“Go ahead. What important things?”
“The plans for Friday night.”
“Friday night,” Thimiroi said, not understanding.
She looked at him scornfully. “Friday—tomorrow—is the last day of May. Or have you forgotten that?”
He felt a chill. “The meteor,” he said.
“The meteor, yes. The event which we came to this place to see,” Laliene said. “Do you recall?”
“So soon,” Thimiroi said dully. “Tomorrow night.”
“We will all assemble about midnight, or a little before, at the Sanciscos’ house. The view will be best from there, according to Kadro. From their front rooms, upstairs. Kleph, Omerie, and Klia have invited everyone—everyone except Hollia and Hara, that is: Omerie is adamant about their not coming, because of something slippery that Hollia tried to do to him. Kleph would not discuss it, but I assume it had to do with trying to get the Sanciscos evicted, so that they could have the Wilson house for themselves. But all the rest of us will be there. And you are particularly included, Thimiroi. Kleph made a point of telling me that. Unless you have other plans for the evening, naturally.”
“Is that what Kleph said? Or are you adding that part of it yourself, about my having other plans?”
“That is what Kleph said.”
“I see.”
“Do you have other plans?”
“What other plans could I possibly have, do you think? Where? With whom?”
Christine seemed startled to see him again so soon. She was still wearing an old pink robe that she had thrown on as he was leaving her house two hours before, and she looked rumpled and drowsy and confused. Behind him the sky held the pearl-gray of early twilight on this late spring evening, but she stood in the half-opened doorway blinking at him as though he had awakened her once again in the middle of the night.
“Thimiroi? You’re back?”
“Let me in. Quickly, please.”
“Is there something wrong? Are you in trouble?”
“Please.”
He stepped past her into the vestibule and hastily pushed the door shut behind him. She gave him a baffled look. “I was just napping,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be coming back this evening, and I had so little sleep last night, you know—”
“I know. We need to talk. This is urgent, Christine.”
“Go into the parlor. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
She pointed to Thimiroi’s left and vanished into the dim recesses at the rear of the entrance hall. Thimiroi went into the room she had indicated, a long, oppressively narrow chamber hung with heavy brocaded draperies and furnished with the sort of lowslung clumsy-looking couches and chairs, probably out of some even earlier era, that were everywhere in the house. He paced restlessly about the room. It was like being in a museum of forgotten styles. There was something eerie and almost hieratic about this mysterious furniture: the dark wood, the heavy legs jutting at curious angles, the coarse, intricately worked fabrics, the strange brass buttons running along the edges. Someone like Denvin would probably think it hideous. To him it was merely strange, powerful, haunting, wonderful in its way.
At last Christine appeared. She had been gone for what felt like hours: washing her face, brushing her hair, changing into a robe she evidently considered more seemly for receiving a visitor at nightfall. Her vanity was almost amusing. The world is about to come to an end, he thought, and she pauses to make herself fit for entertaining company.
But of course she could have no idea of why he was here.
He said, “Are you free tomorrow night?”
“Free? Tomorrow?” She looked uncertain. “Why—yes, yes, I suppose. Friday night. I’m free, yes. What did you have in mind, Thimiroi?”
“How well do you trust me, Christine?”
She did not reply for a moment. For the first time since that day they had had lunch together at the River Cafe, there was something other than fascination, warmth, even love for him, in her eyes. She seemed mystified, troubled, perhaps frightened. It was as if his sudden breathless arrival here this evening had reminded her of how truly strange their relationship was, and of how little she really knew about him.
“Trust you how?” she said finally.
“What I told you this afternoon, about Capri, about Canterbury, about The Travel—did you believe all that or not?”
She moistened her lips. “I suppose you’re going to say that you were making it all up, and that you feel guilty now for having fed all that nonsense to a poor simple gullible woman like me.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I wasn’t making anything up. But do you believe that, Christine? Do you?”
“I said I did, this afternoon.”
“But you’ve had a few hours to think about it. Do you still believe it?”
She made no immediate reply. At length she said, glancing at him warily, “I’ve been napping, Thimiroi. I haven’t been thinking about anything at all. But since it seems to be so important to you: Yes. Yes, I think that what you told me, weird as it was, was the truth. There. If it was just a joke, I swallowed it. Does that make me a simpleton in your eyes?”
“So you trust me.”
“Yes. I trust you.”
“Will you go away with me, then? Leave here with me tomorrow, and possibly never come back?”
“Tomorrow?” The word seemed to have struck her like an explosion. She looked dazed. “Never—come—back—?”
“In all likelihood.”
She put the palms of her hands together, rubbed them against each other, pressed them tight: a little ritual of hers, perhaps. When she looked up at him again her expression had changed: the confusion had cleared from her face and now she appeared merely puzzled, and even somewhat irritated.
In a sharp tone she said, “What is all this about, Thimiroi?”
He drew a deep breath. “Do you know why we chose the autumn of 1347 for our Canterbury visit?” he asked. “Because it was a season of extraordinarily fine weather, yes. But also because it was a peak time, looking down into a terrible valley, the last sweet moment before the coming of a great calamity. By the following summer the Black Death would be devouring England, and millions would die. We chose the timing of our visit to Augustus the same way. The year 19—19 B.C., it was—was the year he finally consolidated all imperial power in his grasp. Rome was his; he ruled it in a way that no one had ruled that nation before. After that there would be only anticlimax for him, and disappointments and losses; and indeed just after we went to him he would fall seriously ill, almost to the edge of death, and for a time it would seem to him that he had lost everything in the very moment of attaining it. But when we visited him in 19 B.C., it was the summit of his time.”
“What does this have to do with—”
“This May, here, now, is another vintage season, Christine. This long golden month of unforgettable weather—it will end tomorrow, Christine, in terror, in destruction, a frightful descent from happiness into disaster, far steeper than either of the other two. That is why we are here, do you see? As spectators, as observers of the great irony—visiting your city at its happiest moment, and then, tomorrow, watching the catastrophe.”
As he spoke, she grew pale and her lips began to quiver; and then color flooded into her face, as it will sometimes do when the full impact of terrible news arrives. Something close to panic was gleaming in her eyes.
“Are you saying that there’s going to be nuclear war? That after all these years the bombs are finally going to go off?”
“Not war, no.”
“What then?”
Without answering, Thimiroi drew forth his wallet and began to stack currency on the table in front of him, hundreds of dollars, perhaps thousands, all the strange little strips of green-and-black paper that they had supplied him with when he first had arrived here. Christine gaped in astonishment. He shoved the money toward her.