A thing with spines and a head like a cold sun slid in front of him. He tried to run past. It moved to block his way, faster than he was. The first one approached. He drew a blade and hoped it would bite on them before he died.
From elsewhere came a being with four arms, two legs, and a mask. “Brannock!” Kalava bawled. “Ai, Brannock, you got here!”
Brannock stopped, a spear-length away. He did not seem to know the man. He only watched as the other two closed in.
Kalava took stance. The old song rang in him:
If the gods have left you,
Then laugh at them, warrior.
Never your heart
Will need to forsake you.
He heard no more than the noise of burning. But suddenly through the smoke he saw his foes freeze moveless, while Brannock trod forward as boldly as ever before; and Kalava knew that the god of Brannock and Ilyandi had become aware of him and had given a command.
Weariness torrented over him. His sword clattered to the ground. He sank too, fumbled in his filthy tunic, took out the message written on bark and offered it. “I have brought you this,” he mumbled. “Now let me go back to my ship.”
XII
We must end as we began, making a myth, if we would tell of that which we cannot ever really know. Imagine two minds conversing. The fire on the mountaintop is quenched. The winds have blown away smoke and left a frosty silence. Below, cloud deck reaches ghost-white to the rim of a night full of stars.
“You have lied to me throughout,” says Wayfarer.
“I have not,” denies Gaia. “The perceptions of this globe and its past through which I guided you were all true,” as true as they were majestic.
“Until lately,” retorts Wayfarer. “It has become clear that when Brannock returned, memories of his journey had been erased and falsehood written in. Had I not noticed abrupt frantic activity here and dispatched him to go see what it was—which you tried to dissuade me from—that man would have perished unknown.”
“You presume to dispute about matters beyond your comprehension,” says Gaia stiffly.
“Yes, your intellect is superior to mine.” The admission does not ease the sternness: “But it will be your own kind among the stars to whom you must answer. I think you would be wise to begin with me.”
“What do you intend?”
“First, to take the man Kalava back to his fellows. Shall I send Brannock with a flyer?”
“No, I will provide one, if this must be. But you do not, you cannot realize the harm in it.”
“Tell me, if you are able.”
“He will rejoin his crew as one anointed by their gods. And so will he come home., unless his vessel founders at sea.”
“I will watch from afar.”
“Lest my agents sink it?”
“After what else you have done, yes, I had best keep guard. Brannock made promises on my behalf which I will honor. Kalava shall have gold in abundance, and his chance to found his colony. What do you fear in this?”
“Chaos. The unforeseeable, the uncontrollable.”
“Which you would loose anew.”
“In my own way, in my own time,” She broods for a while, perhaps a whole microsecond. “It was misfortune that Kalava made his voyage just when he did. I had hoped for a later, more civilized generation to start the settlement of Arctica. Still, I could have adapted my plan to the circumstances, kept myself hidden from him and his successors, had you not happened to be on the planet.” Urgently: “It is not yet too late. If only by refraining from further action after you have restored him to his people, you can help me retrieve what would otherwise be lost.”
“If I should.”
“My dream is not evil.”
“That is not for me to say. But I can say that it is, it has always been, merciless.”
“Because reality is.”
“The reality that you created for yourself, within yourself, need not have been so. But what Christian revealed to me—Yes, you glossed it over. These, you said,” almost tearfully, if a quasi-god can weep, “are your children, born in your mind out of all the human souls that are in you. Their existence would be empty were they not left free of will, to make their own mistakes and find their own ways to happiness.”
“Meanwhile, by observing them, I have learned much that was never known before, about what went into the making of us.”
“I could have believed that. I could have believed that your interferences and your ultimate annihilations of history after history were acts of pity as well as science. You claimed they could be restarted if ever you determined what conditions would better them. It did seem strange that you set one line of them—or more?—not in Earth’s goodly past but in the hard world of today. It seemed twice strange that you were reluctant to have this particular essay brought to light. But I assumed that you with your long experience and superior mentality, had reasons. Your attempt at secrecy might have been to avoid lengthy justifications to your kindred. I did not know, nor venture to judge. I would have left that to them.
“But then Kalava arrived.”
Another mind-silence falls. At last Gaia says, very softly through the night, “Yes. Again humans live in the material universe.”
“How long has it been?” asks Wayfarer with the same quietness.
“I made the first of them about fifty thousand years ago. Robots in human guise raised them from infancy. After that they were free.”
“And, no doubt, expanding across the planet in their Stone Age, they killed off those big game animals. Yes, human. But why did you do it?”
“That humankind might live once more.” A sigh as of time itself blowing past. “This is what you and those whom you serve
