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was not a place where one was sharply aware of the change of seasons, nor did
the passage of time itself make itself very evident when one was living one s
entire life as a tourist.
During the day there was always something new to see. The
zoological garden, for instance: a wondrous park, miraculously green and
lush in this hot dry climate, where astounding animals roamed in enclosures so
generous that they did not seem like enclosures at all. Here were camels,
rhinoceroses, gazelles, ostriches, lions, wild asses; and here too, casually
adjacent to those familiar African beasts, were hippogriffs, unicorns,
basilisks, and fire-snorting dragons with rainbow scales.
Had the original zoo of Alexandria had dragons and unicorns? Phillips doubted
it. But this one did; evidently it was no harder for the backstage
craftsmen to manufacture mythic beasts than it was for them to turn out camels
and gazelles. To
Gioia and her friends all of them were equally mythical, anyway. They were
just as awed by the rhinoceros as by the hippogriff.
One was no more strange nor any less than the other. So far as Phillips had
been able to discover, none of the mammals or birds of his era had survived
into this one except for a few cats and dogs, though many had been
reconstructed.
And then the Library! All those lost treasures, reclaimed from the jaws of
time! Stupendous columned marble walls, airy high-vaulted reading-rooms, dark
coiling stacks stretching away to infinity. The ivory handles of seven
hundred thousand papyrus scrolls bristling on the shelves. Scholars and
librarians gliding quietly about, smiling faint scholarly smiles but plainly
preoccupied with serious matters of the mind. They were all temporaries,
Phillips realized. Mere props, part of the illusion.
But were the scrolls illusions too? Here we have the complete dramas of
Sophocles, said the guide with a blithe wave of its hand, indicating shelf
upon shelf of texts. Only seven of his hundred twenty-three plays had survived
the successive burnings of the library in ancient times by Romans, Christians,
Arabs: were the lost ones here, the
Triptolemus, the
Nausicaa, the
Jason, and all the rest? And would he find here too, miraculously
restored to being, the other vanished treasures of ancient
literature the memoirs of Odysseus, Cato s history of Rome, Thucydides life
of Pericles, the missing volumes of Livy? But when he asked if he might
explore the stacks, the guide smiled apologetically and said that all the
librarians were busy just
now. Another time, perhaps? Perhaps, said the guide. It made no difference,
Phillips decided. Even if these people somehow had brought back those lost
masterpieces of antiquity, how would he read them? He knew no Greek.
The life of the city buzzed and throbbed about him. It was a dazzlingly
beautiful place: the vast bay thick with sails, the great avenues running
rigidly east-west, north-south, the sunlight rebounding almost audibly from
the bright walls of the palaces of kings and gods. They have done this very
well, Phillips thought: very well indeed. In the marketplace hard-eyed
traders squabbled in half a dozen mysterious languages over the price of
ebony, Arabian incense, jade, panther-skins. Gioia bought a dram of pale musky
Egyptian perfume in a delicate tapering glass flask. Magicians and jugglers
and scribes called out stridently to passersby, begging for a few moments of
attention and a handful of coins for their labor. Strapping slaves, black and
tawny and some that might have been Chinese, were put up for auction, made to
flex their muscles, to bare their teeth, to bare their breasts and thighs to
prospective buyers. In the gymnasium naked athletes hurled javelins and
discuses, and wrestled with terrifying zeal. Gioia s friend Stengard came
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rushing up with a gift for her, a golden necklace that would not have
embarrassed Cleopatra. An hour later she had lost it, or perhaps had given it
away while Phillips was looking elsewhere.
She bought another, even finer, the next day. Anyone could have all the money
he wanted, simply by asking: it was as easy to come by as air, for these
people.
Being here was much like going to the movies, Phillips told himself. A
different show every day: not much plot, but the special effects were
magnificent and the detail-work could hardly have been surpassed. A
megamovie, a vast entertainment that went on all the time and was
being played out by the whole population of Earth. And it was all
so effortless, so spontaneous: just as when he had gone to a movie he had
never troubled to think about the myriad technicians behind the scenes, the
cameramen and the costume designers and the set-builders and the
electricians and the model-makers and the boom operators, so too here he
chose not to question the means by which Alexandria had been set before him.
It felt real. It was real. When he drank the strong red wine it gave him
a pleasant buzz. If he leaped from the beacon chamber of the
Lighthouse he suspected he would die, though perhaps he would not stay dead
for long: doubtless they had some way of restoring him as often as was
necessary. Death did not seem to be a factor in these people s lives.
By day they saw sights. By night he and Gioia went to parties, in their hotel,
in seaside villas, in the palaces of the high nobility. The usual people were
there all the time, Hawk and Hekna, Aramayne, Stengard and Shelimir,
Nissandra, Asoka, Afonso, Protay. At the parties there were five or
ten temporaries for every citizen, some as mere servants, others as
entertainers or even surrogate guests, mingling freely and a little daringly.
But everyone knew, all the time, who was a citizen and who just a temporary.
Phillips began to think his own status lay somewhere between. Certainly they
treated him with a courtesy that no one ever would give a temporary, and yet
there was a condescension to their manner that told him not simply
that he was not one of them but that he was someone or something of an
altogether different order of existence.
That he was Gioia s lover gave him some standing in their eyes, but not a
great deal: obviously he was always going to be an outsider, a primitive,
ancient and quaint. For that matter he noticed that Gioia herself, though
unquestionably a member of the set, seemed to be regarded as something
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