Laurinda swallowed and wiped her eyes. “Give her her last year in peace,” she said into the air. “Please.”
Objects appeared in the room behind the doorway. “Here are food, wine, clean water,” said the unheard voice. “Advise her to return downhill after dark, find some friends, and lead them back. A small party, hiding in these ruins, can hope to survive until the invaders move on.”
“It isn’t worthwhile doing more, is it?” Christian said bitterly. “Not to you.”
“Do you wish to end your investigation?”
“No, be damned if I will.”
“Nor I,” said Laurinda. “But when we’re through here, when we’ve done the pitiful little we can for this girl, take us home.”
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 one 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 époque.”
“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 tierce hour 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.
