who had finally relented and sired an heir in his six thousandth year, and then had lived another thousand anyway, so that Prime’s father had had the throne hardly more than a cycle or two. The old man’s deep-set eyes burn like suns: he seems ready to step down from the wall and take command of the ship.
“But even
Prime can’t stop thinking about them. Immortals who have to die! What a dirty joke the universe has played on them! What a nasty sense of irony the gods must have!
Prime activated Captain Tio Patnact again.
“If the Earthfolk are the perfect creatures that you say they are, and immortal besides,” he said, “what I want to know is, how do you think they feel about learning that they’re going to die when the stars fall into the Center of Things? Are they furious? Depressed? Trying desperately to find a way out of their trouble? Are they so calm and perfect and godlike that the thought of their planet’s being gobbled up by some kind of black hole doesn’t bother them at all? Or is it driving them out of their minds?”
“Wouldn’t it bother you?” asked the captain, and vanished into silence.
Standing by the screen, Prime watched Earth grow rapidly larger and larger. The shapes of the continents were visible now, great wedge-shaped chunks of deckle-edged brownness arranged like the spokes of a fan in the middle of an immense sea. At sparse intervals bright spots of heat and light rose from them, glaring out of the infrared, the spectral fingerprint of the fires of life: emanations of the settled areas, the magnificent castles of the grand and immortal Earthfolk.
Prime felt a flicker of awe, a shiver of something close to fear. He caught his breath and clenched his fists. There was a pressure at his throat, a heaviness in his chest, a throbbing in his skull.
Earth! The eternal mother of us all!—the ancestral world—the home of civilization for billions of years, layer upon layer of epochs going back through all nine mandalas and the disorganized forgotten eras that had preceded them.
An encapsulated pulse of Earth’s enormous history came squirting out of his midbrain to bedazzle the outer lobes of his whirling mind. He struggled desperately to embrace the totality of that dizzying blurt, the knowledge of all those different races and civilizations and cultures and empires of mankind, rising up and falling down and being replaced by others that in turn would disappear, wave after wave of endlessly changing but still somehow identifiably human forms over uncountable spans of time, the Originals and the Basics and the Radiants and Serenities, the Masks and the Spinners and the Sorcerers and the Thrones, the Wanderers replacing the Star-Scriers and the Moon-Sweepers driving out the Wanderers and the Hive Folk overwhelming the Moon-Sweepers, and on and on and on, eon after eon, a great continuity of change, the whole thing forming the mountainous and incomprehensible agglomeration that was the turbulent history of the mother world. Most of which had been lost: what remained, names and dates and eras and annals, was only a tiny fragment of the whole, Hanosz Prime knew, only a snippet, only a slice, a faint film with most of the substance behind it gone.
Prime was stunned, staggered, overwhelmed by the proximity of this ancientmost planet of the human realm, standing as it was atop the throne of its own gigantic past.
“Help me,” he said. “I’m overloading. The whole weight of human history is falling on me. I’m choking under it.”
The ship’s medic—Farfalla Vlinder was his name, a native of Boris in the Borboleta system, still alive there, as a matter of fact, but duplicated under contract for use in starships—said quickly, “Don’t try to take in all of Earth, its whole outrageous past and present, in a single gulp. No one can absorb all that. There’s too much, much too much.”
“Yes—but—”
“Think of now and nothing but now. Think just of a single district, a single town, a single house. Think of Sinon Kreidge’s great palace. And think of his daughter Kaivilda. Especially Kaivilda. How beautiful she is. How eager you are to see her.”
“Yes. Yes.”
Yes. Prime will allow himself to think only of Kaivilda.
He has no idea at this point what she looks like, other than that she is beautiful. In his dreams she is formless, nothing more than a golden aura stippled with amethyst and bright ruby. Her colors and textures call to him across the endless night of space.
Of the real Kaivilda, though, Prime knows almost nothing.
So Prime does the best he can. He summons up an ideal construct of Beauty, telling himself that it represents Kaivilda, and concentrates on that. A column of pure music shimmers in his mind. The lines of the full spectrum pulsate at its core. Umbrellas of cool light descend upon him.
“Shall we begin landing procedures?” asks Captain Tio Pacnact.
“Begin them, yes. Immediately.”
The screen brightens. Earth rushes forward until it seems that the whole planet is leaping into his hands.
The tiny scarlet teardrop that is his starship arches across the orbit of ponderous swirling Hjentiflir, which you would call Jupiter, and plunges past the great flower-shaped pattern of eternally blazing matter that the Star- Scrier people of the 104th Encompassment had fabricated for their amusement and pleasure from the otherwise useless clutter which we know as the asteroid belt, and swoops toward the landing stage of Sinon Kreidge’s Keep on the eastern coast of Earth’s great central continent.
Prime steps from his ship. And instantly he sees that this is indeed a planet of wonders and miracles.
Golden sunlight runs in rivers across the iron-blue sky, dazzling him. Stars shine at midday in the firmament. It is warm here, even on this mountaintop, much warmer than on snowy Prime. The sweet unfamiliar air of Earth, thin but not harsh, sweeps about him and as he sucks it in it seems to him that he is drinking down the mellowed wine of antiquity, thousands of cycles old. There is magic in that strange air. Ancient sorceries, floating dissolved in the fragrant atmosphere like flecks of gold in a rare elixir, penetrate his being.
Prime looks around, numbed, dazed. A figure materializes out of the shimmering haze and gestures to him.
It is Kaivilda. She has been waiting at the rim of the landing stage to greet him when he arrives; and now she moves toward him with heartrending grace, as though she is drifting weightless through the strange thin air.
To his great relief Hanosz Prime, stepping from his ship into the warm alien air of Earth, was instantly struck by the perfection of Kaivilda’s beauty. It’s the good old
Prime had known a little of what to expect, but Kaivilda goes far beyond anything he had imagined from the advance reports. She is wondrous—flawless—superb. She inspires in him immediately dreams of the activity that
Young love! At first sight, no less! In any era, it’s something to admire and envy.
(But what an odd pair our young couple would seem to us to be! For them it’s love at first sight—sheer physical attraction. You, on the other hand, would probably find her exceedingly weird-looking and not in the least attractive, and him terrifying and downright repellent.)
For this journey Hanosz Prime had had himself done up as an Authentic, awesome and swaggering and virile. As for Kaivilda, she had lately adopted the modularity known as the Serenity, which came into fashion only recently.
