big event already.

“Well?” he said. “Has Laliene explained the arrangement? You can stay on through tonight, or you can go back now.”

Thimiroi looked at him, and back at Laliene, and to Kadro again. It was all very clear. He had gambled and lost. He had tried to do a foolish, romantic, impossible sort of thing, a twentieth-century sort of thing, for he was in many ways a twentieth-century sort of man; and it had failed, as of course, he realized now, it had been destined to do from the start. But that did not mean it had not been worth attempting. Not at all. Not at all.

“I understand,” Thimiroi said. “I’ll go back now.”

The chairs had all been arranged neatly before the windows in the upstairs rooms. It was past midnight. There was euphoriac in the air, thick and dense. A quarter moon hung over the doomed city, but it was almost hidden now by the thickening clouds. The long season of clear skies was ending. The weather was changing, finally.

“It will be happening very soon now,” Omerie said.

Laliene nodded. “I feel almost as though I’ve lived through it several times already.”

“The same with me,” said Kleph.

“Perhaps we have,” said Klia, with a little laugh. “Who knows? We go round and round in time, and maybe we travel over the same paths more than once.”

Denvin said, “I wonder where Thimiroi is now. And what they’re doing to him.”

“Let’s not talk of Thimiroi,” Antilimoin said. “It’s too sad.”

“He won’t be able to Travel again, will he?” asked Maitira.

“Never again. Absolutely forbidden,” Omerie said. “But he’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing they throw at him. What he did was unforgivable. Unforgivable!”

“Antilimoin’s right,” said Laliene. “Let’s not talk of Thimiroi.”

Kleph moved closer to her. “You love him, don’t you?”

“Loved,” Laliene said.

“Here. Some more tea.”

“Yes. Yes.” Laliene smiled grimly. “He wanted me to send a warning to that woman of his, do you know? She lives right across the way. Her house will be destroyed by the shock wave, almost certainly.”

Lutheena said, looking shocked, “You didn’t think of doing it, did you?”

“Of course not. But I feel so sad about it, all the same. He loved her, you know. And I loved him. And so, for his sake, entirely for his sake—” Laliene shook her head. “But of course it was inconceivable. I suppose she’s asleep right at this minute, not even suspecting—”

“Better the meteor than the Blue Death that follows,” said Omerie. “Quicker. The quick deaths are the good ones. What’s the point of hiding from the meteor only to die of the plague?”

“This is too morbid,” Klia said. “I almost wish we hadn’t come here. We could have skipped it and just gone on to Charlemagne’s coronation—”

“We’ll be there soon enough,” said Kleph. “But we’re here, now. And it’s going to be wonderful—wonderful—”

“Places, everybody!” Kadro called. “It’s almost time! Ten—nine—eight—”

Laliene held her breath. This all seemed so familiar, she thought. As though she had been through it many times already. In a moment the impact, and the tremendous sound, and the first flames rising, and the first stunned cries from the city, and the dark shapes moving around in the distance, blind, bewildered—and then the lurid sky, red as blood, the long unending shriek coming as though from a single voice—

“Now,” said Kadro.

There was an astounding stillness overhead. The onrushing meteor might almost have been sucking all sound from the city toward which it plummeted. And after the silence the cataclysmic crash, the incredible impact, the earth itself recoiling with the force of the collision.

Poor Thimiroi, Laliene thought. And that poor woman, too.

Her heart overflowed with love and sorrow, and her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away from the window, unable to watch, unable to see. Then came the cries. And then the flames.