“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 talkmates.
The next morning, which was brilliant, they went out into the garden and settled on a bench by the fish basin. Drops of rain glistened on flowers, whose fragrance awoke with the strengthening sunshine. 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
