“I want to wait,” he said. Sweat stood on his skin, though the blood had withdrawn. “God, I want to! But I don’t dare.”
“Why not?”
She let go of him. He stared past her and said fast, flattening the anguish out of his tones: “Look, she didn’t want us to see that final world. She clearly didn’t, or quite expect we’d insist, or she’d have been better prepared. Maybe she could have passed something else off on us. As is, once he learns, Wayfarer will probably demand to see for himself. And she does not want him particularly interested in her emulations. Else why hasn’t she taken him through them directly, with me along to help interpret?
“Oh, I don’t suppose our action has been catastrophic for her plans, whatever they are. She can still cope, can still persuade him these creations are merely … toys of hers, maybe. That is, she can if she gets the chance to. I don’t believe she should.”
“How can you take on yourself—How can you imagine—”
“The amulets are a link to her. Not a constantly open channel, obviously, but at intervals they must inform a fraction of her about us, and she must also be able to set up intervals when Wayfarer gets too preoccupied with what he’s being shown to notice that a larger part of her attention has gone elsewhere. We don’t know when that’ll happen next. I’m going back to the house and tell her through one of the amulets that I require immediate contact with him.”
Laurinda stared as if at a ghost.
“That will not be necessary,” said the wind.
Christian lurched where he stood. “What?” he blurted. “You—”
“Oh—Mother—” Laurinda lifted her hands into emptiness.
The blowing of the wind, the rustling in the leaves made words. “The larger part of me, as you call it, has in fact been informed and is momentarily free. I was waiting for you to choose your course.”
Laurinda half moved to kneel in the grass. She glanced at Christian, who had regained balance and stood with fists at sides, confronting the sky. She went to stand by him.
“My lady Gaia,” Christian said most quietly, “you can do to us as you please,” change or obliterate or whatever she liked, in a single instant; but presently Wayfarer would ask why. “I think you understand my doubts.”
“I do,” sighed the air. “They are groundless. My creation of the Technome world is no different from my creation of any other. My avatar said it for me: I give existence, and I search for ways that humans, of their free will, can make the existence good.”
Christian shook his head. “No, my lady. With your intellect and your background, you must have known from the first what a dead end that world would soon be, scientists on a planet that is a sketch and everything else a shadow show. My limited brain realized it. No, my lady, as cold-bloodedly as you were experimenting, I believe you did all the rest in the same spirit. Why? To what end?”
“Your brain is indeed limited. At the proper time, Wayfarer shall receive your observations and your fantasies. Meanwhile, continue in your duty, which is to observe further and refrain from disturbing us in our own task.”
“My duty is to report.”
“In due course, I say.” The wind-voice softened. “There are pleasant places besides this.”
Paradises, maybe. Christian and Laurinda exchanged a glance that lingered for a second. Then she smiled the least bit, boundlessly sorrowfully, and shook her head.
“No,” he declared, “I dare not.”
He did not speak it, but he and she knew that Gaia knew what they foresaw. Given time, and they lost in their joy together, she could alter their memories too slowly and subtly for Wayfarer to sense what was happening.
Perhaps she could do it to Laurinda at this moment, in a flash. But she did not know Christian well enough. Down under his consciousness, pervading his being, was his aspect of Wayfarer and of her coequal Alpha. She would need to feel her way into him, explore and test with infinite delicacy, remake him detail by minutest detail, always ready to back off if it had an unexpected effect; and perhaps another part of her could secretly take control of the Technome world and erase the event itself. … She needed time, even she.
“Your action would be futile, you know,” she said. “It would merely give me the trouble of explaining to him what you in your arrogance refuse to see.”
“Probably. But I have to try.”
The wind went bleak. “Do you defy me?”
“I do,” Christian said. It wrenched from him: “Not my wish. It’s Wayfarer in me. I, I cannot do otherwise. Call him to me.”
The wind gentled. It went over Laurinda like a caress. “Child of mine, can you not persuade this fool?”
“No, Mother,” the woman whispered. “He is what he is.”
“And so—?”
Laurinda laid her hand in the man’s. “And so I will go with him, forsaking you, Mother.”
“You are casting yourselves from existence.”
Christian’s free fingers clawed the air. “No, not her!” he shouted. “She’s innocent!”
“I am not,” Laurinda said. She swung about to lay her arms around him and lift her face to his. “I love you.”
“Be it as you have chosen,” said the wind.
The dream that was the world fell into wreck and dissolved. Oneness swept over them like twin tides, each reclaiming a flung drop of spindrift; and the two seas rolled again apart.
XI
The last few hundred man-lengths Kalava went mostly on his belly. From bush to bole he crawled, stopped, lay flat and strained every sense into the shadows around him, before he crept onward. Nothing stirred but the twigs above, buffeted on a chill and fitful breeze. Nothing sounded but their creak and click, the scrittling of such leaves as they bore, now and then the harsh cry of a hookbeak—those, and the endless low noise of demons, like a remote surf wherein shrilled flutes on no scale he
