The Dancer from Atlantis (6 page)

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 whatnot, 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-hyäi-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?’ He 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.’

Awakening from sleep was strange. It locked the final door on escape out of a dream. The twentieth-century world had become
the one remote, fantastic, not wholly comprehensible as existent.

‘I’m going on scout while my horse can serve me,’ Uldin declared, and took off. He appeared less worn than his companions,
maybe because his best appearance was so uncouth. While he was gone, the rest sought refuge in the sea. Sticks, lashed together
with thongs cut from Oleg’s belt, made a framework on which to hang clothes for protection against direct sunlight and glare
reflected off the water in which they would sit to their necks.

When the awning was ready to be positioned, Erissa slipped off sandals and tunic. Oleg gasped. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked
him innocently.

‘You … a woman … a, well—’ It couldn’t be seen whether the Russian blushed under his beet-red sunburn. Suddenly he laughed.
‘Well, if that’s the kind of girl you are, this needn’t be the worst day of my life!’

She bridled. ‘What do you mean? Put down those hands!’

‘She’s not of your people, Oleg,’ Reid explained. It was obvious to him: ‘Among hers, nakedness is respectable.’ Nevertheless
he felt shy about stripping before her. Taut and lithe, scarcely marked by the children she had borne, her body was the goodliest
he had ever seen.

‘Well, turn your eyes, then, wench, till I’ve waded out decently deep,’ Oleg huffed.

Once laved and cooled, they felt better. Even the thirst was easier to bear. Oleg grudgingly imitated Erissa in following
Reid’s advice about sipping from the sea. ‘I don’t believe, mind you,’ he said. ‘It’ll kill us off the faster in the end.
But if we can keep going thus for a while, a bit stronger than otherwise, maybe the saints can find help to send us. You hear
me?’ he shouted at the sky. ‘A golden chalice set with precious stones for the Church of St. Boris. Six altar cloths of the
finest silk, and scores of pearls sewn on, for St. Mary.’ He paused. ‘I’d best say that in Russian and Romaic too. And, oh,
yes, Norse.’

Reid couldn’t resist japing: ‘Your saints have not been born.’
Oleg looked stricken. The American added hastily, ‘Well, I could be wrong, I suppose,’ No sense in pointing out that Christ
– that Abraham, most likely – was also in the future.

He turned to Erissa. ‘Sleep has cleared my head,’ he went on. ‘Let me think hard about what we know.’ And let me stop being
so damned aware of what I glimpse of you through the water, his mind added guiltily.

He made careful inquiries of them both, pausing for long times to ponder. They regarded him with respect. Uldin hadn’t shown
that; but he had barked curt answers to a few key questions before he left.

Oleg proved a diamond mine of information. Reid decided that the Russian’s bluff manner must be in a large part a disarming
mask over a sophisticated intelligence. The Kievan state was not the slum that most of its Western contemporaries were. Eight
million peope dwelt in a territory as big as the United States east of the Mississippi, a realm stuffed with natural resources
cannily exploited. Trade with the Byzantines was steady and heavy, bringing back not just their goods but their arts and ideas.
The Russian upper classes, more capitalists than noblemen, were literate,
au courant
with events abroad as well as at home; they lived in houses equipped with stoves and window glass; they ate with gold and
silver spoons, off plates set on sumptuous tablecloths, the meals including delicacies like oranges, lemons, and sugar; dogs,
never allowed indoors, had shelters of their own, and customarily a Hungarian groom to care for them and the horses; Kiev
in particular was a cosmopolitan home for a dozen different nationalities; the monarchy was not despotic, rather the system
granted so much freedom that popular assemblies, in Novgorod especially, often turned into brawls—

The point was that Oleg could place himself exactly in space and time: the eastward bend of the Dnieper, early June, 1050
A.D.

Uldin, vaguer, had spoken of recently taking over the land of the East Goths, after having first crushed the Alans, and of
greedy speculations about the Roman Empire to the west. From his dippings into history (thank fortune for a good memory!)
Reid could delimit the Hun’s scene of departure: the Ukraine, one or two hundred miles from the Crimea in a more or less northwesterly
direction; time, the later fourth century A.D.

Erissa posed the trickiest problem, for all her eager cooperation. The name of the island whence she had been seized, Malath,
was that bestowed by its largely Keftiu inhabitants. The English equivalent did not automatically come to Reid, any more than
he would have known Christiana and Oslo were identical if he had not been so informed.

He set aside the riddle of her former home, Atlantis. A continent that sank? Pure myth; geological impossibility, in any period
less than millions of years. And yet the name as used by her bore such a freight of the same meaning, the fair and happy realm
which the sea took back unto itself, that it had come through the helmet as more than a label. … Well she said her Atlantis
was gone. Where had she lived afterward? Might a clue be found in what that other folk whose language she also knew called
the place?