Free Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg Page A

they brought him here, to spare him from the pain of separation. They might be capable of that kindness. Knowing so little of what he had lost, could he truly say that he yearned for it? Willoughby seemed to remember much more of his former life, somehow, and longed for it all the more intensely. He was spared that. Why not stay here, and go on and on from city to city, sightseeing all of time past as the citizens conjured it back into being? Why not? Why not? The chances were that he had no choice about it, anyway.
    He made his way back up toward the citadel and to the baths once more. He felt a little like a ghost, haunting a city of ghosts.
    Belilala seemed unaware that he had been gone for most of the day. She sat by herself on the terrace of the baths, placidly sipping some thick milky beverage that had been sprinkled with a dark spice. He shook his head when she offered him some.
    “Do you remember I mentioned that I saw a man with red hair and a beard this morning?” Phillips said. “He’s a visitor. Hawk told me that.”
    “Is he?” Belilala asked.
    “From a time about four hundred years before mine. I talked with him. He thinks he was brought here by demons.” Phillips gave her a searching look. “I’m a visitor, too, isn’t that so?”
    “Of course, love.”
    “And how was I brought here? By demons also?”
    Belilala smiled indifferently. “You’d have to ask someone else. Hawk, perhaps. I haven’t looked into these things very deeply.”
    “I see. Are there many visitors here, do you know?”
    A languid shrug. “Not many, no, not really. I’ve only heard of three or four besides you. There may be others by now, I suppose.” She rested her hand lightly on his. “Are you having a good time in Mohenjo, Charles?”
    He let her question pass as though he had not heard it.
    “I asked Hawk about Gioia,” he said.
    “Oh?”
    “He told me that she’s no longer here, that she’s gone on to Timbuctoo or New Chicago, he wasn’t sure which.”
    “That’s quite likely. As everybody knows, Gioia rarely stays in the same place very long.”
    Phillips nodded. “You said the other day that Gioia is a short-timer. That means she’s going to grow old and die, doesn’t it?”
    “I thought you understood that, Charles.”
    “Whereas you will not age? Nor Hawk, nor Stengard, nor any of the rest of your set?”
    “We will live as long as we wish,” she said. “But we will not age, no.”
    “What makes a person a short-timer?”
    “They’re born that way, I think. Some missing gene, some extra gene—I don’t actually know. It’s extremely uncommon. Nothing can be done to help them. It’s very slow, the aging. But it can’t be halted.”
    Phillips nodded. “That must be very disagreeable,” he said. “To find yourself one of the few people growing old in a world where everyone stays young. No wonder Gioia is so impatient. No wonder she runs around from place to place. No wonder she attached herself so quickly to the barbaric hairy visitor from the twentieth century, who comes from a time when everybody was a short-timer. She and I have something in common, wouldn’t you say?”
    “In a manner of speaking, yes.”
    “We understand aging. We understand death. Tell me: is Gioia likely to die very soon, Belilala?”
    “Soon? Soon?” She gave him a wide-eyed childlike stare. “What is soon? How can I say? What you think of as soon and what I think of as soon are not the same things, Charles.” Then her manner changed: she seemed to be hearing what he was saying for the first time. Softly she said, “No, no, Charles. I don’t think she will die very soon.”
    “When she left me in Chang-an, was it because she had become bored with me?”
    Belilala shook her head. “She was simply restless. It had nothing to do with you. She was never bored with you.”
    “Then I’m going to go looking for her. Wherever she may be, Timbuctoo, New Chicago, I’ll find her. Gioia and I belong