“From my viewpoint, the Byzantines were as superstitious as a horse,” Havig said. “Magic, divining, guardianship against everything from the Evil Eye to the plague, omens, quack medicines, love philters, you name it, somebody swore by it. Xenia’s shibboleth is astrology. Well, what the deuce, that’s done no harm — she has the basic common sense to interpret her horoscopes in a reasonable fashion — and we’d go out at night and observe the stars together. You could do that in a city as well as anywhere else, before street lamps and everlasting smog. She is more beautiful by starlight even than daylight. O God, how I must fight myself not to bring her a telescope, just a small one! But it would have been too risky, of course.”
“You did a remarkable job of, well, bridging the intellectual gap,” I said.
“Nothing remarkable, Doc.” His voice, muted, caressed a memory. “She was-is-younger than me, I’d guess by a decade and a half. She’s ignorant of a lot that I know. But this works vice versa, remember. She’s familiar with the ins and outs of one of the most glorious cosmopolises history will ever see. The people, the folkways, the lore, the buildings, the art, the songs, the books — why, she’d read Greek classics my age never did, that perished in the sack. She’d tell me about them, she’d sit chanting those tremendous lines from Aeschylus or Sophocles, till lightnings ran up and down my backbone; she’d get us both drunk on Sappho, or howling with laughter out of Aristophanes. Knowing what to look for, I often ‘happened’ to find books in a bazaar … downtime.”
He stopped for breath. I waited. “The everyday, too,” he concluded. “When you finished up in the office, weren’t you interested in what Kate had been doing? And then” — he looked away—”there was us. We were always in love.”
She used to sing while she went about her household tasks. Riding past the walls to the stable, he would hear those little minor-key melodies, floating out of a window, suddenly sound very happy.
On the whole, he and she were comparatively asocial. Now and then, to keep up his façade, it was necessary to entertain a Western merchant, or for Havig alone to attend a party given by one. He didn’t mind. Most of them weren’t bad men for their era, and what they told was interesting. But Xenia had all she could do to conceal her terrified loathing. Fortunately, no one expected her to be a twentieth century-style gracious hostess.
When she stepped from the background and welled and sparkled with life was when Eastern friends came to dinner. Havig got away with that because Jon Andersen, advance man for an extremely distant company, must gather information where he could, hunting crumbs from the tables of Venice and Genoa. He liked those persons himself: scholars, tradesmen, artists, artisans, Xenia’s priest, a retired sea captain, and more exotic types, come on diplomacy or business, whom he sought out — Russians, Jews of several origins, an occasional Arab or Turk.
When he must go away, he both welcomed the change and hated the loss of lifespan which might have been shared with Xenia. Fairly frequent absences were needed for him to stay in character. To be sure, a man’s office was normally in his house, but Jon Andersen’s business would require him not only to go see other men in town, but irregularly to make short journeys by land or sea to various areas.
“Some of that was unavoidable, like accepting an invitation,” he told me. “And once in a while, like every man regardless of how thoroughly married, I wanted to drift around on my own for part of a day. But mainly, you realize, I’d go uptime. I didn’t — I don’t know what good it might do, but I’ve got this feeling of obligation to uncover the truth. So first I’d project myself to Istanbul, where I kept a false identity with a fat bank account. There/then I’d fly to whatever part of the world was indicated, and head futureward, and continue my study of the Maurai Federation and civilization, its rise, glory, decline, fail, and aftermath.”
Twilight stole slow across the island. Beneath its highest hill, land lay darkling save where firefly lanterns glowed among the homes of sea ranchers; but the waters still glimmered. White against a royal blue which arched westward toward Asia, seen through the boughs of a pine which a hundred years of weather had made into a bonsai, Venus gleamed. On the verandah of Carelo Keajimu’s house, smoke drifted fragrant from a censer. A bird sat its perch and sang that intricate, haunting repertoire of melodies for which men had created it; yet this bird was no cageling, it had a place in the woods.
The old man murmured: “Aye, we draw to an end. Dying hurts. Nonetheless the forefathers were wise who in their myths made Nan coequal with Lesu. A thing which endured forever would become unendurable. Death opens a way, for peoples as well as for people.”
He fell silent where he knelt beside his friend, until at last he said: “What you relate makes me wonder if we did not stamp our sigil too deeply.”
(“I’d followed his life,” Havig told me. “He began as a brilliant young philosopher who went into statecraft. He finished as an elder statesman who withdrew to become a philosopher. Then I decided he could join you, as one of the two normal-time human beings I dared trust with my secret.
(“You see, I’m not wise. I can skim the surface of destiny for information; but can I interpret, can I understand? How am I to know what should be done, or what can be done? I’ve scuttled around through a lot of years; but Carelo Keajimu lived, worked, thought to the depths of ninety unbroken ones. I needed his help.”)
“That is,” Havig said, “you feel that, well, one element of your culture is too strong, at the expense of too much else, in the next society?”
“From what you have told me, yes.” His host spent some minutes in rumination. They did not seem overly long. “Or, rather, do you not have the feeling of a strange dichotomy uptime, as you say … between two concepts which our Maurai ideal was to keep in balance?”
Science, rationality, planning, control. Myth, the liberated psyche, man an organic part of a nature whose rightness transcends knowledge and wisdom.
“It seems to me, from what you tell, that the present over-valuation of machine technology is a passing rage,” Keajimu said. “A reaction, not unjustified. We Maurai grew overbearing. Worse, we grew self-righteous. We made that which had once been good into an idol, and thereby allowed what good was left to rot out of it. In the name of preserving cultural diversity, we tried to freeze whole races into shapes which were at best merely quaint, at worst grotesque and dangerous anachronisms. In the name of preserving ecology, we tried to ban work which could lay a course for the stars. No wonder the Ruwenzorya openly order research on a thermonuclear powerplant! No wonder disaffection at home makes us impotent to stop that!”
Again a quietness, until he continued: “But according to your report, Jack my friend, this is a spasm. Afterward the bulk of mankind will reject scientism, will reject science itself and only keep what ossified technology is needful to maintain the world, They will become ever more inward-turning, contemplative, mystical; the common man will look to the sage for enlightenment, who himself will look into himself. Am I right?”
“I don’t know,” Havig said. “I have that impression, but nothing more than the impression. Mostly, you realize, I don’t understand so much as the languages. One or two I can barely puzzle out, but I’ve never had the time to spare for gaining anything like fluency. It’s taken me years of lifespan to learn what little I have learned about you Maurai. Uptime, they’re further removed from me.”
“And the paradox is deepened,” Keajimu said, “by the contrasting sights you have seen. In the middle of a pastoral landscape, spires which hum and shimmer with enigmatic energies. Noiseless through otherwise empty skies glide enormous ships which seem to be made less of metal than of force. And … the symbols on a statue, in a book, chiseled across a lintel, revealed by the motion of a hand … they are nothing you can comprehend. You cannot imagine where they came from. Am I right?”