I suspect that the chances of my actually working out any sort of regular communication with you back here—or any communication at all, really—are very very slim. But I can try, anyway. And at the very least, setting down these accounts of what I’ve been experiencing here ought to provide me with a good way of bringing it all into clearer focus. Which should help me make better sense and order out of it when I’m home again in our own era and undergoing debriefing.
This is the seventh day of the mission. So far everything’s moving along pretty well.
First there was the time-hop trauma to deal with, of course. That was a stunner, though actually not as bad as I was expecting; but naturally I was expecting the worst. This is such a big jump we’ve made—the biggest jump either of us has ever done, by far. During the training period the most I ever did was something like ninety years. This is a jump of one hundred eighty centuries. So I figured I’d come slamming into the Prince’s mind behind a head of steam strong enough to knock me cold for a week. And in fact it was pretty rough, let me tell you.
The tuning was perfect. Of course the purpose of all the preliminary time-search scouting work was to locate a member of the royal family for me to use as my host. And they managed to land me right in the mind of nobody less than the heir to the throne himself!
I won’t ever forget the moment of landing, which felt to me the way I’d expect to feel when hitting the water after a very clumsy dive made from a very high diving board. There was pain, real pain, a lot of it. It would have knocked the breath out of me if there had been any breath in me in the first place.
Then came the total strangeness of that wild moment when the minds are fusing, which you know all too well yourself—that time when you can’t really tell whether you’re you any more or somebody else—and then I blanked out.
So did the Prince, evidently.
We were unconscious for perhaps a day and a half, possibly a little more. That’s why I’m not sure whether this is really Christmas Eve. Once I came to, and had made enough linguistic connections to be able to understand what I was hearing, I tried to figure out how long the Prince and I had been under, going by some of the things that the courtiers were saying to him:
“We rejoice, Highness, that the darkness has ended for you.”
“Two days and a night did we pray, Highness! Two days and a night you were gone from us!”
But it hadn’t been quite as long as that. As you’ve probably discovered yourself by now, their system of days and weeks isn’t much like the one we use, what with a “day” being considered just the time between dawn and sunset, and the dark hours being called a “night,” and the next biggest unit being a group of ten “days” and “nights” together, which works out to a five-day week on our scale, unless I still have it wrong. And two Athilantan days and a night would be a day and a half. But I do think this really is Christmas Eve, counting from the day we set out from Home Year and figuring up the total time that I believe has elapsed since then.
(A question, Lora: Is it really proper to regard this day as Christmas Eve, considering that we’re currently living at a time thousands of years before Christ’s birth? I suppose it is. We did set out from an A.D. Home Year, after all. But still the idea strikes me as a little peculiar. Then again, everything about this venture seems a little peculiar, starting with the fact that you and I have been converted into nothing more than nets of electrical energy and have been hurled thousands of years into the past, leaving our bodies behind in deepsleep. But telling myself that this is Christmas Eve makes it feel just a little homier for me here. God knows I need to have things feel a little homier right now. So do you, I imagine, out there in the frozen wastelands of the mammoth-hunter people.)
I have a very good link with the Prince’s mind. I can read his every thought, I can understand the things he says and the things that are said to him, I can monitor his heartbeat and his respiratory rate and the hormonal output of his glandular system. I am able to anticipate the movements of his body even before he consciously knows he’s going to make those movements. I pick up impulses traveling from his brain to his muscles, and I feel the muscles getting ready to react. I could, whenever I choose, override his own conscious commands and get his body to do whatever I felt like having it do. Not that I’d do any such thing—not while he’s awake and aware. I don’t want him to start thinking that he’s been possessed by a demon, even though that’s essentially what has happened to him.
How does it feel, Lora, thinking of yourself as a demon? Not so good, eh? But that’s what we really are. That’s the truth, isn’t it?
The Prince doesn’t have the slightest suspicion, I’m sure, that he’s been invaded this way, that an intruder from the distant future is inside him, wrapped around his entire nervous system like a blanket of undetectable mist.
I know that he felt me arriving. It wouldn’t have been possible for him not to feel the impact of that. But he had no clear notion of what was actually happening.
“The fingertip of a god has touched my soul,” he told his companions. “For a time I was thrown into darkness. The gods chose to touch me, and who can say why?”
Some kind of stroke, in other words. And then a day and a night and a day of unconsciousness.
Well, the gods work in mysterious ways. So far as anyone-knows, the Prince has made a complete recovery from whatever it was that smote him. I remain hidden, crouching invisible within his mind, a mysterious web of electrical impulses safe from any Athilantan means of detection.
And now he sleeps. I can’t read his dreams, of course— that layer of his mind is much too deep to reach—but his body is at peace, very relaxed. That’s why I think he’s dreaming of his homeland, the warm sweet isle of Athilan. Most likely he thinks he’s lying in his own soft bed.
But he isn’t.
A little while ago I picked him up and sleepwalked him over to his fine shining desk, made of rare and strange timber from the southern lands—something black that may be ebony inlaid with strips of several bright golden woods—and right now he’s sitting upright, hard at work writing this letter for me. Taking dictation, so to speak. A royal prince, taking dictation. But how could he ever know that?
The only clue he could possibly have is the stiffness that’s building up in his right arm and hand. The shape of the letters we use is very different from the Athilantan curlicues and spirals he’s accustomed to, and his musclesare straining and cramping as he writes. When he wakes up, though, he’ll never be able to guess why his arm is a little sore.
We’re near the seacoast, getting ready to break camp and take ship for Athilan itself. The Athilantans have a fairly big outpost here, perhaps three or four hundred people. The name of the place seems to be Thibarak. There are little primitive mainlander encampments scattered widely through the countryside all around. The mainlanders, who come to Thibarak to trade with the Athilantans, regard the powerful island people virtually as gods. I imagine that’s true all over Europe, for as far as the Athilantan empire reaches.
The landscape here is pretty grim and forbidding, though I suppose nothing like the way it is where you are in Naz Glesim. No glaciers here, no ice-fields—the ice has all retreated to the north and east by now—but the ground has a raw, scraped look to it, bare and damp, rough and rocky. The weather is very, very cold. I doubt that it’s been above freezing at all since I’ve been here, though the days are bright and sunny. Still, it’s evidently a lot warmer than it was a few hundred years ago, or than it is right now out where you are, which must be still pretty much in the grip of the ice. We have some birch and willow trees here, and a few pines. I’ve seen occasional mammoths and bison, but not many: the big Ice Age animals don’t like these new forests, and have wandered away to colder country where the grazing is better.