“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.”