There was more, the supplements with details of her medical psychiatric history, the library supplements listing her music and books. He skimmed these, then returned to the poignant inventory and the portrait.

Will I find you again, Mercy in your silken gown and golden jewelry, with your harp and your fife and your strawberries and bluebells? Where will you go to tend your pregnant sheep? (Dest: NS.) Will I find you alone, except for loyal Deirdre and her pups, as you’ve always lived? (Attmt: NS.) Will you welcome me and teach me the songs of old Lauguedoc or old Ireland, or will your heartswound still be too deep for me to fill? (MDep-2, .25 dis UT.)

What did you find on the other side of the time-portal when you stepped through on your birthday, beginning your twenty-ninth year of life six million years before you were born? And why am I leaving this bravest of all new worlds for a constricting unknown? What’s in the dark that I’m so afraid of finding/not finding?

Beguiled my heart, I know not why. And yet I love her till I die.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Claude Majewski opened his eyes, wiped the rheum out of them with a tissue, and removed the earplug that had been teaching him while he slept how to mortise wind beams into the rafters of a log cabin. His left arm was full of pins and needles and his feet were cold. Damn crocky old circulation shot to hell. As he kneaded the blood back into the muscles, he reflected that he would miss the luxury of the auberge’s goose-down pillows, liquicelle mattress, and real muslin sheets. He hoped the survival kit they would test today had a decent camp bed.

He padded across the sunny room to the bath. Here the compassion of Madame Guderian was made manifest in black-and-white marble and golden plumbing, in thick towels, perfumed soap and toiletries by Chanel, in sauna and sunlamp and la Masseuse ready to cradle the clients of the inn in soothing elegance after sobering lessons in la vie sauvage.

Some poor timefarers struggling to endure the Pliocene world would remember the last days at the auberge for French cooking, soft beds, and precious works of art. But Majewski knew that his fondest memories would be of the sybaritic John. The warm padded seat that welcomed his spindly shanks! The tissue, like perforated rabbit fur! He harked back to some of the primitive conveniences he and Gen had suffered on boondock planets, portacans with broken heating units; noisome stone and wood tillyhouses full of lurking critters; rough two-holers over flooded trenches; even one ghastly night of storms on Lusatia when he had squatted on a log and then discovered that it harbored little mitey monstrosities.

O blessed sanitary plumbing! If no one else invented a Pliocene water closet, Claude intended to give it an earnest shot.

He had a cool perfumed shower, cleaned his teeth (third set, good as new), made a face at himself in the Louis XIV mirror. Not too decrepit. A casual appraisal might judge his age to be late fiftyish. He was vain about his Polish green eyes and striking thatch of waved silver hair, the result of having the male-pattern baldness codons erased from his genetic heritage on the last rejuv. But thank God he’d depilated the rest of his pelt! Characters like that pirate who prized facial hair might have another song to sing in a primitive world, especially a warm and buggy one like Pontian Europe. The old paleobiologist had noted with grim humor that yesterday’s lectures and clever animated movies on Pliocene ecology had barely mentioned the insects and other invertebrate denizens. It was more dramatic to show vast herds of hipparions and graceful gazelles being harried by scarcely less graceful cheetahs; or machairodont lions sinking their long canines into bellowing hoe-tuskers.

Claude went back into the bedroom and asked room service to send coffee and croissants. Since this second day was to feature simple survival techniques, he put on the clothing he planned to wear through the gate. Experience had made his choice of kit easy: fishnet underwear, old-fashioned bush shirt and pants made of the best Egyptian long-staple cotton, socks of Orcadian wool with the fat left in, indestructible boots from Etruria. He had brought along his old backpack even though the auberge stood ready to furnish all equipment. It contained his poncho of breathable grintlaskin and an Orcadian sweater. And in one zip compartment was a beautiful Zakopane box, all carved and ornamented wood. Gen’s box. It hardly weighed a thing.

As he breakfasted, he studied the program for the day’s activities. Introduction to Survival Unit A-6. Shelter and Fire. Minimizing Environmental Hazards (ho ho). Orienteering. Fishing and Trapping.

He sighed, drank the perfect coffee, and munched a flaky bread roll. It was going to be a long day.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sister Annamaria Roccaro had done a fair bit of camping, but the expensive new decamole equipment contained in Unit A-6 was a delight and a revelation to her.

She and the other members of Group Green had first gone to class, where a hearty woman instructor briefed them; then they had paired up and descended to a cavern carved out of the living rock 200 meters below the cellars of the auberge. They were let loose into a sunny meadow with a winding stream and told to become acquainted with their survival gear.

The simulated sun felt hot, even though the reset of their body thermostats was progressing apace. After she and Felice hiked a short distance, Amerie decided that she would have to forgo the sandals that had been her first choice for Pliocene footgear. They were suitably monastic and airy, but they also admitted twigs and small stones. Short buskins or even modern boots would be better for cross-country travel. She also decided that the white doeskin habit was over-worn, even with detachable sleeves. Homespun would be better. She could have a doeskin scapular, cowl, and cloak to keep off the weather.

“Aren’t you hot in that outfit, Felice?” she asked her companion. Landry was wearing the green-and-black ring-hockey uniform, which was evidently her choice for the Pliocene.

“It suits me,” the girl said. “I’m used to working in it, and my planet was much warmer than Earth. That doeskin looks very high-priestess, Amerie. I like it.”

The nun felt strangely flustered. Felice, looked so incongruous in her warrior’s cuirass and greaves and that Grecian helm with its brave green feathers perched on the back of her head. Stein and Richard had started to tease her when she appeared in the costume that morning; but for some reason, they had broken off almost immediately.

“Shall we camp here?” the nun suggested. A large cork oak grew beside the brook, shading a flat surface that looked like a good place to set up the cabin. The two women shed their packs, and Amerie extracted the fist-sized inflator from hers and studied it. Their instructor had said that the sealed power supply would be good for about twenty years. “Here are two nozzles, one to blow things up and the other to deflate. It says: IMPERATIVE TO SHEATH UNUSED NOZZLE.”

“Try my cabin-pak.” Felice held out a wad about the size of a sandwich. “I can’t believe it’ll grow into a four-by-four house.”

Sister Roccaro fixed the dangling flat tube of the pak to the inflator, then pressed the activating stud. Compressed air began to spurt into the wad, turning it into a large silvery square. The two women positioned the cabin properly, then watched it grow. The floor thickened to about nine centimeters and became quite rigid as air filled the complex micropore structural web between the layers of film. The walls, somewhat thicker for insulation, grew up, complete with transparent zipable windows and interior screen-curtains. A steeply gabled silvery roof that overhung the doorway inflated last of all.