Im not sure that there are actual steam engines down below. For all I really know, the engine room is staffed by a team of sorcerers who keep giant turbines going round and round by uttering spells. Truth is, I dont know whats down there, and neither does Prince Ram. Princes dont need to bother with such technological details, apparently. Id like to sleepwalk him down belowdecks so that I could have a look around, but I dont dare. Not until Im completely sure that my control over his mind is good enough to keep him asleep as long as I want. I dont want him suddenly waking up and finding himself down in the engine room, where somebody of his high rank ordinarily has no reason to go. And then starting to wonder if theres something funny going on inside his brain.
This much I can tell you, though. The ship is big, as large as a good-sized yacht, long and tapering, with a flat stern and a very high keel. The hull is of metal: iron, probably, but for all I know these people may be capable of fabricating steel. You may balk at that idea, but just keep on reading.
Theres a mast, a big one, but no sign of any rigging or lines. Either the mast has some sacred purpose or its some kind of antenna, but it isnt used to support sails. There are also two funnels, or smokestacks. I never see any smoke coming out of them. I can feel a very light but steady vibration, as though engines of some sort are at work. Thats all I know.
Oh, one other thing. These people use electricity.
I know, I know, I know. It sounds nutty. The first time I saw the lights coming on, I thought the Prince was hallucinating. Or else that I must be misreading the data, coming up with false sensory equivalents for what was passing through his mind. Or maybe I was the one who was hallucinating. I tell you, Lora, it hit me like an earthquake. I was rocked by it. Flustered, bewildered, disoriented. For a moment I wondered whether I could believe anything that I was perceiving. Maybe it was all equally cockeyed. Paleolithic electricity?
But I checked and doublechecked, and the signal was coming through clear and true from him to me. What I was perceiving was what Prince Ram was seeing, to the last decimal place. So it wasnt any fever dream. It was electric lighting, Lora. However incredible that sounds.
Where I was on the mainland, everything was lit by properly prehistoric-looking oil lamps, smelly and smoky, and no doubt its the same out your way. But every corridor of this ship that Ive seen so far, and every stateroom too, I suspect, has electric lights. I suppose they simply havent bothered to set up generators in the mainland outposts, or maybe theres no ready supply of fuel for them there. But they must have some kind of generator aboard ship, cranking out the kilowatts just like at home.
The light-globes are big and awkward, and the light they give is harsh and glaring, but theres no question that its electrical. Ive seen Prince Ram turn the light in his cabin on and off by touching a plate in the wall.
With no effort whatsoever I could make myself believe that Im aboard a twentieth-century vessela peculiar one, true, designed by someone from an obscure country who has invented the whole concept of the oceangoing ship from scratch without ever having seen one from Europe or the United States, but corresponding to them in all the important details. And yet I know that Im back here at the tail end of the Ice Age, with woolly mammoths and shaggy rhinoceroses still wandering around where Paris and London will someday be.
Who are these Athilantans, anyway? How could they possibly have achieved all this, tens of thousands of years out of the normal human sequence of cultural evolution? It doesnt make any sense. Suddenly, in the midst of a world that still uses flint axes and choppers, for a society to spring up that has mastered metals, engineering, architecture, even electricityits crazy, Lora. I dont get it. The old myths said that the Atlanteans were a great people, but not that they were miracle-workers.
Well, let that be for now. I have plenty of other things to tell you.
Im pretty sure now that the place we set out from was the coast of Brittany. We all knew in advance back at Home Era, when we began focusing on members of the ruling caste as my target, that important members of the royal family made regular inspection tours of the coastal provinces and that if they aimed me at the mind of one of the high princes I was just likely to come down in ancient France as in Athilan itself.
Certainly the stone tools that the mainlanders were using were the sort of things used in France at this time. And the harbor was a good one. Whether Thibarak was Cherbourg or Le Havre, I cant say; but unless I have my geography all cockeyed we have just sailed out through the English Channelon the clear days it seemed to me I could see the English shore to the northand now we are running far into the Atlantic, curving down past Portugal toward the mouth of the Mediterranean. Which is just where our archaeologists had decided was the most likely place for Atlantis to have been, of coursesomewhere between the Canary Islands and the Azores.
The weather gets milder and warmer every day. Birds, soft breezes (even in the middle of an Ice Age winter!), drifting masses of seaweed. There is a lot of rain, virtually daily,but its a gentle kind of rain and when the sun comes out afterward the rainbows are heartbreaking. Especially when I stop to think that Atlantis lies at the end of them.
Life aboard ship is
Uh-ohtrouble
Six or seven hours later, same day.
A narrow escape. I was using the Prince to write this letter, and I almost got caught.
Ram was in his stateroom, sitting in one of the hammocklike things that they use on this ship. I had him under trance, and I was telling you all about the weather at sea when suddenly his personal steward came in. To tidy up the room, I suppose.
It isnt the custom among the Athilantans to knock on doors. They make a kind of high whistling noise when they want to enter a room. I was so preoccupied with dictating my letter that I didnt even notice. So in walks the steward, and he sees the heir to the imperial throne sitting bolt upright in his hammock with a weird trance look on his face.
Your Highness! he says. And then, in real terror, Your Highness?!?
He rushes over, seizes the Prince, shakes him hard. Well, you can bet I broke contact with the Princes mind right away. He snapped out of it and looked around in confusion and got angry with the steward for bothering him while he was trying to take a nap. That part went all right.
But I couldnt put the Prince back into trance until the steward had left the cabin. And the steward took just long enough to get out of there so that the Prince had time to look down at the sheet of vellum he was holding, and stare at the nonsensical marks scribbled all over it.
So when the steward finally was gone, there was Prince Ram sitting there, wide awake, holding a sheet of vellum in one hand and an ink-stylus in the other, and the vellum was covered with strange marks. Marks that were, in fact, a script that nobody on Earth is going to be able to understand for another good many thousands of years.
He was absolutely mystified. He held it up close to his eyes, turned it upside down, shook his head in bewilderment. And I heard his thought loud and clear:
What in the name of all the gods is THIS?
Well, I put him back to sleep and tried to get down into his mind and eradicate all memory of what he had just seen. As you know, that isnt the easiest thing in the world to do. You poke around in your carriers short-term memory, trying to blot out a particular incident, and if youre not really careful, you can blot out half a day of other stuff, or a whole week, or even start ripping up the basic memory framework before you realize what youre doing. I didnt want to leave him feeling like an amnesia victim. So I tiptoed around in his memory bank, slicing here and there, doing my best. I think I did the job as nicely as anybody could have; but when I was done, I wasnt entirely confident that I had completely cleaned things up.
I hid the letter. And then I hid myself, getting down into stasis and just sitting quietly in a subconscious corner of the Princes brain all afternoon. I didnt try to make contact with his cerebral levels in any way whatever.
(Thats the hardest thing of all to do, I thinkwhen you have to lay low, sitting tight, doing nothing. After all, we arent capable of going to sleep. And disembodied entities like us cant just head out for a long walk to kill the time. So there we sit, unable even to twitch. Like prisoners in a cage no bigger than a human brain, absolutely immobilized, counting off seconds and minutes for lack of anything else to do. Its maddening, isnt it? Its almost unbearable.)
I guess I could have used the time to prowl through the Princes basic memory storage to pick up a little useful data about the Athilantan civilization, but I didnt dare. He might just be able to detect me poking arounda curious itchy feeling in his mind, lets say. I didnt want to arouse any more suspicions than I already had. And it seemed to me right then that there already was an odd new edge to the Princes mind, a kind of prickly wariness.
Ive seen that happen before. But on other occasions, when my carrier has been allowed to get an inkling of the real situation, it has passed in a few hours. Sure enough, thats what happened this time. Ram began to relax, the edge on his mind went away, he went about his princely duties as though nothing had occurred. And ten minutes ago he returned to his cabin to relax. I put him under trance and got this unfinished letter out of its hiding place.
What a strange business this is, hitchhiking through the past inside someone elses mind! Ive done it a dozen different times now, and Im still not fully used to the idea. Im not sure I really like it very muchtreating another human being as a mere vehicle, moving him this way and that for your own convenience, going through his most intimate thoughts and memories as though he were nothing more than software available for scanning. Sometimes it seems a little ugly. Like being a spy, in a way. What it amounts to is that nobody who ever lived has any secrets from us timetraveling, twenty-first century nosybodies.
On the other hand, since its physically impossible for us to travel through time except as intangible electrical impulses, this is how we have to do it. And it does allow us to recapture all kinds of astounding knowledge that otherwise would have been lost forever in the bottomless sea of the past.
Anywaypicking up where I left off so many hours ago
We are obviously moving into subtropical seas. Even in the Ice Age, it seems, the midsection of the world had pretty decent weather, much rainier than it is in Home Era but not particularly cold. Theres a springtime tenderness in the air that everyone aboard ship is responding to. The Prince and his whole retinue have been on the chilly mainland more than a year, and theyre as eager to get back to Athilan as I am to see it for the first time.
This afternoon the Prince was working on a report to his royal father about the current status of Athilantan trading posts on the mainlandevidently the thing that he was sent to Europe to investigate. There was a map open on his desk as he worked, and I was able to see the whole layout of the empire.
Incredible!
Theyve got outposts strung all along the southern half of Stone Age Europe as far east as Russia, and down into North Africa and the Middle East. Most of the trade is done by sea, but a network of roads links everything together inland. Its awesome how they have it all connected, couriers going back and forth over an elaborate network of highways. (No, I dont think they use automobilesall I saw while I was in Brittany were chariots, some drawn by small, sturdy, fierce-looking horses, and some by what looked like enormous reindeer.)
And all this will be lost. All this will be totally forgotten,-as though it had never been. The memory of it will survive only as fable and myth, which no one will really take seriously until the coming of the age of time exploration. Its heartbreaking to think about it.
The Athilantan highway system runs up as far as what I think is the middle of Germany, then zigs and zags through Central Europe, avoiding the most heavily glaciated areas. One of the roads goes straight to Naz Glesim, where you are,the easternmost outpost of the empire. It gave me a funny feeling to see that name on the map and know that youre there at this very moment.
Thibarak, the coastal trading post where I was, in Brittany, is a sort of headquarters for the imperial mainland operationsat least the Western European branch. Couriers go back and forth between Thibarak and Naz Glesim all the time, bearing directives from the home government and reports from the provincial governor. The trip takes a couple of months each way. I should be able to slip these letters into the diplomatic pouch, and if you really did make it into the mind of Provincial Governor Sippurilayl as they planned it when they did the preliminary time-search, youll eventually get to read them. Or not, as the case may be. Try to arrange it so that Governor Sippurilayl sends letters back to Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimor. That way Ill see them sooner or later. Then, of course, we both will have to wipe out of our carriers minds all memory of the strange messages in unknown gibberish that they keep getting from each other. But with practice that wont be too hard.
I think well reach Atlantis in another four days or so. At sundown the Prince was standing on the deck wearing only a light tunic and mantle, and soft warm breezes were blowing out of the south.
Poor Lora! You must be freezing your butt off out there on the barren Russian steppes while I sit here telling you about the sweet springlike weather were enjoying. Well, I dont mean to rub it in, you know. It was just the luck of the toss that sent me to Atlantis and you to Naz Glesim, and Im well aware that a mere matter of heads instead of tails and Id be the one stuck in the back woods right now. And next trip it may be the other way around for us.
(A pity that they wont ever send us to the same locale when we make these jumps. I know, I know, they want to spread us out over the maximum territory. The best we can hope for is to go to the same era but in different geographical regions. Which I guess is better than nothing. As they told us when we volunteered for this, time travel works best when two people who have a strong emotional connection are sent out as a team. And theyre right. Simply knowing that youre herethousands of miles away, sure, but in the same eragives me a warm, comfortable feeling. And that helps immensely in fending off the terrible isolation that would otherwise come with knowing that Im so distant in time from everything and everyone that I care for. All the same, Id like to be able to see you once in a while. Id like to be able to touch you. Id like to be able tooh, well, never mind. At least I can write to you. And maybe one of these days the courier will get back from the eastern part of the empire and therell be a letter from you to me.)
Meanwhile Atlantis gets closer every second.
Until thengive my regards to all my good friends in Naz Glesim, if there happen to be any, which I doubt.
Miss you miss you miss you miss you.
Roy
4.
Day 27, Month of New Light, Year of the Great River Atlantis, Lora! Im in Atlantis!
The island of Athilan, I should say. It came into view in the middle of the night, while Prince Ram slept. There came a whistling at the door and they woke him up, because he had to perform the Ritual of Homecoming. We went out on deck. And then at last I saw it, gleaming in the moonlight right in front of us.
Its a lofty island, rising high out of the Western Atlantic. The great mountain in the middle, which is called Mount Balamoris, is as I think you know the volcano that sooner or later is going to blow this whole place to oblivion. Later rather than sooner, I profoundly hope. But obviously Mount Balamoris has been inactive for hundreds or even thousands of years, and a fantastic city has been built on its vast slopes and down along the broad plain that runs to the sea.
What was on my mind as we made our final approach to Atlantis was the description of it that Plato gave in his dialog Kritias, which you and I studied while we were in training. That Atlantis was a continent, rich and beautiful, with an abundance of trees and shrubs, flowers and fruits, animals both wild and tame, and precious minerals. And that the capital city, on the southern coast, was a huge metropolis, fifteen miles around, having the form of two circular strips of land divided by three wide canals, with great walls of stone, bridges, towers, and palaces. At the center of the city was a holy quarter within an enclosure of gold, where the temples were covered with gold and silver and their roofs were made of ivory.
I can hear you reminding me that nobody in modern times takes Platos account seriously as history. Well, yes, I know that. I havent forgotten that he wrote it around 355 B.C. and even he says that Atlantis had been destroyed 9,000 years earlier. Which means he cant possibly have any hard data about it, because 9,000 years before Platos time Greece was deep in prehistoric darkness. Im aware that its been the general scholarly belief for a long time that Plato probably made the whole story up himselfthat all it is is a fantasy, just a pleasant work of fiction.
But is it? I wonder. Now that Ive had a look at Atlantis with my own eyes, Im not so sure that Plato was simply making it all up from scratch.
One thing we know, thanks to time exploration, is that Atlantis actually existed. As recently as the twentieth century it was thought to be purely mythical. But no: we have proof now that a spectacularly great island-city really did exist in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years before Platos time, and that it really was destroyed by a gigantic cataclysm. So it certainly isnt beyond belief that memories of the place and its horrendous destruction might have passed into legend, or that tales of fabulous Atlantis could have been told and retold for generation after generation, across time immemorial. And some confused bits and scraps of those ancient legends might still have been circulating in the Mediterranean region at the time when Plato lived.
The strange thing is how much the real Atlantis, the place that Im staring at even as I write this, actually does resemble the one that Plato described.
It isnt a continent, of course. Its a just a very large island, maybe the size of Borneo or Madagascar. But how can you tell, when you see some enormous landmass in front of you that stretches a vast distance out of sight in both directions, whether youre looking at a continental shore or simply a big island? Plato wasnt that far off the mark. Certainly Atlantis was much bigger than Great Britain or Cuba or Iceland.
He was wrong about other details. For example, the capitalss not on the southern shore. Its on the western one. But the city does have a circular layout, with huge walls made up of giant stone blocks laid one atop another. The masonry work was done with fantastic precision, too. Its absolutely perfect. There are waterways and bridges inside the walls, and splendid boulevards that no city on Earth could have equalled until modern times. Perhaps no city of modern Earth does.
And I tell you, Lora, this waterfront district right here is amazing. If you could only see it! Theres a tremendous semicircular harbor with a massive quay of black granite faced with pink marble, and stone piers jutting far out into the water. All around me are Athilantan ships that have come in from all over the world, and right at this minute Im watching them unloading what must be absolutely fabulous cargoes. Officials are checking everything out on shore, boxes and boxes full of precious metals and jewels, spices, furs, strange animals, rare woods.
Then, over to one side of the harbor, theres the Fountain-of the Spheres, which shoots an enormous jet of water into the sky every quarter-hour. On the other side is the Temple of the Dolphins, a white marble structure that has the most incredibly pure, balanced design. Believe me, it makes the Parthenon itself look a little shoddy.
A broad street, the Street of Starwatchers, runs just back of the waterfront. At the head of the Street of Starwatchers theres an imposing domed tower, the Imperial Observatory, and just behind it begins a tremendous avenue, the Concourse of the Sky, which cuts through the city for miles, leading toyes, a central zone of sacred buildings, just like Plato said, set on a sloping hill. The walls of the temples are covered with white marble, not Platos silver and gold, but when the afternoon sun strikes them the entire city blazes with reflected light.
The city continues on the far side of the sacred zone, sprawling right up into the foothills of Mount Balamoris. Beyond are parks, farms, the mines where copper and iron and gold are found, and a huge forest preserve full of all manner of wild beasts, including a herd of elephants. I dont mean the woolly mammoths that are roaming around in Ice Age Europe out where you are, but plain old ordinary elephants, very much like the ones we can see in the zoo, except I think these are even bigger. Theyve got ears the size of tents.
The climate here is extremely gentle. Judging by the fact that night and day are just about equal in length even in midwinter, Id say that Atlantis is located smack on the Tropic of Cancer, or else not very far north of it. Theres a little rain just about every day, but it clears off fast and in a little while the sun is out again and everythings nice and warm. The air is mild and beautifully transparent, the sky is a delicate blue, and wherever you look you see flowers in bloom. Its hard to believe that at this very moment most of Europe and North America is buried under ice. Or that enormous shaggy shambling mammoths and rhinos are grazing in the places where our great cities are going to be built some time in the far future. Or that little bands of men clad in furs are out there trying to hunt them with crude weapons made out of stone.
No wonder shimmering memories of this place continued-to glow in the minds of people like Plato thousands of years later. In every human tribe the wise old storytellers must have passed vivid legends of it down and down and down through the eons, across all those thousands of years of darkness that followed the time of destruction. That great lost city, that barely remembered paradise, that vanished realm of miracles and wonderswhat tales they must have told of it! And went on telling, year after year, century after century, while the ice slowly retreated, and mankind rediscovered the skills of farming, and learned to build towns and villages, and eventually, in Sumer and Egypt and China, began once more to approach the level of accomplishment that we call civilization.
The astounding thing, the utterly unbelievable thing, is this: that the old legends didnt even begin to tell the full story of how miraculous Atlantis really was. The actual Atlantis of the year 18,862 B.C., with its steamships and its electricity and its astonishing architectural and engineering marvels, is tremendously more fantastic than any of the Greek or Roman talespinners ever imagined.
I mean it. So far as technology goes, its right up there with todays New York or Paris or London in many ways, only much more beautiful than any of them. And it existed all the way back here in Stone Age times, when no one else in the rest of the world had managed to get very far beyond living in caves and fashioning knives and axes out of pieces of flint.
Right now I have no explanation of how this could have been possible. None whatever.
Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimors return to the isle of Atlantis involved him in so much ritual and formality that I began to think I was never going to get to see the city at all. We remained cooped up on the ship for an incredible length of time. It was almost as crazy-making as those days of waiting around at Thibarak harbor for the end of the departure rituals so that the royal fleet could finally set out.
First came the Ritual of Homecoming. In this one the Prince gave thanks for his safe voyage home with a lot of praying and burning of incense and the sacrifice of a bull. The Prince performed the sacrifice with his own hands. I hated having to watch at such close range, but I didnt have any choice. At least he killed the animal fast. Hes evidently had a lot of practice. He used a jewel-hilted blade made of what almost certainly was steel. I find that fascinating in a creepy sort of way, dont you? That theyd use high-technology stuff like a steel weapon to perform a barbaric rite like animal sacrifice, I mean. A weird mix. The bull was actually an aurochs, that extinct ancestor of modern cattle, an enormous beast with terrifying black-tipped curving horns at least a yard long.
I thought wed be going ashore then, but no, after a lot of chanting and parading around, and a feast of charred, half-raw aurochs meat that made me glad the Prince was putting it in his digestive tract and not in minethough its sometimes hard to tell the difference when youre a timetrip passenger, you knowthe Prince went belowdecks and busied himself in front of a little shrine in the captains cabin, invoking this god and that, for hours. A team of priests came on board and took part in this; but when they left, Prince Ram remained on the ship.
Night fell. Crowds stood along the quay, singing and hailing the Prince. He waved back at them from the deck of his flagship. There was a fireworks display such as Ive never seen in my life.
In the morning, the Princes younger brother and sister came to give him the official family welcome. Princess Rayna is about fifteen, Id say, and Prince Caiminor maybe thirteen. They look very much like Prince Ram, stocky and short, olive-hued skin, dark eyebrows.
Their reunion with their brother was all very formal, with touching of fingertips taking the place of kissing. The Ritual of Greeting lasted right on into mid-afternoon. Then at last they escorted him from the ship, andby courtesy of my carrier, Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimor Septagimot Stolifax Blayl, Premianor Tisilan of Athilan, I got a chance finally to set foot on the shore of lost Atlantis.
But I didnt get very far. Off we went to the nearby Temple-of the Dolphins, where a kind of tent had been set up for the Prince just inside the outermost row of perfect marble columns. Here he had to be purified, purged of any taint that he might have picked up while dwelling among the grubby uncivilized people of the mainland.
This Rite of Purification took another day and a night. They bathed him in milk and covered him with the petals of red and yellow flowers and chanted again and again, May you be free of all uncleanness. May you be free of all uncleanness. On and on and on. May the dirt of the mainland no longer cling to your skin, they chanted. May you be free of all uncleanness. Over and over, until I thought Id lose my mind.
But it taught me something important about this place.Theres real four-star racism here. Thats what the Rite of Purification is all about. The Athilantans have deep contempt for the mainlanders. They are the dirt of the mainland from which the rite is supposed to cleanse the Prince.
The Athilantan name for the mainlanders is the dirt people.
My command of Athilantan grammar isnt yet as strong as Id like it to be, so Im not sure whether they mean that the mainlanders live in dirt (that is, their scruffy caves and leantos) or that they actually are dirt. But I think its the latter.
So these noble, splendid, magnificently civilized Athilantans regard the people of Stone Age Europe as not much more than animals. Have you noticed that, too, out in Naz Glesim? Maybe its different there, where just a handful of Athilantans live in the midst of hundreds of mainlanders. Theyd have to be more careful there. But here, where there isnt a mainland face to be seen, the Athilantans dont even try to hide their scorn for them.
We thank you, O Gods, for the return of our beloved Prince to the human realm from the land of the dirt people.