“This is their greatest engineering?” Laurinda marveled. “We did—better—in my time. Or yours, Christian.”
“They’re working on it here, I suppose,” the man said. “We’ll investigate further. After all, this is a bare glimpse.”
“You must remember,” the voice volunteered, “no emulation can be as full and complex as the material universe.”
“M-m, yeh. Skeletal geography, apart from chosen regions; parochial biology; simplified cosmos.”
Laurinda glanced at featureless heaven. “The stars unreachable, because here they are not stars?” She shuddered and pressed close against him.
“Yes, a paradox,” he said. “Let’s talk with a scientist.”
“That will be difficult,” the voice demurred.
“You told us in Chinese America you could arrange meetings. It shouldn’t be any harder in this place.”
The voice did not reply at once. Unseen machines rumbled. A dust devil whirled up on a sudden gust of wind. Finally: “Very well. It shall be one who will not be stricken dumb by astonishment and fear. Nevertheless, I should supply you beforehand with a brief description of what you will come to.”
“Go ahead. If it is brief.”
What changes in the history would that encounter bring about? Did it matter? This world was evidently not in temporary reactivation, it was ongoing; the newcomers were at the leading edge of its timeline. Gaia could erase their visit from it. If she cared to. Maybe she was going to terminate it soon because it was making no further progress that interested her.
5
Transfer.
Remote in a wasteland, only a road and an airstrip joining it to anything else, a tower lifted from a walled compound. Around it, night was cooling in a silence hardly touched by a susurrus of chant where robed figures bearing dim lights did homage to the stars. Many were visible, keen and crowded amidst their darkness, a rare sight, for clouds had parted across most of the sky. More lights glowed muted on a parapet surrounding the flat roof of a tower. There a single man and his helper used the chance to turn instruments aloft, telescope, spectroscope, cameras, bulks in the gloom.
Christian and Laurinda appeared unto them.
The man gasped, recoiled for an instant, and dropped to his knees. His assistant caught a book that he had nearly knocked off a table, replaced it, stepped back, and stood imperturbable, an anthropoid whose distant ancestors had been human but who lived purely to serve his master.
Christian peered at the man. As his eyes adapted, he saw garments like his, embroidered with insignia of rank and kindred, headdress left off after dark. The skin was ebony black but nose and lips were thin, eyes oblique, fingertips tapered, long hair and closely trimmed beard straight and blond. No race that ever inhabited old Earth, Christian thought; no, this is a breed that Gaia designed for the dying planet.
The man signed himself, looked into the pale faces of the strangers, and said, uncertainly at first, then with a gathering strength: “Hail and obedience, messengers of God. Joy at your advent.”
Christian and Laurinda understood, as they had understood hunted Zoe. The amulets had told them they would not be the first apparition these people had known. “Rise,” Christian said. “Be not afraid.”
“Nor call out,” Laurinda added.
Smart lass, Christian thought. The ceremony down in the courtyard continued. “Name yourself,” he directed.
The man got back on his feet and took an attitude deferential rather than servile. “Surely the mighty ones know,” he said. “I am Eighth Khaltan, chief astrologue of the Ilgai Technome, and, and wholly unworthy of this honor.” He hesitated. “Is that, dare I ask, is that why you have chosen the forms you show me?”
“No one has had a vision for several generations,” explained the soundless voice in the heads of the newcomers.
“Gaia has manifested herself in the past?” Christian subvocalized.
“Yes, to indicate desirable courses of action. Normally the sending has had the shape of a fire.”
“How scientific is that?”
Laurinda addressed Khaltan: “We are not divine messengers. We have come from a world beyond your world, as mortal as you, not to teach but to learn.”
The man smote his hands together. “Yet it is a miracle, again a miracle—in my lifetime!”
Nonetheless he was soon avidly talking. Christian recalled myths of men who were the lovers of goddesses or who tramped the roads and sat at humble meat with God Incarnate. The believer accepts as the unbeliever cannot.
Those were strange hours that followed. Khaltan was not simply devout. To him the supernatural was another set of facts, another facet of reality. Since it lay beyond his ken, he had turned his attention to the measurable world. In it he observed and theorized like a Newton. Tonight his imagination blazed, questions exploded from him, but always he chose his words with care and turned everything he heard around and around in his mind, examining it as he would have examined some jewel fallen from the sky.
Slowly, piecemeal, while the stars wheeled around the pole, a picture of his civilization took shape. It had overrun and absorbed every other society—no huge accomplishment, when Earth was meagerly populated and most folk on the edge of starvation.
The major technology was biological, agronomy, aquaculture in the remnant lakes and seas, ruthlessly practical genetics. Industrial chemistry flourished. It joined with physics at the level of the later nineteenth century to enable substantial engineering works and reclamation projects.
Society itself—How do you summarize an entire culture in words? It can’t be done. Christian got the impression of a nominal empire, actually a broad-based oligarchy of families descended from conquering soldiers. Much upward mobility was by adoption of promising commoners, whether children or adults. Sons who made no contribution to the well-being of the clan or who disgraced it could be kicked out, if somebody did not pick a fight and kill them in a duel. Unsatisfactory daughters were also expelled, unless a marriage into a lower class could be negotiated. Otherwise the status of the
