The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 7

  The thought came to Phillips suddenly:

  Neither will you.

  And then, after it:

  If you could go home, would you really want to?

  One of the first things he had realized here was that he knew almost nothing substantial about his former existence. His mind was well stocked with details on life in twentieth-century New York, to be sure; but of himself he could say not much more than that he was Charles Phillips and had come from 1984. Profession? Age? Parents’ names? Did he have a wife? Children? A cat, a dog, hobbies? No data: none. Possibly the citizens had stripped such things from him when they brought him here, to spare him from the pain of separation. They might be capable of that kindness. Knowing so little of what he had lost, could he truly say that he yearned for it? Willoughby seemed to remember much more of his former life, somehow, and longed for it all the more intensely. He was spared that. Why not stay here, and go on and on from city to city, sightseeing all of time past as the citizens conjured it back into being? Why not? Why not? The chances were that he had no choice about it, anyway.

  He made his way back up toward the citadel and to the baths once more. He felt a little like a ghost, haunting a city of ghosts.

  Belilala seemed unaware that he had been gone for most of the day. She sat by herself on the terrace of the baths, placidly sipping some thick milky beverage that had been sprinkled with a dark spice. He shook his head when she offered him some.

  “Do you remember I mentioned that I saw a man with red hair and a beard this morning?” Phillips said. “He’s a visitor. Hawk told me that.”

  “Is he?” Belilala asked.

  “From a time about four hundred years before mine. I talked with him. He thinks he was brought here by demons.” Phillips gave her a searching look. “I’m a visitor, too, isn’t that so?”

  “Of course, love.”

  “And how was I brought here? By demons also?”

  Belilala smiled indifferently. “You’d have to ask someone else. Hawk, perhaps. I haven’t looked into these things very deeply.”

  “I see. Are there many visitors here, do you know?”

  A languid shrug. “Not many, no, not really. I’ve only heard of three or four besides you. There may be others by now, I suppose.” She rested her hand lightly on his. “Are you having a good time in Mohenjo, Charles?”

  He let her question pass as though he had not heard it.

  “I asked Hawk about Gioia,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “He told me that she’s no longer here, that she’s gone on to Timbuctoo or New Chicago, he wasn’t sure which.”

  “That’s quite likely. As everybody knows, Gioia rarely stays in the same place very long.”

  Phillips nodded. “You said the other day that Gioia is a short-timer. That means she’s going to grow old and die, doesn’t it?”

  “I thought you understood that, Charles.”

  “Whereas you will not age? Nor Hawk, nor Stengard, nor any of the rest of your set?”

  “We will live as long as we wish,” she said. “But we will not age, no.”

  “What makes a person a short-timer?”

  “They’re born that way, I think. Some missing gene, some extra gene – I don’t actually know. It’s extremely uncommon. Nothing can be done to help them. It’s very slow, the aging. But it can’t be halted.”

  Phillips nodded. “That must be very disagreeable,” he said. “To find yourself one of the few people growing old in a world where everyone stays young. No wonder Gioia is so impatient. No wonder she runs around from place to place. No wonder she attached herself so quickly to the barbaric hairy visitor from the twentieth century, who comes from a time when everybody was a short-timer. She and I have something in common, wouldn’t you say?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “We understand aging. We understand death. Tell me: is Gioia likely to die very soon, Belilala?”

  “Soon? Soon?” She gave him a wide-eyed childlike stare. “What is soon? How can I say? What you think of as soon and what I think of as soon are not the same things, Charles.” Then her manner changed: she seemed to be hearing what he was saying for the first time. Softly she said, “No, no, Charles. I don’t think she will die very soon.”

  “When she left me in Chang-an, was it because she had become bored with me?”

  Belilala shook her head. “She was simply restless. It had nothing to do with you. She was never bored with you.”

  “Then I’m going to go looking for her. Wherever she may be, Timbuctoo, New Chicago, I’ll find her. Gioia and I belong together.”

  “Perhaps you do,” said Belilala. “Yes. Yes, I think you really do.” She sounded altogether unperturbed, unrejected, unbereft. “By all means, Charles. Go to her. Follow her. Find her. Whatever she may be.”

  They had already begun dismantling Timbuctoo when Phillips got there. While he was still high overhead, his flitterflitter hovering above the dusty tawny plain where the River Niger met the sands of the Sahara, a surge of keen excitement rose in him as he looked down at the square gray flat-roofed mud brick buildings of the great desert capital. But when he landed he found gleaming metal-skinned robots swarming everywhere, a horde of them scuttling about like giant shining insects, pulling the place apart.

  He had not known about the robots before. So that was how all these miracles were carried out, Phillips realized: an army of obliging machines. He imagined them bustling up out of the earth whenever their services were needed, emerging from some sterile subterranean storehouse to put together Venice or Thebes or Knossos or Houston or whatever place was required, down to the finest detail, and then at some later time returning to undo everything that they had fashioned. He watched them now, diligently pulling down the adobe walls, demolishing the heavy metal-studded gates, bulldozing the amazing labyrinth of alleyways and thoroughfares, sweeping away the market. On his last visit to Timbuctoo that market had been crowded with a horde of veiled Tuaregs and swaggering Moors, black Sudanese, shrewd-faced Syrian traders, all of them busily dickering for camels, horses, donkeys, slabs of salt, huge green melons, silver bracelets, splendid vellum Korans. They were all gone now, that picturesque crowd of swarthy temporaries. Nor were there any citizens to be seen. The dust of destruction choked the air. One of the robots came up to Phillips and said in a dry crackling insect-voice, “You ought not to be here. This city is closed.”

  He stared at the flashing, buzzing band of scanners and sensors across the creature’s glittering tapered snout. “I’m trying to find someone, a citizen who may have been here recently. Her name is—”

  “This city is closed,” the robot repeated inexorably.

  They would not let him stay as much as an hour. There is no food here, the robot said, no water, no shelter. This is not a place any longer. You may not stay. You may not stay. You may not stay.

  This is not a place any longer.

  Perhaps he could find her in New Chicago, then. He took to the air again, soaring northward and westward over the vast emptiness. The land below him curved away into the hazy horizon, bare, sterile. What had they done with the vestiges of the world that had gone before? Had they turned their gleaming metal beetles loose to clean everything away? Were there no ruins of genuine antiquity anywhere? No scrap of Rome, no shard of Jerusalem, no stump of Fifth Avenue? It was all so barren down there: an empty stage, waiting for its next set to be built. He flew on a great arc across the jutting hump of Africa and on into what he supposed was southern Europe: the little vehicle did all the work, leaving him to doze or stare as he wished. Now and again he saw another flitterflitter pass by, far away, a dark distant winged teardrop outlined against the hard clarity of the sky. He wished there was some way of making radio contact with them, but he had no idea how to go about it. Not that he had anything he wanted to say; he wanted only to hear a human voice. He was utterly isolated. He might just as well have been the last living man on Earth. He closed his eyes and thought
of Gioia.

  “Like this?” Phillips asked. In an ivory-paneled oval room sixty stories above the softly glowing streets of New Chicago he touched a small cool plastic canister to his upper lip and pressed the stud at its base. He heard a foaming sound; and then blue vapor rose to his nostrils.

  “Yes,” Cantilena said. “That’s right.”

  He detected a faint aroma of cinnamon, cloves, and something that might almost have been broiled lobster. Then a spasm of dizziness hit him and visions rushed through his head: Gothic cathedrals, the Pyramids, Central Park under fresh snow, the harsh brick warrens of Mohenjo-daro, and fifty thousand other places all at once, a wild roller-coaster ride through space and time. It seemed to go on for centuries. But finally his head cleared and he looked about, blinking, realizing that the whole thing had taken only a moment. Cantilena still stood at his elbow. The other citizens in the room – fifteen, twenty of them – had scarcely moved. The strange little man with the celadon skin over by the far wall continued to stare at him.

  “Well?” Cantilena asked. “What did you think?”

  “Incredible.”

  “And very authentic. It’s an actual New Chicagoan drug. The exact formula. Would you like another?”

  “Not just yet,” Phillips said uneasily. He swayed and had to struggle for his balance. Sniffing that stuff might not have been such a wise idea, he thought.

  He had been in New Chicago a week, or perhaps it was two, and he was still suffering from the peculiar disorientation that that city always aroused in him. This was the fourth time that he had come here, and it had been the same every time. New Chicago was the only one of the reconstructed cities of this world that in its original incarnation had existed after his own era. To him it was an outpost of the incomprehensible future; to the citizens it was a quaint simulacrum of the archaeological past. That paradox left him aswirl with impossible confusions and tensions.

  What had happened to old Chicago was of course impossible for him to discover. Vanished without a trace, that was clear: no Water Tower, no Marina City, no Hancock Center, no Tribune building, not a fragment, not an atom. But it was hopeless to ask any of the million-plus inhabitants of New Chicago about their city’s predecessor. They were only temporaries; they knew no more than they had to know, and all that they had to know was how to go through the motions of whatever it was that they did by way of creating the illusion that this was a real city. They had no need of knowing ancient history.

  Nor was he likely to find out anything from a citizen, of course. Citizens did not seem to bother much about scholarly matters. Phillips had no reason to think that the world was anything other than an amusement park to them. Somewhere, certainly, there had to be those who specialized in the serious study of the lost civilizations of the past – for how, otherwise, would these uncanny reconstructed cities be brought into being? “The planners,” he had once heard Nissandra or Aramayne say, “are already deep into their Byzantium research.” But who were the planners? He had no idea. For all he knew, they were the robots. Perhaps the robots were the real masters of this whole era, who created the cities not primarily for the sake of amusing the citizens but in their own diligent attempt to comprehend the life of the world that had passed away. A wild speculation, yes; but not without some plausibility, he thought.

  He felt oppressed by the party gaiety all about him. “I need some air,” he said to Cantilena, and headed toward the window. It was the merest crescent, but a breeze came through. He looked out at the strange city below.

  New Chicago had nothing in common with the old one but its name. They had built it, at least, along the western shore of a large inland lake that might even be Lake Michigan, although when he had flown over it had seemed broader and less elongated than the lake he remembered. The city itself was a lacy fantasy of slender pastel-hued buildings rising at odd angles and linked by a webwork of gently undulating aerial bridges. The streets were long parentheses that touched the lake at their northern and southern ends and arched gracefully westward in the middle. Between each of the great boulevards ran a track for public transportation – sleek aquamarine bubble-vehicles gliding on soundless wheels – and flanking each of the tracks were lush strips of park. It was beautiful, astonishingly so, but insubstantial. The whole thing seemed to have been contrived from sunbeams and silk.

  A soft voice beside him said, “Are you becoming ill?”

  Phillips glanced around. The celadon man stood beside him: a compact, precise person, vaguely Oriental in appearance. His skin was of a curious gray-green hue like no skin Phillips had ever seen, and it was extraordinarily smooth in texture, as though he were made of fine porcelain.

  He shook his head. “Just a little queasy,” he said. “This city always scrambles me.”

  “I suppose it can be disconcerting,” the little man replied. His tone was furry and veiled, the inflection strange. There was something feline about him. He seemed sinewy, unyielding, almost menacing. “Visitor, are you?”

  Phillips studied him a moment. “Yes,” he said.

  “So am I, of course.”

  “Are you?”

  “Indeed.” The little man smiled. “What’s your locus? Twentieth century? Twenty-first at the latest, I’d say.”

  “I’m from 1984. A.D. 1984.”

  Another smile, a self-satisfied one. “Not a bad guess, then.” A brisk tilt of the head. “Y’ang-Yeovil.”

  “Pardon me?” Phillips said.

  “Y’ang-Yeovil. It is my name. Formerly Colonel Y’ang-Yeovil of the Third Septentriad.”

  “Is that on some other planet?” asked Phillips, feeling a bit dazed.

  “Oh, no, not at all,” Y’ang-Yeovil said pleasantly. “This very world, I assure you. I am quite of human origin. Citizen of the Republic of Upper Han, native of the city of Port Ssu. And you – forgive me – your name—?”

  “I’m sorry. Phillips. Charles Phillips. From New York City, once upon a time.”

  “Ah, New York!” Y’ang-Yeovil’s face lit with a glimmer of recognition that quickly faded. “New York – New York – it was very famous, that I know—”

  This is very strange, Phillips thought. He felt greater compassion for poor bewildered Francis Willoughby now. This man comes from a time so far beyond my own that he barely knows of New York – he must be a contemporary of the real New Chicago, in fact; I wonder whether he finds this version authentic – and yet to the citizens this Y’ang-Yeovil too is just a primitive, a curio out of antiquity—

  “New York was the largest city of the United States of America,” Phillips said.

  “Of course. Yes. Very famous.”

  “But virtually forgotten by the time the Republic of Upper Han came into existence, I gather.”

  Y’ang-Yeovil said, looking uncomfortable, “There were disturbances between your time and mine. But by no means should you take from my words the impression that your city was—”

  Sudden laughter resounded across the room. Five or six newcomers had arrived at the party. Phillips stared, gasped, gaped. Surely that was Stengard – and Aramayne beside him – and that other woman, half hidden behind them—

  “If you’ll pardon me a moment—” Phillips said, turning abruptly away from Y’ang-Yeovil. “Please excuse me. Someone just coming in – a person I’ve been trying to find ever since—”

  He hurried toward her.

  “Gioia?” he called. “Gioia, it’s me! Wait! Wait!”

  Stengard was in the way. Aramayne, turning to take a handful of the little vapor-sniffers from Cantilena, blocked him also. Phillips pushed through them as though they were not there. Gioia, halfway out the door, halted and looked toward him like a frightened deer.

  “Don’t go,” he said. He took her hand in his. He was startled by her appearance. How long had it been since their strange parting on that night of mysteries in Chang-an? A year? A year and a half? So he believed. Or had he lost all track of time? Were his perceptions of the passing of the months in this wo
rld that unreliable? She seemed at least ten or fifteen years older. Maybe she really was; maybe the years had been passing for him here as in a dream, and he had never known it. She looked strained, faded, worn. Out of a thinner and strangely altered face her eyes blazed at him almost defiantly, as though saying, See? See how ugly I have become?

  He said, “I’ve been hunting for you for – I don’t know how long it’s been, Gioia. In Mohenjo, in Timbuctoo, now here. I want to be with you again.”

  “It isn’t possible.”

  “Belilala explained everything to me in Mohenjo. I know that you’re a short-timer – I know what that means, Gioia. But what of it? So you’re beginning to age a little. So what? So you’ll only have three or four hundred years, instead of forever. Don’t you think I know what it means to be a short-timer? I’m just a simple ancient man of the twentieth century, remember? Sixty, seventy, eighty years is all we would get. You and I suffer from the same malady, Gioia. That’s what drew you to me in the first place. I’m certain of that. That’s why we belong with each other now. However much time we have, we can spend the rest of it together, don’t you see?”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t see, Charles,” she said softly.

  “Maybe. Maybe I still don’t understand a damned thing about this place. Except that you and I – that I love you – that I think you love me—”

  “I love you, yes. But you don’t understand. It’s precisely because I love you that you and I – you and I can’t—”

  With a despairing sigh she slid her hand free of his grasp. He reached for her again, but she shook him off and backed up quickly into the corridor.

  “Gioia?”

  “Please,” she said. “No. I would never have come here if I knew you were here. Don’t come after me. Please. Please.”

  She turned and fled.

  He stood looking after her for a long moment. Cantilena and Aramayne appeared, and smiled at him as if nothing at all had happened. Cantilena offered him a vial of some sparkling amber fluid. He refused with a brusque gesture. Where do I go now, he wondered? What do I do? He wandered back into the party.