Robert Silverberg - The Masks of Time

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For A. J. and Eddie

VORNAN-19 SPEAKS TO A HUSHED WORLD

“. . . they did not land, these explorers from another star. They merely orbited the planet

and saw that it was without life, and thus of no interest to them. They paused only long

enough to jettison the wastes that had accumulated on their ship, then journeyed on, while

those wastes. . .” There was a vast silence in the TV studio, an echo of the hush that fell

on a listening world. “. . . entering the atmosphere and ultimately the sea, began the

process that resulted in the phenomenon we know as. . . ” The panel of scientists was in

turmoil; the camera swung in to reveal grimaces, scowls, wild unbelieving eyes. “. . . life

on Earth.”

THE MASKS OF TIME

by Robert Silverberg

THE MASKS OF TIME: INTRODUCTION

For A. J. and Eddie

It was the late winter of 1967 and I was preoccupied with a need to prove to the

science fiction community that I was a reformed character. Back in the 1950’s, at the

outset of my career, I had allowed some early discouragements in the marketplace to turn

me into a purveyor of mass-produced claptrap; I had written (and sold) untold reams of

stuff with titles like “Guardians of the Crystal Gate” and “Thunder over Starhaven,”

unreconstructed zap-zap pulp adventure fiction. This phase lasted roughly from 1955 to

1958, after which I repented of my literary sins and resolved to write no more formula sf;

but I wrote enough in those few years to tarnish my escutcheon for eons to come. When I

returned to science fiction in the mid-1960’s, it was with considerably less cynicism and

higher ideals, but I faced the severe problem of overcoming my earlier reputation and

getting readers (and editors) to take me seriously. First with a handful of short stories,

then with the novel To Open the Sky, I tried to demonstrate to my friends and to the

readership at large that I had indeed outgrown the bad old days. But nobody much was

listening. Just as I, as sophisticated and critical reader, had long ago decided that writers

Q and P and R were such hopeless hacks that there was no sense wasting my time on

even two sentences of their work, so too had most of my peers come to dismiss my

writing out of hand.

Late in 1966 I wrote a book called Thorns which was so intense, so strong, and so

high-pitchedly literary in tone that I was sure it would obliterate my youthful sins. (And it

did: it shook everybody’s preconceptions about me, launched what was then known as

“the new Silverberg” in a spectacular way, and went to the final balloting for the Hugo

and Nebula awards.) But in the early months of 1967 Thorns was still unpublished and I

still chafed under the need to make people see that I was a different sort of writer, and a

different sort of human being, from the boy of 22 or 23 who had committed “Pirates of

the Void” and its myriad companions.

For A. J. and Eddie

Thorns, like To Open the Sky, had been published by Ballantine Books. Betty

Ballantine, who had known me since the start of my career and had seen me mature and

change, already was confident that my work of the new period was going to transcend

and render invisible my hackwork, and she gave me virtually carte blanche to write as I

pleased. On March 19, 1967, I sent her the outline for The Masks of Time. “As you see,” I

told her, “I’ve got satire in mind this time, and while in many ways this book will echo

the themes and concerns underlying Thorns, the whole narrative approach will be

different: more accessible stylistically, more—well, charming. The element of the

grotesque that figured so largely in Thorns won’t be so big here, and the criticism of

society will be more explicit, in an implicit sort of way. I figure it’ll be a biggish sort of

book, too—maybe about 100,000 words, if it really takes off. It has the sort of structure

that can bear a lot of weight, so long as the ideas flow freely once I get my characters in

motion through the world of 1999.”

Thorns had been intended at least in part as a look-at-me kind of book, full of

stylistic novelties, literary references, flamboyant little numbers designed to show that its

author, past evidence to the contrary, really was a reasonably cultured man whose private

tastes were somewhat more elevated than could be determined from examination of what

he once had written. Once I got that sort of exhibitionism out of my system, I felt no need

to repeat it, but in Masks of Time I set out to demonstrate a different sort of rebellion

against my pulp-magazine antecedents. The essence of pulp fiction is pace; incident

follows incident remorselessly, with no time out for analysis, rumination, or digression.

Although characterization is far from absent in the best pulp fiction, it is manifested

through action and dialog rather than through exposition. I had generally followed these

precepts closely; but in Masks I was going to allow myself the luxury of writing a more

novelistic novel, one in which there was room for discussion, speculation, comment, and

For A. J. and Eddie

other side-matter that was not strictly in the service of advancing the plot. To that end I

chose as my narrator that familiar Jamesian figure, an articulate and civilized man who is

near but not quite at the center of events, and let him tell the tale at his own pace, never

worrying about the editor’s winged chariot hurrying near.

It was, for me, an entirely new way to write. In the early novels I had fretted

constantly about the demands of plot, of keeping the great mechanism ticking away

toward its appointed resolution. In Thorns the need for constant verbal pyrotechnics made

me tense. Here everything was unhurried. I enjoyed the novelty of not having to

compress myself into the self-conceived 55,000-word mold of the early novels. Masks,

when I finished it in June of 1967, was 80,000 words long, the longest novel I had

written. Many years later, one (almost totally hostile) study of my work would criticize it

for having been too long, over-wordy, facile, and undisciplined; facile perhaps, but one

man’s undisciplined writing is another’s very much needed relaxation of arbitrary

confines, and in the progression of my work it was vital to learn how to sprawl, to

ramble, to explore side avenues.

A couple of months after I finished Masks, Thorns was published and achieved

the effect I had hoped for: I was rehabilitated and respectable again within my field. By

the time Ballantine issued Masks of Time in the spring of 1968 I no longer had to feel

motivated by any need to atone for ancient literary sins, and could produce my books

with care only for themselves in themselves, not as warriors in some battle I was waging

against my own past. The change in my work drew an eloquently puzzled essay from

Algis Budrys, then the book columnist in Galaxy, who noted, “How curious to see that

Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books like

Thorns, or like his latest, The Masks of Time. Did he plan to become this way all along, or

did we persuade him?” Budrys too objected to the pacing, to the presence of crowds of

For A. J. and Eddie

apparently superfluous characters, to “incidents that could easily have been left out,” but

shrewdly observed, “Its defects are the opposite of those Silverberg’s work used to have.

. . . This is very much like what you’d expect from a Silverberg looking up over his

shoulder and saying: (Here. Here. I’m an artist. See—here’s a piece of evidence to prove

it. And another. And another.) But Silverberg has never betrayed the slightest trace of

giving a damn what anybody said or thought. So maybe he was planning it this way all

along. Maybe in the old days he’d whisper to a character: (All right, I’m making you out

of cardboard, but what I’ve omitted I’m going to pack into somebody else, some day, and

he won’t just be round, he’ll be dense!)”

Exactly so. All except the part about my not giving a damn what anybody said or

thought. I gave more than a damn, possibly cared too much, and set out quite consciously

to change what people were saying, what they were thinking. And succeeded. People who

know only the last decade of my work find it hard to believe that I am the very same

writer who committed “The Overlord of Colony Eight” and all that other early junk. He is

not only nearly forgotten but almost mythical these days, except to me. Except to me.

At any rate, Masks of Time, in a glossy new edition. Here I am, midway between

“Pirates of the Void” and Shadrach in the Furnace, trying out my real voice in public and

liking the way it sounds.

—Robert Silverberg

Oakland, California

November 1977

For A. J. and Eddie

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.

For A. J. and Eddie

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?”

For A. J. and Eddie

“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 Trinità 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

For A. J. and Eddie

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 Trinità 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

For A. J. and Eddie

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

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摘要：

ForA.J.andEddieVORNAN-19SPEAKSTOAHUSHEDWORLD“...theydidnotland,theseexplorersfromanotherstar.Theymerelyorbitedtheplanetandsawthatitwaswithoutlife,andthusofnointeresttothem.Theypausedonlylongenoughtojettisonthewastesthathadaccumulatedontheirship,thenjourneyedon,whilethosewastes...”Therewasavastsilenc...

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Robert Silverberg - The Masks of Time

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