The Dancer from Atlantis

V

Night brought cold air and brilliant stars. The sea glimmered vaguely. It was without surf or tides, but wavelets chuckled against the stones of the beach. The land reared and rolled southward, a blackness where hills stood hump-backed athwart the constellations and yelps resounded which Reid guessed were from jackals.

He had considered gathering brush for a fire, after Sahir was laid in a gully and covered with clods and, rocks for lack of grave-digging tools. His pipe lighter would kindle it. Uldin, assuming they must go through the laborious use of the flint and steel he carried, spoke against the idea. “No need. You and I have coats, Oleg has his padding, I can lend Erissa my saddle blanket. And the ... shaman wagon ... it shines, no? Why wear ourselves out scratching around for sticks?”

“Water nearby will keep the air from growing too chill,” Oleg pointed out from the experience of a sailor. Reid decided to save his lighter fluid for emergencies, or for what tobacco was in his pouch, though he dared not smoke until he had an abundance to drink.

The sea—definitely a sea, salt as it was—would help a trifle. He’d read Alain Bombard’s report; you can keep alive awhile by taking continual sips. And they might try for fish with whatever tackle they could rig. In the long run, however, and not a terribly long run either, nothing would save them but rescue from outside.

The glow enclosing the time vessel swirled in soft white and pastels, a hateful loveliness that barred off the water, food, shelter, medicine, tools, weapons within. It lit the desert wanly for some yards around. Sahir had known how to unlock it; but Sahir lay stiff awaiting the jackals. Reid felt sorry for him, who had been a well-intentioned man and wanted to live as badly as anyone, and sorry likewise for the partner whose ray-raddled flesh sprawled in the machine that had betrayed them all. But his pity was abstract. He’d never known them as people. He himself, and these three with him, remained to be saved or to die a harder death.

Oleg yawned cavernously. “Woof, what a day! Are we lost in time as you believe, Duncan, or borne off by evil Lyeshy as I think? Either way, I’m for sleep. Maybe I’ll have such pious dreams the angels will carry me back to my little wife.”

“Do you want the second or third watch, then?” Uldin asked.

“None. I sleep in my mail, helmet and ax to hand. What use, seeing an enemy from afar?”

“To make ready for him, you lump. or find a hiding place if he’s too strong,” Uldin snapped. Dirt, grease, stink, scars, and everything, the Hun nonetheless reminded Reid of a martinet captain he’d had. The Russian growled but yielded.

“Let me take first watch,” Reid offered. “I can’t sleep yet anyway.”

“You think too much,” Uldin grunted. “It weakens a man. As you will, though. You, next me, last Oleg.”

“What of me?” Erissa inquired.

Uldin’s look told his opinion of putting a woman on sentry-go. He walked from the illumination and studied the heavens. “Not my sky,” he said. “I can name you the northerly stars, but something’s queer about them. Well, Duncan, do you see that bright one low in the east? Call me when it’s this high:’ He doubtless had no idea of geometry, but his arm lifted to an accurate sixty-degree angle. With his awkward gait, he sought the spot where his horse was tethered, lay down, and slumbered immediately.

Oleg knelt. removed his coif, and crossed himself before saying a prayer in his Old Russian. He had no trouble finding rest either.

I envy them that, Reid thought. Intelligence—no, don’t be snobbish—the habit of verbalizing has its drawbacks.

Weariness filled his body with stones and his head with sand. Most of Uldin’s kumiss had gone to wash down the jerky they had had for supper; what was left must be hoarded; Reid’s mouth felt drier than deadwood. His skin was flushed from the day’s exposure, yet the cold gnawed into him. A brisk walk, several times around the camp, might help.

“I leave, Duncan, soon to return,” Erissa said. “Don’t go far,” he warned.

“No. Never from you.”

He waited till she had vanished in the night before he started on his round, so he could watch her. Not that he felt enamored—under these circumstances?—but what a woman she was, and what a mystery.

The castaways had had slim chance to talk. The shock of arrival and of Sahir’s appearance and death, the stress of heat, thirst, and language transfer, had overtaxed them.

They were lucky to complete what they did before sunset.

Reid had followed the pilot’s advice. Because her bronze knife and her frank wonder at iron equipment fairly well proved she was from the earliest date and therefore from this general period, he made Erissa the linguistic source. She went along with the process as readily as with any-thing he wanted. He found that assimilating a language through the inentaten—was in truth rough: a churning of his mind, bringing on a condition similar to the unpleasant terminal stage of extreme drunkenness, plus exhausting, involuntary muscle contractions. No doubt it went far more slowly and gently in Sahir’s home milieu: and obviously this brutal cramming had hastened the pilot’s end. But there was no choice and Reid recovered after a drowsy rest.

Oleg and Uldin refused, wouldn’t come near the apparatus, until the Russian saw Erissa and the American talking freely. Then he put a helmet on his own pate. Uldin followed suit, maybe just to show that he had equal manhood.

The swift desert dark upon them and their vitality drained, they had no time thereafter for aught but the briefest, most general exchanges of information.

Reid started pacing. The crunch of his footfalls and the remote bestial yelps were his sole hearing, the stars and the cold his sole attendants. He doubted there would be any danger before morning. Still, Uldin was right about posting a guard. Heavy though Reid’s brain was, it lurched into motion.

Where are we? When are we?

Sahir’s expedition left Hawaii in ... sometime in the future, Reid thought. Say a thousand years in my future. Their machine skimmed the land and water surface of the planet while moving backward in time.

Why skim? Well, let’s assume you need the surface for a reference frame. Earth moves through space, and space has no absolute coordinates. Let’s assume you dare not rise lest you lose your contact (gravitation?) and come out in the emptiness between yonder stars.

My term paper—x millennia hence, a couple of decades ago along my now doubled-back world line, a million years ago in my interior time of this night of despair—proved that,travel into the past is impossible for a number of reasons, including the fact that more, than infinite energy would be required. Evidently I was wrong. Evidently sufficient energy—a huge concentration of it in a small volume and short timespan—nevertheless, a finite amount—evidently that will, somehow, affect the parameters of the continuum, and this vehicle here can be thrown

. across the world and backward or forward through the ages.

Traveling, the vehicle must be charged with monstrous forces. Sahir spoke of “insulation.” I think he might better have said “control” or “restraint.” Probably .the forces themselves are the only ones strong enough to generate their own containment.

This trip, there was an imperfection. A leakage. The vehicle flew through space-time surrounded by a ... field .. that snatched along whatever animal was encountered.

Why just animals—higher animals—plus whatever was intimately attached to them such as clothes? Why not trees, rocks, water, air, soil? M-m, yes, Sahir did speak of the reason. It wasn’t important for me to know, he was half out of his mind and babbling, but as long as he did mention it—yes. The technology of,his age, or at least of its space-time vehicles, relies on mental control. Telepathy, including telepathic robots, if you believe in that kind of fable. Myself, I’m inclined to speculate about amplified neural currents. Whatever the explanation may be, the fact is that the drive field only interacts with matter which is, itself, permeated by brain waves.

It might be done that way as a precaution. Then in case of force leakage, the machine will not find itself buried under tons of stuff when it halts. Higher animals aren’t too plentiful, ever. One of them would have to be at precisely the point in space, precisely the instant in time, where—when the vehicle passes by.... Hm. We may have collected various mice and birds and what-not, which hurried out of our sight before we got a chance to notice them. They’d be the commonest victims. An accident involving humans must be rare. Maybe unique.

(Why did it have to happen to me? The eternal question, I suppose, that everybody must sooner or later ask himself.)

Sahir said the trouble registered on instruments and his team started braking. Because of ... inertia ... they couldn’t stop at the point where they’d picked me up. They flew on, acquiring Oleg, Uldin, and Erissa.

As ill luck would have it, when their flight was nearly ended, when they were nearly ready to halt in space and start moving normally forward again in time—another power concentration hit them. Ordinarily they could have passed it by in safety: but given the faulty containment, those cataclysmic forces (or more accurately, I guess. the space-time warping produced by those cataclysmic forces) interacted with the drive field. Energy was released in the form of a lethal blast of X-rays through the hull.

There’s the crazy coincidence, that a time carrier in trouble should happen to pass by a catastrophe.

Uh-uh. Wait. Probably not a coincidence. Probably the chrononauts, or rather their computers and autopilots, always set their courses to pass near events like that if it’s feasible. Given a vessel that’s working properly, I imagine they get an extra boost from the H-bomb explosion or giant meteorite impact or whatever the event happens to be. Makes the launch cheaper, and so makes more time voyages possible than would otherwise be the case.

Did Sahir and his friend know they were headed into their doom, try to veer, and fail? Or did they forget, in the wild scramble of those few moments? (I have the impression that transit time, experienced within the hull, is short.

Certainly we who were, carried along outside knew a bare minute’s darkness, noise, and whirling.)

So. We’re stranded, unless we can find some other futurians. Or they us. I suppose if we can stay here, eventually a search party will come by.

Will it? How closely can they position their spacetime hops, when each requires building a generator that doubtless destroys itself by sheer heat radiation when it’s used?

Well, wouldn’t the futurians make the effort? If only to be sure that the presence of this wrecked machine doesn’t change the past and obliterate them?

Would it do that? Could it? This was a point in my essay which may remain valid: that changing the past is a contradiction in terms. “The moving Finger writes, and having, writ ...” I suspect the machine’s presence here and now, and ours, are part of what happens. I suspect this night has “always” been.

For what can we do? Chances are we’ll die within days. The animals will dispose of our bones. Maybe local tribesmen, if any possess this grim land, will worship the glowing hull for a while. But finally its batteries, or whatever it’s got, must run down. The force field will blink out of existence. Unprotected, the metal will corrode away, or be ripped apart for the use of smiths. The fact that a strange thing once lay here will become a folk tale, forgotten in a few generations.

Oh, Pam, what will you think when I never come down to our cabin?

That I fell overboard accidentally? I imagine so. I trust so. Damn, damn, damn. I should’ve increased my insurance coverage!

“Duncan.”

Erissa had come back. Reid glanced at his wristwatch.

She’d been gone an hour. Not on an errand of nature, then.

“I was praying,” she said simply “and afterward casting a spell for luck. Though I never doubt you will save us.”

In her mouth, the throaty tongue she named Keftiu was softened; she had a low voice and used it gently. Reid had no idea what they called her speech in his era, if they had found any trace of it. His attempts to identify cognates were made extra difficult by the fact that, he, like Oleg and Uldin, had actually gained two languages which she spoke with equal fluency, plus smatterings of others.

He knew the term for the second, non-Keftiu tongue, as he knew the term “English” or “español.” He could pronounce its name, as he could her entire vocabulary from that rather harsh, machine-gun-rapid talk. He could spell the vocabulary; the language had a simplified hieroglyphic-type script, just as Keftiu had a more elaborate and cumbersome written form. But he could not readily transliterate into the Roman alphabet, to compare with words from his own world Thus his command of the language and his knowledge of its name—Ah-hyiii-a was a crude approximation—gave him no clue to the identity of its native speakers.

Since Erissa preferred Keftiu, Reid postponed consideration of the unrelated tongue, however important it probably was in this era. Keftiu was keeping him bemused enough. Though no linguist, he classed it as mainly positional, partly agglutinative, in contrast to its heavily inflected rival.

Perhaps trying to make conversation, she asked him something. Translated more or less literally, her question was, “Of what unknown-to-me nature is that like-unto-Our-Lady’s-moon jewel which you (for a sign of Her?) wear?” But his inner ear heard: “Please, what’s that? So beautiful, like a sigil of the Goddess.”

He showed her the watch. She fingered it reverently. “You didn’t have this before,” she murmured.

“Before?” Re stared at her. The sight was blurry in the dim light, amidst the thick shadows. “You do act as if you already know, me,” he said slowly.

“But of course! Duncan, Duncan, you cannot have forgotten.” She reached from beneath the smelly blanket that, perforce and grimacing, she had wrapped around her tunic. Her fingers brushed his cheek. “Or has the spell fallen on you likewise?” Her head drooped. “The witch made me forget much. You too?”

He jammed hands in coat pockets, clenching a fist around the home shape of his pipe. Breath smoked from him. He begrudged the moisture. “Erissa,” he said in his exhaustion, “I don’t know any more than you what’s happening or has happened. I said what Sahir told me, that we’re entangled in time. And that is a terrible thing to be.”

“I cannot understand.” She shivered where she stood. “You swore we would meet again; but I did not think it would be when a dragon bore me off to a country of death.” She straightened. “That’s the reason, not so?” she asked with renewed life. “You foresaw this and came to save me who have never stopped loving you.”

He sighed. “These are waters too deep to cross before we have even laid our ship’s keel,” he said, and immediately recognized a Keftiu proverb. “I’m empty. I can’t think beyond ... beyond what few hand-graspable facts we may collect between us.”

He paused, groping for words, more because his brain was dull than because there was any great problem about phrasing. “First,” he said, “we must know where we are and what year this is.”

“What year? Why, it’s been four and twenty years, Duncan, since last we were together, you and I, at the wreck of the world.”

“At the—what?”

“When the mountain burst and the fires beneath creation raged forth and the sea turned on the Keftiu who were too happy and destroyed them:’ Erissa lifted her double-ax amulet and signed herself.

The bottom dropped out of Reid’s mind. My God, gibbered through him, has the energy release already taken place? Did we arrive after instead of before it? Then we’re indeed stuck here forever. Aren’t we?

“You shudder, Duncan,” Erissa laid hands on his shoulders. “Come, let me hold you.”

“No. I thank you, no.” He stood for a while mastering himself.

It could be a misunderstanding. Sahir had been definite about an enormous disaster in this general neighborhood, somewhat futureward of this night. No use trying to untangle the whole skein in an hour. Knot by knot, that was the way. Erissa’s home wasn’t, too distant geographically, was it? Not according to Sahir. Okay, begin with that.

“Tell me,” Reid said, “where are you from?”

“What?” She hesitated. “Well ... I was many places after we parted. I’m now on the island Malath. Before then—oh, many places, Duncan, always longing for the home where you found me.”

“The what? Where? Say its name. Where were you then?”

She shook her head. Murky though the night was, he could see her tresses ripple beneath the stars. “You know that, Duncan.” she said puzzledly.

“Tell me anyhow,” he insisted.

“Why, Kharia-ti-yeh.” Land of the Pillar, Reid translated. Erissa went on, anxious to make herself clear in the face of his baffling ignorance: “Or, as they called it on the mainland, Atlantis.”