‘You think that’s why I remember absolutely nothing between the temple and here?’
‘I would say so. Probably they didn’t want you making a fuss.’
I decided I would have another glass of orange juice. For some reason I was extremely thirsty. John gave me a description of which button to press and I went to the kitchen alone. With a bit of fiddling I got what I wanted, but I got plenty of other stuff as well. I took the whole lot back to the balcony, for I was getting hungry again. I had in fact lost weight during the winter. For the most part I had lived on fish and on a kind of cake made out of honey and flour. After such a pleasant but monotonous diet, the profusion of tastes coming from the machines in the kitchen had quite a fascination.
‘How advanced are these people, technologically I mean?’ I asked as I munched the odd concoctions.
‘Considering they’re something like six thousand years beyond us, not as much as I would have expected. At the development pace of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’d say they’re about five hundred years on. Of course that’s impressive enough. It’s about the gap which separated us from the fifteenth century. They’ve apparently been able to put into practice things we could only just conceive of. For instance they can produce enormous captive magnetic fields. You do this with a superconducting material, which prevents you from having ridiculous heating problems. Our trouble was that we couldn’t get sufficiently rigid materials, and we had to fuss with very low temperatures. Somehow they’ve got rigid serviceable materials. Very strong magnetic fields have become a standard part of their technology, like the electric motor and dynamo are with us. You’ll find their vehicles look at first sight like a hovercraft. They float over the ground. But they don’t do it by blowing air. They simply ride on a magnetic field. The logistics of it work just like a railway system. They’ve got tracks laid out all over the country. But the tracks are magnetic, nothing at all like railway lines. The great thing about it is that it’s all silent, and it’s all computer controlled. Apparently you ring up for a vehicle in the same way as we might ring up for a taxi.’
‘But with travelling as individual as that, like taxis, I’d have thought there’d be an almost impossible crush.’
‘I think the secret of it is that there just aren’t many people. We think in terms of tens or hundreds of millions. I haven’t found out yet exactly how many of them there are, but it can’t be anything like a twentieth-century population.’
It was all very intriguing. Already I had a fancy to do a bit of travelling around myself.
‘How did you know to come up here?’
‘I had information you were here.’
‘You realize what that means?’
‘I don’t think it’s as bad as you think. Look, who were your special friends in Greece? You give me an answer because I’ve asked an entirely reasonable question, not because I force an answer out of you. That’s probably what you did. There may be nothing more to it.’
‘And I’ve since forgotten all about it?’
‘I thought we agreed about that. Anyway they told me you would be here. Something more, they’re going to put on a special film show for us. To give us an idea of the things that have happened in the span of time between our day and theirs. I gather it’ll last for quite a time, although they apologized for the sparsity of some of the material. They said we would realize why when we’d seen it.’
We went back inside to the main room. John hunted around until he found a master switch. When he pressed it the same thing happened as in the kitchen, a panel slid back and a kind of typewriter keyboard appeared. Only this time there were many more keys on it. John took out a piece of paper:
‘I’ve got the code here, at least I’ve got instructions about which buttons to press. Until we get used to it we’d better do what they tell us. Otherwise we may find ourselves inside the washing machine.’
He pressed I suppose about half a dozen keys. On one of the flat pieces of the wall there appeared a picture. It was a pleasant country scene in colour, no more. ‘That must be the call signal.’
We made ourselves a couple of comfortable armchairs in the floor and sat down to wait. There was a sudden commotion outside. Then in streamed my priestess, Melea, followed by another girl. I kissed Melea, and for good measure the other girl too. They were strikingly similar. Noticing the picture on the wall Melea said something in a strange language. She went to the keyboard on the wall and punched a few buttons. The picture disappeared. Something else must have happened, for there were a few small clicks, but I didn’t notice anything by eye. Then Melea made quite a little speech, again in the strange language. A second or two after she had finished I was astonished to hear her voice again in the room. I say in the room because it didn’t come from any particular place. I suppose there must have been a lot of small speakers distributed everywhere over the walls. The astonishing thing was that the language was English, with a very curious pronunciation, but English nevertheless.
‘This is my friend Neria. She too was in Greece, at the temple of Delphi. That also was a temple of Apollo. It was she who made the prophecy about the war between Athens and Sparta. Will you not introduce your friend?’
I began to speak in my not very good Greek. She interrupted me:
‘It will be much better if you speak in your own language.’
So I made the introduction. Immediately I had finished there came my own voice, I would have sworn it was mine, in a language of which I didn’t know a single word. Naturally I was pretty dumbfounded. The girls stepped forward and kissed John, one after the other, which must have surprised him as much as the language business did me. Off his guard, he turned to me and said:
‘Did they behave in Greece like this?’ Immediately after he had finished, his voice was heard everywhere throughout the room in the new language. The girls made the incident into a joke which helped break the ice. I’ve noticed before that when you’ve been close and intimate with a girl you haven’t known for more than a short time the second meeting is always a slight embarrassment. One can never be sure whether the situation is still the same as it had been. So I was glad this moment of embarrassment was out of the way.
Melea turned to me and smiled. ‘We have brought you a present. In fact we’ve brought you two, one from each of us, but we are only going to let you see one at a time.’
The translation system made for very accurate understanding but I could see it was going to be a bit stilted. It wouldn’t be right over breakfast.
Now it was Neria who went to the keyboard. With a deliberate flourish of the hand she tapped away at two or three of the buttons. I was quite unprepared for what followed. I suppose I expected some kind of picture to appear on the wall. But no, in through the doorway from the direction of the kitchen an object glided into the room. It made no sound as it moved. Neria pressed a button and it stopped not far from the exit on to the balcony. I realized they must have the magnetic tracks John was talking about even under the damned floor itself.
We all turned our attention to the object. At the touch of a switch on its side the top folded back. There underneath was a keyboard, a piano keyboard, with the usual eighty-eight keys. At the right-hand end there was a small metal lever, and nothing else.
The two girls stood waiting like expectant children at a party, just after the conjurer has arrived. For me, some conjuring would be necessary it seemed. There was no piano stool, no pedals, and the box itself just wasn’t big enough to contain any appreciable length of string.
‘Where do I sit?’
‘Haven’t you got an adjuster?’