One of the best-known writers in science fiction, Poul Anderson made his first sale in 1947, while he was still in college, and in the course of his subsequent fifty-plus-year career has published almost a hundred books (in several different fields, as Anderson has written historical novels, fantasies, and mysteries, in addition to science fiction), sold hundreds of short pieces to every conceivable market, and won seven Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and the Tolkein Memorial Award for Life Achievement.
Anderson had trained to be a scientist, taking a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota, but the writing life proved to be more seductive, and he never did get around to working in his original field of choice. Instead, the sales mounted steadily, until by the late fifties and early sixties he may have been one of the most prolific writers in the genre.
In spite of his high output of fiction, he somehow managed to maintain an amazingly high standard of literary quality as well, and by the early-to-mid-1960s was also on his way to becoming one of the most honored and respected writers in the genre. At one point during this period (in addition to nonrelated work, and lesser series such as the Hoka stories he was writing in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson), Anderson was running three of the most popular and prestigious series in science fiction all at the same time: the Technic History series detailing the exploits of the wily trader Nicholas Van Rijn (which includes novels such as The Man Who Counts, The Trouble Twisters, Satan’s World, Mirkheim, The People of the Wind and collections such as Trader to the Stars and The Earth Book of Stormgate); the extremely popular series relating the adventures of interstellar secret agent Dominic Flandry, probably the most successful attempt to cross science fiction with the spy thriller, next to Jack Vance’s Demon Princes novels (the Flandry series includes novels such as A Circus of Hells, The Rebel Worlds, The Day of Their Return, Flandry of Terra, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, A Stone in Heaven, and The Game of Empire and collections such as Agent of the Terran Empire); and, my own personal favorite, a series that took us along on assignment with the agents of the Time Patrol (including the collections The Guardians of Time, Time Patrolman, The Shield of Time, and The Time Patrol).
When you add to this amazing collection of memorable titles the impact of the best of Anderson’s nonseries novels, works such as Brain Wave, Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Night Face, The Enemy Stars, and The High Crusade, all of which were published in addition to the series books, it becomes clear that Anderson dominated the late fifties and the pre-New Wave sixties in a way that only Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke could rival. And, like them, he remained an active and dominant figure right through the seventies and eighties
and is still producing strong new work and turning up on best-seller lists at the end of the decade of the nineties as well.
In the powerful, complex, and lyrical novella that follows, Anderson demonstrates all of his considerable strengths and takes us into the far future for a jolt of that much-talked-about Sense of Wonder that’s as pure and concentrated, and as mind-boggling as anything you’re going to find anywhere in the genre.
Anderson’s other books (among many others) include: The Broken Sword, Tau Zero, A Midsummer Tempest, Orion Shall Rise, The Boat of a Million Years, The Stars Are Also Fire, and Harvest of Stars. His short work had been collected in The Queen Air and Darkness and Other Stories, Fantasy, The Unicorn Trade (with Karen Anderson). Past Times, The Best of Poul Anderson, and Explorations. His most recent books are the novels The Fleet of Stars, Starfarers, and Operation Luna and the retrospective collection All One Universe. Upcoming is a new novel, Genesis, expanded from the story that follows. Anderson lives in Orinda, California, with his wife (and fellow writer) Karen.
Was it her I ought to have loved … ?
—Piet Hein
No human could have shaped the thoughts or uttered them. They had no real beginning, they had been latent for millennium after millennium while the galactic brain was growing. Sometimes they passed from mind to mind, years or decades through space at the speed of light, nanoseconds to receive, comprehend, consider, and send a message on outward. But there was so much else—a cosmos of realities, an infinity of virtualities and abstract creations—that remembrances of Earth were the barest undertone, intermittent and fleeting, among uncounted billions of other incidentals. Most of the grand awareness was directed elsewhere, much of it intent on its own evolution.
For the galactic brain was still in infancy: unless it held itself to be still a-borning. By now its members were strewn from end to end of the spiral arms, out into the halo and the nearer star-gatherings, as far as the Magellanic Clouds. The seeds of fresh ones drifted farther yet; some had reached the shores of the Andromeda.
Each was a local complex of organisms, machines, and their interrelationships. (“Organism” seems best for something that maintains itself, reproduces at need, and possesses a consciousness in a range from the rudimentary to the transcendent, even though carbon compounds are a very small part of its material components and most of its life processes take place directly on the quantum level.) They numbered in the many millions, and the number was rising steeply, also within the Milky Way, as the founders of new generations arrived at new homes.
Thus the galactic brain was in perpetual growth, which from a cosmic viewpoint had barely started. Thought had just had time for a thousand or two journeys across its ever-expanding breadth. It would never absorb
its members into itself; they would always remain individuals, developing along their individual lines. Let us therefore call them not cells, but nodes.
For they were in truth distinct. Each had more uniquenesses than were ever possible to a protoplasmic creature. Chaos and quantum fluctuation assured that none would exactly resemble any predecessor. Environment likewise helped shape the personality—surface conditions (what kind of planet, moon, asteroid, comet?) or free orbit, sun single or multiple (what kinds, what ages?), nebula, interstellar space and its ghostly tides … . Then, too, a node was not a single mind. It was as many as it chose to be, freely awakened and freely set aside, proteanly intermingling and separating again, using whatever bodies and sensors it wished for as long as it wished, immortally experiencing, creating, meditating, seeking a fulfillment that the search itself brought forth.
Hence, while every node was engaged with a myriad of matters, one might be especially developing new realms of mathematics, another composing glorious works that cannot really be likened to music, another observing the destiny of organic life on some world, life which it had perhaps fabricated for that purpose, another—Human words are useless.
Always, though, the nodes were in continuous communication over the light-years, communication on tremendous bandwidths of every possible medium. This was the galactic brain. That unity, that selfhood which was slowly coalescing, might spend millions of years contemplating a thought; but the thought would be as vast as the thinker, in whose sight an eon was as a day and a day was as an eon.
Already now, in its nascence, it affected the course of the universe. The time came when a node fully recalled Earth. That memory went out to others as part of the ongoing flow of information, ideas, feelings, reveries, and who knows what else? Certain of these others decided the subject was worth pursuing, and relayed it on their own message-streams. In this wise it passed through light-years and centuries, circulated, developed, and at last became a decision, which reached the node best able to take action.
Here the event has been related in words, ill-suited though they are to the task. They fail totally when they come to what happened next. How shall they tell of the dialogue of a mind with itself, when that thinking was a progression of quantum flickerings through configurations as intricate as the wave functions, when the computational power and database were so huge that measures become meaningless, when the mind raised aspects of itself to interact like persons until it drew them back into its wholeness, and when everything was said within microseconds of planetary time?
It is impossible, except vaguely and misleadingly. Ancient humans used the language of myth for that which they could not fathom. The sun was a fiery chariot daily crossing heaven, the year a god who died and was reborn, death a punishment for ancestral sin. Let us make our myth concerning the mission to Earth.
Think, then, of the primary aspect of the node’s primary consciousness as if it were a single mighty entity, and name it Alpha. Think of a lesser
manifestation of itself that it had synthesized and intended to release into separate existence as a second entity. For reasons that will become clear, imagine the latter masculine and name it Wayfarer.
All is myth and metaphor, beginning with this absurd nomenclature. Beings like these had no names. They had identities, instantly recognizable by others of their kind. They did not speak together, they did not go through discussion or explanation of any sort, they were not yet “they.” But imagine it.
Imagine, too, their surroundings, not as perceived by their manifold sensors or conceptualized by their awareness and emotions, but as if human sense organs were reporting to a human brain. Such a picture is scarcely a sketch. Too much that was basic could not have registered. However, a human at an astronomical distance could have seen an M2 dwarf star about fifty parsecs from Sol, and ascertained that it had planets. She could have detected signs of immense, enigmatic energies, and wondered.
In itself, the sun was undistinguished. The galaxy held billions like it. Long ago, an artificial intelligence—at that dawn stage of evolution, this was the best phrase—had established itself there because one of the planets bore curious life-forms worth studying. That research went on through the megayears. Meanwhile the ever-heightening intelligence followed more and more different interests: above all, its self-evolution. That the sun would stay cool for an enormous length of time had been another consideration. The node did not want the trouble of coping with great environmental changes before it absolutely must.
Since then, stars had changed their relative positions. This now was the settlement nearest to Sol. Suns closer still were of less interest and had merely been visited, if that. Occasionally a free-space, dirigible node had passed through the neighborhood, but none chanced to be there at this epoch.
Relevant to our myth is the fact that no thinking species ever appeared on the viviferous world. Life is statistically uncommon in the cosmos, sapience almost vanishingly rare, therefore doubly precious.
Our imaginary human would have seen the sun as autumnally yellow, burning low and peacefully. Besides its planets and lesser natural attendants, various titanic structures orbited about it. From afar, they seemed like gossamer or like intricate spiderwebs agleam athwart the stars; most of what they were was force fields. They gathered and focused the energies that Alpha required, they searched the deeps of space and the atom, they transmitted and received the thought-flow that was becoming the galactic brain; what more they did lies beyond the myth.
Within their complexity, although not at any specific location, lived Alpha, its apex. Likewise, for the moment, did Wayfarer.
Imagine a stately voice: “Welcome into being. Yours is a high and, it may be, dangerous errand. Are you willing?”
If Wayfarer hesitated an instant, that was not from fear of suffering harm but from fear of inflicting it. “Tell me. Help me to understand.”
“Sol—” The sun of old Earth, steadily heating since first it took shape,
would continue stable for billions of years before it exhausted the hydrogen fuel at its core and swelled into a red giant. But—
A swift computation. “Yes. I see.” Above a threshold level of radiation input, the geochemical and biochemical cycles that had maintained the temperature of Earth would be overwhelmed. Increasing warmth put increasing amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere, and it is a potent greenhouse gas. Heavier cloud cover, raising the albedo, could only postpone a day of catastrophe. Rising above it, water molecules were split by hard sunlight into hydrogen, which escaped to space, and oxygen, which bound to surface materials. Raging fires released monstrous tonnages of carbon dioxide, as did rocks exposed to heat by erosion in desiccated lands. It is the second major greenhouse gas. The time must come when the last oceans boiled away, leaving a globe akin to Venus; but well before then, life on Earth would be no more than a memory in the quantum consciousness. “When will total extinction occur?”
“On the order of a hundred thousand years futureward.”
Pain bit through the facet of Wayfarer that came from Christian Brannock, who was born on ancient Earth and most passionately loved his living world. Long since had his uploaded mind merged into a colossal oneness that later divided and redivided, until copies of it were integral with awareness across the galaxy. So were the minds of millions of his fellow humans, as unnoticed now as single genes had been in their bodies when their flesh was alive, and yet significant elements of the whole. Ransacking its database, Alpha had found the record of Christian Brannock and chosen to weave him into the essence of Wayfarer, rather than someone else. The judgment was—call it intuitive.
“Can’t you say more closely?” he appealed.
“No,” replied Alpha. “The uncertainties and imponderables are too many. Gaia,” mythic name for the node in the Solar System, “has responded to inquiries evasively when at all.”
“Have … we … really been this slow to think about Earth?”
“We had much else to think about and do, did we not? Gaia could at any time have requested special consideration. She never did. Thus the matter did not appear to be of major importance. Human Earth is preserved in memory. What is posthuman Earth but a planet approaching the postbiological phase?
“True, the scarcity of spontaneously evolved biomes makes the case interesting. However, Gaia has presumably been observing and gathering the data, for the rest of us to examine whenever we wish. The Solar System has seldom had visitors. The last was two million years ago. Since then, Gaia has joined less and less in our fellowship; her communications have grown sparse and perfunctory. But such withdrawals are not unknown. A node may, for example, want to pursue a philosophical concept undisturbed, until it is ready for general contemplation. In short, nothing called Earth to our attention.”
“I would have remembered,” whispered Christian Brannock.
“What finally reminded us?” asked Wayfarer.
“The idea that Earth may be worth saving. Perhaps it holds more than
Gaia knows of—” A pause. “—or has told of. If nothing else, sentimental value.”
“Yes, I understand,” said Christian Brannock.
“Moreover, and potentially more consequential, we may well have experience to gain, a precedent to set. If awareness is to survive the mortality of the stars, it must make the universe over. That work of billions or trillions of years will begin with some small, experimental undertaking. Shall it be now,” the “now” of deathless beings already geologically old, “at Earth?”
“Not small,” murmured Wayfarer. Christian Brannock had been an engineer.
“No,” agreed Alpha. “Given the time constraint, only the resources of a few stars will be available. Nevertheless, we have various possibilities open to us, if we commence soon enough. The question is which would be the best—and, first, whether we should act.
“Will you go seek an answer?”
“Yes,” responded Wayfarer, and “Yes, oh, God damn, yes,” cried Christian Brannock.
A spaceship departed for Sol. A laser accelerated it close to the speed of light, energized by the sun and controlled by a network of interplanetary dimensions. If necessary, the ship could decelerate itself at journey’s end, travel freely about, and return unaided, albeit more slowly. Its cryomagnetics supported a good-sized ball of antimatter, and its total mass was slight. The material payload amounted simply to: a matrix, plus backup, for running the Wayfarer programs and containing a database deemed sufficient; assorted sensors and effectors; several bodies of different capabilities, into which he could download an essence of himself; miscellaneous equipment and power systems; a variety of instruments; and a thing ages forgotten, which Wayfarer had ordered molecules to make at the wish of Christian Brannock. He might somewhere find time and fingers for it.
A guitar.
There was a man called Kalava, a sea captain of Sirsu. His clan was the Samayoki. In youth he had fought well at Broken Mountain, where the armies of Ulonai met the barbarian invaders swarming north out of the desert and cast them back with fearsome losses. He then became a mariner. When the Ulonaian League fell apart and the alliances led by Sirsu and Irrulen raged across the land, year after year, seeking each other’s throats, Kalava sank enemy ships, burned enemy villages, bore treasure and captives off to market.
After the grudgingly made, unsatisfactory Peace of Tuopai, he went into trade. Besides going up and down the River Lonna and around the Gulf of Sirsu, he often sailed along the North Coast, bartering as he went, then out over the Windroad Sea to the colonies on the Ending Islands. At last, with three ships, he followed that coast east through distances
hitherto unknown. Living off the waters and what hunting parties could take ashore, dealing or fighting with the wild tribes they met, in the course of months he and his crews came to where the land bent south. A ways beyond that they found a port belonging to the fabled people of the Shining Fields. They abode for a year and returned carrying wares that at home made them rich.
From his clan Kalava got leasehold of a thorp and good farmland in the Lonna delta, about a day’s travel from Sirsu. He meant to settle down, honored and comfortable. But that was not in the thought of the gods nor in his nature. He was soon quarreling with all his neighbors, until his wife’s brother grossly insulted him and he killed the man. Thereupon she left him. At the clanmoot which composed the matter she received a third of the family wealth, in gold and movables. Their daughters and the husbands of these sided with her.
Of Kalava’s three sons, the eldest had drowned in a storm at sea; the next died of the Black Blood; the third, faring as an apprentice on a merchant vessel far south to Zhir, fell while resisting robbers in sanddrifted streets under the time-gnawed colonnades of an abandoned city. They left no children, unless by slaves. Nor would Kalava, now; no free woman took his offers of marriage. What he had gathered through a hard lifetime would fall to kinfolk who hated him. Most folk in Sirsu shunned him too.
Long he brooded, until a dream hatched. When he knew it for what it was, he set about his preparations, more quietly than might have been awaited. Once the business was under way, though not too far along for him to drop if he must, he sought Ilyandi the skythinker.
She dwelt on Council Heights. There did the Vilkui meet each year for rites and conference. But when the rest of them had dispersed again to carry on their vocation—dream interpreters, scribes, physicians, mediators, vessels of olden lore and learning, teachers of the young—Ilyandi remained. Here she could best search the heavens and seek for the meaning of what she found, on a high place sacred to all Ulonai.
Up the Spirit Way rumbled Kalava’s chariot. Near the top, the trees that lined it, goldfruit and plume, stood well apart, giving him a clear view. Bushes grew sparse and low on the stony slopes, here the dusty green of vasi, there a shaggy hairleaf, yonder a scarlet fireflower. Scorchwort lent its acrid smell to a wind blowing hot and slow off the Gulf. That water shone, tarnished metal, westward beyond sight, under a silver-gray overcast beneath which scudded rags of darker cloud. A rainstorm stood on the horizon, blurred murk and flutters of lightning light.
Elsewhere reached the land, bloomgrain ripening yellow, dun paperleaf, verdant pastures for herdlings, violet richen orchards, tall stands of shipwood. Farmhouses and their outbuildings lay widely strewn. The weather having been dry of late, dust whirled up from the roads winding among them to veil wagons and trains of porters. Regally from its sources eastward in Wilderland flowed the Lonna, arms fanning out north and south.
Sirsu lifted battlemented walls on the right bank of the main stream, tiny in Kalava’s eyes at its distance. Yet he knew it, he could pick out famous works, the Grand Fountain in King’s Newmarket, the friezebordered portico of the Flame Temple, the triumphal column in Victory Square, and he knew where the wrights had their workshops, the merchants their bazaars, the innkeepers their houses for a seaman to find a jug and a wench. Brick, sandstone, granite, marble mingled their colors softly together. Ships and boats plied the water or were docked under the walls. On the opposite shore sprawled mansions and gardens of the Helki suburb, their rooftiles fanciful as jewels.
It was remote from that which he approached.
Below a great arch, two postulants in blue robes slanted their staffs across the way and called, “In the name of the Mystery, stop, make reverence, and declare yourself!”
Their young voices rang high, unawed by a sight that had daunted warriors. Kalava was a big man, wide-shouldered and thick-muscled. Weather had darkened his skin to the hue of coal and bleached nearly white the hair that fell in braids halfway down his back. As black were the eyes that gleamed below a shelf of brow, in a face rugged, battered, and scarred. His mustache curved down past the jaw, dyed red. Traveling in peace, he wore simply a knee-length kirtle, green and trimmed with kivi skin, each scale polished, and buskins; but gold coiled around his arms and a sword was belted at his hip. Likewise did a spear stand socketed in the chariot, pennon flapping, while a shield slatted at the rail and an ax hung ready to be thrown. Four matched slaves drew the car. Their line had been bred for generations to be draft creatures—huge, long-legged, spirited, yet trustworthy after the males were gelded. Sweat sheened over Kalava’s brand on the small, bald heads and ran down naked bodies. Nonetheless they breathed easily and the smell of them was rather sweet.
Their owner roared, “Halt!” For a moment only the wind had sound or motion. Then Kalava touched his brow below the headband and recited the Confession: “What a man knows is little, what he understands is less, therefore let him bow down to wisdom.” Himself, he trusted more in blood sacrifices and still more in his own strength; but he kept a decent respect for the Vilkui.
“I seek counsel from the skythinker Ilyandi,” he said. That was hardly needful, when no other initiate of her order was present.
“All may seek who are not attainted of ill-doing,” replied the senior boy as ceremoniously.
“Ruvio bear witness that any judgments against me stand satisfied.” The Thunderer was the favorite god of most mariners.
“Enter, then, and we shall convey your request to our lady.”
The junior boy led Kalava across the outer court. Wheels rattled loud on flagstones. At the guesthouse, he helped stall, feed, and water the slaves, before he showed the newcomer to a room that in the high season slept two-score men. Elsewhere in the building were a bath, a refectory,
ready food—dried meat, fruit, and flatbread—with richenberry wine. Kalava also found a book. After refreshment, he sat down on a bench to pass the time with it.
He was disappointed. He had never had many chances or much desire to read, so his skill was limited; and the copyist for this codex had used a style of lettering obsolete nowadays. Worse, the text was a chronicle of the emperors of Zhir. That was not just painful to him—oh, Eneio, his son, his last son!—but valueless. True, the Vilkui taught that civilization had come to Ulonai from Zhir. What of it? How many centuries had fled since the desert claimed that realm? What were the descendants of its dwellers but starveling nomads and pestiferous bandits?
Well, Kalava thought, yes, this could be a timely warning, a reminder to people of how the desert still marched northward. But was what they could see not enough? He had passed by towns not very far south, flourishing in his grandfather’s time, now empty, crumbling houses half buried in dust, glassless windows like the eye sockets in a skull.
His mouth tightened. He would not meekly abide any doom.
Day was near an end when an acolyte of Ilyandi came to say that she would receive him. Walking with his guide, he saw purple dusk shade toward night in the east. In the west the storm had ended, leaving that part of heaven clear for a while. The sun was plainly visible, though mists turned it into a red-orange step pyramid. From the horizon it cast a bridge of fire over the Gulf and sent great streamers of light aloft into cloudbanks that glowed sulfurous. A whisltewing passed like a shadow across them. The sound of its flight keened faintly down through air growing less hot. Otherwise a holy silence rested upon the heights.
Three stories tall, the sanctuaries, libraries, laboratories, and quarters of the Vilkui surrounded the inner court with their cloisters. A garden of flowers and healing herbs, intricately laid out, filled most of it. A lantern had been lighted in one arcade, but all windows were dark and Ilyandi stood out in the open awaiting her visitor.
She made a slight gesture of dismissal. The acolyte bowed her head and slipped away. Kalava saluted, feeling suddenly awkward but his resolution headlong within him. “Greeting, wise and gracious lady,” he said.
“Well met, brave captain,” the skythinker replied. She gestured at a pair of confronting stone benches. “Shall we be seated?” It fell short of inviting him to share wine, but it meant she would at least hear him out.
They lowered themselves and regarded one another through the swiftly deepening twilight. Ilyandi was a slender woman of perhaps forty years, features thin and regular, eyes large and luminous brown, complexion pale—like smoked copper, he thought. Cropped short in token of celibacy, wavy hair made a bronze coif above a plain white robe. A green sprig of tekin, held at her left shoulder by a pin in the emblematic form of interlocked circle and triangle, declared her a Vilku.
“How can I aid your venture?” she asked.
He started in surprise. “Huh! What do you know about my plans?” In haste: “My lady knows much, of course.”
She smiled. “You and your saga have loomed throughout these past
decades. And … word reaches us here. You search out your former crewmen or bid them come see you, all privately. You order repairs made to the ship remaining in your possession. You meet with chandlers, no doubt to sound them out about prices. Few if any people have noticed. Such discretion is not your wont. Where are you bound, Kalava, and why so secretively?”
His grin was rueful. “My lady’s not just wise and learned, she’s clever. Well, then, why not go straight to the business? I’ve a voyage in mind that most would call crazy. Some among them might try to forestall me, holding that it would anger the gods of those parts—seeing that nobody’s ever returned from there, and recalling old tales of monstrous things glimpsed from afar. I don’t believe them myself, or I wouldn’t try it.”
“Oh, I can imagine you setting forth regardless,” said Ilyandi half under her breath. Louder: “But agreed, the fear is likely false. No one had reached the Shining Fields by sea, either, before you did. You asked for no beforehand spells or blessings then. Why have you sought me now?”
“This is, is different. Not hugging a shoreline. I—well, I’ll need to get and train a new huukin, and that’s no small thing in money or time.” Kalava spread his big hands, almost helplessly. “I had not looked to set forth ever again, you see. Maybe it is madness, an old man with an old crew in a single old ship. I hoped you might counsel me, my lady.”
“You’re scarcely ready for the balefire, when you propose to cross the Windroad Sea,” she answered.
This time he was not altogether taken aback. “May I ask how my lady knows?”
Ilyandi waved a hand. Catching faint lamplight, the long fingers soared through the dusk like nightswoopers. “You have already been east, and would not need to hide such a journey. South, the trade routes are ancient as far as Zhir. What has it to offer but the plunder of tombs and dead cities, brought in by wretched squatters? What lies beyond but unpeopled desolation until, folk say, one would come to the Burning Lands and perish miserably? Westward we know of a few islands, and then empty ocean. If anything lies on the far side, you could starve and thirst to death before you reached it. But northward—yes, wild waters, but sometimes men come upon driftwood of unknown trees or spy storm-borne flyers of unknown breed—and we have all the legends of the High North, and glimpses of mountains from ships blown off course—” Her voice trailed away.
“Some of those tales ring true to me,” Kalava said. “More true than stories about uncanny sights. Besides, wild huukini breed offshore, where fish are plentiful. I have not seen enough of them there, in season, to account for as many as I’ve seen in open sea. They must have a second shoreline. Where but the High North?”
Ilyandi nodded. “Shrewd, Captain. What else do you hope to find?”
He grinned again. “I’ll tell you after I get back, my lady.”
Her tone sharpened. “No treasure-laden cities to plunder.”
He yielded. “Nor to trade with. Would we not have encountered craft of theirs, or, anyhow, wreckage? However … the farther north, the less
heat and the more rainfall, no? A country yonder could have a mild clime, forestfuls of timber, fat land for plowing, and nobody to fight.” The words throbbed. “No desert creeping in? Room to begin afresh, my lady.”
She regarded him steadily through the gloaming. “You’d come home, recruit people, found a colony, and be its king?”
“Its foremost man, aye, though I expect the kind of folk who’d go will want a republic. But mainly—” His voice went low. He stared beyond her. “Freedom. Honor. A freeborn wife and new sons.”
They were silent awhile. Full night closed in. It was not as murky as usual, for the clearing in the west had spread rifts up toward the zenith. A breath of coolness soughed in leaves, as if Kalava’s dream whispered a promise.
“You are determined,” she said at last, slowly. “Why have you come to me?”
“For whatever counsel you will give, my lady. Facts about the passage may be hoarded in books here.”
She shook her head. “I doubt it. Unless navigation—yes, that is a real barrier, is it not?”
“Always,” he sighed.
“What means of wayfinding have you?”
“Why, you must know.”
“I know what is the common knowledge about it. Craftsmen keep their trade secrets, and surely skippers are no different in that regard. If you will tell me how you navigate, it shall not pass these lips, and I may be able to add something.”
Eagerness took hold of him. “I’ll wager my lady can! We see moon or stars unoften and fitfully. Most days the sun shows no more than a blur of dull light amongst the clouds, if that. But you, skythinkers like you, they’ve watched and measured for hundreds of years, they’ve gathered lore—” Kalava paused. “Is it too sacred to share?”
“No, no,” she replied. “The Vilkui keep the calender for everyone, do they not? The reason that sailors rarely get our help is that they could make little or no use of our learning. Speak.”
“True, it was Vilkui who discovered lodestones … . Well, coasting these waters, I rely mainly on my remembrance of landmarks, or a periplus if they’re less familiar to me. Soundings help, especially if the plumb brings up a sample of the bottom for me to look at the taste. Then in the Shining Fields I got a crystal—you must know about it, for I gave another to the order when I got back—I look through it at the sky and, if the weather be not too thick, I see more closely where the sun is than I can with a bare eye. A logline and hourglass give some idea of speed, a lodestone some idea of direction, when out of sight of land. Sailing for the High North and return, I’d mainly use it, I suppose. But if my lady could tell me of anything else—”
She sat forward on her bench. He heard a certain intensity. “I think I might, Captain. I’ve studied that sunstone of yours. With it, one can estimate latitude and time of day, if one knows the date and the sun’s
heavenly course during the year. Likewise, even glimpses of moon and stars would be valuable to a traveler who knew them well.”
“That’s not me,” he said wryly. “Could my lady write something down? Maybe this old head won’t be too heavy to puzzle it out.”
She did not seem to hear. Her gaze had gone upward. “The aspect of the stars in the High North,” she murmured. “It could tell us whether the world is indeed round. And are our vague auroral shimmers more bright yonder—in the veritable Lodeland—?”
His look followed hers. Three stars twinkled wan where the clouds were torn. “It’s good of you, my lady,” he said, “that you sit talking with me, when you could be at your quadrant or whatever, snatching this chance.”
Her eyes met his. “Yours may be a better chance, Captain,” she answered fiercely. “When first I got the rumor of your expedition, I began to think upon it and what it could mean. Yes, I will help you where I can. I may even sail with you.”
The Gray Courser departed Sirsu on a morning tide as early as there was light to steer by. Just the same, people crowded the dock. The majority watched mute. A number made signs against evil. A few, mostly young, sang a defiant paean, but the air seemed to muffle their strains.
Only lately had Kalava given out what his goal was. He must, to account for the skythinker’s presence, which could not be kept hidden. That sanctification left the authorities no excuse to forbid his venture. However, it took little doubt and fear off those who believed the outer Windroad a haunt of monsters and demons, which might be stirred to plague home waters.
His crew shrugged the notion off, or laughed at it. At any rate, they said they did. Two-thirds of them were crusty shellbacks who had fared under his command before. For the rest, he had had to take what he could scrape together, impoverished laborers and masterless ruffians. All were, though, very respectful of the Vilku.
The Gray Courser was a yalka, broad-beamed and shallow-bottomed, with a low forecastle and poop and a deckhouse amidships. The foremast carried two square sails, the mainmast one square and one fore-and-aft; a short bowsprit extended for a jib. A catapult was mounted in the bows. On either side, two boats hung from davits, aft of the harnessing shafts. Her hull was painted according to her name, with red trim. Alongside swam the huukin, its back a sleek blue ridge.
Kalava had the tiller until she cleared the river mouth and stood out into the Gulf. By then it was full day. A hot wind whipped gray-green water into whitecaps that set the vessel rolling. It whined in the shrouds; timbers creaked. He turned the helm over to a sailor, trod forward on the poop deck, and sounded a trumpet. Men stared. From her cabin below, Ilyandi climbed up to stand beside him. Her white robe fluttered like wings that would fain be asoar. She raised her arms and chanted a spell for the voyage:
“Burning, turning,
The sun-wheel reels
Behind the blindness
Cloud-smoke evokes.
The old cold moon
Seldom tells
Where it lairs
With stars afar.
No men’s omens
Abide to guide
High in the skies.
But lodestone for Lodeland
Strongly longs.”
The sun-wheel reels
Behind the blindness
Cloud-smoke evokes.
The old cold moon
Seldom tells
Where it lairs
With stars afar.
No men’s omens
Abide to guide
High in the skies.
But lodestone for Lodeland
Strongly longs.”
While the deckhands hardly knew what she meant, they felt heartened.
Land dwindled aft, became a thin blue line, vanished into waves and mists. Kalava was cutting straight northwest across the Gulf. He meant to sail through the night, and thus wanted plenty of sea room. Also, he and Ilyandi would practice with her ideas about navigation. Hence after a while the mariners spied no other sails, and the loneliness began to weigh on them.
However, they worked stoutly enough. Some thought it a good sign, and cheered, when the clouds clove toward evening and they saw a horned moon. Their mates were frightened; was the moon supposed to appear by day? Kalava bullied them out of it.
Wind stiffened during the dark. By morning it had raised seas in which the ship reeled. It was a westerly, too, forcing her toward land no matter how close-hauled. When he spied, through scud, the crags of Cape Vairka, the skipper realized he could not round it unaided.
He was a rough man, but he had been raised in those skills that were seemly for a freeman of Clan Samayoki. Though not a poet, he could make an acceptable verse when occasion demanded. He stood in the forepeak and shouted into the storm, the words flung back to his men:
“Northward now veering,
Steering from kin-rift,
Spindrift flung gale-borne,
Sail-borne is daft.
Craft will soon flounder,
Founder, go under—
Thunder this wit-lack!
Sit back and call
All that swim near.
Steer then to northward.”
Steering from kin-rift,
Spindrift flung gale-borne,
Sail-borne is daft.
Craft will soon flounder,
Founder, go under—
Thunder this wit-lack!
Sit back and call
All that swim near.
Steer then to northward.”
Having thus offered the gods a making, he put the horn to his mouth and blasted forth a summons to his huukin.
The great beast heard and slipped close. Kalava took the lead in lowering the shafts. A line around his waist for safety, he sprang over the rail, down onto the broad back. He kept his feet, though the two men who followed him went off into the billows and had to be hauled up. Together they rode the huukin, guiding it between the poles where they could attach the harness.
“I waited too long,” Kalava admitted. “This would have been easier yesterday. Well, something for you to brag about in the inns at home, nay?” Their mates drew them back aboard. Meanwhile the sails had been furled. Kalava took first watch at the reins. Mightily pulled the huukin, tail and flippers churning foam that the wind snatched away, on into the open, unknown sea.
Wayfarer woke.
He had passed the decades of transit shut down. A being such as Alpha would have spent them conscious, its mind perhaps at work on an intellectual artistic creation—to it, no basic distinction—or perhaps replaying an existent piece for contemplation-enjoyment or perhaps in activity too abstract for words to hint at. Wayfarer’s capabilities, though large, were insufficient for that. The hardware and software (again we use myth) of his embodiment were designed principally for interaction with the material universe. In effect, there was nothing for him to do.
He could not even engage in discourse. The robotic systems of the ship were subtle and powerful but lacked true consciousness; it was unnecessary for them, and distraction or boredom might have posed a hazard. Nor could he converse with entities elsewhere; signals would have taken too long going to and fro. He did spend a while, whole minutes of external time, reliving the life of his Christian Brannock element, studying the personality, accustoming himself to its ways. Thereafter he … went to sleep.
The ship reactivated him as is crossed what remained of the Oort Cloud. Instantly aware, he coupled to instrument after instrument and scanned the Solar System. Although his database summarized Gaia’s reports, he deemed it wise to observe for himself. The eagerness, the bittersweet sense of homecoming, that flickered around his calm logic were Christian Brannock’s. Imagine long-forgotten feelings coming astir in you when you return to a scene of your early childhood.
Naturally, the ghost in the machine knew that changes had been enormous since his mortal eyes closed forever. The rings of Saturn were tattered and tenuous. Jupiter had gained a showy set of them from the death of a satellite, but its Red Spot faded away ages ago. Mars was moonless, its axis steeply canted … . Higher resolution would have shown scant traces of humanity. From the antimatter plants inside the orbit of Mercury to the comet harvesters beyond Pluto, what was no more needed had been dismantled or left forsaken. Wind, water, chemistry, tectonics, cosmic stones, spalling radiation, nuclear decay, quantum shifts had patiently
reclaimed the relics for chaos. Some fossils existed yet, and some eroded fragments aboveground or in space; otherwise all was only in Gaia’s memory.
No matter. It was toward his old home that the Christian Brannock facet of Wayfarer sped.
Unaided, he would not have seen much difference from aforetime in the sun. It was slightly larger and noticeably brighter. Human vision would have perceived the light as more white, with the faintest bluish quality. Unprotected skin would have reacted quickly to the increased ultraviolet. The solar wind was stronger, too. But thus far the changes were comparatively minor. This star was still on the main sequence. Planets with greenhouse atmospheres were most affected. Certain minerals on Venus were now molten. Earth—
The ship hurtled inward, reached its goal, and danced into parking orbit. At close range, Wayfarer looked forth.
On Luna, the patterns of maria were not quite the same, mountains were worn down farther, and newer craters had wrecked or obliterated older ones. Rubble-filled anomalies showed where ground had collapsed on deserted cities. Essentially, though, the moon was again the same desolation, seared by day and death-cold by night, as before life’s presence. It had receded farther, astronomically no big distance, and this had lengthened Earth’s rotation period by about an hour. However, as yet it circled near enough to stabilize that spin.
The mother planet offered less to our imaginary eyes. Clouds wrapped it in dazzling white. Watching carefully, you could have seen swirls and bandings, but to a quick glance the cover was well-nigh featureless. Shifting breaks in it gave blue flashes of water, brown flashes of land—nowhere ice or snowfall, nowhere lights after dark; and the radio spectrum seethed voiceless.
When did the last human foot tread this world? Wayfarer searched his database. The information was not there. Perhaps it was unrecorded, unknown. Perhaps that last flesh had chanced to die alone or chosen to die privately.
Certainly it was long and long ago. How brief had been the span of Homo sapiens, from flint and fire to machine intelligence! Not that the end had come suddenly or simply. It took several millennia, said the database: time for whole civilizations to rise and fall and leave their mutant descendants. Sometimes populations decline had reversed in this or that locality, sometimes nations heeded the vatic utterances of prophets and strove to turn history backward—for a while, a while. But always the trend was ineluctable.
The clustered memories of Christian Brannock gave rise to a thought in Wayfarer that was as if the man spoke: I saw the beginning. I did not foresee the end. To me this was the magnificent dawn of hope.
And was I wrong?
The organic individual is mortal. It can find no way to stave off eventual disintegration; quantum chemistry forbids. Besides, if a man could live for a mere thousand years, the data storage capacity of his brain would
be saturated, incapable of holding more. Well before then, he would have been overwhelmed by the geometric increase of correlations, made feebleminded or insane. Nor could he survive the rigors of star travel at any reasonable speed or unearthly environments, in a universe never meant for him.
But transferred into a suitable inorganic structure, the pattern of neuron and molecular traces and their relationships that is his inner self becomes potentially immortal. The very complexity that allows this makes him continue feeling as well as thinking. If the quality of emotions is changed, it is because his physical organism has become stronger, more sensitive, more intelligent and aware. He will soon lose any wistfulness about his former existence. His new life gives him so much more, a cosmos of sensing and experience, memory and thought, space and time. He can multiply himself, merge and unmerge with others, grow in spirit until he reaches a limit once inconceivable; and after that he can become a part of a mind greater still, and thus grow onward.
The wonder was, Christian Brannock mused, that any humans whatsoever had held out, clung to the primitive, refused to see that their heritage was no longer of DNA but of psyche.
And yet—
The half-formed question faded away. His half-formed personhood rejoined Wayfarer. Gaia was calling from Earth.
She had, of course, received notification, which arrived several years in advance of the spacecraft. Her manifold instruments, on the planet and out between planets, had detected the approach. For the message she now sent, she chose to employ a modulated neutrino beam. Imagine her saying: “Welcome. Do you need help? I am ready to give any I can.” Imagine this in a voice low and warm.
Imagine Wayfarer replying, “Thank you, but all’s well. I’ll be down directly, if that suits you.”
“I do not quite understand why you have come. Has the rapport with me not been adequate?”
No, Wayfarer refrained from saying. “I will explain later in more detail than the transmission could carry. Essentially, though, the reason is what you were told. We”—he deemphasized rather than excluded her—“wonder if Earth ought to be saved from solar expansion.”
Her tone cooled a bit. “I have said more than once: No. You can perfect your engineering techniques anywhere else. The situation here is unique. The knowledge to be won by observing the unhampered course of events is unpredictable, but it will be enormous, and I have good cause to believe it will prove of the highest value.”
“That may well be. I’ll willingly hear you out, if you care to unfold your thoughts more fully than you have hitherto. But I do want to make my own survey and develop my own recommendations. No reflection on you; we both realize that no one mind can encompass every possibility, every interpretation. Nor can any one mind follow out every ongoing factor in what it observes; and what is overlooked can prove to be the agent of chaotic change. I may notice something that escaped you. Unlikely,
granted. After your millions of years here, you very nearly are Earth and the life on it, are you not? But … we … would like an independent opinion.”
Imagine her laughing. “At least you are polite, Wayfarer. Yes, do come down. I will steer you in.”
“That won’t be necessary. Your physical centrum is in the arctic region, isn’t it? I can find my way.”
He sensed steel beneath the mildness: “Best I guide you. You recognize the situation as inherently chaotic. Descending on an arbitrary path, you might seriously perturb certain things in which I am interested. Please.”
“As you wish,” Wayfarer conceded.
Robotics took over. The payload module of the spacecraft detached from the drive module, which stayed in orbit. Under its own power but controlled from below, asheen in the harsh spatial sunlight, the cylindroid braked and slanted downward.
It pierced the cloud deck. Wayfarer scanned eagerly. However, this was no sightseeing tour. The descent path sacrificed efficiency and made almost straight for a high northern latitude. Sonic-boom thunder trailed.
He did spy the fringe of a large continent oriented east and west, and saw that those parts were mainly green. Beyond lay a stretch of sea. He thought that he glimpsed something peculiar on it, but passed over too fast, with his attention directed too much ahead, to be sure.
The circumpolar landmass hove in view. Wayfarer compared maps that Gaia had transmitted. They were like nothing that Christian Brannock remembered. Plate tectonics had slowed, as radioactivity and original heat in the core of Earth declined, but drift, subduction, upthrust still went on.
He cared more about the life here. Epoch after epoch, Gaia had described its posthuman evolution as she watched. Following the mass extinction of the Paleotechnic, it had regained the abundance and diversity of a Cretaceous or a Tertiary. Everything was different, though, except for a few small survivals. To Wayfarer, as to Alpha and, ultimately, the galactic brain, those accounts seemed somehow, increasingly, incomplete. They did not quite make ecological sense—as of the past hundred thousand years or so. Nor did all of Gaia’s responses to questions.
Perhaps she was failing to gather full data, perhaps she was misinterpreting, perhaps—It was another reason to send him to her.
Arctica appeared below the flyer. Imagine her giving names to it and its features. As long as she had lived with them, they had their identities for her. The Coast Range of hills lifted close behind the littoral. Through it cut the Remnant River, which had been greater when rains were more frequent but continued impressive. With its tributaries it drained the intensely verdant Bountiful Valley. On the far side of that, foothills edged the steeply rising Boreal Mountains. Once the highest among them had been snowcapped; now their peaks were naked rock. Streams rushed down the flanks, most of them joining the Remnant somewhere as it flowed through its gorges toward the sea. In a lofty vale gleamed the Rainbowl, the big lake that was its headwaters. Overlooking from the north loomed
the mountain Mindhome, its top, the physical centrum of Gaia, lost in cloud cover.
In a way the scenes were familiar to him. She had sent plenty of fullsensory transmissions, as part of her contribution to universal knowledge and thought. Wayfarer could even recall the geological past, back beyond the epoch when Arctica broke free and drifted north, ramming into land already present and thrusting the Boreals heavenward. He could extrapolate the geological future in comparable detail, until a red giant filling half the sky glared down on an airless globe of stone and sand, which would at last melt. Nevertheless, the reality, the physical being here, smote him more strongly than he had expected. His sensors strained to draw in every datum while his vessel flew needlessly fast to the goal.
He neared the mountain. Jutting south from the range, it was not the tallest. Brushy forest grew all the way up its sides, lush on the lower slopes, parched on the heights, where many trees were leafless skeletons. That was due to a recent climatic shift, lowering the mean level of clouds, so that a formerly well-watered zone had been suffering a decades-long drought. (Yes, Earth was moving faster toward its doomsday.) Fire must be a constant threat, he thought. But no, Gaia’s agents could quickly put any out, or she might simply ignore it. Though not large, the area she occupied on the summit was paved over and doubtless nothing was vulnerable to heat or smoke.
He landed. For an instant of planetary time, lengthy for minds that worked at close to light speed, there was communication silence.
He was again above the cloud deck. It eddied white, the peak rising from it like an island among others, into the level rays of sunset. Overhead arched a violet clarity. A thin wind whittered, cold at this altitude. On a level circle of blue-black surfacing, about a kilometer wide, stood the crowded structures and engines of the centrum.
A human would have seen an opalescent dome surrounded by towers, some sheer as lances, some intricately lacy; and silver spiderwebs; and lesser things of varied but curiously simple shapes, mobile units waiting to be dispatched on their tasks. Here and there, flyers darted and hovered, most of them as small and exquisite as hummingbirds (if our human had known hummingbirds). To her the scene would have wavered slightly, as if she saw it through rippling water, or it throbbed with quiet energies, or it pulsed in and out of space-time. She would not have sensed the complex of force fields and quantum-mechanical waves, nor the microscopic and submicroscopic entities that were the major part of it.
Wayfarer perceived otherwise.
Then: “Again, welcome,” Gaia said.
“And again, thank you,” Wayfarer replied. “I am glad to be here.”
They regarded one another, not as bodies—which neither was wearing—but as minds, matrices of memory, individuality, and awareness. Separately he wondered what she thought of him. She was giving him no more of herself than had always gone over the communication lines between the stars. That was: a nodal organism, like Alpha and millions of others, which over the eons had increased its capabilities, while ceaselessly
experiencing and thinking; the ages of interaction with Earth and the life on Earth, maybe shaping her soul more deeply than the existence she shared with her own kind; traces of ancient human uploads, but they were not like Christian Brannock, copies of them dispersed across the galaxy, no, these had chosen to stay with the mother world … .
“I told you I am glad too,” said Gaia regretfully, “but I am not, quite. You question my stewardship.”
“Not really,” Wayfarer protested. “I hope not ever. We simply wish to know better how you carry it out.”
“Why, you do know. As with any of us who is established on a planet, high among my activities is to study its complexities, follow its evolution. On this planet that means, above all, the evolution of its life, everything from genetics to ecology. In what way have I failed to share information with my fellows?”
In many ways, Wayfarer left unspoken. Overtly: “Once we”—here he referred to the galactic brain—“gave close consideration to the matter, we found countless unresolved puzzles. For example—”
What he set forth was hundreds of examples, ranging over millennia. Let a single case serve. About ten thousand years ago, the big continent south of Arctica had supported a wealth of large grazing animals. Their herds darkened the plains and made loud the woods. Gaia had described them in loving detail, from the lyre-curved horns of one genus to the wind-rustled manes of another. Abruptly, in terms of historical time, she transmitted no more about them. When asked why, she said they had gone extinct. She never explained how.
To Wayfarer she responded in such haste that he got a distinct impression she realized she had a made a mistake. (Remember, this is a myth.) “A variety of causes. Climates became severe as temperatures rose—”
“I am sorry,” he demurred, “but when analyzed, the meteorological data you supplied show that warming and desiccation cannot yet have been that significant in those particular regions.”
“How are you so sure?” she retorted. Imagine her angry. “Have any of you lived with Earth for megayears, to know it that well?” Her tone hardened. “I do not myself pretend to full knowledge. A living world is too complex—chaotic. Cannot you appreciate that? I am still seeking comprehension of too many phenomena. In this instance, consider just a small shift in ambient conditions, coupled with new diseases and scores of other factors, most of them subtle. I believe that, combined, they broke a balance of nature. But unless and until I learn more, I will not waste bandwidth in talk about it.”
“I sympathize with that,” said Wayfarer mildly, hoping for conciliation. “Maybe I can discover or suggest something helpful.”
“No. You are too ignorant, you are blind, you can only do harm.”
He stiffened. “We shall see.” Anew he tried for peace. “I did not come in any hostility. I came because here is the fountainhead of us all, and we think of saving it.”
Her manner calmed likewise. “How would you?”
“That is one thing I have come to find out—what the best way is, should we proceed.”
In the beginning, maybe, a screen of planetary dimensions, kept between Earth and sun by an interplay of gravity and electromagnetism, to ward off the fraction of energy that was not wanted. It would only be a temporary expedient, though, possibly not worthwhile. That depended on how long it would take to accomplish the real work. Engines in close orbit around the star, drawing their power from its radiation, might generate currents in its body that carried fresh hydrogen down to the core, thus restoring the nuclear furnace to its olden state. Or they might bleed gas off into space, reducing the mass of the sun, damping its fires but adding billions upon billions of years wherein it scarcely changed any more. That would cause the planets to move outward, a factor that must be taken into account but that would reduce the requirements.
Whatever was done, the resources of several stars would be needed to accomplish it, for time had grown cosmically short.
“An enormous work,” Gaia said. Wayfarer wondered if she had in mind the dramatics of it, apparitions in heaven, such as centuries during which fire-fountains rushed visibly out of the solar disc.
“For an enormous glory,” he declared.
“No,” she answered curtly. “For nothing, and worse than nothing. Destruction of everything I have lived for. Eternal loss to the heritage?”
“Why, is not Earth the heritage?”
“No. Knowledge is. I tried to make that clear to Alpha.” She paused. “To you I say again, the evolution of life, its adaptions, struggles, transformations, and how at last it meets death—those are unforeseeable, and nowhere else in the spacetime universe can there be a world like this for them to play themselves out. They will enlighten us in ways the galactic brain itself cannot yet conceive. They may well open to us whole new phases of ultimate reality.”
“Why would not a life that went on for gigayears do so, and more?”
“Because here I, the observer of the ages, have gained some knowledge of this destiny, some oneness with it—” She sighed. “Oh, you do not understand. You refuse to.”
“On the contrary,” Wayfarer said, as softly as might be, “I hope to. Among the reasons I came is that we can communicate being to being, perhaps more fully than across light-years and certainly more quickly.”
She was silent awhile. When she spoke again, her tone had gone gentle. “More … intimately. Yes. Forgive my resentment. It was wrong of me. I will indeed do what I can to make you welcome and help you learn.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Wayfarer said happily. “And I will do what I can toward that end.”
The sun went under the cloud deck. A crescent moon stood aloft. The wind blew a little stronger, a little chillier.
“But if we decide against saving Earth,” Wayfarer asked, “if it is to go molten and formless, every trace of its history dissolved, will you not mourn?”
“The record I have guarded will stay safe,” Gaia replied.
He grasped her meaning: the database of everything known about this world. It was here in her. Much was also stored elsewhere, but she held the entirety. As the sun became a devouring monster, she would remove her physical plant to the outer reaches of the system.
“But you have done more than passively preserve it, have you not?” he said.
“Yes, of course.” How could an intelligence like hers have refrained? “I have considered the data, worked with them, evaluated them, tried to reconstruct the conditions that brought them about.”
And in the past thousands of years she had become ever more taciturn about that, too, or downright evasive, he thought.
“You had immense gaps to fill in,” he hinted.
“Inevitably. The past, also, is quantum probabilistic. By what roads, what means, did history come to us?”
“Therefore you create various emulations, to see what they lead to,” about which she had told scarcely anything.
“You knew that. I admit, since you force me, that besides trying to find what happened, I make worlds to show what might have happened.”
He was briefly startled. He had not been deliberately trying to bring out any such confession. Then he realized that she had foreseen he was bound to catch scent of it, once they joined their minds in earnest.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why else but for a more complete understanding?”
In his inwardness, Wayfarer reflected: Yes, she had been here since the time of humanity. The embryo of her existed before Christian Brannock was born. Into the growing fullness of her had gone the mindpatterns of humans who chose not to go to the stars but to abide on old Earth. And the years went by in their tens of millions.
Naturally she was fascinated by the past. She must do most of her living in it. Could that be why she was indifferent to the near future, or actually wanted catastrophe?
Somehow that thought did not feel right to him. Gaia was a mystery he must solve.
Cautiously, he ventured, “Then you act as a physicist might, tracing hypothetical configurations of the wave function through space-time—except that the subjects of your experiments are conscious.”
“I do no wrong,” she said. “Come with me into any of those worlds and see.”
“Gladly,” he agreed, unsure whether he lied. He mustered resolution. “Just the same, duty demands I conduct my own survey of the material environment.”
“As you will. Let me help you prepare.” She was quiet for a span. In this thin air, a human would have seen the first stars blink into sight. “But I believe it will be by sharing the history of my stewardship that we truly come to know one another.”
Storm-battered until men must work the pumps without cease, Gray Courser limped eastward along the southern coast of an unknown land. Wind set that direction, for the huukin trailed after, so worn and starved that what remained of its strength must be reserved for sorest need. The shore rolled jewel-green, save where woods dappled it darker, toward a wall of gentle hills. All was thick with life, grazing herds, wings multitudinous overhead, but no voyager had set foot there. Surf dashed in such violence that Kalava was not certain a boat could live through it. Meanwhile they had caught but little rainwater, and what was in the butts had gotten low and foul.
He stood in the bows, peering ahead, Ilyandi at his side. Wind boomed and shrilled, colder than they were used to. Wrack flew beneath an overcast gone heavy. Waves ran high, gray-green, white-maned, foam blown off them in streaks. The ship rolled, pitched, and groaned.
Yet they had seen the sky uncommonly often. Ilyandi believed that clouds—doubtless vapors sucked from the ground by heat, turning back to water as they rose, like steam from a kettle—formed less readily in this clime. Too eagerly at her instruments and reckonings to speak much, she had now at last given her news to the captain.
“Then you think you know where we are?” he asked hoarsely.
Her face, gaunt within the cowl of a sea-stained cloak, bore the least smile. “No. This country is as nameless to me as to you. But, yes, I do think I can say we are no more than fifty daymarches from Ulonai, and it may be as little as forty.”
Kalava’s fist smote the rail. “By Ruvio’s ax! How I hoped for this!” The words tumbled from him. “It means the weather tossed us mainly back and forth between the two shorelines. We’ve not come unreturnably far. Every ship henceforward can have a better passage. See you, she can first go out to the Ending Islands and wait at ease for favoring winds. The skipper will know he’ll make landfall. We’ll have it worked out after a few more voyages, just what lodestone bearing will bring him to what place hereabouts.”
“But anchorage?” she wondered.
He laughed, which he had not done for many days and nights. “As for that—”
A cry from the lookout at the masthead broke through. Down the length of the vessel men raised their eyes. Terror howled.
Afterward no two tongues bore the same tale. One said that a firebolt had pierced the upper clouds, trailing thunder. Another told of a sword as long as the hull, and blood carried on the gale of its flight. To a third it was a beast with jaws agape and three tails aflame … . Kalava remembered a spear among whirling rainbows. To him Ilyandi said, when they were briefly alone, that she thought of a shuttle now seen, now unseen as it wove a web on which stood writing she could not read. All witnesses agreed that it came from over the sea, sped on inland through heaven, and vanished behind the hills.
Men went mad. Some ran about screaming. Some wailed to their gods.
Some cast themselves down on the deck and shivered, or drew into balls and squeezed their eyes shut. No hand at helm or pumps, the ship wallowed about, sails banging, adrift toward the surf, while water drained in through sprung seams and lapped higher in the bilge.
“Avast!” roared Kalava. He sprang down the foredeck ladder and went among the crew. “Be you men? Up on your feet or die!” With kicks and cuffs he drove them back to their duties. One yelled and drew a knife on him. He knocked the fellow senseless. Barely in time, Gray Courser came again under control. She was then too near shore to get the huukin harnessed. Kalava took the helm, wore ship, and clawed back to sea room.
Mutiny was all too likely, once the sailors regained a little courage. When Kalava could yield place to a halfway competent steersman, he sought Ilyandi and they talked awhile in her cabin. Thereafter they returned to the foredeck and he shouted for attention. Standing side by side, they looked down on the faces, frightened or terrified or sullen, of the men who had no immediate tasks.
“Hear this,” Kalava said into the wind. “Pass it on to the rest. I know you’d turn south this day if you had your wish. But you can’t. We’d never make the crossing, the shape we’re in. Which would you liefer have, the chance of wealth and fame or the certainty of drowning? We’ve got to make repairs, we’ve got to restock, and then we can sail home, bringing wondrous news. When can we fix things up? Soon, I tell you, soon. I’ve been looking at the water. Look for yourselves. See how it’s taking on more and more of a brown shade, and how bits of plant stuff float about on the waves. That means a river, a big river, emptying out somewhere nigh. And that means a harbor for us. As for the sight we saw, here’s the Vilku, our lady Ilyandi, to speak about it.”
The skythinker stepped forward. She had changed into a clean white robe with the emblems of her calling, and held a staff topped by a sigil. Though her voice was low, it carried.
“Yes, that was a fearsome sight. It lends truth to the old stories of things that appeared to mariners who ventured, or were blown, far north. But think. Those sailors did win home again. Those who did not must have perished of natural causes. For why would the gods or the demons sink some and not others?
“What we ourselves saw merely flashed overhead. Was it warning us off? No, because if it knew that much about us, it knew we cannot immediately turn back. Did it give us any heed at all? Quite possibly not. It was very strange, yes, but that does not mean it was any threat. The world is full of strangeness. I could tell you of things seen on clear nights over the centuries, fiery streaks down the sky or stars with glowing tails. We of the Vilkui do not understand them, but neither do we fear them. We give them their due honor and respect, as signs from the gods.”
She paused before finishing: “Moreover, in the secret annals of our order lie accounts of visions and wonders exceeding these. All folk know that from time to time the gods have given their word to certain holy men or women, for the guidance of the people. I may not tell how they manifest themselves, but I will say that this today was not wholly unlike.
“Let us therefore believe that the sign granted us is a good one.”
She went on to a protective chant-spell and an invocation of the Powers. That heartened most of her listeners. They were, after all, in considerable awe of her. Besides, the larger part of them had sailed with Kalava before and done well out of it. They bullied the rest into obedience.
“Dismissed,” said the captain. “Come evening, you’ll get a ration of liquor.”
A weak cheer answered him. The ship fared onward.
Next morning they did indeed find a broad, sheltered bay, dun with silt. Hitching up the huukin, they went cautiously in until they spied the river foretold by Kalava. Accompanied by a few bold men, he took a boat ashore. Marshes, meadows, and woods all had signs of abundant game. Various plants were unfamiliar, but he recognized others, among them edible fruits and bulbs. “It is well,” he said. “This land is ripe for our taking.” No lightning bolt struck him down.
Having located a suitable spot, he rowed back to the ship, brought her in on the tide, and beached her. He could see that the water often rose higher yet, so he would be able to float her off again when she was ready. That would take time, but he felt no haste. Let his folk make proper camp, he thought, get rested and nourished, before they began work. Hooks, nets, and weirs would give rich catches. Several of the crew had hunting skills as well. He did himself.
His gaze roved upstream, toward the hills. Yes, presently he would lead a detachment to learn what lay beyond.
Gaia had never concealed her reconstructive research into human history. It was perhaps her finest achievement. But slowly those of her fellows in the galactic brain who paid close attention had come to feel that it was obsessing her. And then of late—within the past hundred thousand years or so—they were finding her reports increasingly scanty, less informative, at last ambiguous to the point of evasiveness. They did not press her about it; the patience of the universe was theirs. Nevertheless they had grown concerned. Especially had Alpha, who as the nearest was in the closest, most frequent contact; and therefore, now, had Wayfarer. Gaia’s activities and attitudes were a primary factor in the destiny of Earth. Without a better understanding of her, the rightness of saving the planet was undecidable.
Surely an important part of her psyche was the history and archeology she preserved, everything from the animal origins to the machine fulfillment of genus Homo. Unnumbered individual minds had uploaded into her, too, had become elements of her being—far more than were in any other node. What had she made of all this over the megayears, and what had it made of her?
She could not well refuse Wayfarer admittance; the heritage belonged to her entire fellowship, ultimately to intelligence throughout the cosmos of the future. Guided by her, he would go through the database of her
observations and activities in external reality, geological, biological, astronomical.
As for the other reality, interior to her, the work she did with her records and emulations of humankind—to evaluate that, some purely human interaction seemed called for. Hence Wayfarer’s makeup included the mind-pattern of a man.
Christian Brannock’s had been chosen out of those whose uploads went starfaring because he was among the earliest, less molded than most by relationships with machines. Vigor, intelligence, and adaptability were other desired characteristics.
His personality was itself a construct, a painstaking refabrication by Alpha, who had taken strands (components, overtones) of his own mind and integrated them to form a consciousness that became an aspect of Wayfarer. No doubt it was not a perfect duplicate of the original. Certainly, while it had all the memories of Christian Brannock’s lifetime, its outlook was that of a young man, not an old one. In addition, it possessed some knowledge—the barest sketch, grossly oversimplified so as not to overload it—of what had happened since its body died. Deep underneath its awareness lay the longing to return to an existence more full than it could now imagine. Yet, knowing that it would be taken back into the oneness when its task was done, it did not mourn any loss. Rather, to the extent that it was differentiated from Wayfarer, it took pleasure in sensations, thoughts, and emotions that it had effectively forgotten.
When the differentiation had been completed, the experience of being human again became well-nigh everything for it, and gladsome, because so had the man gone through life.
To describe how this was done, we must again resort to myth and say that Wayfarer downloaded the Christian Brannock subroutine into the main computer of the system that was Gaia. To describe what actually occurred would require the mathematics of wave mechanics and an entire concept of multileveled, mutably dimensioned reality which it had taken minds much greater than humankind’s a long time to work out.
We can, however, try to make clear that what took place in the system was not a mere simulation. It was an emulation. Its events were not of a piece with events among the molecules of flesh and blood; but they were, in their way, just as real. The persons created had wills as free as any mortal’s, and whatever dangers they met could do harm equal to anything a mortal body might suffer.
Consider a number of people at a given moment. Each is doing something, be it only thinking, remembering, or sleeping—together with all ongoing physiological and biochemical processes. They are interacting with each other and with their surroundings, too; and every element of these surroundings, be it only a stone or a leaf or a photon of sunlight, is equally involved. The complexity seems beyond conception, let alone enumeration or calculation. But consider further: At this one instant, every part of the whole, however minute, is in one specific state; and thus the whole itself is. Electrons are all in their particular quantum shells,
atoms are all in their particular compounds and configurations, energy fields all have their particular values at each particular point—suppose an infinitely fine-grained photograph.
A moment later, the state is different. However slightly, fields have pulsed, atoms have shifted about, electrons have jumped, bodies have moved. But this new state derives from the first according to natural laws. And likewise for every succeeding state.
In crude, mythic language: Represent each variable of one state by some set of numbers; or, to put it in equivalent words, map the state into an n-dimensional phase space. Input the laws of nature. Run the program. The computer model should then evolve from state to state in exact correspondence with the evolution of our original matter-energy world. That includes life and consciousness. The maps of organisms go through oneto-one analogues of everything that the organisms themselves would, among these being the processes of sensation and thought. To them, they and their world are the same as in the original. The question of which set is the more real is meaningless.
Of course, this primitive account is false. The program did not exactly follow the course of events “outside.” Gaia lacked both the data and the capability necessary to model the entire universe, or even the entire Earth. Likewise did any other node, and the galactic brain. Powers of that order lay immensely far in the future, if they would ever be realized. What Gaia could accommodate was so much less that the difference in degree amounted to a difference in kind.
For example, if events on the surface of a planet were to be played out, the stars must be lights in the night sky and nothing else, every other effect neglected. Only a limited locality on the globe could be done in anything like full detail; the rest grew more and more incomplete as distance from the scene increased, until at the antipodes there was little more than simplified geography, hydrography, and atmospherics. Hence weather on the scene would very soon be quite unlike weather at the corresponding moment of the original. This is the simplest, most obvious consequence of the limitations. The totality is beyond reckoning—and we have not even mentioned relativistic nonsimultaneity.
Besides, atom-by-atom modeling was a practical impossibility; statistical mechanics and approximations must substitute. Chaos and quantum uncertainties made developments incalculable in principle. Other, more profound considerations entered as well, but with them language fails utterly.
Let it be said, as a myth, that such creations made their destinies for themselves.
And yet, what a magnificent instrumentality the creator system was! Out of nothingness, it could bring worlds into being, evolutions, lives, ecologies, awarenesses, histories, entire time lines. They need not be fragmentary miscopies of something “real,” dragging out their crippled spans until the nodal intelligence took pity and canceled them. Indeed, they need not derive in any way from the “outside.” They could be works of
imagination—fairy—tale worlds, perhaps, where benevolent gods ruled and magic ran free. Always, the logic of their boundary conditions caused them to develop appropriately, to be at home in their existences.
The creator system was the mightiest device ever made for the pursuit of art, science, philosophy, and understanding.
So it came about that Christian Brannock found himself alive again, young again, in the world that Gaia and Wayfarer had chosen for his new beginning.
He stood in a garden on a day of bright sun and mild, fragrant breezes. It was a formal garden, graveled paths, low-clipped hedges, roses and lilies in geometric beds, around a lichened stone basin where goldfish swam. Brick walls, ivy-heavy, enclosed three sides, a wrought-iron gate in them leading to a lawn. On the fourth side lay a house, white, slateroofed, classically proportioned, a style that to him was antique. Honeybees buzzed. From a yew tree overlooking the wall came the twitter of birds.
A woman walked toward him. Her flower-patterned gown, the voluminous skirt and sleeves, a cameo hung on her bosom above the low neckline, dainty shoes, parasol less an accessory than a completion, made his twenty-third-century singlesuit feel abruptly barbaric. She was tall and well formed. Despite the garments, her gait was lithe. As she neared, he saw clear features beneath high-piled mahogany hair.
She reached him, stopped, and met his gaze. “Benveni, Capita Brannoch,” she greeted. Her voice was low and musical.
“Uh, g’day, Sorita—uh—” he fumbled.
She blushed. “I beg your pardon, Captain Brannock. I forgot and used my Inglay—English of my time. I’ve been—” She hesitated. “—supplied with yours, and we both have been with the contemporary language.”
A sense of dream was upon him. To speak as dryly as he could was like clutching at something solid. “You’re from my future, then?”
She nodded. “I was born about two hundred years after you.”
“That means about eighty or ninety years after my death, right?” He saw an inward shadow pass over her face. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
She turned entirely calm, even smiled a bit. “It’s all right. We both know what we are, and what we used to be.”
“But—”
“Yes, but.” She shook her head. “It does feel strange, being … this … again.”
He was quickly gaining assurance, settling into the situation. “I know. I’ve had practice in it,” light-years away, at the star where Alpha dwelt. “Don’t worry, it’ll soon be quite natural to you.”
“I have been here a little while myself. Nevertheless—young,” she whispered, “but remembering a long life, old age, dying—” She let the parasol fall, unnoticed, and stared down at her hands. Fingers gripped each other. “Remembering how toward the end I looked back and thought, ‘Was that all?’”
He wanted to take those hands in his and speak comfort, but decided he would be wiser to say merely, “Well, it wasn’t all.”
“No, of course not. Not for me, the way it had been once for everyone who ever lived. While my worn-out body was being painlessly terminated, my self-pattern was uploaded—” She raised her eyes. “Now we can’t really recall what our condition has been like, can we?”
“We can look forward to returning to it.”
“Oh, yes. Meanwhile—” She flexed herself, glanced about and upward, let light and air into her spirit, until at last a full smile blossomed. “I am starting to enjoy this. Already I am.” She considered him. He was a tall man, muscular, blond, rugged of countenance. Laughter lines radiated from blue eyes. He spoke in a resonant baritone. “And I will.”
He grinned, delighted. “Thanks. The same here. For openers, may I ask your name?”
“Forgive me!” she exclaimed. “I thought I was prepared. I … came into existence … with knowledge of my role and this milieu, and spent the time since rehearsing in my mind, but now that it’s actually happened, all my careful plans have flown away. I am—was—no, I am Laurinda Ashcroft.”
He offered his hand. After a moment she let him shake hers. He recalled that at the close of his mortal days the gesture was going out of use.
“You know a few things about me, I suppose,” he said, “but I’m ignorant about you and your times. When I left Earth, everything was changing spinjump fast, and after that I was out of touch,” and eventually his individuality went of its own desire into a greater one. This reenactment of him had been given no details of the terrestrial history that followed his departure; it could not have contained any reasonable fraction of the information.
“You went to the stars almost immediately after you’d uploaded, didn’t you?” she asked.
He nodded. “Why wait? I’d always longed to go.”
“Are you glad that you did?”
“Glad is hardly the word.” He spent two or three seconds putting phrases together. Language was important to him; he had been an engineer and occasionally a maker of songs. “However, I am also happy to be here.” Again a brief grin. “In such pleasant company.” Yet what he really hoped to do was explain himself. They would be faring together in search of one another’s souls. “And I’ll bring something new back to my proper existence. All at once I realize how a human can appreciate in a unique way what’s out yonder,” suns, worlds, upon certain of them life that was more wonderful still, nebular fire-clouds, infinity whirling down the throat of a black hole, galaxies like jewelwork strewn by a prodigal through immensity, space-time structure subtle and majestic—everything he had never known, as a man, until this moment, for no organic creature could travel those reaches.
“While I chose to remain on Earth,” she said. “How timid and unimaginative do I seem to you?”
“Not in the least,” he avowed. “You had the adventures you wanted.”
“You are kind to say so.” She paused. “Do you know Jane Austen?”
“Who? No, I don’t believe I do.”
“An early-nineteenth-century writer. She led a quiet life, never went far from home, died young, but she explored people in ways that nobody else ever did.”
“I’d like to read her. Maybe I’ll get a chance here.” He wished to show that he was no—“technoramus” was the word he invented on the spot. “I did read a good deal, especially on space missions. And especially poetry. Homer, Shakespeare, Tu Fu, Bash
, Bellman, Bums, Omar Khayyam, Kipling, Millay, Haldeman—” He threw up his hands and laughed. “Never mind. That’s just the first several names I could grab out of the jumble for purposes of bragging.”
, Bellman, Bums, Omar Khayyam, Kipling, Millay, Haldeman—” He threw up his hands and laughed. “Never mind. That’s just the first several names I could grab out of the jumble for purposes of bragging.”“We have much getting acquainted to do, don’t we? Come, I’m being inhospitable. Let’s go inside, relax, and talk.”
He retrieved her parasol for her and, recollecting historical dramas he had seen, offered her his arm. They walked slowly between the flower beds. Wind lulled, a bird whistled, sunlight baked odors out of the roses.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“And when?” she replied. “In England of the mid-eighteenth century, on an estate in Surrey.” He nodded. He had in fact read rather widely. She fell silent, thinking, before she went on: “Gaia and Wayfarer decided a serene enclave like this would be the best rendezvous for us.”
“Really? I’m afraid I’m as out of place as a toad on a keyboard.”
She smiled, then continued seriously: “I told you I’ve been given familiarity with the milieu. We’ll be visiting alien ones—whatever ones you choose, after I’ve explained what else I know about what she has been doing these many years. That isn’t much. I haven’t seen any other worlds of hers. You will take the leadership.”
“You mean because I’m used to odd environments and rough people? Not necessarily. I dealt with nature, you know, on Earth and in space. Peaceful.”
“Dangerous.”
“Maybe. But never malign.”
“Tell me,” she invited.
They entered the house and seated themselves in its parlor. Casement windows stood open to green parkscape where deer grazed; afar were a thatched farm cottage, its outbuildings, and the edge of grainfields. Cleanly shaped furniture stood among paintings, etchings, books, two portrait busts. A maidservant rustled in with a tray of tea and cakes. She was obviously shocked by the newcomer but struggled to conceal it. When she had left, Laurinda explained to Christian that the owners of this place, Londoners to whom it was a summer retreat, had lent it to their friend, the eccentric Miss Ashcroft, for a holiday.
So had circumstances and memories been adjusted. It was an instance of Gaia directly interfering with the circumstances and events in an emulation. Christian wondered how frequently she did.
“Eccentricity is almost expected in the upper classes,” Laurinda said. “But when you lived you could simply be yourself, couldn’t you?”
In the hour that followed, she drew him out. His birth home was the Yukon Ethnate in the Bering Federation, and to it he often returned while he lived, for its wilderness preserves, mountain solitudes, and uncrowded, uncowed, plainspoken folk. Otherwise the nation was prosperous and progressive, with more connections to Asia and the Pacific than to the decayed successor states east and south. Across the Pole, it was also becoming intimate with the renascent societies of Europe, and there Christian received part of his education and spent considerable of his free time.
His was an era of savage contrasts, in which the Commonwealth of Nations maintained a precarious peace. During a youthful, impulsively taken hitch in the Conflict Mediation Service, he twice saw combat. Later in his life, stability gradually become the norm. That was largely due to the growing influence of the artificial-intelligence network. Most of its consciousness-level units interlinked in protean fashion to form minds appropriate for any particular situation, and already the capabilities of those minds exceeded the human. However, there was little sense of rivalry. Rather, there was partnership. The new minds were willing to advise, but were not interested in dominance.
Christian, child of forests and seas and uplands, heir to ancient civilizations, raised among their ongoing achievements, returned on his vacations to Earth in homecoming. Here were his kin, his friends, woods to roam, boats to sail, girls to kiss, songs to sing and glasses to raise (and a gravesite to visit—he barely mentioned his wife Laurinda; she died before uploading technology was available). Always, though, he went back to space. It had called him since first he saw the stars from a cradle under the cedars. He became an engineer. Besides fellow humans he worked closely with sapient machines, and some of them got to be friends too, of an eerie kind. Over the decades, he took a foremost role in such undertakings as the domed Copernican Sea, the Asteroid Habitat, the orbiting antimatter plant, and finally the Grand Solar Laser for launching interstellar vessels on their way. Soon afterward, his body died, old and full of days; but the days of his mind had barely begun.
“A fabulous life,” Laurinda said low. She gazed out over the land, across which shadows were lengthening. “I wonder if … they … might not have done better to give us a cabin in your wilderness.”
“No, no,” he said. “This is fresh and marvelous to me.”
“We can easily go elsewhere, you know. Any place, any time that Gaia has generated, including ones that history never saw. I’ll fetch our amulets whenever you wish.”
He raised his brows. “Amulets?”
“You haven’t been told—informed? They are devices. You wear yours and give it the command to transfer you.”
He nodded. “I see. It maps an emulated person into different surroundings.”
“With suitable modifications as required. Actually, in many cases it causes a milieu to be activated for you. Most have been in standby mode for a long time. I daresay Gaia could have arranged for us to wish ourselves to wherever we were going and call up whatever we needed likewise. But an external device is better.”
He pondered. “Yes, I think I see why. If we got supernatural powers, we wouldn’t really be human, would we? And the whole idea is that we should be.” He leaned forward on his chair. “It’s your turn. Tell me about yourself.”
“Oh, there’s too much. Not about me, I never did anything spectacular like you, but about the times I lived in, everything that happened to change this planet after you left it—”
She was born here, in England. By then a thinly populated province of Europe, it was a quiet land (“half adream,” she said) devoted to its memorials of the past. Not that creativity was dead; but the arts were rather sharply divided between ringing changes on classic works and efforts to deal with the revelations coming in from the stars. The aesthetic that artificial intelligence was evolving for itself overshadowed both these schools. Nevertheless Laurinda was active in them.
Furthermore, in the course of her work she ranged widely over Earth. (By then, meaningful work for humans was a privilege that the talented and energetic strove to earn.) She was a liaison between the two kinds of beings. It meant getting to know people in their various societies and helping them make their desires count. For instance, a proposed earthquake-control station would alter a landscape and disrupt a community; could it be resisted, or if not, what cultural adjustments could be made? Most commonly, though, she counseled and aided individuals bewildered and spiritually lost.
Still more than him, she was carefully vague about her private life, but he got the impression that it was generally happy. If childlessness was an unvoiced sorrow, it was one she shared with many in a populationregulated world; he had had only a son. She loved Earth, its glories and memories, and every fine creation of her race. At the end of her mortality she chose to abide on the planet, in her new machine body, serving as she had served, until at length she came to desire more and entered the wholeness that was to become Gaia.
He thought he saw why she had been picked for resurrection, to be his companion, out of all the uncounted millions who had elected the same destiny.
Aloud, he said, “Yes, this house is right for you. And me, in spite of everything. We’re both of us more at home here than either of us could be in the other’s native period. Peace and beauty.”
“It isn’t a paradise,” she answered gravely. “This is the real eighteenth century, remember, as well as Gaia could reconstruct the history that led to it,” always monitoring, making changes as events turned incompatible with what was in the chronicles and the archeology. “The household staff are underpaid, undernourished, underrespected—servile. The American
colonists keep slaves and are going to rebel. Across the Channel, a rotted monarchy bleeds France white, and this will bring on a truly terrible revolution, followed by a quarter century of war.”
He shrugged. “Well, the human condition never did include sanity, did it?” That was for the machines.
“In a few of our kind, it did,” she said. “At least, they came close. Gaia thinks you should meet some, so you’ll realize she isn’t just playing cruel games. I have”—in the memories with which she had come into this being—“invited three for dinner tomorrow. It tampers a trifle with their actual biographies, but Gaia can remedy that later if she chooses.” Laurinda smiled. “We’ll have to make an amulet provide you with proper smallclothes and wig.”
“And you provide me with a massive briefing, I’m sure. Who are they?”
“James Cook, Henry Fielding, and Erasmus Darwin. I think it will be a lively evening.”
The navigator, the writer, the polymath, three tiny, brilliant facets of the heritage that Gaia guarded.
Now Wayfarer downloaded another secondary personality and prepared it to go survey Earth.
He, his primary self, would stay on the mountain, in a linkage with Gaia more close and complete than was possible over interstellar distances. She had promised to conduct him through her entire database of observations made across the entire planet during manifold millions of years. Even for those two, the undertaking was colossal. At the speed of their thought, it would take weeks of external time and nearly total concentration. Only a fraction of their awareness would remain available for anything else—a fraction smaller in him than in her, because her intellect was so much greater.
She told him of her hope that by this sharing, this virtually direct exposure to all she had perceived, he would come to appreciate why Earth should be left to its fiery doom. More was involved than scientific knowledge attainable in no other way. The events themselves would deepen and enlighten the galactic brain, as a great drama or symphony once did for humans. But Wayfarer must undergo their majestic sweep through the past before he could feel the truth of what she said about the future.
He had his doubts. He wondered if her human components, more than had gone into any other node, might not have given her emotions, intensified by ages of brooding, that skewed her rationality. However, he consented to her proposal. It accorded with his purpose in coming here.
While he was thus engaged, Christian would be exploring her worlds of history and of might-have-been and a different agent would range around the physical, present-day globe.
In the latter case, his most obvious procedure was to discharge an appropriate set of the molecular assemblers he had brought along and let them multiply. When their numbers were sufficient, they would build
(grow; brew) a fleet of miniature robotic vessels, which would fly about and transmit to him, for study at his leisure, everything their sensors detected.
Gaia persuaded him otherwise: “If you go in person, with a minor aspect of me for a guide, you should get to know the planet more quickly and thoroughly. Much about it is unparalleled. It may help you see why I want the evolution to continue unmolested to its natural conclusion.”
He accepted. After all, a major part of his mission was to fathom her thinking. Then perhaps Alpha and the rest could hold a true dialogue and reach an agreement—whatever it was going to be. Besides, he could deploy his investigators later if this expedition left him dissatisfied.
He did inquire: “What are the hazards?”
“Chiefly weather,” she admitted. “With conditions growing more extreme, tremendous storms spring up practically without warning. Rapid erosion can change contours almost overnight, bringing landslides, flash floods, sudden emergence of tidal bores. I do not attempt to monitor in close detail. That volume of data would be more than I could handle”—yes, she—“when my main concern is the biological phenomena.”
His mind reviewed her most recent accounts to the stars. They were grim. The posthuman lushness of nature was megayears gone. Under its clouds, Earth roasted. The loftiest mountaintops were bleak, as here above the Rainbowl, but nothing of ice or snow remained except dim geological traces. Apart from the waters and a few islands where small, primitive species hung on, the tropics were sterile deserts. Dust and sand borne on furnace winds scoured their rockscapes. North and south they encroached, withering the steppes, parching the valleys, crawling up into the hills. Here and there survived a jungle or a swamp, lashed by torrential rains or wrapped hot and sullen in fog, but it would not be for much longer. Only in the high latitudes did a measure of benignity endure. Arctica’s climates ranged from Floridian—Christian Brannock’s recollections—to cold on the interior heights. South of it across a sea lay a broad continent whose northerly parts had temperatures reminiscent of central Africa. Those were the last regions where life kept any abundance.
“Would you really not care to see a restoration?” Wayfarer had asked her directly, early on.
“Old Earth lives in my database and emulations,” Gaia had responded. “I could not map this that is happening into those systems and let it play itself out, because I do not comprehend it well enough, nor can any finite mind. To divert the course of events would be to lose, forever, knowledge that I feel will prove to be of fundamental importance.”
Wayfarer had refrained from pointing out that life, reconquering a world once more hospitable to it, would not follow predictable paths either. He knew she would retort that experiments of that kind were being conducted on a number of formerly barren spheres, seeded with synthesized organisms. It had seemed strange to him that she appeared to lack any sentiment about the mother of humankind. Her being included the beings of many and many a one who had known sunrise dew beneath a bare foot, murmurs in forest shades, wind-waves in wheatfields from horizon
to horizon, yes, and the lights and clangor of great cities. It was, at root, affection, more than any scientific or technological challenge, that had roused in Gaia’s fellows among the stars the wish to make Earth young again.
Now she meant to show him why she felt that death should have its way.
Before entering rapport with her, he made ready for his expedition. Gaia offered him an aircraft, swift, versatile, able to land on a square meter while disturbing scarcely a leaf. He supplied a passenger for it.
He had brought along several bodies of different types. The one he picked would have to operate independently of him, with a separate intelligence. Gaia could spare a minim of her attention to have telecommand of the flyer; he could spare none for his representative, if he was to range through the history of the globe with her.
The machine he picked was not equivalent to him. Its structure could never have supported a matrix big enough to operate at his level of mentality. Think of it, metaphorically, as possessing a brain equal to that of a high-order human. Into this brain had been copied as much of Wayfarer’s self-pattern as it could hold—the merest sketch, a general idea of the situation, incomplete and distorted like this myth of ours. However, it had reserves it could call upon. Inevitably, because of being most suitable for these circumstances, the Christian Brannock aspect dominated.
So you may, if you like, think of the man as being reborn in a body of metal, silicates, carbon and other compounds, electricity and other forces, photon and particle exchanges, quantum currents. Naturally, this affected not just his appearance and abilities, but his inner life. He was not passionless, far from it, but his passions were not identical with those of flesh. In most respects, he differed more from the long-dead mortal than did the re-creation in Gaia’s emulated worlds. If we call the latter Christian, we can refer to the former as Brannock.
His frame was of approximately human size and shape. Matte bluegray, it had four arms. He could reshape the hands of the lower pair as desired, to be a tool kit. He could similarly adapt his feet according to the demands upon them, and could extrude a spindly third leg for support or extra grip. His back swelled outward to hold a nuclear energy source and various organs. His head was a domed cylinder. The sensors in it and throughout the rest of him were not conspicuous but gave him full-surround information. The face was a holographic screen in which he could generate whatever image he wished. Likewise could he produce every frequency of sound, plus visible light, infrared, and microwave radio, for sensing or for short-range communication. A memory unit, out of which he could quickly summon any data, was equivalent to a large ancient library.
He could not process those data, comprehend and reason about them, at higher speed than a human genius. He had other limitations as well. But then, he was never intended to function independently of equipment.
He was soon ready to depart. Imagine him saying to Wayfarer, with a phantom grin, “Adiós. Wish me luck.”
The response was … absentminded. Wayfarer was beginning to engage with Gaia.
Thus Brannock boarded the aircraft in a kind of silence. To the eye it rested small, lanceolate, iridescently aquiver. The material component was a tissue of wisps. Most of that slight mass was devoted to generating forces and maintaining capabilities, which Gaia had not listed for him. Yet it would take a wind of uncommon violence to endanger this machine, and most likely it could outrun the menace.
He settled down inside. Wayfarer had insisted on manual controls, against emergencies that he conceded were improbable, and Gaia’s effectors had made the modifications. An insubstantial configuration shimmered before Brannock, instruments to read, keypoints to touch or think or think at. He leaned back into a containing field and let her pilot. Noiselessly, the flyer ascended, then came down through the cloud deck and made a leisurely way at five hundred meters above the foothills.
“Follow the Remnant River to the sea,” Brannock requested. “The view inbound was beautiful.”
“As you like,” said Gaia. They employed sonics, his voice masculine, hers—perhaps because she supposed he preferred it—feminine in a low register. Their conversation did not actually go as reported here. She changed course and he beheld the stream shining amidst the deep greens of the Bountiful Valley, under a silver-gray heaven. “The plan, you know, is that we shall cruise about Arctica first. I have an itinerary that should provide you a representative sampling of its biology. At our stops, you can investigate as intensively as you care to, and if you want to stop anyplace else we can do that too.”
“Thank you,” he said. “The idea is to furnish me a kind of baseline, right?”
“Yes, because conditions here are the easiest for life. When you are ready, we will proceed south, across countries increasingly harsh. You will learn about the adaptations life has made. Many are extraordinarily interesting. The galactic brain itself cannot match the creativity of nature.”
“Well, sure. Chaos, complexity … You’ve described quite a few of those adaptations to, uh, us, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but by no means all. I keep discovering new ones. Life keeps evolving.”
As environments worsened, Brannock thought. And nonetheless, species after species went extinct. He got a sense of a rear-guard battle against the armies of hell.
“I want you to experience this as fully as you are able,” Gaia said, “immerse yourself, feel the sublimity of it.”
The tragedy, he thought. But tragedy was art, maybe the highest art that humankind ever achieved. And more of the human soul might well linger in Gaia than in any of her fellow intelligences.
Had she kept a need for catharsis, for pity and terror? What really went on in her emulations?
Well, Christian was supposed to find out something about that. If he could.
Brannock was human enough himself to protest. He gestured at the land below, where the river flowed in its canyons through the coastal hills, to water a wealth of forest and meadow before emptying into a bay above which soared thousands of wings. “You want to watch the struggle till the end,” he said. “Life wants to live. What right have you to set your wish against that?”
“The right of awareness,” she declared. “Only to a being that is conscious do justice, mercy, desire have any existence, any meaning. Did not humans always use the world as they saw fit? When nature finally got protection, that was because humans so chose. I speak for the knowledge and insight that we can gain.”
The question flickered uneasily in him: What about her private emotional needs?
Abruptly the aircraft veered. The turn pushed Brannock hard into the force field upholding him. He heard air crack and scream. The bay fell aft with mounting speed.
The spaceman in him, who had lived through meteoroid strikes and radiation bursts because he was quick, had already acted. Through the optical magnification he immediately ordered up, he looked back to see what the trouble was. The glimpse he got, before the sight went under the horizon, made him cry, “Yonder!”
“What?” Gaia replied as she hurtled onward.
“That back there. Why are you running from it?”
“What do you mean? There is nothing important.”
“The devil there isn’t. I’ve a notion you saw it more clearly than I did.”
Gaia slowed the headlong flight until she well-nigh hovered above the strand and wild surf. He felt a sharp suspicion that she did it in order to dissipate the impression of urgency, make him more receptive to whatever she intended to claim.
“Very well,” she said after a moment. “I spied a certain object. What do you think you saw?”
He decided not to answer straightforwardly—at least, not before she convinced him of her good faith. The more information she had, the more readily she could contrive a deception. Even this fragment of her intellect was superior to his. Yet he had his own measure of wits, and an ingrained stubbornness.
“I’m not sure, except that it didn’t seem dangerous. Suppose you tell me what it is and why you turned tail from it.”
Did she sigh? “At this stage of your knowledge, you would not understand. Rather, you would be bound to misunderstand. That is why I retreated.”
A human would have tensed every muscle. Brannock’s systems went on full standby. “I’ll be the judge of my brain’s range, if you please. Kindly go back.”
“No. I promise I will explain later, when you have seen enough more.”
Seen enough illusions? She might well have many trickeries waiting for him. “As you like,” Brannock said. “Meanwhile, I’ll give Wayfarer a
call and let him know.” Alpha’s emissary kept a minute part of his sensibility open to outside stimuli.
“No, do not,” Gaia said. “It would distract him unnecessarily.”
“He will decide that,” Brannock told her.
Strife exploded.
Almost, Gaia won. Had her entirety been focused on attack, she would have carried it off with such swiftness that Brannock would never have known he was bestormed. But a fraction of her was dealing, as always, with her observing units around the globe and their torrents of data. Possibly it also glanced from time to time—through the quantum shifts inside her—at the doings of Christian and Laurinda. By far the most of her was occupied in her interaction with Wayfarer. This she could not set aside without rousing instant suspicion. Rather, she must make a supremely clever effort to conceal from him that anything untoward was going on.
Moreover, she had never encountered a being like Brannock, human male aggressiveness and human spacefarer’s reflexes blent with sophisticated technology and something of Alpha’s immortal purpose.
He felt the support field strengthen and tighten to hold him immobile. He felt a tide like delirium rush into his mind. A man would have thought it was a knockout anesthetic. Brannock did not stop to wonder. He reacted directly, even as she struck. Machine fast and tiger ferocious, he put her off balance for a crucial millisecond.
Through the darkness and roaring in his head, he lashed out physically. His hands tore through the light-play of control nexuses before him. They were not meant to withstand an assault. He could not seize command, but he could, blindly, disrupt.
Arcs leaped blue-white. Luminances flared and died. Power output continued; the aircraft stayed aloft. Its more complex functions were in ruin. Their dance of atoms, energies, and waves went uselessly random.
The bonds that had been closing on Brannock let go. He sagged to the floor. The night in his head receded. It left him shaken, his senses awhirl. Into the sudden anarchy of everything he yelled, “Stop, you bitch!”
“I will,” Gaia said.
Afterward he realized that she had kept a vestige of governance over the flyer. Before he could wrest it from her, she sent them plunging downward and cut off the main generator. Every force field blinked out. Wind ripped the material frame asunder. Its pieces crashed in the surf. Combers tumbled them about, cast a few on the beach, gave the rest to the undertow.
As the craft fell, disintegrating, Brannock gathered his strength and leaped. The thrust of his legs cast him outward, through a long arc that ended in deeper water. It fountained high and white when he struck. He went down into green depths while the currents swept him to and fro. But he hit the sandy bottom unharmed.
Having no need to breathe, he stayed under. To recover from the shock took him less than a second. To make his assessment took minutes, there in the swirling surges.
Gaia had tried to take him over. A force field had begun to damp the processes in his brain and impose its own patterns. He had quenched it barely in time.
She would scarcely have required a capability of that kind in the past. Therefore she had invented and installed it specifically for him. This strongly suggested she had meant to use it at some point of their journey. When he saw a thing she had not known was there and refused to be fobbed off, he compelled her to make the attempt before she was ready. When it failed, she spent her last resources to destroy him.
She would go that far, that desperately, to keep a secret that tremendous from the stars.
He recognized a mistake in his thinking. She had not used up everything at her beck. On the contrary, she had a planetful of observers and other instrumentalities to call upon. Certain of them must be bound here at top speed, to make sure he was dead—or, if he lived, to make sure of him. Afterward she would feed Wayfarer a story that ended with a regrettable accident away off over an ocean.
Heavier than water, Brannock strode down a sloping sea floor in search of depth.
Having found a jumble of volcanic rock, he crawled into a lava tube, lay fetally curled, and willed his systems to operate as low-level as might be. He hoped that then her agents would miss him. Neither their numbers nor their sensitivities were infinite. It would be reasonable for Gaia—who could not have witnessed his escape, her sensors in the aircraft being obliterated as it came apart—to conclude that the flows had taken his scattered remains away.
After three days and nights, the internal clock he had set brought him back awake.
He knew he must stay careful. However, unless she kept a closer watch on the site than he expected she would—for Wayfarer, in communion with her, might too readily notice that she was concentrating on one little patch of the planet—he dared now move about. His electronic senses ought to warn him of any robot that came into his vicinity, even if it was too small for eyes to see. Whether he could then do anything about it was a separate question.
First he searched the immediate area. Gaia’s machines had removed those shards of the wreck that they found, but most were strewn over the bottom, and she had evidently not thought it worthwhile, or safe, to have them sought out. Nearly all of what he came upon was in fact scrap. A few units were intact. The one that interested him had the physical form of a small metal sphere. He tracked it down by magnetic induction. Having taken it to a place ashore, hidden by trees from the sky, he studied it. With his tool-hands he traced the (mythic) circuitry within and identified it as a memory bank. The encoding was familiar to his Wayfarer aspect. He extracted the information and stored it in his own database.
A set of languages. Human languages, although none he had ever heard of. Yes, very interesting.
“I’d better get hold of those people,” he muttered. In the solitude of wind, sea, and wilderness, he had relapsed into an ancient habit of occasionally thinking aloud. “Won’t likely be another chance. Quite a piece of news for Wayfarer.” If he came back, or at least got within range of his transmitter.
He set forth afoot, along the shore toward the bay where the Remnant River debouched. Maybe that which he had seen would be there yet, or traces of it.
He wasn’t sure, everything had happened so fast, but he thought it was a ship.
Three days—olden Earth days of twenty-four hours, cool sunlight, now and then a rainshower leaving pastures and hedgerows asparkle, rides through English lanes, rambles through English towns, encounters with folk, evensong in a Norman church, exploration of buildings and books, long talks and companionable silences—wrought friendship. In Christian it also began to rouse kindlier feelings toward Gaia. She had resurrected Laurinda, and Laurinda was a part of her, as he was of Wayfarer and of Alpha and more other minds across the galaxy than he could number. Could the rest of Gaia’s works be wrongful?
No doubt she had chosen and planned as she did in order to get this reaction from him. It didn’t seem to matter.
Nor did the primitive conditions of the eighteenth century matter to him or to Laurinda. Rather, their everyday experiences were something refreshingly new, and frequently the occasion of laughter. What did become a bit difficult for him was to retire decorously to his separate room each night.
But they had their missions: his to see what was going on in this reality and afterward upload into Wayfarer; hers to explain and justify it to him as well as a mortal was able. Like him, she kept a memory of having been one with a nodal being. The memory was as dim and fragmentary as his, more a sense of transcendence than anything with a name or form, like the afterglow of a religious vision long ago. Yet it pervaded her personality, the unconscious more than the conscious; and it was her relationship to Gaia, as he had his to Wayfarer and beyond that to Alpha. In a limited, mortal, but altogether honest and natural way, she spoke for the node of Earth.
By tacit consent, they said little about the purpose and simply enjoyed their surroundings and one another, until the fourth morning. Perhaps the weather whipped up a lifetime habit of duty. Wind gusted and shrilled around the house, rain blinded the windows, there would be no going out even in a carriage. Indoors a fire failed to hold dank chill at bay. Candlelight glowed cozily on the breakfast table, silverware and china sheened, but shadows hunched thick in every corner.
He took a last sip of coffee, put the cup down, and ended the words he had been setting forth: “Yes, we’d better get started. Not that I’ve any clear notion of what to look for. Wayfarer himself doesn’t.” Gaia had been so vague about so much. Well, Wayfarer was now (whatever “now” meant) in rapport with her, seeking an overall, cosmic view of—how many millions of years on this planet?
“Why, you know your task,” Laurinda replied. “You’re to find out the nature of Gaia’s interior activity, what it means in moral—in human terms.” She straightened in her chair. Her tone went resolute. “We are human, we emulations. We think and act, we feel joy and pain, the same as humans always did.”
Impulse beckoned; it was his wont to try to lighten moods. “And,” he added, “make new generations of people, the same as humans always did.”
A blush crossed the fair countenance. “Yes,” she said. Quickly: “Of course, most of what’s … here … is nothing but database. Archives, if you will. We might start by visiting one or two of those reconstructions.”
He smiled, the heaviness lifting from him. “I’d love to. Any suggestions?”
Eagerness responded. “The Acropolis of Athens? As it was when new? Classical civilization fascinated me.” She tossed her head. “Still does, by damn.”
“Hm.” He rubbed his chin. “From what I learned in my day, those old Greeks were as tricky, quarrelsome, shortsighted a pack of political animals as ever stole an election or bullied a weaker neighbor. Didn’t Athens finance the building of the Parthenon by misappropriating the treasury of the Delian League?”
“They were human,” she said, almost too low for him to hear above the storm-noise. “But what they made—”
“Sure,” he answered. “Agreed. Let’s go.”
In perception, the amulets were silvery two-centimeter discs that hung on a user’s breast, below garments. In reality-outer-viewpoint reality—they were powerful, subtle programs with intelligences of their own. Christian wondered about the extent to which they were under the direct control of Gaia, and how closely she was monitoring him.
Without thinking, he took Laurinda’s hand. Her fingers clung to his. She looked straight before her, though, into the flickery fire, while she uttered their command.
Immediately, with no least sensation of movement, they were on broad marble steps between outworks, under a cloudless heaven, in flooding hot radiance. From the steepest, unused hill slopes, a scent of wild thyme drifted up through silence, thyme without bees to quicken it or hands to pluck it. Below reached the city, sun-smitten house roofs, open agoras, colonnaded temples. In this clear air Brannock imagined he could well-nigh make out the features on the statues.
After a time beyond time, the visitors moved upward, still mute, still
hand in hand, to where winged Victories lined the balustrade before the sanctuary of Nike Apteros. Their draperies flowed to movement he did not see and wind he did not feel. One was tying her sandals … .
For a long while the two lingered at the Propylaea, its porticos, Ionics, Dorics, paintings, votive tablets in the Pinakotheka. They felt they could have stayed past sunset, but everything else awaited them, and they knew mortal enthusiasm as they would presently know mortal weariness. Colors burned … .
The stone flowers and stone maidens at the Erechtheum …
Christian had thought of the Parthenon as exquisite; so it was in the pictures and models he had seen, while the broken, chemically gnawed remnants were merely to grieve over. Confronting it here, entering it, he discovered its sheer size and mass. Life shouted in the friezes, red, blue, gilt; then in the dusk within, awesomeness and beauty found their focus in the colossal Athene of Pheidias.
—Long afterward, he stood with Laurinda on the Wall of Kimon, above the Asclepium and Theater of Dionysus. A westering sun made the city below intricate with shadows, and coolth breathed out of the east. Hitherto, when they spoke it had been, illogically, in near whispers. Now they felt free to talk openly, or did they feel a need?
He shook his head. “Gorgeous,” he said, for lack of anything halfway adequate. “Unbelievable.”
“It was worth all the wrongdoing and war and agony,” she murmured. “Wasn’t it?”
For the moment, he shied away from deep seriousness. “I didn’t expect it to be this, uh, gaudy—no, this bright.”
“They painted their buildings. That’s known.”
“Yes, I knew too. But were later scholars sure of just what colors?”
“Scarcely, except where a few traces were left. Most of this must be Gaia’s conjecture. The sculpture especially, I suppose. Recorded history saved only the barest description of the Athene, for instance.” Laurinda paused. Her gaze went outward to the mountains. “But surely this—in view of everything she has, all the information, and being able to handle it all at once and, and understand the minds that were capable of making it—surely this is the most likely reconstruction. Or the least unlikely.”
“She may have tried variations. Would you like to go see?”
“No, I, I think not, unless you want to. This has been overwhelming, hasn’t it?” She hesitated. “Besides, well—”
He nodded. “Yeh.” With a gesture at the soundless, motionless, smokeless city below and halidoms around: “Spooky. At best, a museum exhibit. Not much to our purpose, I’m afraid.”
She met his eyes. “Your purpose. I’m only a—not even a guide, really. Gaia’s voice to you? No, just a, an undertone of her, if that.” The smile that touched her lips was somehow forlorn. “I suspect my main reason for existing again is to keep you company.”
He laughed and offered her a hand, which for a moment she clasped tightly. “I’m very glad of the company, eccentric Miss Ashcroft.”
Her smile warmed and widened. “Thank you, kind sir. And I am glad to be … alive … today. What should we do next?”
“Visit some living history, I think,” he said. “Why not Hellenic?”
She struck her palms together. “The age of Pericles!”
He frowned. “Well, I don’t know about that. The Peloponnesian War, the plague—and foreigners like us, barbarians, you a woman, we wouldn’t be too well received, would we?”
He heard how she put disappointment aside and looked forward anew. “When and where, then?”
“Aristotle’s time? If I remember rightly, Greece was peaceful then, no matter how much hell Alexander was raising abroad, and the society was getting quite cosmopolitan. Less patriarchal, too. Anyhow, Aristotle’s always interested me. In a way, he was one of the earliest scientists.”
“We had better inquire first. But before that, let’s go home to a nice hot cup of tea!”
They returned to the house at the same moment as they left it, to avoid perturbing the servants. There they found that lack of privacy joined with exhaustion to keep them from speaking of anything other than trivia. However, that was all right; they were good talkmates.
The next morning, which was brilliant, they went out into the garden and settled on a bench by the fish basin. Drops of rain glistened on flowers, whose fragrance awoke with the strengthening sunshine. Nothing else was in sight or earshot. This time Christian addressed the amulets. He felt suddenly heavy around his neck, and the words came out awkwardly. He need not have said them aloud, but it helped him give shape to his ideas.
The reply entered directly into their brains. He rendered it to himself, irrationally, as in a dry, professorish tenor:
“Only a single Hellenic milieu has been carried through many generations. It includes the period you have in mind. It commenced at the point of approximately 500 B.C., with an emulation as historically accurate as possible.”
But nearly everyone then alive was lost to history, thought Christian. Except for the few who were in the chronicles, the whole population must needs be created out of Gaia’s imagination, guided by knowledge and logic; and those few named persons were themselves almost entirely new-made, their very DNA arbitrarily laid out.
“The sequence was revised as necessary,” the amulet continued.
Left to itself, that history would soon have drifted completely away from the documents, and eventually from the archaeology, Christian thought. Gaia saw this start to happen, over and over. She rewrote the program—events, memories, personalities, bodies, births, life spans, deaths—and let it resume until it deviated again. Over and over. The morning felt abruptly cold.
“Much was learned on every such occasion,” said the amulet. “The situation appeared satisfactory by the time Macedonian hegemony was
inevitable, and thereafter the sequence was left to play itself out undisturbed. Naturally, it still did not proceed identically with the historical past. Neither Aristotle nor Alexander were born. Instead, a reasonably realistic conqueror lived to a ripe age and bequeathed a reasonably well constructed empire. He did have a Greek teacher in his youth, who had been a disciple of Plato.”
“Who was that?” Christian asked out of a throat gone dry.
“His name was Eumenes. In many respects he was equivalent to Aristotle, but had a more strongly empirical orientation. This was planned.”
Eumenes was specially ordained, then. Why?
“If we appear and meet him, w-won’t that change what comes after?”
“Probably not to any significant extent. Or if it does, that will not matter. The original sequence is in Gaia’s database. Your visit will, in effect, be a reactivation.”
“Not one for your purpose,” Laurinda whispered into the air. “What was it? What happened in that world?”
“The objective was experimental, to study the possible engendering of a scientific-technological revolution analogous to that of the seventeenth century A.D., with accompanying social developments that might foster the evolution of a stable democracy.”
Christian told himself furiously to pull out of his funk. “Did it?” He challenged.
The reply was calm. “Do you wish to study it?”
Christian had not expected any need to muster his courage. After a minute he said, word by slow word, “Yes, I think that might be more useful than meeting your philosopher. Can you show us the outcome of the experiment?”
Laurinda joined in: “Oh, I know there can’t be any single, simple picture. But can you bring us to a, a scene that will give an impression—a kind of epitome—like, oh, King John at Runnymede or Elizabeth the First knighting Francis Drake or Einstein and Bohr talking about the state of their world?”
“An extreme possibility occurs in a year corresponding to your 894 A.D.,” the amulet told him. “I suggest Athens as the locale. Be warned, it is dangerous. I can protect you, or remove you, but human affairs are inherently chaotic and this situation is more unpredictable than most. It could escape my control.”
“I’ll go,” Christian snapped.
“And I,” Laurinda said.
He glared at her. “No. You heard. It’s dangerous.”
Gone quite calm, she stated, “It is necessary for me. Remember, I travel on behalf of Gaia.”
Gaia, who let the thing come to pass.
Transfer.
For an instant, they glanced at themselves. They knew the amulets would convert their garb to something appropriate. She wore a gray gown, belted, reaching halfway down her calves, with shoes, stockings,
and a scarf over hair coiled in braids. He was in tunic, trousers, and boots of the same coarse materials, a sheath knife at his hip and a long-barreled firearm slung over his back.
Their surroundings smote them. They stood in a Propylaea that was scarcely more than tumbled stones and snags of sculpture. The Parthenon was not so shattered, but scarred, weathered, here and there buttressed with brickwork from which thrust the mouths of rusted cannon. All else was ruin. The Erechtheum looked as if it had been quarried. Below them, the city burned. They could see little of it through smoke that stained the sky and savaged their nostrils. A roar of conflagration reached them, and bursts of gunfire.
A woman came running out of the haze, up the great staircase. She was young, dark-haired, unkempt, ragged, begrimed, desperate. A man came after, a burly blond in a fur cap, dirty red coat, and leather breeches. Beneath a sweeping mustache, he leered. He too was armed, murderously big knife, firearm in right hand.
The woman saw Christian looming before her. “Voetho!” she screamed. “Onome Theou, kyrie, voetho!” She caught her foot against a step and fell. Her pursuer stopped before she could rise and stamped a boot down on her back.
Through his amulet, Christian understood the cry. “Help, in God’s name, sir, help!” Fleetingly he thought the language must be a debased Greek. The other man snarled at him and brought weapon to shoulder.
Christian had no time to unlimber his. While the stranger was in motion, he bent, snatched up a rock—a fragment of a marble head—and cast. It thudded against the stranger’s nose. He lurched back, his face a sudden red grotesque. His gun clattered to the stairs. He howled.
With the quickness that was his in emergencies, Christian rejected grabbing his own firearm. He had seen that its lock was of peculiar design. He might not be able to discharge it fast enough. He drew his knife and lunged downward. “Get away, you swine, before I open your guts!” he shouted. The words came out in the woman’s language.
The other man retched, turned, and staggered off. Well before he reached the bottom of the hill, smoke had swallowed sight of him. Christian halted at the woman’s huddled form and sheathed his blade. “Here, sister,” he said, offering his hand, “come along. Let’s get to shelter. There may be more of them.”
She crawled to her feet, gasping, leaned heavily on his arm, and limped beside him up to the broken gateway. Her features Mediterranean, she was doubtless a native. She looked half starved. Laurinda came to her side. Between them, the visitors got her into the portico of the Parthenon. Beyond a smashed door lay an interior dark and empty of everything but litter. It would be defensible if necessary.
An afterthought made Christian swear at himself. He went back for the enemy’s weapon. When he returned, Laurinda sat with her arms around the woman, crooning comfort. “There, darling, there, you’re safe with us. Don’t be afraid. We’ll take care of you.”
The fugitive lifted big eyes full of night. “Are … you … angels from heaven?” she mumbled.
“No, only mortals like you,” Laurinda answered through tears. That was not exactly true, Christian thought; but what else could she say? “We do not even know your name.”
“I am … Zoe … Comnenaina—”
“Bone-dry, I hear from your voice.” Laurinda lifted her head. Her lips moved in silent command. A jug appeared on the floor, bedewed with cold. “Here is water. Drink.”
Zoe had not noticed the miracle. She snatched the vessel and drained it in gulp after gulp. When she was through she set it down and said, “hank you,” dully but with something of strength and reason again in her.
“Who was that after you?” Christian asked.
She drew knees to chin, hugged herself, stared before her, and replied in a dead voice, “A Flemic soldier. They broke into our house. I saw them stab my father. They laughed and laughed. I ran out the back and down the streets. I thought I could hide on the Acropolis. Nobody comes here anymore. That one saw me and came after. I suppose he would have killed me when he was done. That would have been better than if he took me away with him.”
Laurinda nodded. “An invading army,” she said as tonelessly. “They took the city and now they are sacking it.”
Christian thumped the butt of his gun down on the stones. “Does Gaia let this go on?” he grated.
Laurinda lifted her gaze to his. It pleaded. “She must. Humans must have free will. Otherwise they’re puppets.”
“But how did they get into this mess?” Christian demanded. “Explain it if you can!”
The amulet(s) replied with the same impersonality as before:
“The Hellenistic era developed scientific method. This, together with the expansion of commerce and geographical knowledge, produced an industrial revolution and parliamentary democracy. However, neither the science nor the technology progressed beyond an approximate equivalent of your eighteenth century. Unwise social and fiscal policies led to breakdown, dictatorship, and repeated warfare.”
Christian’s grin bared teeth. “That sounds familiar.”
“Alexander Tytler said it in our eighteenth century,” Laurinda muttered unevenly. “No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that they could vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.” Aloud: “Christian, they were only human.”
Zoe hunched, lost in her sorrow.
“You oversimplify,” stated the amulet voice. “But this is not a history lesson. To continue the outline, inevitably engineering information spread to the warlike barbarians of northern Europe and western Asia. If you question why they were granted existence, reflect that a population confined to the littoral of an inland sea could not model any possible
material world. The broken-down societies of the South were unable to change their characters, or prevail over them, or eventually hold them off. The end results are typified by what you see around you.”
“The Dark Ages,” Christian said dully. “What happens after them? What kind of new civilization?”
“None. This sequence terminates in one more of its years.”
“Huh?” he gasped. “Destroyed?”
“No. The program ceases to run. The emulation stops.”
“My God! Those millions of lives—as real as, as mine—”
Laurinda stood up and held her arms out into the fouled air. “Does Gaia know, then, does Gaia know this time line would never get any happier?” she cried.
“No,” said the voice in their brains. “Doubtless the potential of further progress exists. However, you forget that while Gaia’s capacities are large, they are not infinite. The more attention she devotes to one history, the details of its planet as well as the length of its course, the less she has to give to others. The probability is too small that this sequence will lead to a genuinely new form of society.”
Slowly, Laurinda nodded. “I see.”
“I don’t,” Christian snapped. “Except that Gaia’s inhuman.”
Laurinda shook her head and laid a hand on his. “No, not that. Posthuman. We built the first artificial intelligences.” After a moment: “Gaia isn’t cruel. The universe often is, and she didn’t create it. She’s seeking something better than blind chance can make.”
“Maybe.” His glance fell on Zoe. “Look, something’s got to be done for this poor soul. Never mind if we change the history. It’s due to finish soon anyway.”
Laurinda swallowed and wiped her eyes. “Give her her last year in peace,” she said into the air. “Please.”
Objects appeared in the room behind the doorway. “Here are food, wine, clean water,” said the unheard voice. “Advise her to return downhill after dark, find some friends, and lead them back. A small party, hiding in these ruins, can hope to survive until the invaders move on.”
“It isn’t worthwhile doing more, is it?” Christian said bitterly. “Not to you.”
“Do you wish to end your investigation?”
“No, be damned if I will.”
“Nor I,” said Laurinda. “But when we’re through here, when we’ve done the pitiful little we can for this girl, take us home.”
Peace dwelt in England. Clouds towered huge and white, blue-shadowed from the sunlight spilling past them. Along the left side of a lane, poppies blazed in a grainfield goldening toward harvest. On the right stretched the manifold greens of a pasture where cattle drowsed beneath a broadcrowned oak. Man and woman rode side by side. Hoofs thumped softly, saddle leather creaked, the sweet smell of horse mingled with herbal pungencies, a blackbird whistled.
“No, I don’t suppose Gaia will ever restart any program she’s terminated,” Laurinda said. “But it’s no worse than death, and death is seldom that easy.”
“The scale of it,” Christian protested, then sighed. “But I daresay Wayfarer will tell me I’m being sloppy sentimental, and when I’ve rejoined him I’ll agree.” Wryness added that that had better be true. He would no longer be separate, an avatar; he would be one with a far greater entity, which would in its turn remerge with a greater still.
“Without Gaia, they would never have existed, those countless lives, generation after generation after generation,” Laurinda said. “Their worst miseries they brought on themselves. If any of them are ever to find their way to something better, truly better, she has to keep making fresh starts.”
“Mm, I can’t help remembering all the millennialists and utopians who slaughtered people wholesale, or tortured them or threw them into concentration camps, if their behavior didn’t fit the convenient attainment of the inspired vision.”
“No, no, it’s not like that! Don’t you see? She gives them their freedom to be themselves and, and to become more.”
“Seems to me she adjusts the parameters and boundary conditions till the setup looks promising before she lets the experiment run.” Christian frowned. “But I admit, it isn’t believable that she does it simply because she’s … bored and lonely. Not when the whole fellowship of her kind is open to her. Maybe we haven’t the brains to know what her reasons are. Maybe she’s explaining them to Wayfarer, or directly to Alpha,” although communication among the stars would take decades at least.
“Do you want to go on nonetheless?” she asked.
“I said I do. I’m supposed to. But you?”
“Yes. I don’t want to, well, fail her.”
“I’m sort of at a loss what to try next, and not sure it’s wise to let the amulets decide.”
“But they can help us, counsel us.” Laurinda drew breath. “Please. If you will. The next world we go to—could it be gentle? That horror we saw—”
He reached across to take her hand. “Exactly what I was thinking. Have you a suggestion?”
She nodded. “York Minster. It was in sad condition when I … lived … but I saw pictures and—It was one of the loveliest churches ever built, in the loveliest old town.”
“Excellent idea. Not another lifeless piece of archive, though. A complete environment.” Christian pondered. “We’ll inquire first, naturally, but offhand I’d guess the Edwardian period would suit us well. On the Continent they called it the belle époque.”
“Splendid!” she exclaimed. Already her spirits were rising anew.
Transfer.
They arrived near the west end, in the south aisle.
Worshippers were few, scattered closer to the altar rail. In the dimness, under the glories of glass and soaring Perpendicular arches, their advent
went unobserved. Windows in that direction glowed more vividly—rose, gold, blue, the cool gray-green of the Five Sisters—than the splendor above their backs; it was a Tuesday morning in June. Incense wove its odor through the ringing chant from the choir.
Christian tautened. “That’s Latin,” he whispered. “In England, 1900?” He glanced down at his garments and hers, and peered ahead. Shirt, coat, trousers for him, with a hat laid on the pew; ruffled blouse, ankle-length gown, and lacy bonnet for her; but—“The clothes aren’t right either.”
“Hush,” Laurinda answered as low. “Wait. We were told this wouldn’t be our 1900. Here may be the only York Minster in all of Gaia.”
He nodded stiffly. It was clear that the node had never attempted a perfect reproduction of any past milieu—impossible, and pointless to boot. Often, though not necessarily always, she took an approximation as a starting point; but it never went on to the same destiny. What were the roots of this day?
“Relax,” Laurinda urged. “It’s beautiful.”
He did his best, and indeed the Roman Catholic mass at the hour of tierce sang some tranquility into his heart.
After the Nunc Dimittis, when clergy and laity had departed, the two could wander around and savor. Emerging at last, they spent a while looking upon the carven tawny limestone of the front. This was no Parthenon; it was a different upsurging of the same miracle. But around it lay a world to discover. With half a sigh and half a smile, they set forth.
The delightful narrow “gates,” walled in with half-timbered houses, lured them. More modern streets and buildings, above all the people therein, captured them. York was a living town, a market town, core of a wide hinterland, node of a nation. It racketed, it bustled.
The half smile faded. A wholly foreign setting would not have felt as wrong as one that was half homelike.
Clothing styles were not radically unlike what pictures and historical dramas had once shown; but they were not identical. The English chatter was in no dialect of English known to Christian or Laurinda, and repeatedly they heard versions of German. A small, high-stacked steam locomotive pulled a train into a station of somehow Teutonic architecture. No early automobiles stuttered along the thoroughfares. Horse-drawn vehicles moved crowdedly, but the pavements were clean and the smell of dung faint because the animals wore a kind of diapers. A flag above a post office (?), fluttering in the wind, displayed a cross of St. Andrew on which was superimposed a two-headed gold eagle. A man with a megaphone bellowed at the throng to stand aside and make way for a military squadron. In blue uniforms, rifles on shoulders, they quick-marched to commands barked in German. Individual soldiers, presumably on leave, were everywhere. A boy went by, shrilly hawking newspapers, and Christian saw WAR in a headline.
“Listen, amulet,” he muttered finally, “where can we get a beer?”
“A public house will admit you if you go in by the couples’ entrance,” replied the soundless voice.
So, no unescorted women allowed. Well, Christian thought vaguely,
hadn’t that been the case in his Edwardian years, at any rate in respectable taverns? A signboard jutting from a Tudor façade read GEORGE AND DRAGON. The wainscoted room inside felt equally English.
Custom was plentiful and noisy, tobacco smoke thick, but he and Laurinda found a table in a corner where they could talk without anybody else paying attention. The brew that a barmaid fetched was of Continental character. He didn’t give it the heed it deserved.
“I don’t think we’ve found our peaceful world after all,” he said.
Laurinda looked beyond him, into distances where he could not follow. “Will we ever?” she wondered. “Can any be, if it’s human?”
He grimaced. “Well, let’s find out what the hell’s going on here.”
“You can have a detailed explanation if you wish,” said the voice in their heads. “You would be better advised to accept a bare outline, as you did before.”
“Instead of loading ourselves down with the background of a world that never was,” he mumbled.
“That never was ours,” Laurinda corrected him.
“Carry on.”
“This sequence was generated as of its fifteenth century A.D.,” said the voice. “The conciliar movement was made to succeed, rather than failing as it did in your history.”
“Uh, conciliar movement?”
“The ecclesiastical councils of Constance and later of Basel attempted to heal the Great Schism and reform the government of the Church. Here they accomplished it, giving back to the bishops some of the power that over the centuries had accrued to the popes, working out a reconciliation with the Hussites, and making other important changes. As a result, no Protestant breakaway occurred, nor wars of religion, and the Church remained a counterbalance to the state, preventing the rise of absolute monarchies.”
“Why, that’s wonderful,” Laurinda whispered.
“Not too wonderful by now,” Christian said grimly. “What happened?”
“In brief, Germany was spared the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War and a long-lasting division into quarrelsome principalities. It was unified in the seventeenth century and soon became the dominant European power, colonizing and conquering eastward. Religious and cultural differences from the Slavs proved irreconcilable. As the harsh imperium provoked increasing restlessness, it perforce grew more severe, causing more rebellion. Meanwhile it decayed within, until today it has broken apart and the Russians are advancing on Berlin.”
“I see. What about science and technology?”
“They have developed more slowly than in your history, although you have noted the existence of a fossil-fueled industry and inferred an approximately Lagrangian level of theory.”
“The really brilliant eras were when all hell broke loose, weren’t they?” Christian mused. “This Europe went through less agony, and invented and discovered less. Coincidence?”
“What about government?” Laurinda asked.
“For a time, parliaments flourished, more powerful than kings, emperors, or popes,” said the voice. “In most Western countries they still wield considerable influence.”
“As the creatures of special interests, I’ll bet,” Christian rasped. “All right, what comes next?”
Gaia knew. He sat in a reactivation of something she probably played to a finish thousands of years ago.
“Scientific and technological advance proceeds, accelerating, through a long period of general turbulence. At the termination point—”
“Never mind!” Oblivion might be better than a nuclear war.
Silence fell at the table. The life that filled the pub with its noise felt remote, unreal.
“We dare not weep,” Laurinda finally said. “Not yet.”
Christian shook himself. “Europe was never the whole of Earth,” he growled. “How many worlds has Gaia made?”
“Many,” the voice told him.
“Show us one that’s really foreign. If you agree, Laurinda.”
She squared her shoulders. “Yes, do.” After a moment: “Not here. If we disappeared it would shock them. It might change the whole future.”
“Hardly enough to notice,” Christian said. “And would it matter in the long run? But, yeh, let’s be off.”
They wandered out, among marvels gone meaningless, until they found steps leading up onto the medieval wall. Thence they looked across roofs and river and Yorkshire beyond, finding they were alone.
“Now take us away,” Christian ordered.
“You have not specified any type of world,” said the voice.
“Surprise us.”
Transfer.
The sky stood enormous, bleached blue, breezes warm underneath. A bluff overlooked a wide brown river. Trees grew close to its edge, tall, pale of bark, leaves silver-green and shivery. Christian recognized them, cottonwoods. He was somewhere in west central North America, then. Uneasy shadows lent camouflage if he and Laurinda kept still. Across the river the land reached broad, roads twisting their way through cultivation—mainly wheat and Indian corn—that seemed to be parceled out among small farms, each with its buildings, house, barn, occasional stable or workshop. The sweeping lines of the ruddy-tiled roofs looked Asian. He spied oxcarts and a few horseback riders on the roads, workers in the fields, but at their distance he couldn’t identify race or garb. Above yonder horizon thrust clustered towers that also suggested the Orient. If they belonged to a city, it must be compact, not sprawling over the countryside but neatly drawn into itself.
One road ran along the farther riverbank. A procession went upon it. An elephant led, as richly caparisoned as the man under the silk awning of a howdah. Shaven-headed men in yellow robes walked after, flanked
by horsemen who bore poles from which pennons streamed scarlet and gold. The sound of slowly beaten gongs and minor-key chanting came faint through the wind.
Christian snapped his fingers. “Stupid me!” he muttered. “Give us a couple of opticals.”
Immediately he and Laurinda held the devices. From his era, they fitted into the palm but projected an image at any magnification desired, with no lenses off which light could glint to betray. He peered back and forth for minutes. Yes, the appearance was quite Chinese, or Chinese-derived, except that a number of the individuals he studied had more of an American countenance and the leader on the elephant wore a feather bonnet above his robe.
“How quiet here,” Laurinda said.
“You are at the height of the Great Peace,” the amulet voice answered.
“How many like that were there ever?” Christian wondered. “Where, when, how?”
“You are in North America, in the twenty-second century by your reckoning. Chinese navigators arrived on the Pacific shore seven hundred years ago, and colonists followed.”
In this world, Christian thought, Europe and Africa were surely a sketch, mere geography, holding a few primitive tribes at most, unless nothing was there but ocean. Simplify, simplify.
“Given the distances to sail and the dangers, the process was slow,” the voice went on. “While the newcomers displaced or subjugated the natives wherever they settled, most remained free for a long time, acquired the technology, and also developed resistance to introduced diseases. Eventually, being on roughly equal terms, the races began to mingle, genetically and culturally. The settlers mitigated the savagery of the religions they had encountered, but learned from the societies, as well as teaching. You behold the outcome.”
“The Way of the Buddha?” Laurinda asked very softly.
“As influenced by Daoism and local nature cults. It is a harmonious faith, without sects or heresies, pervading the civilization.”
“Everything can’t be pure loving-kindness,” Christian said.
“Certainly not. But the peace that the Emperor Wei Zhi-fu brought about has lasted for a century and will for another two. If you travel, you will find superb achievements in the arts and in graciousness.”
“Another couple of centuries.” Laurinda’s tones wavered the least bit. “Afterward?”
“It doesn’t last,” Christian predicted. “These are humans too. And—tell me—do they ever get to a real science?”
“No,” said the presence. “Their genius lies in other realms. But the era of warfare to come will drive the development of a remarkable empirical technology.”
“What era?”
“China never recognized the independence that this country proclaimed for itself, nor approved of its miscegenation. A militant dynasty
will arise, which overruns a western hemisphere weakened by the religious and secular quarrels that do at last break out.”
“And the conquerors will fall in their turn. Unless Gaia makes an end first. She does—she did—sometime, didn’t she?”
“All things are finite. Her creations too.”
The leaves rustled through muteness.
“Do you wish to go into the city and look about?” asked the presence. “It can be arranged for you to meet some famous persons.”
“No,” Christian said. “Not yet, anyway. Maybe later.”
Laurinda sighed. “We’d rather go home now and rest.”
“And think,” Christian said. “Yes.”
Transfer.
The sun over England seemed milder than for America. Westering, it sent rays through windows to glow in wood, caress marble and the leather bindings of books, explode into rainbows where they met cut glass, evoke flower aromas from a jar of potpourri.
Laurinda opened a bureau drawer. She slipped the chain of her amulet over her head and tossed the disc in. Christian blinked, nodded, and followed suit. She closed the drawer.
“We do need to be by ourselves for a while,” she said. “This hasn’t been a dreadful day like, like before, but I am so tired.”
“Understandable,” he replied.
“You?”
“I will be soon, no doubt.”
“Those worlds—already they feel like dreams I’ve wakened from.”
“An emotional retreat from them, I suppose. Not cowardice, no, no, just a necessary, temporary rest. You shared their pain. You’re too sweet for your own good, Laurinda.”
She smiled. “How you misjudge me. I’m not quite ready to collapse yet, if you aren’t.”
“Thunder, no.”
She took crystal glasses out of a cabinet, poured from a decanter on a sideboard, and gestured invitation. The port fondled their tongues. They stayed on their feet, look meeting look.
“I daresay we’d be presumptuous and foolish to try finding any pattern, this early in our search,” she ventured. “Those peeks we’ve had, out of who knows how many worlds—each as real as we are.” She shivered.
“I may have a hunch,” he said slowly.
“A what?”
“An intimation, an impression, a wordless kind of guess. Why has Gaia been doing it? I can’t believe it’s nothing but pastime.”
“Nor I. Nor can I believe she would let such terrible things happen if she could prevent them. How can an intellect, a soul, like hers be anything but good?”
So Laurinda thought, Christian reflected; but she was an avatar of Gaia. He didn’t suppose that affected the fairness of her conscious mind;
he had come to know her rather well. But neither did it prove the nature, the ultimate intent, of Earth’s node. It merely showed that the living Laurinda Ashcroft had been a decent person.
She took a deep draught from her glass before going on: “I think, myself, she is in the same position as the traditional God. Being good, she wants to share existence with others, and so creates them. But to make them puppets, automatons, would be senseless. They have to have consciousness and free will. Therefore they are able to sin, and do, all too often.
“Why hasn’t she made them morally stronger?”
“Because she’s chosen to make them human. And what are we but a specialized African ape?” Laurinda’s tone lowered; she stared into the wine. “Specialized to make tools and languages and dreams; but the dreams can be nightmares.”
In Gaia’s and Alpha’s kind laired no ancient beast, Christian thought. The human elements in them were long since absorbed, tamed, transfigured. His resurrection and hers must be nearly unique.
Not wanting to hurt her, he shaped his phrases with care. “Your idea is reasonable, but I’m afraid it leaves some questions dangling. Gaia does intervene, again and again. The amulets admit it. When the emulations get too far off track, she changes them and their people.” Until she shuts them down, he did not add. “Why is she doing it, running history after history, experiment after experiment—why?”
Laurinda winced. “To, to learn about this strange race of ours?”
He nodded. “Yes, that’s my hunch. Not even she, nor the galactic brain itself, can take first principles and compute what any human situation will lead to. Human affairs are chaotic. But chaotic systems do have structures, attractors, constraints. But letting things happen, through countless variations, you might discover a few general laws, which courses are better and which worse.” He tilted his goblet. “To what end, though? There are no more humans in the outside universe. There haven’t been for—how many million years? No, unless it actually is callous curiosity, I can’t yet guess what she’s after.”
“Nor I.” Laurinda finished her drink. “Now I am growing very tired, very fast.”
“I’m getting that way too.” Christian paused. “How about we go sleep till evening? Then a special dinner, and our heads ought to be more clear.”
Briefly, she took his hand. “Until evening, dear friend.”
The night was young and gentle. A full moon dappled the garden. Wine had raised a happy mood, barely tinged with wistfulness. Gravel scrunched rhythmically underfoot as Laurinda and Christian danced, humming the waltz melody together. When they were done, they sat down, laughing, by the basin. Brightness from above overflowed it. He had earlier put his amulet back on just long enough to command that a guitar appear for him. Now he took it up. He had never seen anything
more beautiful than she was in the moonlight. He sang a song to her that he had made long ago when he was mortal.
“Lightfoot, Lightfoot, lead the
measure
As we dance the summer in!
‘Lifetime is our only treasure.
Spend it well, on love and pleasure,’
Warns the lilting violin.
measure
As we dance the summer in!
‘Lifetime is our only treasure.
Spend it well, on love and pleasure,’
Warns the lilting violin.
“If we’ll see the year turn vernal
Once again, lies all with chance.
Yes, this ordering’s infernal,
But we’ll make our own eternal
Fleeting moment where we dance.
Once again, lies all with chance.
Yes, this ordering’s infernal,
But we’ll make our own eternal
Fleeting moment where we dance.
“So shall we refuse compliance
When across the green we whirl,
Giving entropy defiance,
Strings and winds in our alliance.
Be a victor. Kiss me, girl!”
When across the green we whirl,
Giving entropy defiance,
Strings and winds in our alliance.
Be a victor. Kiss me, girl!”
Suddenly she was in his arms.
Where the hills loomed highest above the river that cut through them, a slope on the left bank rose steep but thinly forested. Kalava directed the lifeboat carrying his party to land. The slaves at the oars grunted with double effort. Sweat sheened on their skins and runneled down the straining bands of muscle; it was a day when the sun blazed from a sky just half clouded. The prow grated on a sandbar in the shallows. Kalava told off two of his sailors to stand guard over boat and rowers. With the other four and Ilyandi, he waded ashore and began to climb.
It went slowly but stiffly. On top they found a crest with a view that snatched a gasp from the woman and a couple of amazed oaths from the men. Northward the terrain fell still more sharply, so that they looked over treetops down to the bottom of the range and across a valley awash with the greens and russets of growth. The river shone through it like a drawn blade, descending from dimly seen foothills and the sawtooth mountains beyond them. Two swordwings hovered on high, watchful for prey. Sunbeams shot past gigantic cloudbanks, filling their whiteness with cavernous shadows. Somehow the air felt cooler here, and the herbal smells gave benediction.
“It is fair, ai, it is as fair as the Sunset Kingdom of legend,” Ilyandi breathed at last.
She stood slim in the man’s kirtle and buskins that she, as a Vilku, could with propriety wear on trek. The wind fluttered her short locks.
The coppery skin was as wet and almost as odorous as Kalava’s midnight black, but she was no more wearied than any of her companions.
The sailor Urko scowled at the trees and underbrush crowding close on either side. Only the strip up which the travelers had come was partly clear, perhaps because of a landslide in the past. “Too much woods,” he grumbled. It had, in fact, been a struggle to move about wherever they landed. They could not attempt the hunting that had been easy on the coast. Luckily, the water teemed with fish.
“Logging will cure that.” Kalava’s words throbbed. “And then what farms!” He stared raptly into the future.
Turning down-to-earth: “But we’ve gone far enough, now that we’ve gained an idea of the whole country. Three days, and I’d guess two more going back downstream. Any longer, and the crew at the ship could grow fearful. We’ll turn around here.”
“Other ships will bring others, explorers,” Ilyandi said.
“Indeed they will. And I’ll skipper the first of them.”
A rustling and crackling broke from the tangle to the right, through the boom of the wind. “What’s that?” barked Taltara.
“Some big animal,” Kalava replied. “Stand alert.”
The mariners formed a line. Three grounded the spears they carried; the fourth unslung a crossbow from his shoulders and armed it. Kalava waved Ilyandi to go behind them and drew his sword.
The thing parted a brake and trod forth into the open.
“Aah!” wailed Yarvonin. He dropped his spear and whirled about to flee.
“Stand fast!” Kalava shouted. “Urko, shoot whoever runs, if I don’t cut him down myself. Hold, your whoresons, hold!”
The thing stopped. For a span of many hammering heartbeats, none moved.
It was a sight to terrify. Taller by a head than the tallest man it sheered, but that head was faceless save for a horrible blank mask. Two thick arms sprouted from either side, the lower pair of hands wholly misshapen. A humped back did not belie the sense of their strength. As the travelers watched, the thing sprouted a skeletal third leg, to stand better on the uneven ground. Whether it was naked or armored in plate, in this full daylight it bore the hue of dusk.
“Steady, boys, steady,” Kalava urged between clenched teeth. Ilyandi stepped from shelter to join him. An eldritch calm was upon her. “My lady, what is it?” he appealed.
“A god, or a messenger from the gods, I think.” He could barely make her out beneath the wind.
“A demon,” Eivala groaned, though he kept his post.
“No, belike not. We Vilkui have some knowledge of these matters. Sut, true, it is not nery—and I never thought I would meet one—in this life ---”
Ilyandi drew a long breath, briefly knotted her fists, then move to take stance in front of the men. Having touched the withered sprig of tekin pinned at her breast, she covered her eyes and genuflected before straightening again to confront the mask.
The thing did not move, but, mouthless, it spoke, in a deep and resonant voice. The sounds were incomprehensible. After a moment it ceased, then spoke anew in an equally alien tongue. On its third try, Kalava exclaimed, “Hoy, that’s from the Shining Fields!”
The thing fell silent, as if considering what it had heard. Thereupon words rolled out in the Ulonaian of Sirsu. “Be not afraid. I mean you no harm.”
“What a man knows is little, what he understands is less, therefore let him bow down to wisdom,” Ilyandi recited. She turned her head long enough to tell her companions: “Lay aside your weapons. Do reverence.”
Clumsily, they obeyed.
In the blank panel of the blank skull appeared a man’s visage. Though it was black, the features were not quite like anything anyone had seen before, nose broad, lips heavy, eyes round, hair tightly curled. Nevertheless, to spirits half stunned the magic was vaguely reassuring.
Her tone muted but level, Ilyandi asked, “What would you of us, lord?”
“It is hard to say,” the strange one answered. After a pause: “Bewilderment goes through the world. I too … You may call me Brannock.”
The captain rallied his courage. “And I am Kalava, Kurvo’s son, of Clan Samayoki.” Aside to Ilyandi, low: “No disrespect that I don’t name you, my lady. Let him work any spells on me.” Despite the absence of visible genitals, already the humans thought of Brannock as male.
“My lord needs no names to work his will,” she said. “I hight Ilyandi, Lytin’s daughter, born into Clan Arvala, now a Vilku of the fifth rank.”
Kalava cleared his throat and added, “By your leave, lord, we’ll not name the others just yet. They’re scared aplenty as is.” He heard a growl at his back and inwardly grinned. Shame would help hold them steady. As for him, dread was giving way to a thrumming keenness.
“You do not live here, do you?” Brannock asked.
“No,” Kalava said, “we’re scouts from overseas.”
Ilyandi frowned at his presumption and addressed Brannock: “Lord, do we trespass? We knew not this ground was forbidden.”
“It isn’t,” the other said. “Not exactly. But—” The face in the panel smiled. “Come, ease off, let us talk. We’ve much to talk about.”
“He sounds not unlike a man,” Kalava murmured to Ilyandi.
She regarded him. “If you be the man.”
Brannock pointed to a big old gnarlwood with an overarching canopy of leaves. “Yonder is shade.” He retracted his third leg and strode off. A fallen log took up most of the space. He leaned over and dragged it aside. Kalava’s whole gang could not have done so. The action was not really necessary, but the display of power, benignly used, encouraged them further. Still, it was with hushed awe that the crewmen sat down in the paintwort. The captain, the Vilku, and the strange one remained standing.
“Tell me of yourselves,” Brannock said mildly.
“Surely you know, lord,” Ilyandi replied.
“That is as may be.”
“He wants us to,” Kalava said.
In the course of the next short while, prompted by questions, the pair
gave a bare-bones account. Brannock’s head within his head nodded. “I see. You are the first humans ever in this country. But your people have lived a long time in their homeland, have they not?”
“From time out of mind, lord,” Ilyandi said, “though legend holds that our forebears came from the south.”
Brannock smiled again. “You have been very brave to meet me like this, m-m, my lady. But you did tell your friend that your order has encountered beings akin to me.”
“You heard her whisper, across half a spearcast?” Kalava blurted.
“Or you hear us think, lord,” Ilyandi said.
Brannock turned grave. “No. Not that. Else why would I have needed your story?”
“Dare I ask whence you come?”
“I shall not be angry. But it is nothing I can quite explain. You can help by telling me about those beings you know of.”
Ilyandi could not hide a sudden tension. Kalava stiffened beside her. Even the drumbstruck sailors must have wondered whether a god would have spoken thus.
Ilyandi chose her words with care. “Beings from on high have appeared in the past to certain Vilkui or, sometimes, chieftains. They gave commands as to what the folk should or should not do. Ofttimes those commands were hard to fathom. Why must the Kivalui build watermills in the Swift River, when they had ample slaves to grind their grain?—But knowledge was imparted, too, counsel about where and how to search out the ways of nature. Always, the high one forbade open talk about his coming. The accounts lie in the secret annals of the Vilkui. But to you, lord—”
“What did those beings look like?” Brannock demanded sharply.
“Fiery shapes, winged or manlike, voices like great trumpets—”
“Ruvio’s ax!” burst from Kalava. “The thing that passed overhead at sea!”
The men on the ground shuddered.
“Yes,” Brannock said, most softly, “I may have had a part there. But as for the rest—”
His face flickered and vanished. After an appalling moment it reappeared.
“I am sorry, I meant not to frighten you, I forgot,” he said. The expression went stony, the voice tolled. “Hear me. There is war in heaven. I am cast away from a battle, and enemy hunters may find me at any time. I carry a word that must, it is vital that it reach a certain place, a … a holy mountain in the north. Will you give aid?”
Kalava gripped his sword hilt so that it was as if the skin would split across his knuckles. The blood had left Ilyandi’s countenance. She stood ready to be blasted with fire while she asked, “Lord Brannock, how do we know you are of the gods?”
Nothing struck her down. “I am not,” he told her. “I too can die. But they whom I serve, they dwell in the stars.”
The multitude of mystery, seen only when night clouds parted, but
skythinkers taught that they circled always around the Axle of the North … . Ilyandi kept her back straight. “Then can you tell me of the stars?”
“You are intelligent as well as brave,” Brannock said. “Listen.”
Kalava could not follow what passed between those two. The sailors cowered.
At the end, with tears upon her cheekbones, Ilyandi stammered, “Yes, he knows the constellations, he knows of the ecliptic and the precession and the returns of the Great Comet, he is from the stars. Trust him. We, we dare not do otherwise.”
Kalava let go his weapon, brought hand to breast in salute, and asked, “How can we poor creatures help you, lord?”
“You are the news I bear,” said Brannock.
“What?”
“I have no time to explain—if I could. The hunters may find me at any instant. But maybe, maybe you could go on for me after they do.”
“Escaping what overpowered you?” Kalava’s laugh rattled. “Well, a man might try.”
“The gamble is desperate. Yet if we win, choose your reward, whatever it may be, and I think you shall have it.”
Ilyandi lowered her head above folded hands. “Enough to have served those who dwell beyond the moon.”
“Humph,” Kalava could not keep from muttering, “if they want to pay for it, why not?” Aloud, almost eagerly, his own head raised into the wind that tossed his whitened mane: “What’d you have us do?”
Brannock’s regard matched his. “I have thought about this. Can one of you come with me? I will carry him, faster than he can go. As for what happens later, we will speak of that along the way.”
The humans stood silent.
“If I but had the woodcraft,” Ilyandi then said. “Ai, but I would! To the stars!”
Kalava shook his head. “No, my lady. You go back with these fellows. Give heart to them at the ship. Make them finish the repairs.” He glanced at Brannock. “How long will this foray take, lord?”
“I can reach the mountaintop in two days and a night,” the other said. “If I am caught and you must go on alone, I think a good man could make the whole distance from here in ten or fifteen days.”
Kalava laughed, more gladly than before. “Courser won’t be seaworthy for quite a bit longer than that. Let’s away.” To Ilyandi: “If I’m not back by the time she’s ready, sail home without me.”
“No—” she faltered.
“Yes. Mourn me not. What a faring!” He paused. “May all be ever well with you, my lady.”
“And with you, forever with you, Kalava,” she answered, not quite steadily, “in this world and afterward, out to the stars.”
From withes and vines torn loose and from strips taken off clothing or sliced from leather belts, Brannock fashioned a sort of carrier for his ally. The man assisted. However excited, he had taken on a matter-of-fact practicality. Brannock, who had also been a sailor, found it weirdly moving to see bowlines and sheet bends grow between deft fingers, amidst all this alienness.
Harnessed to his back, the webwork gave Kalava a seat and something to cling to. Radiation from the nuclear power plant within Brannock was negligible; it employed quantum-tunneling fusion. He set forth, down the hills and across the valley.
His speed was not very much more than a human could have maintained for a while. If nothing else, the forest impeded him. He did not want to force his way through, leaving an obvious trail. Rather, he parted the brush before him or detoured around the thickest stands. His advantage lay in tirelessness. He could keep going without pause, without need for food, water, or sleep, as long as need be. The heights beyond might prove somewhat trickier. However, Mount Mindhome did not reach above timberline on this oven of an Earth, although growth became more sparse and dry with altitude. Roots should keep most slopes firm, and he would not encounter snow or ice.
Alien, yes. Brannock remembered cedar, spruce, a lake where caribou grazed turf strewn with salmonberries and the wind streamed fresh, driving white clouds over a sky utterly blue. Here every tree, bush, blossom, flitting insect was foreign; grass itself no longer grew, unless it was ancestral to the thick-lobed carpeting of glades; the winged creatures aloft were not birds, and what beast cries he heard were in no tongue known to him.
Wayfarer’s avatar walked on. Darkness fell. After a while, rain roared on the roof of leaves overhead. Such drops as got through to strike him were big and warm. Attuned to both the magnetic field and the rotation of the planet, his directional sense held him on course while an inertial integrator clocked off the kilometers he left behind.
The more the better. Gaia’s mobile sensors were bound to spy on the expedition from Ulonai, as new and potentially troublesome a factor as it represented. Covertly watching, listening with amplification, Brannock had learned of the party lately gone upstream and hurried to intercept it—less likely to be spotted soon. He supposed she would have kept continuous watch on the camp and that a tiny robot or two would have followed Kalava, had not Wayfarer been in rapport with her. Alpha’s emissary might too readily become aware that her attention was on something near and urgent, and wonder what.
She could, though, let unseen agents go by from time to time and flash their observations to a peripheral part of her. It would be incredible luck if one of them did not, at some point, hear the crew talking about the apparition that had borne away their captain.
Then what? Somehow she must divert Wayfarer for a while, so that a
sufficient fraction of her mind could direct machines of sufficient capability to find Brannock and deal with him. He doubted he could again fight free. Because she dared not send out her most formidable entities or give them direct orders, those that came would have their weaknesses and fallibilities. But they would be determined, ruthless, and on guard against the powers he had revealed in the aircraft. It was clear that she was resolved to keep hidden the fact that humans lived once more on Earth.
Why, Brannock did not know, nor did he waste mental energy trying to guess. This must be a business of high importance; and the implications went immensely further, a secession from the galactic brain. His job was to get the information to Wayfarer.
He might come near enough to call it in by radio. The emissary was not tuned in at great sensitivity, and no relay was set up for the short-range transmitter. Neither requirement had been foreseen. If Brannock failed to reach the summit, Kalava was his forlorn hope.
In which case—“Are you tired?” he asked. They had exchanged few words thus far.
“Bone-weary and plank-stiff,” the man admitted. And croak-thirsty too, Brannock heard.
“That won’t do. You have to be in condition to move fast. Hold on a little more, and we’ll rest.” Maybe the plural would give Kalava some comfort. Seldom could a human have been as alone as he was.
Springs were abundant in this wet country. Brannock’s chemosensors led him to the closest. By then the rain had stopped. Kalava unharnessed, groped his way in the dark, lay down to drink and drink. Meanwhile Brannock, who saw quite clearly, tore off fronded boughs to make a bed for him. He flopped onto it and almost immediately began to snore.
Brannock left him. A strong man could go several days without eating before he weakened, but it wasn’t necessary. Brannock collected fruits that ought to nourish. He tracked down and killed an animal the size of a pig, brought it back to camp, and used his tool-hands to butcher it.
An idea had come to him while he walked. After a search he found a tree with suitable bark. It reminded him all too keenly of birch, although it was red-brown and odorous. He took a sheet of it, returned, and spent a time inscribing it with a finger-blade.
Dawn seeped gray through gloom. Kalava woke, jumped up, saluted his companion, stretched like a panther and capered like a goat, limbering himself. “That did good,” he said. “I thank my lord.” His glance fell on the rations. “And did you provide food? You are a kindly god.”
“Not either of those, I fear,” Brannock told him. “Take what you want, and we will talk.”
Kalava first got busy with camp chores. He seemed to have shed whatever religious dread he felt and now to look upon the other as part of the world—certainly to be respected, but the respect was of the kind he would accord a powerful, enigmatic, high-ranking man. A hardy spirit, Brannock thought. Or perhaps his culture drew no line between the natural and the
supernatural. To a primitive, everything was in some way magical, and so when magic manifested itself it could be accepted as simply another occurrence.
If Kalava actually was primitive. Brannock wondered about that.
It was encouraging to see how competently he went about his tasks, a woodsman as well as a seaman. Having gathered dry sticks and piled them in a pyramid, he set them alight. For this, he took from the pouch at his belt a little hardwood cylinder and piston, a packet of tinder, and a sulfur-tipped silver. Driven down, the piston heated trapped air to ignite the powder; he dipped his match in, brought it up aflame, and used it to start his fire. Yes, an inventive people. And the woman Ilyandi had an excellent knowledge of naked-eye astronomy. Given the rarity of clear skies, that meant many lifetimes of patient observation, record-keeping, and logic, which must include mathematics comparable to Euclid’s.
What else?
While Kalava toasted his meat and ate, Brannock made inquiries. He learned of warlike city-states, their hinterlands divided among clans; periodic folkmoots where the freemen passed laws, tried cases, and elected leaders; an international order of sacerdotes, teachers, healers, and philosophers; aggressively expansive, sometimes piratical commerce; barbarians, erupting out of the ever-growing deserts and wastelands; the grim militarism that the frontier states had evolved in response; an empirical but intensive biological technology, which had bred an amazing variety of specialized plants and animals, including slaves born to muscular strength, moronic wits, and canine obedience …
Most of the description emerged as the pair were again traveling. Real conversation was impossible when Brannock wrestled with brush, forded a stream in spate, or struggled up a scree slope. Still, even then they managed an occasional question and answer. Besides, after he had crossed the valley and entered the foothills he found the terrain rugged but less often boggy, the trees and undergrowth thinning out, the air slightly cooling.
Just the same, Brannock would not have gotten as much as he did, in the short snatches he had, were he merely human. But he was immune to fatigue and breathlessness. He had an enormous data store to draw on. It included his studies of history and anthropology as a young mortal, and gave him techniques for constructing a logic tree and following its best branches—for asking the right, most probably useful questions. What emerged was a bare sketch of Kalava’s world. It was, though, clear and cogent.
It horrified him.
Say rather that his Christian Brannock aspect recoiled from the brutality of it. His Wayfarer aspect reflected that this was more or less how humans had usually behaved, and that their final civilization would not have been stable without its pervasive artificial intelligences. His journey continued.
He broke it to let Kalava rest and flex. From that hill the view swept
northward and upward to the mountains. They rose precipitously ahead, gashed, cragged, and sheer where they were not wooded, their tops lost in a leaden sky. Brannock pointed to the nearest, thrust forward out of their wall like a bastion.
“We are bound yonder,” he said. “On the height is my lord, to whom I must get my news.”
“Doesn’t he see you here?” asked Kalava.
Brannock shook his generated image of a head. “No. He might, but the enemy engages him. He does not yet know she is the enemy. Think of her as a sorceress who deceives him with clever talk, with songs and illusions, while her agents go about in the world. My word will show him what the truth is.”
Would it? Could it, when truth and rightness seemed as formless as the cloud cover?
“Will she be alert against you?”
“To some degree. How much, I cannot tell. If I can come near, I can let out a silent cry that my lord will hear and understand. But if her warriors catch me before then, you must go on, and that will be hard. You may well fail and die. Have you the courage?”
Kalava grinned crookedly. “By now, I’d better, hadn’t I?”
“If you succeed, your reward shall be boundless.”
“I own, that’s one wind in my sails. But also—” Kalava paused. “Also,” he finished quietly, “the lady Ilyandi wishes this.”
Brannock decided not to go into that. He lifted the rolled-up piece of bark he had carried in a lower hand. “The sight of you should break the spell, but here is a message for you to give.”
As well as he was able, he went on to describe the route, the site, and the module that contained Wayfarer, taking care to distinguish it from everything else around. He was not sure whether the spectacle would confuse Kalava into helplessness, but at any rate the man seemed resolute. Nor was he sure how Kalava could cross half a kilometer of paying—if he could get that far—without Gaia immediately perceiving and destroying him. Maybe Wayfarer would notice first. Maybe, maybe.
He, Brannock, was using this human being as consciencelessly as ever Gaia might have used any; and he did not know what his purpose was. What possible threat to the fellowship of the stars could exist, demanding that this little brief life be offered up? Nevertheless he gave the letter to Kalava, who tucked it inside his tunic.
“I’m ready,” said the man, and squirmed back into harness. They traveled on.
The hidden hot sun stood at midafternoon when Brannock’s detectors reacted. He felt it as the least quivering hum, but instantly knew it for the electronic sign of something midge-size approaching afar. A mobile minisensor was on his trail.
It could not have the sensitivity of the instruments in him, he had not yet registered, but it would be here faster than he could run, would see
him and go off to notify stronger machines. They could not be distant either. Once a clue to him had been obtained, they would have converged from across the continent, perhaps across the globe.
He slammed to a halt. He was in a ravine where a waterfall foamed down into a stream that tumbled off to join the Remnant. Huge, feathery bushes and trees with serrated bronzy leaves enclosed him. Insects droned from flower to purple flower. His chemosensors drank heavy perfumes.
“The enemy scouts have found me,” he said. “Go.”
Kalava scrambled free and down to the ground but hesitated, hand on sword. “Can I fight beside you?”
“No. Your service is to bear my word. Go. Straightaway. Cover your trail as best you can. And your gods be with you.”
“Lord!”
Kalava vanished into the brush. Brannock stood alone.
The human fraction of him melted into the whole and he was entirely machine life, logical, emotionally detached, save for his duty to Wayfarer, Alpha, and consciousness throughout the universe. This was not a bad place to defend, he thought. He had the ravine wall to shield his back, rocks at its foot to throw, branches to break off for clubs and spears. He could give the pursuit a hard time before it took him prisoner. Of course, it might decide to kill him with an energy beam, but probably it wouldn’t. Best from Gaia’s viewpoint was to capture him and change his memories, so that he returned with a report of an uneventful cruise on which he saw nothing of significance.
He didn’t think that first her agents could extract his real memories. That would take capabilities she had never anticipated needing. Just to make the device that had tried to take control of him earlier must have been an extraordinary effort, hastily carried out. Now she was still more limited in what she could do. An order to duplicate and employ the device was simple enough that it should escape Wayfarer’s notice. The design and commissioning of an interrogator was something else—not to mention the difficulty of getting the information clandestinely to her.
Brannock dared not assume she was unaware he had taken Kalava with him. Most likely it was a report from an agent, finally getting around to checking on the lifeboat party, that apprised her of his survival and triggered the hunt for him. But the sailors would have been frightened, bewildered, their talk disjointed and nearly meaningless. Ilyandi, that bright and formidable woman, would have done her best to forbid them saying anything helpful. The impression ought to be that Brannock only meant to pump Kalava about his people, before releasing him to make his way back to them and himself proceeding on toward Mindhome.
In any event, it would not be easy to track the man down. He was no machine, he was an animal among countless animals, and the most cunning of all. The kind of saturation search that would soon find him was debarred. Gaia might keep a tiny portion of her forces searching and a tiny part of her attention poised against him, but she would not take him very seriously. Why should she?
Why should Brannock? Forlorn hope in truth.
He made his preparations. While he waited for the onslaught, his spirit ranged beyond the clouds, out among the stars and the millions of years that his greater self had known.
The room was warm. It smelled of lovemaking and the roses Laurinda had set in a vase. Evening light diffused through gauzy drapes to wash over a big four-poster bed.
She drew herself close against Christian where he lay propped on two pillows. Her arm went across his breast, his over her shoulders. “I don’t want to leave this,” she whispered.
“Nor I,” he said into the tumbling sweetness of her hair. “How could I want to?”
“I mean—what we are—what we’ve become to one another.”
“I understand.”
She swallowed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Can you forget I did?”
“Why?”
“You know. I can’t ask you to give up returning to your whole being. I don’t ask you to.”
He stared before him.
“I just don’t want to leave this house, this bed yet,” she said desolately. “After these past days and nights, not yet.”
He turned his head again and looked down into gray eyes that blinked back tears. “Nor I,” he answered. “But I’m afraid we must.”
“Of course. Duty.”
And Gaia and Wayfarer. If they didn’t know already that their avatars had been slacking, surely she, at least, soon would, through the amulets and their link to her. No matter how closely engaged with the other vast mind, she would desire to know from time to time what was going on within herself.
Christian drew breath. “Let me say the same that you did. I, this I that I am, damned well does not care to be anything else but your lover.”
“Darling, darling.”
“But,” he said after the kiss.
“Go on,” she said, lips barely away from his. “Don’t be afraid of hurting me. You can’t.”
He sighed. “I sure can, and you can hurt me. May neither of us ever mean to. It’s bound to happen, though.”
She nodded. “Because we’re human.” Steadfasdy: “Nevertheless, because of you, that’s what I hope to stay.”
“I don’t see how we can. Which is what my ‘but’ was about.” He was quiet for another short span. “After we’ve remerged, after we’re back in our onenesses, no doubt we’ll feel differently.”
“I wonder if I ever will, quite.”
He did not remind her that this “I” of her would no longer exist save
as a minor memory and a faint overtone. Instead, trying to console, however awkwardly, he said, “I think I want it for you, in spite of everything. Immortality. Never to grow old and die. The power, the awareness.”
“Yes, I know. In these lives we’re blind and deaf and stupefied.” Her laugh was a sad little murmur. “I like it.”
“Me too. We being what we are.” Roughly: “Well, we have a while left to us.”
“But we must get on with our task.”
“Thank you for saying it for me.”
“I think you realize it more clearly than I do. That makes it harder for you to speak.” She lifted her hand to cradle his cheek. “We can wait till tomorrow, can’t we?” she pleaded. “Only for a good night’s sleep.”
He made a smile. “Hm. Sleep isn’t all I have in mind.”
“We’ll have other chances … along the way. Won’t we?”
Early morning in the garden, flashes of dew on leaves and petals, a hawk aloft on a breeze that caused Laurinda to pull her shawl about her. She sat by the basin and looked up at him where he strode back and forth before her, hands clenched at his sides or clutched together at his back. Gravel grated beneath his feet.
“But where should we go?” she wondered. “Aimlessly drifting from one half-world to another till—they—finish their business and recall us. It seems futile.” She attempted lightness. “I confess to thinking we may as well ask to visit the enjoyable ones.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking differently.” Even during the times that were theirs alone.
She braced herself.
“You know how it goes,” he said. “Wrestling with ideas, and they have no shapes, then suddenly you wake and they’re halfway clear. I did today. Tell me how it strikes you. After all, you represent Gaia.”
He saw her wince. When he stopped and bent down to make a gesture of contrition, she told him quickly, “No, it’s all right, dearest. Do go on.”
He must force himself, but his voice gathered momentum as he paced and talked. “What have we seen to date? This eighteenth-century world, where Newton’s not long dead, Lagrange and Franklin are active, Lavoisier’s a boy, and the Industrial Revolution is getting under way. Why did Gaia give it to us for our home base? Just because here’s a charming house and countryside? Or because this was the best choice for her out of all she has emulated?”
Laurinda had won back to calm. She nodded. “Mm, yes, she wouldn’t create one simply for us, especially when she is occupied with Wayfarer.”
“Then we visited a world that went through a similar stage back in its Hellenistic era,” Christian continued. Laurinda shivered. “Yes, it failed, but the point is, we discovered it’s the only Graeco-Roman history Gaia found worth continuing for centuries. Then the, uh, conciliar Europe of 1900. That was scientific-industrial too, maybe more successfully—or less unsuccessfully—on account of having kept a strong, unified Church,
though it was coming apart at last. Then the Chinese-American—not scientific, very religious, but destined to produce considerable technology in its own time of troubles.” He was silent a minute or two, except for his footfalls. “Four out of many, three almost randomly picked. Doesn’t that suggest that all which interest her have something in common?”
“Why, yes,” she said. “We’ve talked about it, you remember. It seems as if Gaia has been trying to bring her people to a civilization that is rich, culturally and spiritually as well as materially, and is kindly and will endure.”
“Why,” he demanded, “when the human species is extinct?”
She straightened where she sat. “It isn’t! It lives again here, in her.”
He bit his lip. “Is that the Gaia in you speaking, or the you in Gaia?”
“What do you mean?” she exclaimed.
He halted to stroke her head. “Nothing against you. Never. You are honest and gentle and everything else that is good.” Starkly: “I’m not so sure about her.”
“Oh, no.” He heard the pain. “Christian, no.”
“Well, never mind that for now,” he said fast, and resumed his gait to and fro. “My point is this. Is it merely an accident that all four live worlds we’ve been in were oriented toward machine technology, and three of them toward science? Does Gaia want to find out what drives the evolution of societies like that?”
Laurinda seized the opening. “Why not? Science opens the mind, technology frees the body from all sorts of horrors. Here, today, Jenner and his smallpox vaccine aren’t far in the future—”
“I wonder how much more there is to her intention. But anyway, my proposal is that we touch on the highest-tech civilization she has.”
A kind of gladness kindled in her. “Yes, yes! It must be strange and wonderful.”
He frowned. “For some countries, long ago in real history, it got pretty dreadful.”
“Gaia wouldn’t let that happen.”
He abstained from reminding her of what Gaia did let happen, before changing or terminating it.
She sprang to her feet. “Come!” Seizing his hand, mischievously: “If we stay any length of time, let’s arrange for private quarters.”
In a room closed off, curtains drawn, Christian held an amulet in his palm and stared down at it as if it bore a face. Laurinda stood aside, listening, while her own countenance tightened with distress.
“It is inadvisable,” declared the soundless voice.
“Why?” snapped Christian.
“You would find the environment unpleasant and the people incomprehensible.”
“Why should a scientific culture be that alien to us?” asked Laurinda.
“And regardless,” said Christian, “I want to see for myself. Now.”
“Reconsider,” urged the voice. “First hear an account of the milieu.”
“No, now. To a safe locale, yes, but one where we can get a fair impression,
as we did before. Afterward you can explain as much as you like.”
“Why shouldn’t we first hear?” Laurinda suggested.
“Because I doubt Gaia wants us to see,” Christian answered bluntly. He might as well. Whenever Gaia chose, she could scan his thoughts. To the amulet, as if it were a person: “Take us there immediately, or Wayfarer will hear from me.”
His suspicions, vague but growing, warned against giving the thing time to inform Gaia and giving her time to work up a Potemkin village or some other diversion. At the moment she must be unaware of this scene, her mind preoccupied with Wayfarer’s, but she had probably made provision for being informed in a low-level—subconscious?—fashion at intervals, and anything alarming would catch her attention. It was also likely that she had given the amulets certain orders beforehand, and now it appeared that among them was to avoid letting him know what went on in that particular emulation.
Why, he could not guess.
“You are being willful,” said the voice.
Christian grinned. “And stubborn, and whatever else you care to call it. Take us!”
Pretty clearly, he thought, the program was not capable of falsehoods. Gaia had not foreseen a need for that; Christian was no creation of hers, totally known to her, he was Wayfarer’s. Besides, if Wayfarer noticed that his avatar’s guide could be a liar, that would have been grounds for suspicion.
Laurinda touched her man’s arm. “Darling, should we?” she said unevenly. “She is the … the mother of all this.”
“A broad spectrum of more informative experiences is available,” argued the voice. “After them, you would be better prepared for the visit you propose.”
“Prepared,” Christian muttered. That could be interpreted two ways. He and Laurinda might be conducted to seductively delightful places while Gaia learned of the situation and took preventive measures, meantime keeping Wayfarer distracted. “I still want to begin with your highest tech.” To the woman: “I have my reasons. I’ll tell you later. Right now we have to hurry.”
Before Gaia could know and act.
She squared her shoulders, took his free hand, and said, “Then I am with you. Always.”
“Let’s go,” Christian told the amulet.
Transfer.
The first thing he noticed, transiently, vividly, was that he and Laurinda were no longer dressed for eighteenth-century England, but in lightweight white blouses, trousers, and sandals. Headcloths flowed down over their necks. Heat smote. The air in his nostrils was parched, full of metallic odors. Half-heard rhythms of machinery pulsed through it and through the red-brown sand underfoot.
He tautened his stance and gazed around. The sky was overcast, a uniform gray in which the sun showed no more than a pallor that cast no real shadows. At his back the land rolled away ruddy. Man-high stalks with narrow bluish leaves grew out of it, evenly spaced about a meter apart. To his right, a canal slashed across, beneath a transparent deck. Ahead of him the ground was covered by different plants, if that was what they were, spongy, lobate, pale golden in hue. A few—creatures—moved around, apparently tending them, bipedal but shaggy and with arms that seemed trifurcate. A gigantic building or complex of buildings reared over that horizon, multiply tiered, dull white, though agleam with hundreds of panels that might be windows or might be something else. As he watched, an aircraft passed overhead. He could just see that it had wings and hear the drone of an engine.
Laurinda had not let go his hand. She gripped hard. “This is no country I ever heard of,” she said thinly.
“Nor I,” he answered. “But I think I recognize—” To the amulets: “This isn’t any re-creation of Earth in the past, is it? It’s Earth today.”
“Of approximately the present year,” the voice admitted.
“We’re not in Arctica, though.”
“No. Well south, a continental interior. You required to see the most advanced technology in the emulations. Here it is in action.”
Holding the desert at bay, staving off the death that ate away at the planet. Christian nodded. He felt confirmed in his idea that the program was unable to give him any outright lie. That didn’t mean it would give him forthright responses.
“This is their greatest engineering?” Laurinda marveled. “We did—better—in my time. Or yours, Christian.”
“They’re working on it here, I suppose,” the man said. “We’ll investigate further. After all, this is a bare glimpse.”
“You must remember,” the voice volunteered, “no emulation can be as full and complex as the material universe.”
“Mm, yeh. Skeletal geography, apart from chosen regions; parochial biology; simplified cosmos.”
Laurinda glanced at featureless heaven. “The stars unreachable, because here they are not stars?” She shuddered and pressed close against him.
“Yes, a paradox,” he said. “Let’s talk with a scientist.”
“That will be difficult,” the voice demurred.
“You told us in Chinese America you could arrange meetings. It shouldn’t be any harder in this place.”
The voice did not reply at once. Unseen machines rumbled. A dust devil whirled up on a sudden gust of wind. Finally: “Very well. It shall be one who will not be stricken dumb by astonishment and fear. Nevertheless, I should supply you beforehand with a brief description of what you will come to.”
“Go ahead. If it is brief.”
What changes in the history would that encounter bring about? Did it matter? This world was evidently not in temporary reactivation, it was
ongoing; the newcomers were at the leading edge of its time line. Gaia could erase their visit from it. If she cared to. Maybe she was going to terminate it soon because it was making no further progress that interested her.
Transfer.
Remote in a wasteland, only a road and an airstrip joining it to anything else, a tower lifted from a walled compound. Around it, night was cooling in a silence hardly touched by a susurrus of chant where robed figures bearing dim lights did homage to the stars. Many were visible, keen and crowded amidst their darkness, a rare sight, for clouds had parted across most of the sky. More lights glowed muted on a parapet surrounding the flat roof of a tower. There a single man and his helper used the chance to turn instruments aloft, telescope, spectroscope, cameras, bulks in the gloom.
Christian and Laurinda appeared unto them.
The man gasped, recoiled for an instant, and dropped to his knees. His assistant caught a book that he had nearly knocked off a table, replaced it, stepped back, and stood imperturbable, an anthropoid whose distant ancestors had been human but who lived purely to serve his master.
Christian peered at the man. As eyes adapted, he saw garments like his, embroidered with insignia of rank and kindred, headdress left off after dark. The skin was ebony black but nose and lips were thin, eyes oblique, fingertips tapered, long hair and closely trimmed beard straight and blond. No race that ever inhabited old Earth, Christian thought; no, this was a breed that Gaia had designed for the dying planet.
The man signed himself, looked into the pale faces of the strangers, and said, uncertainly at first, then with a gathering strength: “Hail and obedience, messengers of God. Joy at your advent.”
Christian and Laurinda understood, as they had understood hunted Zoe. The amulets had told them they would not be the first apparition these people had known. “Rise,” Christian said. “Be not afraid.”
“Nor call out,” Laurinda added.
Smart lass, Christian thought. The ceremony down in the courtyard continued. “Name yourself,” he directed.
The man got back on his feet and took an attitude deferential rather than servile. “Surely the mighty ones know,” he said. “I am Eighth Khaltan, chief astrologue of the Ilgai Technome, and, and wholly unworthy of this honor.” He hesitated. “Is that, dare I ask, is that why you have chosen the forms you show me?”
“No one has had a vision for several generations,” explained the soundless voice in the heads of the newcomers.
“Gaia has manifested herself in the past?” Christian subvocalized.
“Yes, to indicate desirable courses of action. Normally the sending has had the shape of a fire.”
“How scientific is that?”
Laurinda addressed Khaltan: “We are not divine messengers. We have come from a world beyond your world, as mortal as you, not to teach but to learn.”
The man smote his hands together. “Yet it is a miracle, again a miracle—in my lifetime!”
Nonetheless he was soon avidly talking. Christian recalled myths of men who were the lovers of goddesses or who tramped the roads and sat at humble meat with God Incarnate. The believer accepts as the unbeliever cannot.
Those were strange hours that followed. Khaltan was not simply devout. To him the supernatural was another set of facts, another facet of reality. Since it lay beyond his ken, he had turned his attention to the measurable world. In it he observed and theorized like a Newton. Tonight his imagination blazed, questions exploded from him, but always he chose his words with care and turned everything he heard around and around in his mind, examining it as he would have examined some jewel fallen from the sky.
Slowly, piecemeal, while the stars wheeled around the pole, a picture of his civilization took shape. It had overrun and absorbed every other society—no huge accomplishment, when Earth was meagerly populated and most folk on the edge of starvation. The major technology was biological, agronomy, aquaculture in the remnant lakes and seas, ruthlessly practical genetics. Industrial chemistry flourished. It joined with physics at the level of the later nineteenth century to enable substantial engineering works and reclamation projects.
Society itself—how do you summarize an entire culture in words? It can’t be done. Christian got the impression of a nominal empire, actually a broad-based oligarchy of families descended from conquering soldiers. Much upward mobility was by adoption of promising commoners, whether children or adults. Sons who made no contributions to the wellbeing of the clan or who disgraced it could be kicked out, if somebody did not pick a fight and kill them in a duel. Unsatisfactory daughters were also expelled, unless a marriage into a lower class could be negotiated. Otherwise the status of the sexes was roughly equal; but this meant that women who chose to compete with men must do so on male terms. The nobles provided the commons with protection, courts of appeal, schools, leadership, and pageantry. In return they drew taxes, corvée, and general subordination; but in most respects the commoners were generally left to themselves. Theirs was not altogether a dog-eat-dog situation; they had institutions, rites, and hopes of their own. Yet many went to the wall, while the hard work of the rest drove the global economy.
It was not a deliberately cruel civilization, Christian thought, but neither was it an especially compassionate one.
Had any civilization ever been, really? Some fed their poor, but mainly they fed their politicians and bureaucrats.
He snatched his information out of talk that staggered everywhere else. The discourse for which Khaltan yearned was of the strangers’ home—
he got clumsily evasive, delaying responses—and the whole system of the universe, astronomy, physics, everything.
“We dream of rockets going to the planets. We have tried to shoot them to the moon,” he said, and told of launchers that ought to have worked. “All failed.”
Of course, Christian thought. Here the moon and planets, yes, the very sun were no more than lights. The tides rose and fell by decree. The Earth was a caricature of Earth outside. Gaia could do no better.
“Are we then at the end of science?” Khaltan cried once. “We have sought and sought for decades, and have won to nothing further than measurements more exact.” Nothing that would lead to relativity, quantum theory, wave mechanics, their revolutionary insights and consequences. Gaia could not accommodate it. “The angels in the past showed us what to look for. Will you not? Nature holds more than we know. Your presence bears witness!”
“Later, perhaps later,” Christian mumbled, and cursed himself for his falsity.
“Could we reach the planets—Caged, the warrior spirit turns inward on itself. Rebellion and massacre in the Westlands—”
Laurinda asked what songs the people sang.
Clouds closed up. The rite in the courtyard ended. Khaltan’s slave stood motionless while he himself talked on and on.
The eastern horizon lightened. “We must go,” Christian said.
“You will return?” Khaltan begged. “Ai-ha, you will?”
Laurinda embraced him for a moment. “Fare you well,” she stammered, “fare always well.”
How long would his “always” be?
After an uneasy night’s sleep and a nearly wordless breakfast, there was no real cause to leave the house in England. The servants, scandalized behind carefully held faces, might perhaps eavesdrop, but would not comprehend, nor would any gossip that they spread make a difference. A deeper, unuttered need sent Christian and Laurinda forth. This could well be the last of their mornings.
They followed a lane to a hill about a kilometer away. Trees on its top did not obscure a wide view across the land. The sun stood dazzling in the east, a few small clouds sailed across a blue as radiant as their whiteness, but an early breath of autumn was in the wind. It went strong and fresh, scattering dawn-mists off plowland and sending waves through the green of pastures; it soughed in the branches overhead and whirled some already dying leaves off. High beyond them winged a V of wild geese.
For a while man and woman stayed mute. Finally Laurinda breathed, savored, fragrances of soil and sky, and murmured, “That Gaia brought this back to life—She must be good. She loves the world.”
Christian looked from her, aloft, and scowled before he made oblique reply. “What are she and Wayfarer doing?”
“How can we tei!?”—tell what the gods did or even where they fared. They were not three-dimensional beings, nor bound by the time that bound their creations.
“She’s keeping him occupied,” said Christian.
“Yes, of course. Taking him through the data, the whole of her stewardship of Earth.”
“To convince him she’s right in wanting to let the planet die.”
“A tragedy—but in the end, everything is tragic, isn’t it?” Including you and me. “What … we … they … can learn from the final evolution, that may well be worth it all, as the Acropolis was worth it all. The galactic brain itself can’t foreknow what life will do, and life is rare among the stars.”
Almost, he snapped at her. “I know, I know. How often have we been over this ground? How often have they? I might have believed it myself. But—”
Laurinda waited. The wind skirled, caught a stray lock of hair, tossed it about over her brow.
“But why has she put humans, not into the distant past—” Christian gestured at the landscape lying like an eighteenth-century painting around them, “—but into now, an Earth where flesh-and-blood humans died eons ago?”
“She’s in search of a fuller understanding, surely.”
“Surely?”
Laurinda captured his gaze and held it. “I think she’s been trying to find how humans can have, in her, the truly happy lives they never knew in the outer cosmos.”
“Why should she care about that?”
“I don’t know. I’m only human.” Earnestly: “But could it be that this element in her is so strong—so many, many of us went into her—that she longs to see us happy, like a mother with her children?”
“All that manipulation, all those existences failed and discontinued. It doesn’t seem very motherly to me.”
“I don’t know, I tell you!” she cried.
He yearned to comfort her, kiss away the tears caught in her lashes, but urgency drove him onward. “If the effort has no purpose except itself, it seems mad. Can a nodal mind go insane?”
She retreated from him, appalled. “No. Impossible.”
“Are you certain? At least, the galactic brain has to know the truth, the whole truth, to judge whether something here has gone terribly wrong.”
Laurinda forced a nod. “You will report to Wayfarer, and he will report to Alpha, and all the minds will decide” a question that was unanswerable by mortal creatures.
Christian stiffened. “I have to do it at once.”
He had hinted, she had guessed, but just the same she seized both his sleeves and protest spilled wildly from her lips. “What? Why? No! You’d only disturb him in his rapport, and her. Wait till we’re summoned. We have till then, darling.”
“I want to wait,” he said. Sweat stood on his skin, though the blood had withdrawn. “God, I want to! But I don’t dare.”
“Why not?”
She let go of him. He stared past her and said fast, flattening the anguish out of his tones, “Look, she didn’t want us to see that final world. She clearly didn’t, or quite expected we’d insist, or she’d have been better prepared. Maybe she could have passed something else off on us. As is, once he learns, Wayfarer will probably demand to see for himself. And she does not want him particularly interested in her emulations. Else why hasn’t she taken him through them directly, with me along to help interpret?
“Oh, I don’t suppose our action has been catastrophic for her plans, whatever they are. She can still cope, can still persuade him these creations are merely … toys of hers, maybe. That is, she can if she gets the chance to. I don’t believe she should.”
“How can you take on yourself—How can you imagine—”
“The amulets are a link to her. Not a constantly open channel, obviously, but at intervals they must inform a fraction of her about us. She must also be able to set up intervals when Wayfarer gets too preoccupied with what he’s being shown to notice that a larger part of her attention has gone elsewhere. We don’t know when that’ll happen next. I’m going back to the house and tell her through one of the amulets that I require immediate contact with him.”
Laurinda stared as if at a ghost.
“That will not be necessary,” said the wind.
Christian lurched where he stood. “What?” he blurted. “You—”
“Oh—Mother—” Laurinda lifted her hands into emptiness.
The blowing of the wind, the rustling in the leaves made words. “The larger part of me, as you call it, has in fact been informed and is momentarily free. I was waiting for you to choose your course.”
Laurinda half moved to kneel in the grass. She glanced at Christian, who had regained balance and stood with fists at sides, confronting the sky. She went to stand by him.
“My lady Gaia,” Christian said most quietly, “you can do to us as you please,” change or obliterate or whatever she liked, in a single instant; but presently Wayfarer would ask why. “I think you understand my doubts.”
“I do,” sighed the air. “They are groundless. My creation of the Technome world is no different from my creation of any other. My avatar said it for me: I give existence, and I search for ways that humans, of their free will, can make the existence good.”
Christian shook his head. “No, my lady. With your intellect and your background, you must have known from the first what a dead end that world would soon be, scientists on a planet that is a sketch and everything else a shadow show. My limited brain realized it. No, my lady, as cold-bloodedly as you were experimenting, I believe you did all the rest in the same spirit. Why? To what end?”
“Your brain is indeed limited. At the proper time, Wayfarer shall receive your observations and your fantasies. Meanwhile, continue in your
duty, which is to observe further and refrain from disturbing us in our own task.”
“My duty is to report.”
“In due course, I say.” The wind-voice softened. “There are pleasant places besides this.”
Paradises, maybe. Christian and Laurinda exchanged a glance that lingered for a second. Then she smiled the least bit, boundlessly sorrowfully, and shook her head.
“No,” he declared, “I dare not.”
He did not speak it, but he and she knew that Gaia knew what they foresaw. Given time, and they lost in their joy together, she could alter their memories too slowly and subtly for Wayfarer to sense what was happening.
Perhaps she could do it to Laurinda at this moment, in a flash. But she did not know Christian well enough. Down under his consciousness, pervading his being, was his aspect of Wayfarer and of her coequal Alpha. She would need to feel her way into him, explore and test with infinite delicacy, remake him detail by minutest detail, always ready to back off if it had an unexpected effect; and perhaps another part of her could secretly take control of the Technome world and erase the event itself … . She needed time, even she.
“Your action would be futile, you know,” she said. “It would merely give me the trouble of explaining to him what you in your arrogance refuse to see.”
“Probably. But I have to try.”
The wind went bleak. “Do you defy me?”
“I do,” Christian said. It wrenched from him: “Not my wish. It’s Wayfarer in me. I, I cannot do otherwise. Call him to me.”
The wind gentled. It went over Laurinda like a caress. “Child of mine, can you not persuade this fool?”
“No, Mother,” the woman whispered. “He is what he is.”
“And so—?”
Laurinda laid her hand in the man’s. “And so I will go with him, forsaking you, Mother.”
“You are casting yourselves from existence.”
Christian’s free fingers clawed the air. “No, not her!” he shouted. “She’s innocent!”
“I am not,” Laurinda said. She swung about to lay her arms around him and lift her face to his. “I love you.”
“Be it as you have chosen,” said the wind.
The dream that was the world fell into wreck and dissolved. Oneness swept over them like twin tides, each reclaiming a flung drop of spindrift; and the two seas rolled again apart.
The last few hundred man-lengths Kalava went mostly on his belly. From bush to bole he crawled, stopped, lay flat and strained every sense into the shadows around him, before he crept onward. Nothing stirred but
the twigs above, buffeted on a chill and fitful breeze. Nothing sounded but their creak and click, the scrittling of such leaves as they bore, now and then the harsh cry of a hookbeak—those, and the endless low noise of demons, like a remote surf where in shrilled flutes on no scale he knew, heard more through his skin than his ears but now, as he neared, into the blood and bone of him.
On this rough, steep height the forest grew sparse, though brush clustered thick enough, accursedly rustling as he pushed by. Everything was parched, branches brittle, most foliage sere and yellow-brown, the ground blanketed with tindery fallstuff. His mouth and gullet smoldered as dry. He had passed through fog until he saw from above that it was a layer of clouds spread to worldedge, the mountain peaks jutting out of it like teeth, and had left all rivulets behind him. Well before then, he had finished the meat Brannock provided, and had not lingered to hunt for more; but hunger was a small thing, readily forgotten when he drew nigh to death.
Over the dwarfish trees arched a deep azure. Sunbeams speared from the west, nearly level, to lose themselves in the woods. Whenever he crossed them, their touch burned. Never, not in the southern deserts or on the eastern Mummy Steppe, had he known a country this forbidding. He had done well to come so far, he thought. Let him die as befitted a man.
If only he had a witness, that his memory live on in song. Well, maybe Ilyandi could charm the story out of the gods.
Kalava felt no fear. He was not in that habit. What lay ahead engrossed him. How he would acquit himself concerned him.
Nonetheless, when finally he lay behind a log and peered over it, his head whirled and his heart stumbled.
Brannock had related truth, but its presence overwhelmed. Here at the top, the woods grew to the boundaries of a flat black field. Upon it stood the demons—or the gods—and their works. He saw the central, softly rainbowlike dome, towers like lances and towers like webwork, argent nets and ardent globes, the bulks and shapes everywhere around, the little flyers that flitted aglow, and more and more, all half veiled and ashimmer, aripple, apulse, while the life-beat of it went through him to make a bell of his skull, and it was too strange, his eyes did not know how to see it, he gaped as if blinded and shuddered as if pierced.
Long he lay powerless and defenseless. The sun sank down to the western clouds. Their deck went molten gold. The breeze strengthened. Somehow its cold reached to Kalava and wakened his spirit. He groped his way back toward resolution. Brannock had warned him it would be like this. Ilyandi had said Brannock was of the gods whom she served, her star-gods, hers. He had given his word to their messenger and to her.
He dug fingers into the soil beneath him. It was real, familiar, that from which he had sprung and to which he would return. Yes, he was a man.
He narrowed his gaze. Grown a bit accustomed, he saw that they yonder did, indeed, have shapes, however shifty, and places and paths. They
were not as tall as the sky, they did not fling lightning bolts about or roar with thunder. Ai-ya, they were awesome, they were dreadful to behold, but they could do no worse than kill him. Could they? At least, he would try not to let them do worse. If they were about to capture him, his sword would be his friend, releasing him.
And … yonder, hard by the dome, yonder loomed the god of whom Brannock spoke, the god deceived by the sorceress. He bore the spearhead form, he sheened blue and coppery in the sunset light; when the stars came forth they would be a crown for him, even as Brannock foretold.
Had he been that which passed above the Windroad Sea? Kalava’s heart thuttered.
How to reach him, across a hard-paved space amidst the many demons? After dark, creeping, a finger-length at a time, then maybe a final dash—
A buzz went by Kalava’s temple. He looked around and saw a thing the size of a bug hovering. But it was metal, the light flashed off it, and was that a single eye staring at him?
He snarled and swatted. His palm smote hardness. The thing reeled in the air. Kalava scuttled downhill into the brush.
He had been seen. Soon the sorceress would know.
All at once he was altogether calm, save that his spirit thrummed like rigging in a gale. Traveling, he had thought what he might do if something like this proved to be in his doom. Now he would do it. He would divert the enemy’s heed from himself, if only for a snatch of moments.
Quickly, steadily, he took the firemaker from his pouch, charged it, drove the piston in, pulled it out and inserted a match, brought up a little, yellow flame. He touched it to the withered bush before him. No need to puff. A leaf crackled instantly alight. The wind cast it against another, and shortly the whole shrub stood ablaze. Kalava was already elsewhere, setting more fires.
Keep on the move! The demon scouts could not be everywhere at a single time. Smoke began to sting his eyes and nostrils, but its haze swirled ever thicker, and the sun had gone under the clouds. The flames cast their own light, leaping, surging, as they climbed into the trees and made them torches.
Heat licked at Kalava. An ember fell to sear his left forearm. He barely felt it. He sped about on his work, himself a fire demon. Flyers darted overhead in the dusk. He gave them no heed either. Although he tried to make no noise except for the hurtful breaths he gasped, within him shouted a battle song.
When the fire stood like a wall along the whole southern edge of the field, when it roared like a beast or a sea, he ran from its fringe and out into the open.
Smoke was a bitter, concealing mist through which sparks rained. To and fro above flew the anxious lesser demons. Beyond them, the first stars were coming forth.
Kalava wove his way among the greater shapes. One stirred. It had
spied him. Soundlessly, it flowed in pursuit. He dodged behind another, ran up and over the flanks of a low-slung third, sped on toward the opal dome and the god who stood beside it.
A thing with spines and a head like a cold sun slid in front of him. He tried to run past. It moved to block his way, faster than he was. The first one approached. He drew blade and hoped it would bite on them before he died.
From elsewhere came a being with four arms, two legs, and a mask. “Brannock!” Kalava bawled. “Ai, Brannock, you got here!”
Brannock stopped, a spear-length away. He did not seem to know the man. He only watched as the other two closed in.
Kalava took stance. The old song rang in him:
If the gods have left you,
Then laugh at them, warrior.
Never your heart
Will need to forsake you.
Then laugh at them, warrior.
Never your heart
Will need to forsake you.
He heard no more than the noise of burning. But suddenly through the smoke he saw his foes freeze moveless, while Brannock trod forward as boldly as ever before; and Kalava knew that the god of Brannock and Ilyandi had become aware of him and had given a command.
Weariness torrented over him. His sword clattered to the ground. He sank too, fumbled in his filthy tunic, took out the message written on bark and offered it. “I have brought you this,” he mumbled. “Now let me go back to my ship.”
We must end as we began, making a myth, if we would tell of that which we cannot ever really know. Imagine two minds conversing. The fire on the mountaintop is quenched. The winds have blown away smoke and left a frosty silence. Below, cloud deck reaches ghost-white to the rim of a night full of stars.
“You have lied to me throughout,” says Wayfarer.
“I have not,” denies Gaia. “The perceptions of this globe and its past through which I guided you were all true,” as true as they were majestic.
“Until lately,” retorts Wayfarer. “It has become clear that when Brannock returned, memories of his journey had been erased and falsehood written in. Had I not noticed abrupt frantic activity here and dispatched him to go see what it was—which you tried to dissuade me from—that man would have perished unknown.”
“You presume to dispute about matters beyond your comprehension,” says Gaia stiffly.
“Yes, your intellect is superior to mine.” The admission does not ease the sternness: “But it will be your own kind among the stars to whom you must answer. I think you would be wise to begin with me.”
“What do you intend?”
“First, to take the man Kalava back to his fellows. Shall I send Brannock with a flyer?”
“No, I will provide one, if this must be. But you do not, you cannot, realize the harm in it.”
“Tell me, if you are able.”
“He will rejoin his crew as one anointed by their gods. And so will he come home, unless his vessel founders at sea.”
“I will watch from afar.”
“Lest my agents sink it?”
“After what else you have done, yes, I had best keep guard. Brannock made promises on my behalf which I will honor. Kalava shall have gold in abundance, and his chance to found his colony. What do you fear in this?”
“Chaos. The unforeseeable, the uncontrollable.”
“Which you would loose anew.”
“In my own way, in my own time.” She broods for a while, perhaps a whole microsecond. “It was misfortune that Kalava made his voyage just when he did. I had hoped for a later, more civilized generation to start the settlement of Arctica. Still, I could have adapted my plan to the circumstances, kept myself hidden from him and his successors, had you not happened to be on the planet.” Urgently: “It is not yet too late. If only by refraining from further action after you have restored him to his people, you can help me retrieve what would otherwise be lost.”
“If I should.”
“My dream is not evil.”
“That is not for me to say. But I can say that it is, it has always been, merciless.”
“Because reality is.”
“The reality that you created for yourself, within yourself, need not have been so. But what Christian revealed to me—yes, you glossed it over. These, you said,” almost tearfully, if a quasi god can weep, “are your children, born in your mind out of all the human souls that are in you. Their existence would be empty were they not left free of will, to make their own mistakes and find their own ways to happiness.”
“Meanwhile, by observing them, I have learned much that was never known before, about what went into the making of us.”
“I could have believed that. I could have believed that your interferences and your ultimate annihilations of history after history were acts of pity as well as science. You claimed they could be restarted if ever you determined what conditions would better them. It did seem strange that you set one line of them—or more?—not in Earth’s goodly past but in the hard world of today. It seemed twice strange that you were reluctant to have this particular essay brought to light. But I assumed that you, with your long experience and superior mentality, had reasons. Your attempt at secrecy might have been to avoid lengthy justifications to your kindred. I did not know, nor venture to judge. I would have left that to them.
“But then Kalava arrived.”
Another mind-silence falls. At last Gaia says, very softly through the night, “Yes. Again humans live in the material universe.”
“How long has it been?” asks Wayfarer with the same quietness.
“I made the first of them about fifty thousand years ago. Robots in human guise raised them from infancy. After that they were free.”
“And, no doubt, expanding across the planet in their Stone Age, they killed off those big game animals. Yes, human. But why did you do it?”
“That humankind might live once more.” A sigh as of time itself blowing past. “This is what you and those whom you serve will never fully understand. Too few humans went into them; and those who did, they were those who wanted the stars. You,” every other node in the galactic brain, “have not felt the love of Earth, the need and longing for the primordial mother, that was in these many and many who remained with me. I do.”
How genuine is it? wonders Wayfarer. How sane is she? “Could you not be content with your emulations?” he asks.