—Your ancestors knew that Romany Star would be destroyed? And they did nothing to save themselves?
—They built sixteen starships, and loaded aboard them whatever they could. The rest they left behind to face the flames. And when the catastrophe comes to the isle of Athilan, we will have ships ready, and once again we will save what we can. The rest will be destroyed beyond recovery.
I said, bewildered,—I can’t believe that you’ll just sit here like sheep and take no action, even though you can seethe future and you know that the future holds destruction for you.
—Tell me this, wizard. In your era, do people still die?
—Yes. Of course.
—And yet you go about your daily lives, doing your work and making plans for the future and seeking always to better yourselves, even though you know that in twenty or thirty or fifty years you will certainly be dead? You don’t simply give up and lie down, the moment you discover that death is inevitable, and abandon all striving right at that point?
—It isn’t the same thing,I said.The individual has to die sooner or later, yes. But the family goes on, the nation goes on, the world goes on. Each one of us does his part in the time that’s allotted. What other choice do we have?
—And if you knew—you absolutely knew—that the world itself would perish on the day of your own death? Would you give up all striving because it seemed futile, wizard? Or would you continue to work and plan?
His argument seemed wrong to me.—But this isn’t a matter of the whole world being destroyed! It’s a matter of one island being struck by catastrophe, and its people having advance warning of the fact, and being unwilling to move to a safer place despite everything they know. That makes no sense to me.
—Only the kings know of the doom that is coming. Not any other soul.
—Even so. If the kings know, it’s their duty to save their people.
—And shall the king then thwart the will of the gods?Ram asked.We must take what comes. And fully learn the lesson the gods wish to teach.
That was where I gave up. I understood, then: these people really are alien. Their minds don’t work like ours. They seethe steamroller coming, and they refuse to get out of the way. It’s the will of the gods, they say. And for them that’s all there is to it. Pure fatalism. A philosophy like that isn’t easy for me to comprehend. But after all I’m only a visitor here.
And my visit’s almost over. I feel the bond weakening; I feel Home Era starting to pull me back. In a little while I’ll be up front there, giving my report, confessing my blatant errors of judgment, surrendering myself to the judgment that’s waiting for me. If I’m lucky they’ll go easy on me. I understand that I’m not the first time-traveler to give in to the temptation to help his host avoid serious trouble. We’re only human, after all.
And what will happen here, I wonder?
Well, Atlantis will be destroyed. That was a given fact from the start. Perhaps it’ll happen when Ram is king, perhaps in the reign of some grandchild of his—but it will happen. No question of it. Fire and brimstone will fall, and the sea will rise, and the island will be swallowed up. In that moment the empire will end.
But a few ships are going to escape. I’m certain of that.
Where will they go? Egypt? Mesopotamia?
Will they live to build still another civilization, which will eventually perish also, but manage to pass a few fragments onward, until our world, the world that we call “modern,” has taken form? Somewhere in our own world today are the descendants of these Athilantans. Of that I’m certain too. These perpetual wanderers, these many-times refugees—surely they endure, surely they still dwell among us. By now they’ve forgotten their own history, I suspect. They don’t know that their ancestors came from another world to live among us Dirt People, and once built the greatest empire that ever was, of which not a trace remains. It’s all forever lost, back here in the distant buried corridors of time.
But that’s not important. Time devours everything. Entire histories vanish. What matters is endurance. The spirit survives and goes onward when the palaces crumble and the kings are forgotten.
And if I’ve learned anything from this fantastic journey in time, Lora, that’s it. You too, out there among the mammoth-hunters in their houses of bone, have seen what it’s like to struggle against hostile nature and prevail. I, here in glittering Athilan, have also discovered a thing or two about how harsh a place the universe can be, and how stubborn we mortals can be in fighting back.
Ram knows I’m leaving soon, disappearing into a distant-future time that’s not even a dream to him. I wonder if he’ll miss his “demon,” his “wizard.” I suspect he will.
I know I’m going to miss him. He’s the most noble guy I’ve ever known. And I think he’s going to be the greatest Grand Darionis that the Empire of Athilan has ever had.
And that’s the whole story. It’s just about time to go now, love. I’ll be seeing you in a little while, only twenty thousand years from here. I hope they have a pizza waiting for us when we get there.
PROJECT PENDULUM
1. Eric -5 minutes
Displacement hit him like a punch in the gut. He had to fight to keep from doubling up, coughing and puking. He was dizzy, too, and his legs kept trying to float up toward the ceiling. But the sensation lasted only a fraction of a second, and then he felt fine.
He was still in the laboratory, standing right in front of himself. In front of Sean, too. Twin and twin. Sean and the other version of himself were sitting side by side on the shunt platform in their strange little three-legged metal chairs, waiting for it all to begin.
Five minutes from now the singularity coupling would come to life and the displacement force would take hold of them. And they would be shuttled at infinite speed between the black hole and the white hole until they were thrust out through the time gate. But right now they were staring in wonder and amazement at him—at the extra Eric, Eric2, the one who had been conjured up out of the mysterious well of time. Who had been pulled five minutes out of the future to stand before them now.
Weird to be looking at yourself like this, Eric thought. Seeing yourself from the outside.
In a sense, of course, he had had a way of seeing himself-from the outside all his life. He just needed to glance at his twin brother, Sean. Looking at Sean’s eyes was almost like looking into a mirror. The same color, the same glinting alertness. The same quick motions, taking everything in.
But this was different. Sean was like a mirror image of him, and your mirror image is never what you are. Eric didn’t feel he looked as much like Sean as everyone else seemed to think, anyway. But now he was looking at himself, not Sean. Seeing neither his twin brother nor his own mirror image, but seeing himself unreflected, as others saw him all the time.
Strange. His nose—the nose of the other Eric—didn’t seem right and his smile turned the wrong way at the corners of his mouth. His eyebrows were reversed, with the one on the right side pointing up. His whole face looked out of balance.
Eric wandered around the lab like some sort of disembodied spirit, prowling here and there. Someone aimed a camera at him and he made faces into it, putting his hands to his ears and wiggling them.