VI

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 awarenesses 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 gigantic 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 will 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 with her 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 the most suitable, 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. It was not quite the same as his earlier postmortal robotic existence. There was more richness, even more passion, though 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 blue-gray, 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, “Adios. Wish me luck.”

The response was . . . absent-minded. 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, key-points to touch 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 lands 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.

VII

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, short-sighted 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.

3

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 that had had no bees to quicken it or hands to pluck it. Below reached the city, sun smitten houseroofs, open agoras, colonnaded temples. In this clear air Christian 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 under shelter 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 Ash-croft.”

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!”

4

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 talk mates.

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. No one else was in sight or earshot. This time Christian addressed the amulets. His 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.E., 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 archeology, Christian thought. Gaia saw this start to happen, over and over. She rewrote the program-events, memories, personalities, bodies, births, lifespans, 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 was 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 C.E., 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 C.E.,” 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.

5

Transfer.

For an instant, they glanced at themselves. They had known 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 other 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, “Thank 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 creak-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 arc 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. I “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.”

6

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 broad-crowned 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.”

”M-m, 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 opaque.”

”Splendid!” she exclaimed. Already her spirits were rising anew.

7

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 facade 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 C.E.,” 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.”

8

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 Amerindian 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 Tranquility” 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 are surely a sketch, mere geography, holding a few primitive tribes at most, unless nothing is 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 Taoism 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 tone 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.”

9

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. By 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.”

10

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.

”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.

”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!”

Suddenly she was in his arms.

VIII

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 other 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, you 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. But, true, it is not fiery-and I never thought I would meet one-in this life-“

Ilyandi drew a long breath, briefly knotted her fists, then moved 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, and 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 barebones 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 dumbstruck 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.’

IX

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 powerplant 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 chemo-sensors 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 trended boughs to make a bed for him. Kalava 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 a 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 sliver. 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 evergrowing 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 paving-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.

2

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 is 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.

X

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.” Steadfastly: “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?”

2

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. “M-m, 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 went on. 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.”

3

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.

4

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.”

”M-m, 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 timeline. 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.

5

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 is a breed that Gaia 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 contribution to the well-being 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, corvee, 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’s not a deliberately cruel civilization, Christian thought, but neither is 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?

6

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 tell?”-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 that 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, and 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.

XI

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 wherein 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? Ka-lava’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.

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.”

XII

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.

”No. How possibly? I cannot make a whole cosmos for them. I can only make them, the flesh-and-blood them, for the cosmos. Let them live in it not as machines or as flickerings within a machine, but as humans.”

”On a planet soon dead?”

”They will, they must forge survival for themselves. I do not compel them, I do not dominate them with my nearness or any knowledge of it. That would be to stunt their spirits, turn them into pet animals or worse. I simply give guidance, not often, in the form of divinities in whom they would believe anyway at this stage of their societies, and simply toward the end of bringing them to a stable, high-technology civilization that can save them from the sun.”

”Using what you learn from your shadow folk to suggest what the proper course of history may be?”

”Yes. How else should I know? Humankind is a chaotic phenomenon. Its actions and their consequences cannot be computed from first principles. Only by experiment and observation can we learn something about the nature of the race.”

”Experiments done with conscious beings, aware of their pain. Oh, I see why you have kept most of your doings secret.”

”I am not ashamed,” declares Gaia. “I am proud. I gave life back to the race that gave life to us. They will make their own survival, I say. It may be that when they are able, they will move to the outer reaches of the Solar System, or some of them somehow even to the stars. It may be they will shield Earth or damp the sun. It is for them to decide, them to do. Not us, do you hear me? Them.”

”The others yonder may feel differently. Alarmed or horrified, they may act to put an end to this.”

”Why?” Gaia demands. “What threat is it to them?”

”None, I suppose. But there is a moral issue. What you are after is a purely human renascence, is it not? The former race went up in the machines, not because it was forced but because it chose, because that was the way by which the spirit could live and grow forever. You do not want this to happen afresh. You want to perpetuate war, tyranny, superstition, misery, instincts in mortal combat with each other, the ancient ape, the ancient beast of prey.”

”I want to perpetuate the lover, parent, child, adventurer, artist, poet, prophet. Another element in the universe. Have we machines in our self-sureness every answer, every dream, that can ever be?”

Wayfarer hesitates. “It is not for me to say, it is for your peers.”

”But now perhaps you see why I have kept my secrets and why I have argued and, yes, fought in my fashion against the plans of the galactic brain. Someday my humans must discover its existence. I can hope that then they will be ready to come to terms with it. But let those mighty presences appear among them within the next several thousand years-let signs and wonders, the changing of the heavens and the world, be everywhere-what freedom will be left for my children, save to cower and give worship? After-ward, what destiny for them, save to be animals in a preserve, forbidden any ventures that might endanger them, until at last, at best, they too drain away into the machines?”

Wayfarer speaks more strongly than before. “Is it better, what they might make for themselves? I cannot say. I do not know. But neither, Gaia, do you. And . . . the fate of Christian and Laurinda causes me to wonder about it.”

”You know,” she says, “that they desired humanness.” “They could have it again.”

Imagine a crowned head shaking. “No. I do not suppose any other node would create a world to house their mortality, would either care to or believe it was right.”

”Then why not you, who have so many worlds in you?” Gaia is not vindictive. A mind like hers is above that. But she says, “I cannot take them. After such knowledge as they have tasted of, how could they return to me?” And to make new copies, free of memories that would weigh their days down with despair, would be meaningless.

”Yet-there at the end, I felt what Christian felt.” “And I felt what Laurinda felt. But now they are at peace in us.” “Because they are no more. I, though, am haunted,” the least, rebellious bit, for a penalty of total awareness is that nothing can be ignored or forgotten. “And it raises questions that I expect Alpha will want answered, if answered they can be.”

After a time that may actually be measurable less by quantum shivers than by the stars, Wayfarer says: “Let us bring those two back.”

”Now it is you who are pitiless,” Gaia says.

”I think we must.”

”So be it, then.”

The minds conjoin. The data are summoned and ordered. A configuration is established.

It does not emulate a living world or living bodies. The minds have agreed that that would be too powerful an allurement and torment. The subjects of their inquiry need to think clearly; but because the thought is to concern their inmost selves, they are enabled to feel as fully as they did in life.

Imagine a hollow darkness, and in it two ghosts who glimmer slowly into existence until they stand confronted before they stumble toward a phantom embrace.

”Oh, beloved, beloved, is it you?” Laurinda cries.

”Do you remember?” Christian whispers.

”I never forgot, not quite, not even at the heights of oneness.”

”Nor I, quite.”

They are silent a while, although the darkness shakes with the beating of the hearts they once had.

”Again,” Laurinda says. “Always.”

”Can that be?” wonders Christian.

Through the void of death, they perceive one speaking: “Gaia, if you will give Laurinda over to me, I will take her home with Christian-home into Alpha.”

And another asks: “Child, do you desire this? You can be of Earth and of the new humanity.”

She will share in those worlds, inner and outer, only as a memory borne by the great being to whom she will have returned; but if she departs, she will not have them at all.

”Once I chose you, Mother,” Laurinda answers.

Christian senses the struggle she is waging with herself and tells her, “Do whatever you most wish, my dearest.”

She turns back to him. “I will be with you. Forever with you.”

And that too will be only as a memory, like him; but what they were will be together, as one, and will live on, unforgotten.

”Farewell, child,” says Gaia.

”Welcome,” says Wayfarer.

The darkness collapses. The ghosts dissolve into him. He stands on the mountaintop ready to bear them away, a part of everything he has gained for those whose avatar he is.

”When will you go?” Gaia asks him.

”Soon,” he tells her: soon, home to his own oneness.

And she will abide, waiting for the judgment from the stars.

Astronaut Christian Brannock has lived to see artificial intelligence develop to a point where a human personality can be uploaded into a computer, achieving a sort of hybrid immortality. He welcomes that because the technology will make it possible for him to achieve his dream and explore the stars.

A billion years later, Brannock is dispatched to Earth to check on some strange anomalies. While there, he meets Laurinda Ashcroft, another hybrid upload. Brannock and Laurinda join forces and investigate Gaia, the supermind dominating the planet, and learn the truth of her shocking and terrifying secret plans for Earth.

In classic Poul Anderson fashion, Genesis investigates the subject of human immortality as well as another possibility for what our future as humans may hold, subjects that he has tirelessly been investigating for fifty-two years as one of the most highly regarded writers of science fiction.

Paul Anderson

POUL ANDERSON is the winner of the Nebula Grandmaster Award for lifetime achievement, three other Nebula Awards, and seven Hugos. He is the author of The Boat or a Million Years, Starfarers, and more than twenty-five other novels. He lives in Orinda, California.