“You’ll be sent back for rehabilitation, Kadro says.”
“When?”
“It’s up to you. You can stay and watch the show with the rest of us—you’ve paid for it, after all. There’s no harm, Kadro says, in letting you remain in this era another few hours. Or you can let them have you right now.”
For an instant despair engulfed him. Then he regained his control.
“Tell Kadro that I think I’ll go now,” he said.
“Yes,” said Laliene. “That’s probably the wisest thing.”
He said, “Will Kleph be punished too?”
“I don’t think so.”
He felt a surge of anger. “Why not? Why is what I did any different from what she did? All right, I had a twentieth-century lover. So did Kleph. You know that. That Wilson man.”
“It was different, Thimiroi.”
“Different? How?”
“For Kleph it was just a little diversion, an illicit adventure. What she was doing was wrong, but it didn’t imperil the basic structure of things. She doesn’t propose to save this Wilson. She isn’t going to intervene with the pattern. You were going to run off with yours, weren’t you? Live with her somewhere far from here, spare her from the calamity, possibly change all time to come? That couldn’t be tolerated, Thimiroi. I’m astonished that you thought it would be. But of course you were in love.”
Thimiroi was silent again. Then he said, “Will you do me one favor, at least?”
“What is that?”
“Send word to her. Her name’s Christine Rawlins. She lives in the big old house right across the street from the one where the Sanciscos are. Tell her to go somewhere else tonight—to move into the Montgomery House, maybe, or even to leave the city. She can’t stay where she is. Her house is almost certainly right in the path of—of—”
“I couldn’t possibly do that,” Laliene said quietly.
“No?”
“It would be intervention. It’s the same thing you’re being punished for.”
“She’ll die, though!” Thimiroi cried. “She doesn’t deserve that. She’s full of life, full of hopes, dreams—”
“She’s been dead for hundreds of years,” said Laliene coolly. “Giving her another day or two of life now won’t matter. If the meteor doesn’t get her, the plague will. You know that. You also know that I can’t intervene for her. And you know that even if I tried, she’d never believe me. She’d have no reason to. No matter what you may have told her before, she knows nothing of it now. There’s been a counter-intervention, Thimiroi. You understand that, don’t you? She’s never known you, now. Whatever may have happened between you and she has been unhappened.”
Laliene’s words struck him like knives.
“So you won’t do a thing?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Thimiroi. I tried to save you from this. For friendship’s sake. For love’s sake, even. But of course you wouldn’t be swerved at all.”
Kadro came into the room. He was dressed for the evening’s big event already.
“Well?” he said. “Has Laliene explained the arrangement? You can stay on through tonight, or you can go back now.”
Thimiroi looked at him, and back at Laliene, and to Kadro again. It was all very clear. He had gambled and lost. He had tried to do a foolish, romantic, impossible sort of thing, a twentieth-century sort of thing, for he was in many ways a twentieth-century sort of man; and it had failed, as of course, he realized now, it had been destined to do from the start. But that did not mean it had not been worth attempting. Not at all. Not at all.
“I understand,” Thimiroi said. “I’ll go back now.”
The chairs had all been arranged neatly before the windows in the upstairs rooms. It was past midnight. There was euphoriac in the air, thick and dense. A quarter moon hung over the doomed city, but it was almost hidden now by the thickening clouds. The long season of clear skies was ending. The weather was changing, finally.
“It will be happening very soon now,” Omerie said.
Laliene nodded. “I feel almost as though I’ve lived through it several times already.”
“The same with me,” said Kleph.
“Perhaps we have,” said Klia, with a little laugh. “Who knows? We go round and round in time, and maybe we travel over the same paths more than once.”
Denvin said, “I wonder where Thimiroi is now. And what they’re doing to him.”
“Let’s not talk of Thimiroi,” Antilimoin said. “It’s too sad.”
“He won’t be able to Travel again, will he?” asked Maitira.
“Never again. Absolutely forbidden,” Omerie said. “But he’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing they throw at him. What he did was unforgivable. Unforgivable!”
“Antilimoin’s right,” said Laliene. “Let’s not talk of Thimiroi.”
Kleph moved closer to her. “You love him, don’t you?”
“Loved,” Laliene said.
“Here. Some more tea.”
“Yes. Yes.” Laliene smiled grimly. “He wanted me to send a warning to that woman of his, do you know? She lives right across the way. Her house will be destroyed by the shock wave, almost certainly.”
Lutheena said, looking shocked, “You didn’t think of doing it, did you?”
“Of course not. But I feel so sad about it, all the same. He loved her, you know. And I loved him. And so, for his sake, entirely for his sake—” Laliene shook her head. “But of course it was inconceivable. I suppose she’s asleep right at this minute, not even suspecting—”
“Better the meteor than the Blue Death that follows,” said Omerie. “Quicker. The quick deaths are the good ones. What’s the point of hiding from the meteor only to die of the plague?”
“This is too morbid,” Klia said. “I almost wish we hadn’t come here. We could have skipped it and just gone on to Charlemagne’s coronation—”
“We’ll be there soon enough,” said Kleph. “But we’re here, now. And it’s going to be wonderful—wonderful—”
“Places, everybody!” Kadro called. “It’s almost time! Ten—nine—eight—”
Laliene held her breath. This all seemed so familiar, she thought. As though she had been through it many times already. In a moment the impact, and the tremendous sound, and the first flames rising, and the first stunned cries from the city, and the dark shapes moving around in the distance, blind, bewildered—and then the lurid sky, red as blood, the long unending shriek coming as though from a single voice—
“Now,” said Kadro.
There was an astounding stillness overhead. The onrushing meteor might almost have been sucking all sound from the city toward which it plummeted. And after the silence the cataclysmic crash, the incredible impact, the earth itself recoiling with the force of the collision.
Poor Thimiroi, Laliene thought. And that poor woman, too.
Her heart overflowed with love and sorrow, and her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away from the window, unable to watch, unable to see. Then came the cries. And then the flames.