The Masks of Time

ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The savior of what, please?”

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

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

“Bethlehem.”

“A suburb of Rome?”

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

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

“Is Jesus forgotten in your time, Vornan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vornan-19 replied, “I will not do as you say.”

Those were his first words to us — the opening lines of his Epistle to the Barbarians. He spoke in English. Many of the witnesses heard and understood what he had said. The policeman did not, and continued to harangue him in Italian.

Vornan-19 said, “I am a traveler from a distant era. I am here to inspect your world.”

Still in English. The policeman sputtered. He believed that Vornan was an Apocalyptist, and an American Apocalyptist at that, the worst kind. The policeman’s duty was to defend the decency of Rome and the sanctity of Christmas Day against this madman’s exhibitionist vulgarities. He shouted at the visitor to come down the steps. Ignoring him, Vornan-19 turned and serenely continued upward. The sight of those pale, slender retreating buttocks maddened the officer of the law. He removed his own cloak and rushed up the steps, determined to wrap it around the stranger.

Witnesses declare that Vornan-19 did not look at the policeman or touch him in any way. The officer, holding the cloak in his left hand, reached out with his right to seize Vornan’s shoulder. There was a faint gleaming yellowish-blue discharge, and a slight popping sound, and the policeman tumbled backward as though he had been struck by an electric bolt. Crumpling as he fell, he rolled to the bottom of the stairs and lay in a heap, twitching faintly. The onlookers drew back. Vornan-19 proceeded up the steps to the top, halting there to tell one of the witnesses a bit about himself.

The witness was a German Apocalyptist named Horst Klein, nineteen years old, who had taken part in the revelry at the Forum between midnight and dawn and now, too keyed up to go to sleep, was wandering the city in a mood of post coitum depression. Young Klein, fluent in English, became a familiar television personality in the days that followed, repeating his story for the benefit of global networks. Then he slipped into oblivion, but his place in history is assured. I don’t doubt that somewhere in Mecklenburg or Schleswig today he’s repeating the conversation yet.

As Vornan-19 approached him, Klein said, “You shouldn’t kill carabinieri. They won’t forgive you.”

“He isn’t dead. Merely stunned a bit.”

“You don’t talk like an American,” said Klein.

“I’m not. I come from the Centrality. That’s a thousand years from now, you understand.”

Klein laughed. “The world ends in three hundred seventy-two days.”

“Do you believe, that? What year is this, anyway?”

“1998. December twenty-fifth.”

“The world has at least a thousand more years. Of that I’m certain. I am Vornan-19, and I am here as a visitor. I am in need of hospitality. I would like to sample your food and your wine. I wish to wear clothing of the period. I am interested in ancient sexual practices. Where may I find a house of intercourse?”

“That gray building there,” said Klein, pointing toward the church of Trinitа dei Monti. “They’ll take care of all your needs inside. Just tell them you come from a thousand years from now. 2998, is it?”

“2999 by your system.”

“Good. They’ll love you for that. Just prove to them that the world isn’t going to end a year from New Year’s Day, and they’ll give you whatever you want.”

“The world will not end quite so soon,” said Vornan-19 gravely. “I thank you, my friend.”

He began to move toward the church.

Breathless carabinieri rushed at him from several directions at once. They did not dare come within five yards of him, but they formed a phalanx barring him from access to the church. They were armed with neural whips. One of them flung his cloak at Vornan’s feet.

“Put that on.”

“I do not speak your language.”

Horst Klein said, “They want you to cover your body. The sight of it offends them.”

“My body is undeformed,” said Vornan-19. “Why should I cover it?”

“They want you to, and they have neural whips. They can hurt you with them. See? Those gray rods in their hands.”

“May I examine your weapon?” the visitor said affably to the nearest officer. He reached for it. The man shrank back. Vornan moved with implausible swiftness and wrenched the whip from the policeman’s hand. He took it business end first, and should have received a stunning near-lethal burst, but somehow he did not. The men gaped as Vornan studied the whip, casually triggering it and rubbing his hand across the metal prod to feel the effects it produced. They stepped back, crossing themselves fervently.

Horst Klein broke through the crumbling phalanx and flung himself at Vornan’s feet. “You really are from the future, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“How do you do it — touch the whip?”

“These mild forces can be absorbed and transformed,” said Vornan. “Don’t you have the energy rituals yet?”

The German boy, trembling, shook his head. He scooped up the policeman’s cloak and offered it to the naked man. “Put this over yourself,” he whispered. “Please. Make things easier for us. You can’t walk around naked.”

Surprisingly, Vornan consented. After some fumbling he managed to don the cloak.

Klein said, “The world doesn’t end in a year?”

“No. Certainly not.”

“I’ve been a fool!”

“Perhaps.”

Tears ran down the broad, unlined Teutonic cheeks. The frayed laughter of exhaustion ripped through Horst Klein’s lips. He groveled on the cold stone slab, slapping his palms against the ground in an improvised salaam before Vornan-19. Shivering, sobbing, gasping, Horst Klein recanted his faith in the Apocalyptist movement.

The man from the future had gained his first disciple.