Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online

some time now.”
    He hesitated. This had caught him unprepared. Cautiously he said, “Gioia and I were going to go there together, you know.”
    Belilala smiled amiably, as though the topic under discussion were nothing more than the choice of that evening’s restaurant.
    “Were you?” she asked.
    “It was all arranged while we were still in Alexandria. To go with you instead—I don’t know what to tell you, Belilala.” Phillips sensed that he was growing terribly flustered. “You know that I’d like to go. With you. But on the other hand I can’t help feeling that I shouldn’t go there until I’m back with Gioia again. If I ever am.” How foolish this sounds, he thought. How clumsy, how adolescent. He found that he was having trouble looking straight at her. Uneasily he said, with a kind of desperation in his voice, “I did promise her—there was a commitment, you understand—a firm agreement that we would go to Mohenjo-daro together—”
    “Oh, but Gioia’s already there!” said Belilala in the most casual way.
    He gaped as though she had punched him.
    “What?”
    “She was one of the first to go, after it opened. Months and months ago. You didn’t know?” she asked, sounding surprised, but not very. “You really didn’t know?”
    That astonished him. He felt bewildered, betrayed, furious. His cheeks grew hot, his mouth gaped. He shook his head again and again, trying to clear it of confusion. It was a moment before he could speak. “Already there?” he said at last. “Without waiting for me? After we had talked about going there together—after we had agreed—”
    Belilala laughed. “But how could she resist seeing the newest city? You know how impatient Gioia is!”
    “Yes. Yes.”
    He was stunned. He could barely think.
    “Just like all short-timers,” Belilala said. “She rushes here, she rushes there. She must have it all, now, now, right away, at once, instantly. You ought never expect her to wait for you for anything for very long: the fit seizes her, and off she goes. Surely you must know that about her by now.”
    “A short-timer?” He had not heard that term before.
    “Yes. You knew that. You must have known that.” Belilala flashed her sweetest smile. She showed no sign of comprehending his distress. With a brisk wave of her hand she said, “Well, then, shall we go, you and I? To Mohenjo-daro?”
    “Of course,” Phillips said bleakly.
    “When would you like to leave?”
    “Tonight,” he said. He paused a moment. “What’s a short-timer, Belilala?”
    Color came to her cheeks. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked.
    Had there ever been a more hideous place on the face of the earth than the city of Mohenjo-daro? Phillips found it difficult to imagine one. Nor could he understand why, out of all the cities that had ever been, these people had chosen to restore this one to existence. More than ever they seemed alien to him, unfathomable, incomprehensible.
    From the terrace atop the many-towered citadel he peered down into grim claustrophobic Mohenjo-daro and shivered. The stark, bleak city looked like nothing so much as some prehistoric prison colony. In the manner of an uneasy tortoise it huddled, squat and compact, against the gray monotonous Indus River plain: miles of dark burnt-brick walls enclosing miles of terrifyingly orderly streets, laid out in an awesome, monstrous gridiron pattern of maniacal rigidity. The houses themselves were dismal and forbidding too, clusters of brick cells gathered about small airless courtyards. There were no windows, only small doors that opened not onto the main boulevards but onto the tiny mysterious lanes that ran between the buildings. Who had designed this horrifying metropolis? What harsh sour souls they must have had, these frightening and frightened folk, creating for themselves in the lush fertile plains of India such a Supreme Soviet of a city!
    “How lovely it is,” Belilala murmured. “How fascinating!”
    He stared at