“It gets you,” Monty said. “I always watch the faces of the newcomers when they first walk in it.”
“It wears off after a time,” said Bishop, not believing it.
Monty shook his head. “My friend, it does not wear off. It doesn’t surprise you quite so much, but it stays with you all the time. A human does not live long enough for a place like this to wear thin and commonplace.”
He had eaten dinner in the dining room, which was old and solemn, with an ancient other-worldness and a hushed, tiptoe atmosphere, with Kimonian waiters at your elbow, ready to recommend a certain dish or a vintage as one that you should try.
Monty had coffee while he ate and there had been others who had come drifting past to stop a moment and welcome him and ask him of Earth, always using a studied casualness, always with a hunger in their eyes that belied the casualness.
“They make you feel at home,” said Monty, “and they mean it. They are glad when a new one comes.”
He did feel at home—more at home than he had ever felt in his life before, as if already he was beginning to fit in. He had not expected to fit in so quickly and he was slightly astonished at it—for here were all the people he had dreamed of being with, and he finally was with them. You could feel the magnetic force of them, the personal magnetism that had made them great, great enough to be Kimon-worthy, and looking at them he wondered which of them he would get to know, which would be his friends.
He was relieved when he found that he was not expected to pay for his dinner or his drinks, but simply sign a chit, and once he’d caught onto that, everything seemed brighter, for the dinner of itself would have taken quite a hole out of the twenty nestling in his pocket.
With dinner over and with Monty gone somewhere into the crowd, he found himself in the bar, sitting on a stool and nursing a drink that the Kimonian bartender had recommended as being something special.
The girl came out of nowhere and floated up to the stool beside him and she said:
“What’s that you’re drinking, friend?”
“I don’t know,” said Bishop. He made a thumb toward the man behind the bar. “Ask him to make you one.”
The bartender heard and got busy with the bottles and the shaker.
“You’re fresh from Earth,” said the girl.
“Fresh is the word,” said Bishop.
“It’s not so bad,” she said. “That is, if you don’t think about it.”
“I won’t think about it,” Bishop promised. “I won’t think of anything.”
“Of course, you do get used to it,” she said. “After a while you don’t mind the faint amusement. You think, what the hell, let them laugh all they want to so long as I have it good. But the day will come—”
“What are you talking about?” asked Bishop. “Here’s your drink. Dip your muzzle into that and—”
“The day will come when we are old to them, when we don’t amuse them any longer. When we become passé. We can’t keep thinking up new tricks. Take my painting, for example—”
“See here,” said Bishop. “You’re talking way above my head.”
“See me a week from now,” she said. “The name’s Maxine. Just ask to see Maxine. A week from now, we can talk together. So long, Buster.”
She floated off the stool and suddenly was gone.
She hadn’t touched her drink.
He went up to his rooms and stood for a long time at a window, staring out into the featureless landscape lighted by a moon.
Wonder thundered in his brain, the wonder and the newness and the many questions, the breathlessness of finally being here, of slowly coming to a full realization of the fact that he was here, that he was one of the glittering, fabulous company he had dreamed about for years.
The long grim years peeled off him, the years of books and study, the years of determined driving, the hungry, anxious, grueling years when he had lived a monkish life, mortifying body and soul to drive his intellect.
The years fell off and he felt the newness of himself as well as the newness of the scene. A cleanness and a newness and the sudden glory.
The cabinet finally spoke to him.
“Why don’t you try the live-it, sir?”
Bishop swung sharply around.
“You mean—?”
“The third room,” said the cabinet. “You’ll find it most amusing.”
“The live-it!”
“That’s right,” said the cabinet. “You pick it and you live it.”
Which sounded like something out of the Alice books.
“It’s safe,” said the cabinet. “It’s perfectly safe. You can come back any time you wish.”
“Thank you,” said Bishop.
He went into the room and sat down in the chair and studied the buttons on the arms.
History?
Might as well, he told himself. He knew a bit of history. He’d been interested in it and had taken several courses and done a lot of supplemental reading.
He punched the “History” button.
A panel in the wall before the chair lit up and a face appeared—the face of a Kimonian, the bronzed and golden face, the classic beauty of the race.
Aren’t any of them homely? Bishop wondered. None of them ugly or crippled, like the rest of humanity?
“What type of history, sir?” the face in the screen asked him.
“Type?”
“Galactic, Kimonian, Earth—almost any place you wish.”
“Earth, please,” said Bishop.
“Specifications?”
“England,” said Bishop. “October 14, 1066. A place called Senlac.”
And he was there.
He was no longer in the room with its single chair and its four bare walls, but he stood upon a hill in sunny autumn weather with the gold and red of trees and the blueness of the haze and the shouts of men.
He stood rooted in the grass that blew upon the hillside and saw that the grass had turned to hay with its age and sunshine—and out beyond the grass and hill, grouped down on the plain, was a ragged line of horsemen, with the sun upon their helmets and flashing on their shields, with the leopard banners curling in the wind.
It was October 14th and it was Saturday and on the hill stood Harold’s hosts behind their locked shield wall, and before the sun had set new forces would have been put in motion to shape the course of empire.
Taillefer, he thought. Taillefer will ride in the fore of William’s charge, singing the “Chanson de Roland” and wheeling his sword into the air so that it becomes a wheel of fire to lead the others on.
The Normans charged and there was no Taillefer. There was no one who wheeled his sword into the air, there was no singing. There was merely shouting and the hoarse crying of men riding to their death.
The horsemen were charging directly at him and he wheeled and tried to run, but he could not outrun them and they were upon him. He saw the flash of polished hoofs and the cruel steel of the shoes upon the hoofs, the glinting lance point, the swaying, jouncing scabbard, the red and green and yellow of the cloaks, the dullness of the armor, the open roaring mouths of men—and they were upon him. And passing through him and over him as if he were not there.
He stopped stock-still, heart hammering in his chest, and, as if from somewhere far off, he felt the wind of the charging horses that were running all around him.
Up the hill there were hoarse cries of “Ut! Ut!” and the high, sharp ring of steel. Dust was rising all around him and somewhere off to the left a dying horse was screaming. Out of the dust a man came running down the hill. He staggered and fell and got up and ran again and Bishop could see that blood poured out of the ripped armor and washed down across the metal, spraying the dead, sere grass as he ran down the hill.