It’s not a deliberately cruel civilization, Christian thought, but neither is it an especially compassionate one.
Had any civilization ever been, really? Some fed their poor, but mainly they fed their politicians and bureaucrats.
He snatched his information out of talk that staggered everywhere else. The discourse for which Khaltan yearned was of the strangers’ home—he got clumsily evasive, delaying responses—and the whole system of the universe, astronomy, physics, everything.
“We dream of rockets going to the planets. We have tried to shoot them to the moon,” he said, and told of launchers that ought to have worked. “All failed.”
Of course, Christian thought. Here the moon and planets, yes, the very sun were no more than lights. The tides rose and fell by decree. The Earth was a caricature of Earth outside. Gaia could do no better.
“Are we then at the end of science?” Khaltan cried once. “We have sought and sought for decades, and have won to nothing further than measurements more exact.” Nothing that would lead to relativity, quantum theory, wave mechanics, their revolutionary insights and consequences. Gaia could not accommodate it. “The angels in the past showed us what to look for. Will you not? Nature holds more than we know. Your presence bears witness!”
“Later, perhaps later,” Christian mumbled, and cursed himself for his falsity.
“Could we reach the planets—Caged, the warrior spirit turns inward on itself. Rebellion and massacre in the Westlands—”
Laurinda asked what songs the people sang.
Clouds closed up. The rite in the courtyard ended. Khaltan’s slave stood motionless while he himself talked on and on.
The eastern horizon lightened. “We must go,” Christian said.
“You will return?” Khaltan begged. “Ai-ha, you will?”
Laurinda embraced him for a moment. “Fare you well,” she stammered, “fare always well.”
How long would his “always” be?
6
After an uneasy night’s sleep and a nearly wordless breakfast, there was no real cause to leave the house in England. The servants, scandalized behind carefully held faces, might perhaps eavesdrop, but would not comprehend, nor would any gossip that they spread make a difference. A deeper, unuttered need sent Christian and Laurinda forth. This could well be the last of their mornings.
They followed a lane to a hill about a kilometer away. Trees on its top did not obscure a wide view across the land. The sun stood dazzling in the east, a few small clouds sailed across a blue as radiant as their whiteness, but an early breath of autumn was in the wind. It went strong and fresh, scattering dawn-mists off plowland and sending waves through the green of pastures; it soughed in the branches overhead and whirled some already dying leaves off. High beyond them winged a V of wild geese.
For a while, man and woman stayed mute. Finally Laurinda breathed, savored, fragrances of soil and sky, and murmured, “That Gaia brought this back to life—She must be good. She loves the world.”
Christian looked from her, aloft, and scowled before he made an oblique reply. “What are she and Wayfarer doing?”
“How can we tell?”—tell what the gods did or even where they fared. They were not three-dimensional beings, nor bound by the time that bound their creations.
“She’s keeping him occupied,” said Christian.
“Yes, of course. Taking him through the data, the whole of her stewardship of Earth.”
“To convince him she’s right in wanting to let the planet die.”
“A tragedy—but in the end, everything is tragic, isn’t it?” Including you and me. “What … we … they … can learn from the final evolution, that may well be worth it all, as the Acropolis was worth it all. The galactic brain itself can’t foreknow what life will do, and life is rare among the stars.”
Almost, he snapped at her. “I know, I know. How often have we been over this ground? How often have they? I might have believed it myself. But—”
Laurinda waited. The wind skirled, caught a stray lock of hair, tossed it about over her brow.
“But why has she put humans, not into the distant past”—Christian gestured at the landscape lying like an eighteenth-century painting around them—“but into now, an Earth where flesh-and-blood humans died eons ago?”
“She’s in search of a fuller understanding, surely.”
“Surely?”
Laurinda captured his gaze and held it. “I think she’s been trying to find how humans can have, in her, the truly happy lives they never knew in the outer cosmos.”
“Why should she care about that?”
“I don’t know. I’m only human.” Earnestly: “But could it be that that element in her is so strong—so many, many of us went into her—that she longs to see us happy, like a mother with her children?”
“All that manipulation, all those existences failed and discontinued. It doesn’t seem very motherly to me.”
“I don’t know, I tell you!” she cried.
He yearned to comfort her, kiss away the tears caught in her lashes, but urgency drove him onward. “If the effort has no purpose except itself, it seems mad. Can a nodal mind go insane?”
She retreated from him, appalled. “No. Impossible.”
“Are you certain? At least, the galactic brain has to know the truth, the whole truth, to judge whether something here has gone terribly wrong.”
Laurinda forced a nod. “You will report to Wayfarer, and he will report to Alpha, and all the minds will decide,” a question that was unanswerable by mortal creatures.
Christian stiffened. “I have to do it at once.”
He had hinted, she had guessed, but just the same she seized both his sleeves and protest spilled wildly from her lips. “What? Why? No! You’d only disturb him in his rapport,
