A few ships putting out from the harbor, struggling against the fantastic heaving of the waves. A pitiful band of refugees, once again setting forth to save themselves as Athilan is brought down into ruin, just as Romany Star once had been.
The surface of the land subsides. It just drops downward into itself, as if everything that had been supporting it had gone up in the eruption. The sea comes pouring in, and nothing can hold it back. There’s a different sound now, a strange taut high-pitched one, like the thrumming of some immense insect, growing louder, louder, louder, until it fills every space and there can be room for nothing else anywhere in the world. It’s the sound of the city dying. And then it stops, with awful abruptness, with a crack of silence followed by a great stillness.
The stillness goes on and on.
The sky is clear again, blue with a golden sun, and the hugeness of the sea spreads before us.
Of the island of Athilan there is not the slightest sign. It has been devoured; it has been swallowed up; it has vanished beneath the surface of the water as though it had never existed.
The vision ended. Ram didn’t move. He knelt there as though he’d been clubbed. Through his numbed mind there ran, again and again, ghastly scenes out of the last hour of Athilan.
Then the door of the House of Anointing opened, and the three masked priests returned. With them was the King. He wore no mask; and his face was stark and stern as he knelt over his son and drew him gently to his feet. From his look, I realized that the King knew what Ram had seen. He had seen it himself, years before, on the day of his own Anointing.
So this is the mystery that the princes of this empire are shown as they enter into full manhood. They are pulled loose from the framework of time—how, I can’t even guess— and allowed to float freely, backward and then forward. And they are shown the fate that awaits this greatest of all cities.
What a shattering thing to learn! To discover that all striving is in vain, that discipline and ambition, hard work and planning, prayers and rituals, lead only to fiery doom and watery destruction! Why, then, bother to take on the burdens of being a king? Everything is pointless. Nothing you achieve can possibly withstand the coming fury. Your homeland will sink beneath the sea and be forgotten. What a devastating lesson that is!
No wonder Ram had crouched there in a stupor of shock and defeat.
When he left the House of Anointing with his father and the three priests he walked as a prince must walk, straightbacked, square-shouldered. But his eyes were bleak and his mind still lay locked in gloom and torment and cold despair. And that’s how he has been, these three days past. A cloud of seemingly unbreakable depression hangs over him. He won’t speak to anyone, he doesn’t eat at all, he remains in his room.
I can’t say I feel a lot better myself. The waves of sorrow-and amazement and horror that come from Ram’s mind have seeped into my own, and my mood is gray and chilly. There’s no use trying to kid myself with cheery little uplifting cliches. I’ve been forced right up against the underlying truth of things. What a dark and cruel place the world is, for all its beauty, for all its wonder! We have miracles around us on every side—a spiderweb is a miracle, Lora!—but also we have violence, insanity, terrible disease, sudden death. The same Nature that brings us the mountains and the rivers and the green glistening meadows brings us the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood of redhot lava rolling toward the city.
That Atlantis was one day to be destroyed was hardly any secret to me when I came here. But even so, it was a truly miserable experience to be forced to watch at close range as the news of the city’s inevitable doom was brought to someone who has spent his entire life preparing to be its king.
I wish I could do something for him. But he doesn’t want to talk even with me. My few attempts at making mental contact have been hurled back with furious snarls. He needs to work this thing through by himself, entirely by himself.
I suppose the Athilantans see the Anointing as a necessary part of the education of a future Grand Darionis. But to me, right now, it seems terribly cruel, a needless disillusionment. It utterly pulls the rug out from under you.
Everyone wants some way of seeing into the future, of course; but these people actually have one, and look at the damage it does. If I were going to become Grand Darionis of Athilan in a few years I’d just as soon be spared the knowledge that the whole place is fated eventually to go down the tubes regardless of anything anyone do.
I did, by the way, get your last letter just before all this happened.
I’m glad to hear you backing me up on the theory that the Athilantans came here from another world. Somebody else might just have shrugged and said that poor Roy has gone completely nuts. Instead you went and peered into Governor Sippurilayl’s memories of his boyhood history lessons and found that he’d been taught the same story Ram had. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s true; but I think it is, and apparently so do you. Thanks for your support. A good guy, you are. I don’t need to tell you, do I, how much you mean to me, how deeply I miss you, how eager I am to see you again?
And thanks also for the revised calendar information. Using the data you sent, I was able to sit down finally and plot everything out the way I should have done a long while back. I see now that my stint in Atlantis is just about over. Six days more, maybe seven, and they’ll be yanking us back to our sleeping bodies up there in Home Year. So we’ll actually be together again soon. I feel good about that, you can bet. But I hate the idea of leaving Atlantis at a time like this.
My God, these have been an awful few days.
With much much love—
—Roy
12.
Day 42, Golden Days, Great River.
This is my last letter. We’ll be home soon. In fact you won’t even get to read this, because it can’t possibly reach you out there in Naz Glesim before we leave. But I need to set all this down on paper anyway, just to get everything clear in my own mind. Let’s pretend that you’ll get it next week, although you won’t, not here. But you’ll be hearing it from me next week in person, up in Home Era.
The basic situation is this: I’ve been breaking rules again. In a big way. I’m beginning to think I’m suffering from some kind of compulsion to go against everything we were trained to do when we became time observers.
What happened was that I decided that since I’ve got very little time left to spend in Atlantis, I would save the city from the doom that’s bearing down on it before I have to leave. That’s right. All by myself I would spare this great civilization from destruction.
I don’t mean that I came up with some way to defuse that volcano or to keep the earthquake from happening. All I did was go to work on Prince Ram, trying to convince him to order an evacuation to some safer place while there was still time.
I should tell you that Ram had come up out of his state of deep gloom by this point. On the fifth morning after the Rite of Anointing he awakened in a perfectly calm, cheerful mood. He prayed, he swam about eighty laps in the palace pool, he ate an enormous breakfast, he met with his father and tackled a colossal stack of official reports that needed to be scanned and approved. It was as thought the Rite of Anointing had never taken place. He was absolutely his old self again. No trace remained of the dark, bitter, agonized frame of mind that had gripped him since the day of that terrible revelation.