He had always liked new clothes.
Breakfast was a work of art. Real fruit juice. Real coffee. Real bread toasted to a fragrant brown crispness and loaded with creamy yellow butter, the soft richness seeming to hold within itself all the trapped sunlight of bygone years. He ate slowly, moving the food over his palate, swallowing with careful deliberation, tasting the food instead of merely chewing it, savouring it as if he had never eaten before. The meal finished he rose and, with casual deliberation, moved about the huge room with its scattered treasures and its quiet, subtle, unmistakeable air of good taste.
A plaque of polished wood hung against the wall. A stone was mounted in the centre, a fragment of grey, crumbling rock and he stared at it; leaning forward to touch it and, as his fingers caressed the rough surface, time slipped and he was young again.
A grey plain, the hiss of oxygen and the chafing encumbrance of a suit. Sunlight, harsh and glaring through the shields, jagged peaks and, high in the star-shot sky, a swollen, green-mottled ball wreathed with the tenuous fingers of fleecy cloud.
Luna!
The rock had come from there, torn from where it had lain for uncounted years, wrenched free by a metal glove and carried as a trophy back to distant Earth. He had been the one to rip it from its bed. He had torn it free and stumbled, knee deep in luna dust, back to where the ship waited like a splinter of radiant steel in the savage light of a naked sun. Long ago now. Long, long ago. Back in his first-youth when life was a gay adventure and death a mere word. How long?
He sighed as he thought about it, not trying to read the gold-letter date on the polished wood, letting his hand fall from the rough stone and, as he turned, the too-bright memories scattered and vanished in the light of harsh reality.
A book lay on a small table, a single volume written by a man long dead, and yet containing within its pages the trapped gems of his genius, caught and safeguarded against time. It fell open as he picked it up, flattening at a favourite poem, and he scanned it, feeling a warm comfort in the familiar text.
From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving, Whatever gods may be, That no life lasts forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.
He set it down, the warm comfort vanishing at the touch of chill dread, feeling a slight irritation where always before he had relished the swing and depth of the thought behind the words. Swinburne was not for him—not now.
He touched other books, scanned other volumes, all old friends, all holding for him some special grace, some captured memory. He read a story for the hundredth time and enjoyed it as if he had read it but once. He fingered worn bindings and yellowed pages, blinking as his eyes refused their duty until he had had a surfeit of reading and put away the books and sat, staring through the high windows at the late-afternoon sky beyond.
He felt restless. He felt impatient with a strange urgency as though he had much to do and little time in which to do it. Summer was nearly over and soon would come the bitter winter or . . .
He didn’t let himself think about it.
He found a bottle, dusty and sealed, stained and bearing the arms of an emperor long dead. He held it against the light, staring at the golden glory imprisoned in the glass, caressing the bottle as if it was a thing infinitely precious, which it was, and priceless, which was almost true. He took a huge glass, a monstrous thing with a tiny stem and a balloon-like bowl. He warmed it between his palms, rolling it, nursing its delicate fragility; then, opening the bottle, he poured out the lambent fluid and, still warming the glass, inhaled the ineffable fragrance of the rare old brandy.
He inhaled and sipped, inhaled and sipped again, feeling little fires light in his stomach and warm his chilling flesh with the magic of the grape and summer suns of distant memory.
“I wonder often what the vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.” He smiled as he murmured the lines, the brandy in the glass seeming to wink at him with reflected light, smiling with its golden face and gurgling with its liquid mouth in complete agreement with the philosophy of the Persian Poet.
“You’re a snare,” said John accusingly. “You are the one true magic of the ages, the single thing which, by illusion, can turn terror into pleasure, hate into love, despair into hope. You can make all men brothers, all worries as drifting dreams, all hurt and pain as laughable memories. You hold the gift of courage. With you a man can face the world and be undaunted. With you he can ever smile at . . .”
He swallowed, drained the glass and rose from the soft, form-fitting chair in which he sat.
A bowl of fruit stood on a table of glistening plastic, the colours cunningly fashioned in abstruse designs of convoluted shades. He picked a grape, a swollen mutation from the hydroponic gardens, and crushed it against his teeth, savouring the seedless pulp and the sharp, almost acid tang of the syrupy juice. He ate slowly, his fingers not reaching for another until the first had been enjoyed to the full then, as he stared at the darkening sky outside, left the fruit and moved towards the door.
He had always liked the city.
He had always liked the medley of noises, the traffic sounds, the hum of inaudible conversations, the droning and scuffling, the humming and scraping of millions of feet and millions of wheels as the life of the metropolis ebbed and flowed.
There was a little park he remembered, an oasis of green and brown, of trees and flowers, of soft grass and winding paths among the steel and glass, the concrete and plastic of the city. Here little birds chirped their tuneless songs and the heavy scent of growing things filled the summer afternoon with heady fragrance and stately blossoms nodded with somnolent grace.
He spent a little time in the park.
There were some sculptures he had always admired, things of stone fashioned by hands long dust, holding within themselves the dreams and ideals of bygone ages, the figures staring with blank eyes as they had stared over the passing years and as they would stare for years to come.
He spent a while with the familiar shapes.
There was a street lined with garish signs and filled with the healthy, raucous, cheerfully independent voices of shouting men. A place of misty treasure and glowing illusion where flesh and blood puppets cavorted on stages and the beat of skin and the throb of brass brought a sense of reeking jungles and carnivorous beasts. Here emotions were released and bodies swayed to nerve-tingling rhythm while eyes widened and breath came fast and the pulse of blood rose until each cell and sinew tingled with the collapse of care.
He walked the street until his legs were tired.
He walked until the prickling between his shoulder blades had faded, until his anticipation had died, until despair and frustration rode with him like an invisible incubus and worry began to gnaw with its ten thousand teeth at the yielding fabric of his mind.
When?
He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know for there is some knowledge a man should not have, but...when?
Tiredly he made his way back to his apartment, walking slowly through the bright-lit streets, the sky a black bowl above his head and the scintillant trails of the ships hurling themselves from the spaceport dying like the sparks from a million fireworks against the faded stars.
When?
Now? Two minutes time? Tomorrow?
He hoped not tomorrow. He hoped that he wouldn’t have another night of old-man’s sleep in which the visions of his youth came to torment him on waking with bitter memories of what might have been. Not again the slow awakening, the rising, the horrible aging and sagging onrush of senility. Not tomorrow. Please God not tomorrow!