“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.”
2
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 Ashcroft.”
Her smile warmed and widened. “Thank you, kind sir. And I am glad to be … alive … today. What should we do next?”
“Visit some living history, I think,” he said. “Why not Hellenic?”
She struck her palms together. “The age of Pericles!”
He frowned. “Well, I don’t know about that. The Peloponnesian War, the plague—and foreigners like us, barbarians, you a woman, we wouldn’t be too well received, would we?”
He heard
