“You’d better change,” Kadro said. “There’s a transport vehicle on the way up here to take you into town.”
He touched something at his hip and a cloud of dark mist sprang up around them. Under its protective cover they opened their suitcases—their twentieth-century clothes were waiting neatly inside, and some of the strange local currency—and set about the task of making themselves look like natives.
“Oh, how wonderful!” Laliene cried, holding a gleaming, iridescent green robe in front of herself and dancing around with it. “How did they think of such things? Look at how it’s cut! Look at the way it’s fitted together!”
“I’ve seen you wearing a thousand things more lovely than those,” said Denvin sourly.
She made a face at him. Denvin himself had almost finished changing: he was clad now in gray trousers, scarlet shirt open at the throat, charcoal-colored jacket cut with flaring lapels. Like Kadro, he looked splendid in his costume. But Kadro and Denvin looked splendid in anything they wore. The two of them were men of the same sort, Thimiroi thought, both of them dandyish, almost dainty. Perfect men of fashion. He himself, much taller than they and very muscular, almost rawboned, had never quite mastered their knack of seeming at utter ease in all situations. He often felt out of place among such smooth types as they, almost as though he were some sort of throwback, full of hot, primordial passions and drives rarely seen in the refined era into which he had happened to be born. It was, perhaps, his creative intensity, he often thought. His artistic nature. He was too earthy for them, too robust of spirit, too much the primitive. As he slipped into his twentieth-century clothes, the tight yellow pants, the white shirt boldly striped in blue, the jet-black jacket, the tapering black boots, he felt a curious sense of having returned home at last, after a long journey.
“Here comes the car,” Kadro said. “Hold out your hands, quickly! I have your implants.”
Thimiroi extended his arm. Something silvery-bright, like a tiny gleaming beetle, sparkled between two of Kadro’s fingers. He pressed it gently against Thimiroi’s skin, just above the long rosy scar of the inoculation, and it made the tiniest of whirring sounds.
“This is their language,” said Kadro. He touched it to Denvin’s arm also, and to Laliene’s. “And this one, the technology and social customs. And this is your medical booster, just in case.” Buzz, buzz, buzz. Kadro smiled. He was very efficient. “You’re all ready for the twentieth century now. And just in time, too.”
A vehicle had pulled up in the roadway behind them, yellow with black markings, and odd projections on its roof. Thimiroi felt a quick faint stab of nausea as a breeze, suddenly stirring out of the quiescent air, swept a whiff of the vehicle’s greasy fumes past his face.
The driver hopped out. He was very big, bigger even than Thimiroi, with immense heavy shoulders and a massive column of a neck. His face was unusual, the lips strongly pronounced, the cheekbones broad and jutting like blades. His hair was black and woolly and grew very close to his skull. But the most surprising thing about him was the color of his skin. It was dark brown, almost black: his eyes were bright as beacons against that astonishing chocolate-hued backdrop. Thimiroi had never imagined that anyone might have skin of such a color. Was that what they all were like in the twentieth century? Skin the color of night? No one on Capri had looked like that, or in Canterbury.
“You the people called for a taxi?” the driver asked. “Here—let me put those suitcases in the trunk—”
Perhaps it is a form of ornamentation, Thimiroi thought. They have it artificially done. They think it makes them look more beautiful when they change their skins, when they change their faces, so that they are like this.
And it was beautiful. There was a brooding somber power about this black man’s face. He was like something carved from a block of some precious and recalcitrant stone.
“I’ll ride up front,” Kadro said. “You three get in back.” He turned to the driver. “The Montgomery House is where we are going. You know where that is?”
The driver laughed. “Ain’t no one in town who don’t know the Montgomery House. But you sure you don’t want a hotel that’s a little cheaper?”
“The Montgomery House will do,” said Kadro.
They had ridden in mule-drawn carts on the narrow winding paths of hilly Capri, and in wagons drawn by oxen on the rutted road to Canterbury. That had been charming and pretty, to ride in such things, to feel the jouncing of the wheels and see the sweat glistening on the backs of the panting animals. There was nothing charming or pretty about traveling in this squat glass-walled wheeled vehicle, this taxi. It rumbled and quivered as if it were about to explode. It careered alarmingly around the sharp curves of the road, threatening at any moment to break free of the driver’s tenuous control and go spurting over the edge of the embankment in a cataclysmic dive through space. It poured forth all manner of dark noxious gases. It was an altogether terrifying thing.
And yet fascinating and wonderful. Crude and scary though the taxi was, it was not really very different in fundamental concept or design from the silent, flawless vehicles of Thimiroi’s world. Contemplating that, Thimiroi had a keen sense of the kinship of this world to his own. We are not that far beyond them in time, he thought. They exist at the edge of the modern era, really. The Capri of the Romans, the Canterbury of the pilgrimage—those are truly alien places, set deep back in the pre-technological past. But there is not the same qualitative difference between our epoch and this twentieth century. The gulf is not so great. The seeds of our world can be found in theirs. Or so it seems to me, Thimiroi told himself, after five minutes’ acquaintance with this place.
Kadro said, “Omerie and Kleph and Klia are here already. They’ve rented a house just down the street from the hotel where you’ll be staying.”
Laliene smiled. “The Sanciscos! Oh, how I look forward to seeing them again! Omerie is such a clever man. And Kleph and Klia—how beautiful they are, how refreshing to spend time with them!”
“The place they’ve taken is absolutely perfect for the end of the month,” said Kadro. “The view will be supreme. Hollia and Hara wanted to buy it, you know. But Omerie got to it ahead of them.”
“Hollia and Hara are going to be here?” Denvin said, sounding surprised.
“Everyone will be here. Who would miss it?” Kadro’s hands moved in a quick playful gesture of malicious pleasure. “Hollia was beside herself, of course. She couldn’t believe that Omerie had beaten her to that house. But, as you say, Laliene, Omerie is such a clever man.”
“Hollia is ruthless,” said Denvin. “If the place is that good, she’ll try to get it away from the Sanciscos. Mark my words, Kadro. She’ll try some slippery little trick.”
“She may very well. Not that there’s any real reason to. I understand that the Sanciscos are planning to invite all of us to watch the show from their front window. Including Hollia and Hara, naturally. So they won’t be the worse for it. Except that Hollia would have preferred to be the hostess herself. Cenbe will be coming, you know.”
“Cenbe!” Laliene cried.
“Exactly. To finish his symphony. Hollia would have wanted to preside over that. And instead it will be Omerie’s party, and Kleph’s and Klia’s, and she’ll just be one of the crowd.” Kadro giggled. “Dear Hollia. My heart goes out to her.”
“Dear Hollia,” Denvin echoed.
“Look there,” said Thimiroi, pointing out the side window of the taxi. He spoke brusquely, his voice deliberately rough. All this gossipy chatter bored and maddened him. Who cared whether it was Hollia who gave the party, or the Sanciscos, or the Emperor Augustus himself? What mattered was the event that was coming. The experience. The awesome, wondrous, shattering calamity. “Isn’t that Lutheena across the street?” he asked.