Without unrolling it, he said, aiming the thought right at me, sharp and fierce as a lightning-bolt:
—Does this contain more of your demon-writing?
So he knew I was still there. I remained silent and tried to seem inconspicuous. Didn’t help.
—Tell me. What is this all about? Is there a demon inside Provincial Governor Sippurilayl also? What do you two demons say to each other in your letters?
Then he opened the scroll and stared at it. —
Yes,he said.As I thought. More demon-marks. Very well, demon. I am unable to expel you; therefore, I must attempt to know you. Tell me who and what you are, demon. I command you to reply. By all the gods do I command you!
I was at a crossroads. I could have knocked him out then and there, and tried once more to edit from his mind all recollection of this latest scroll. Or I could admit the truth—despite everything that our training says—and see what would happen next.
Lora, I didn’t hesitate more than a fraction of a second. —
I am not a demon, I said.I am a visitor from a land that lies far away at the other end of time.
I said it. I actually said it. I gave away the whole show.
I didn’t feel that I had any other option, Lora. Probably we never should have started sending these letters back and forth; but we did—I take the blame for that—and so the Prince and most likely Provincial Governor Sippurilayl also have been exposed to the sight of documents written in English. And the Prince, at least, has managed to figure out that something peculiar is going on.
I suppose I could, even at this point, have gone into Prince Ram’s mind and tried to carve out every bit of data having to do with my presence there and with the scrolls he had seen. But I hadn’t done such a great job of editing his mind in my previous attempts, apparently, and there was so much now to remove that I didn’t for a moment think I could do it without seriously damaging him.
I wasn’t going to risk that.
Better to break all the rules, and tell him the full truth, and take the consequences, both here and in Home Era, for what I had done.
And what was the Prince’s reaction, do you think? Bewilderment? Shock? Horror? Or a simple snort of anger and derision at the thought that the demon who was infesting him was a crazy demon, thus making a bad situation worse?
None of the above. He wasn’t annoyed or upset. He was very calm, matter-of-fact, almost casual. I suppose that is one of the differences between ordinary mortals and princes who have been trained all their lives to be rulers of a great realm. Your basic prince needs to know how to stay cool and collected in the face of any sort of crisis, no matter how weird.
He said,So you come from the time when the gods walked the earth? That golden time long ago?
—No. I come from a time yet unborn.
—A future time, you mean?
—The future, yes. More than twenty thousand years from now.
—Ah. How very strange. And are you of our people?
I hesitated.—I don’t think so. No.
He thought about that.—Of the Dirt People, then?
—Perhaps. I can’t be certain.
—Because you come from such a distant time?
—Yes,I said. In twenty thousand years many things change.
His mental voice was silent a long while. I felt him pondering the information I had given him, examining it, mulling it, digesting it.
At last he said,If you come from so far away, then you must be a great wizard.
—Not really. But great wizards sent me here.
—You are no wizard? You are only a demon?
—Neither a demon nor a wizard, Prince Ram.
He said, after considering that a moment,I think you are a wizard all the same. What is your name, wizard?
—Roy Colton.
—That is a name only a wizard would have.
—It’s a very ordinary name, I assure you.
—It is a wizard’s name,the Prince replied firmly.I have no doubt of that.He was still completely calm.And why have you entered my mind, wizard? What is it you seek there?
The tone of his mental voice was casual, conversational. It unsettled me a little, the ease with which he seemed to be accepting my presence within him now. Knowing about it had upset him at first, sure, but he didn’t appear to have any problem with it now. He seemed to find it pretty interesting. He was curious about the whys and wherefores.
Was he setting a trap for me?
It didn’t look that way. I took a readout on his endocrine systems and saw that beneath his pose of calmness lay nothing but more calmness. You or I, discovering that some inexplicable phantom has taken residence in our heads, would never have been so calm. We’d have figured we were going psycho and checked ourselves into the nearest ward for a complete workover. But that’s the value, I guess, of living in a world where the gods are still real and vivid and where you expect to run into the occasional demon or wizard now and then. It didn’t occur to Prince Ram that he might have lost his sanity when he started hearing voices in his head. My being inside him was simply a challenge that had to be dealt with, a problem that had to be solved.
His openness and straightforwardness were tremendously appealing. He simply wanted to know who I was and what my being here was all about.
So I told him everything. I broke every rule in the book.
I told him how in the distant future land where I lived, we had developed the power to send our minds backward in time. I described the way time research had begun, the first experiments, the failures and the successes, the early shorthop attempts at going back a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. I went on to talk about how, as we mastered the technique, we’d begun to send volunteers back across the centuries in the form of disembodied consciousnesses— jumping a hundred years, five hundred, a thousand.
Whether he really understood very much of this is anybody’s guess. But from the fluctuations of his hormone levels I could tell that he was spellbound, utterly fascinated, when I spoke of the way time explorers, reporting on their experiences, are able to recapture the past and make it seem to live again.
And then I spoke of Athilan—“Atlantis, as we call it,” I said. I described how, as we pushed our research back and back and back, we began picking up sketchy details of the existence of Athilan, and I told him that of all the nations of the ancient world, the empire of Athilan was the greatest, and therefore was the one that we yearned most to know about.
I held my breath, afraid that I’d given away too much. I didn’t want to have to tell him of the coming destruction of his land, the obliteration of all but the most hazy memory of the great empire that was Athilan. But I had tossed him a big hint, of course. If Athilan was all but forgotten in my time, what was I saying, if not that it had been destroyed somewhere along the way? But he was so interested in the idea of consciousnesses wandering back in time that we went right by that obvious point.
—Are you the first wizard of your people to visit Athilan? he asked.
—The third,I said. And I told him of Fletcher’s pioneering-trip, and Iversen’s, and how the information they brought back was useful in its way but too limited, because Fletcher had landed in the mind of a slave, and Iversen in that of a not very bright shopkeeper, and neither one was capable of providing much insight into the details of Athilantan life. So a deliberate attempt was made, I said, to see to it that the next explorer who went back to Athilan entered the mind of a member of the ruling family.