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 of 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
