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 Sweat stood on his skin, though the blood had withdrawn.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? Kalava’s heart thuttered.
How to reach him, across a hard-paved space amidst the many demons? After dark, creeping, a finger-length at a time, then maybe a final dash—
A buzz went by Kalava’s temple. He looked around and saw a thing the size of a bug hovering. But it was metal, the light flashed off it, and was that a single eye staring at him?
He snarled and swatted. His palm smote hardness. The thing reeled in the air. Kalava scuttled downhill into the brush.
He had been seen. Soon the sorceress would know.
All at once he was altogether calm, save that his spirit thrummed like rigging in a gale. Traveling, he had thought what he might do if something like this proved to be in his doom. Now he would do it. He would divert the enemy’s heed from himself, if only for a snatch of moments.
Quickly, steadily, he took the firemaker from his pouch, charged it, drove the piston in, pulled it out and inserted a match, brought up a little, yellow flame. He touched it to the withered bush before him. No need to puff. A leaf crackled instantly alight. The wind cast it against another, and shortly the whole shrub stood ablaze. Kalava was already elsewhere, setting more fires.
Keep on the move! The demon scouts could not be everywhere at a single time. Smoke began to sting his eyes and nostrils, but its haze swirled ever thicker, and the sun had gone under the clouds. The flames cast their own light, leaping, surging, as they climbed into the trees and made them torches.
Heat licked at Kalava. An ember fell to sear his left forearm. He barely felt it. He sped about on his work, himself a fire demon. Flyers darted overhead in the dusk. He gave them no heed either. Although he tried to make no noise except for the hurtful breaths he gasped, within him shouted a battle song.
When the fire stood like a wall along the whole southern edge of the field, when it roared like a beast or a sea, he ran from its fringe and out into the open.
Smoke was a bitter, concealing mist through which sparks rained. To and fro above flew the anxious lesser demons. Beyond them, the first stars were coming forth.
Kalava wove his way among the greater shapes. One stirred. It had spied him. Soundlessly, it flowed in pursuit. He dodged behind another, ran up and over the flanks of a low-slung third, sped on toward the opal dome and the god who stood beside it.
A thing with spines and a head like a cold sun slid in front of him. He tried to run past. It moved to block his way, faster than he was. The first one approached. He drew blade and hoped it would bite on them before he died.
From elsewhere came a being with four arms, two legs, and a mask. “Brannock!” Kalava bawled. “Ai, Brannock, you got here!”
Brannock stopped, a spear-length away. He did not seem to know the man. He only watched as the other two closed in.
Kalava took stance. The old song rang in him:
If the gods have left you,
Then laugh at them, warrior.
Never your heart
Will need to forsake you.
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 yo
urself, 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.”
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