If Ram really thinks Im gone, why did he tell me that he knows Im still here? Doesnt make sense. Nor can I easily believe that hes afraid of Teneristis, or of any new penitence that Teneristis might saddle him with. The Prince didnt seem at all hesitant about going into the Labyrinth. What could possibly be worse than that?
The theory about the Rite of Anointing has a little more substance. Its the biggest event of his life so far. What if its dangerous in some way, or blasphemous, to try to undergo the rite while youre possessed by a demon? Maybe Rams so eager for the Anointing that he doesnt want the rite postponed, which might happen if he let Teneristis know that hes still carrying that stubborn demon around in his head. On the other hand, Ram is honorable, above all else. Can he honorably conceal the fact that the exorcism didnt work, and let himself go through with this immensely significant ceremony while hes in a ritually impure state?
That leaves #2, which unfortunately seems all too plausible. Ram has been trained to be a king, and that involves being crafty. If theres a pesky enemy bothering you who wont go away, one way to handle him would be to lay low and clobber him when hes not expecting it.
Theres also the possibility that Rams worried that this whole demonic possession business could lead to his being disqualified to become king at all, that he might be passed over in favor of his younger brother, unless he sweeps the entire thing under the carpet as fast as he can.
Whatever the reason, the Prince is keeping quiet these days. And so am I.
Three hours later. And everything is completely different now. Just for starters, let me tell you that the Prince is not in a trance as I write this. Hes completely conscious, aware of whats going on, though of course he has no idea of the meaning of the words that his hand is shaping under my control.
I may be making the worst mistake of my life. And the last mistake of my life, too. But somehow I think everything is going to be all right. Let me tell you what happened.
The thing that kicked it off was the arrival of the diplomatic pouch from Naz Glesim. It contained the second of your letters, the one in which you talk about the mammoth hunt. (I think they have to be nuts to go out hunting gigantic beasts like that in the middle of a driving snowstorm. Even if they do believe that warm weather will never come unless they do it.) As before, the scroll was packed as if it had come from Provincial Governor Sippurilayl and was addressed to Prince Ram, so the bureaucrats downstairs brought it straight to the Prince in his study.
This time the Prince waited until they were gone before opening it. I waited, too, figuring Id pounce on him and put him in trance just as he started to unroll it, so that he wouldnt even have a phantom memory of once again having glimpsed something written in English. But he was way ahead of me.
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. Didnt 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 truthdespite everything that our training saysand see what would happen next.
Lora, I didnt 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 didnt feel that I had any other option, Lora. Probably we never should have started sending these letters back and forth; but we didI take the blame for thatand 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 Rams 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 hadnt done such a great job of editing his mind in my previous attempts, apparently, and there was so much now to remove that I didnt for a moment think I could do it without seriously damaging him.
I wasnt 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 Princes 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 wasnt 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 dont think so. No.
He thought about that.Of the Dirt People, then?
Perhaps. I cant 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.
Its a very ordinary name, I assure you.
It is a wizards 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 didnt 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 didnt 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. Wed have figured we were going psycho and checked ourselves into the nearest ward for a complete workover. But thats 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 didnt 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, wed 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 anybodys 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 AthilanAtlantis, 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 Id given away too much. I didnt 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 Fletchers pioneering-trip, and Iversens, 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.
And here you are,Prince Ram said.
And here I am.
We talked half the afternoon, through what would normally have been his exercise period. He overflowed with questions about the world I came from.
I described telephones for him, and television, and supersonic transports, and space satellites. I told him that we had mining camps on the Moon and three little scientific outposts on Mars, and were talking about sending a crew out for a close look at the moons of Jupiter. I made a stab at explaining what our system of government is like, and what its like to live in a world that has several great nations instead of only one, and how we managed to survive the ferocious conflicts that almost finished us all off in the horrendous twentieth century.
He wasnt skeptical in the slightest. I guess he had no trouble believing that wizards capable of sending a mans mind back twenty thousand years could also make machines that could fly from Thibarak to Naz Glesim in a couple of hours, or send pictures halfway around the world in a moment.
The only thing he absolutely couldnt swallow was the notion of democratic elections. He wanted to know the name of our king, and how long he and his family had ruled.
It doesnt work that way any more,I said.In our land we choose a new ruler every four years. If he or she rules wisely, they are often given four years more. And then we choose someone else.
That made no sense to him, no matter how many different-ways I explained it.
The people choose the king? A stranger is allowed to replace an established ruler?
He was baffled. His body grew tense, his head began to throb. Only when I told him that there were other countries where the rulers held power for a great many years, sometimes for their whole lives, did he ease back a little.
But even the concept of dictatorship seemed bizarre and troublesome to him. To grab power and proclaim yourself the boss, and then to rule until the people grow tired of you and overthrow you, whereupon somebody else stands up and says hes bossno, no, Prince Ram couldnt swallow that. It seemed like insanity to him. Our scientific wonders, our television and time travel and voyages to Mars, those he could accept without a quiver of doubt. But not our politics.
Wrapping it up, the next day.
Where it stands now is that Ram and I have become pals. The best of friends. He completely accepts my presence within him, is not at all spooked by it, thinks its just terrific. A wizard from the far future living behind his forehead who can tell him all sorts of marvelous things. Doesnt intend to let anyone know about it, naturally. His little secret, to cherish and enjoy.
I realize that this violates all our training, for me to have let him in on the truth of the situation. It goes against everything that were taught in the way of procedural tactics. My necks going to be on the block for sure when I return to Home Era. So all this has big implications not just for my future, but for yours and mine together. Dont think I havent been troubled by that. But I couldnt help doing what Ive done. It was the only honorable choice. Either admit the truth, or risk destroying Prince Rams sanity. Well, I made my choice, and now I have to stick with it, even though it certainly means the ruination of my career.
He knows that youre occupying the mind of Provincial Governor Sippurilayl. He knows that we communicate by means of these letters, and he will continue to oblige me by serving as my scribe. Whether you want to reveal yourself to Sippurilayl is entirely up to you. Personally I dont think you should. You have nothing to gain from it and everything to lose once youre back in Home Era. After all, you still have a career in time research to think about, regardless of the mess Ive made of mine.
Will you go on writing to me, knowing what you know now?
I hope you will. Ill be devastated if you dont, Lora.
Please dont worry that by corresponding with me youll be making yourself some kind of accomplice in my breach of the rules. Im going to let it be known loud and clear, when weve returned to Home Era, that I chose to make my presence known to Ram entirely on my own, without consulting you and certainly without any suggestion from you that I do it.
As you know, I never intended to blow my cover this way. It was just something that happened. To do it was wrong, and Im prepared to take the consequences, whatever they may be, when the time comes. I have to say, though, that I dont really see what harm it does, this far in the past, to let one clever prince know that we of the twenty-first century are capable of roving through time. His knowing that cant possibly change any aspect of history, can it?
Or can it?
Well, so be it, What Ive done cant be undone. Ram kept himself up half the night talking with me, asking a million and one questions, the way you would with a new college roommate. All about my family, the place where I was born, my training as a wizard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, until he was goofy with fatigue and I had to ease him to sleep without his knowing it, for his own sake.
Roommates is what we are, all right.
How strange this all is, Lora! How totally strange.
Roy
9.
Day 22, Western Wind, Great River.
News. Big news. A flabbergasting, mind-blowing discovery, in fact. A completely unexpected discovery that makes everything that was impossible to explain about the Athilantan empire fall suddenly into place.
Now that I no longer need to conceal my presence from Ram, I can move about freely in his mind. That doesnt seem to bother him. He doesnt see it as an invasion of his privacy; he doesnt seem to understand the concept of privacy at all. Or care about it, if he does.
One thing I wanted to know about was the rite of Romany Star.
Remember that mysterious ceremony that Ram and his father performed one night last month? The Prince and the King staring at the sky, chanting solemn prayers to one particular star, shredding and burning their garments, destroying the coronets that they wore? Obviously an important rite. But what was its significance?
I slipped down into the depths of Rams consciousness to see what I could learn about it. And got a lot more than I was expecting.
As I hardly need to tell you, you cant do research in a human mind, whether its your own or someone elses, the way you would in a public library. Minds have no indexes and you cant run a computer scan to find the particular data you want. Everything is arranged systematically inside the mind, I suppose, but the genius has not yet been born who is capable of figuring out what that system is. So the best you can do is poke around randomly and try to make the connections you need.
I touched here and there within Rams mind, looking for the memories of the night of the Romany Star rite. I came up with all sorts of other thingsthe time in the Labyrinth, and a stroll along a spectacular beach, all white sands and sparkling water, and a wild horseback ride down some forest glade, and so on and so onand then there it was, Ram and the King on the palace roof chanting their prayer.
That entry in Rams memory file had a special feel to it, a distinct resonance, a tone all its own. It was like one of those haunting melodies that you couldnt possibly sing yourself, but which youd recognize whenever you heard it. I cant describe it to you, but I know what it was like. And, now that I had experienced it, I had a reference point. I went darting off down this mental avenue and that one, hoping to pick that special tone up again somewhere else, another point of association with Romany Star.
And I found it. It came rising up toward me out of a part of his brain where history and myth lay sleeping.
Intermingled with it was a strange bleak image: charred debris, bits of burned rope, twisted fragments of what looked like hammocks, rising out of a sea of ashes. I looked closer. I felt dry hot winds. I saw a great swollen red sun in the sky.
Closer. Deeper. The ashes rose and became an eerie city made of woven reeds. Buildings, streets, bridgeseverything light, delicate, insubstantial. Somber-faced people walked in silence through its narrow, interlacing lanes. Sometimes it was night, and a string of shining moons was hung across the sky. Then came day, and that gigantic menacing sun.
The people had the look of the people of Athilan: dark hair and eyes, dark complexions, stocky bodies, broad shoulders. I thought I saw Ram in those streets, and his father.
The sun grew larger. The air grew hotter. There was terror-in the eyes of the people who walked in the streets. Their world was coming to an end. Soon fire would sweep through the sky; soon this delicate city of woven reeds would become the sea of ashes that I had been shown before.
I saw ships lifting off into space. Maybe a dozen or more of them, carrying the lucky few, chosen by lot, who would escape the explosion of the red sun.
And the restthe restoh, Lora, I knew what would happen-to them, and my heart ached for them! A whole world destroyed. Romany Star sending spears of flame across the gulf of space, and everything perishing, everything except what was aboard those twelve or sixteen starships.
The moment of devastation came. Terrible light, like the fury of a thousand nuclear bombs at once, burst overhead. But the starships were on their way, up and out, heading into the vast darkness that lay beyond the blazing sky.
Do you understand what Im saying, Lora?
Lora, these Athilantans are aliens. Humanoid aliens, so much like humans that its just about impossible to tell the difference. They came here aboard those starships, refugees from some other world lightyears away that died when its sun went nova.
No wonder theyre head and shoulders above the real natives of the Paleolithic world. Maybe a thousand years before the era that you and I are visiting now, maybe three thousand, they dropped down suddenly out of space, bringing to a world that didnt yet know the use of metals a culture that could build spaceships capable of traveling between the stars. That is, a culture thats advanced even beyond our own.
To the Cro-Magnons and their contemporaries, they must have seemed like gods. In a way they were gods. And they built a mighty city in the midst of Earths frostbound Stone Age darkness.
Their descendants here in Athilan still look back in sorrow-and anguish to their old lost home, which they call Romany Star. On a certain night each year they turn their eyes to the stars, and they chant the prayer for the dead, in remembrance of all that had been theirs before the red sun swelled in the sky, before their unstable home star flared up and destroyed their world.
Now I understand why the people of Athilan gave thanks for Rams return to the human realm when he came back to the city from the mainland, and why they refer to the mainlanders as the Dirt People.
I suppose they could have found some more complimentary term for them than that, but the fact remains that the Athilantans see themselves as the only true humans, and the mainlanders, the natives of Earth, as some sort of inferior alien beings. It isnt really the sort of racism that used to be so common in our modern world. That involved one branch of the human species telling itself that it was superior to the other branches of the human race. There wasnt any justification for those feelings of superiority. All the different races of modern Earth are just minor variations of the same species, Homo sapiens. But these people really are superior. And they arent simply a special branch of Homosapiens. They arent Homo sapiens at all, even though they look just like us, or nearly so. Theyre a different species entirely. Im not saying its admirable or pretty in any way for them to have such contempt for the mainlanders. But at least I can understand why they feel that way. And also I think that when we translate their words into ours the terms they use may come out sounding a little more contemptuous than the Athilantans actually intend.
Doesnt it all sound completely crazy? Refugees from the stars, traveling here on spaceborne arks, founding a glorious city on this balmy isle in the eastern Atlantic, and setting up a far-flung Paleolithic empire? But its true. Ive located Rams memories of the historical chronicles that he studied when he was a boy. You can probably find the same stuff in Sippurilayls mind if you look for it.
And now we know why these people are so improbably far ahead of everyone else who existed on Earth in prehistoric times. They had a tremendous head start.
The present-day Athilantan civilization isnt nearly as advanced as the one that died with Romany Star. Theyve lost a lot of their old technological knowledge over the centuries, perhaps through neglect, or maybe simply because they werent able to reconstruct it on this new world. But theyre still inconceivably superior in abilities and attainments to the primitive hunting folk over whom they rule.
It does sound too fantastic to be true. A myth, a legend, a poem, anything but the actual truth.
Well, it is the actual truth. I absolutely believe that. Ive discussed it with Ram and he vehemently insists that it isnt any myththat it all really happened, the solar flare that destroyed their world, the migration to Earth, the building of Athilan on an uninhabited island in the warmest part of the planet. They have detailed and reliable chronicles describing the whole thing. Every child studies the history of the calamity the way we study Christopher Columbus and George Washington.
Go check out Provincial Governor Sippurilayls memories of his childhood history lessons. Youll find it all there. I know that you will.
And what a tremendous story it is, isnt it?
Roy
10.
Day 4, Month of Golden Days, Year of Great River.
I hope you havent been worried about me during my long silence. Everythings fine here. I just havent felt much like writing letters.
The truth is Ive been a little embarrassed about my last two letters, the one in which I confess that Ive revealed my presence to Ram, and the one in which I tell you about my discovery of the extraterrestrial origin of the Athilantans. (Have you received that second one yet? Youll be awfully confused by what Ive just said if you havent.) I was afraid that one or the other of those letters would convince you that Id gone loonythat youd write back to me full of fury about my breaking of the time-travel rules, or that youd tell me that the business about the Athilantans coming from a different solar system was the craziest nonsense you had ever heard. So I couldnt bring myself to send you any more letters until I saw what your reaction to those two was.
Well, now your reply to my Ive-told-Ram-everything letter has come in. Im immensely relieved that you arent angry with me, Lora. It makes me realize all over again what a wonderful person you are. And why I love you so much.
No question, as you say, that Im going to be in very hot water when I get back to Home Era. But you do recognize, as I hoped you would, that letting Ram know the truth was my only honorable course. I simply couldnt let the heir to the throne go on thinking he was possessed by a demon, and calling in all sorts of witch-doctors to exorcise him.
You dont comment on the other and bigger revelation, from which I conclude that you havent seen my second letter yet, though youll be able to figure out something of what its about from what Ive said here. In any case I can tell you that Ive done a lot of further researchRam has taken me through the royal archives, which contain extremely elaborate records of every event in Athilantan historyand I have no doubt at all that the interstellar migration story is accurate. Ram and his people really do come from another world.
The Athilantans have been on Earth for 1143 years. Harinamurthe first onewas the captain of the space fleet that brought them here. The migration took them only thirty-one years, which means they must have traveled at the speed of light, or something pretty close to it. That implies a technology way beyond ours, at least so far as space travel goes, since we havent managed yet to reach speeds anything like that and were still limited to our own Solar System. For the time being, anyway.
Sixteen starships altogether made the trip. They dont exist any morethey were dismantled and totally recycled into other things during the early years of the colony, when metals were scarce. When they landed here, they knew they were here to stay: they werent going to be journeying between the stars ever again.
It ought to be possible for the people up front to check all this out by running an astronomical survey. There cant be many red stars within a 31-lightyear radius that have a history of instability, and maybe they can figure out which one of them went nova about 20,000 B.C. And then wed know where Romany Star was. When we become capable of building spaceships fast enough to travel to other stars, which I guess is still another hundred years or so ahead for us, we can send an expedition out to look for the charred ruins of the civilization that once lived there, and confirm that whole thing.
On to other matters.
The Prince and I are getting along very well. Hes completely comfortable with the idea that we share the same body. As he goes through his days princely chores he keeps a running commentary going, explaining everything that hes doing. Ive learned vast amounts about the trade routes of the Athilantan empire, about its history, about its religion. I hope I can keep it all straight in my head until I get back to Home Era. (Damn not having any way to take notes back with us! But at least they did a good job of training us to use our memories.)
The Prince questions me, too, about Home Era. Our time is like a fantasy to hima time when billions of people occupy the Earth and all sorts of different cultures exist and his appetite for details about it is tremendous. He wants to know about city planning, about our arts and religions, about sports, about automobiles and airplanes, about almost anything. I think he suspects that Im making up some or even all of what I tell him. There are moments it almost feels like that to me: Home Era seems terribly far away, terribly unreal. After these months here I sometimes think that only Athilan is real and everything else is a fairy tale. Having no body of your own will do that to you, Ive heard.