'Shock?'
'First, there's the business of his being able to link with other universes and bleed energy through. That was always theoretically possible, but now ... now people know it can be done, and no one knows how.' I took another sip of the tea. 'I think it will be a long time before they figure out how that can be done. The artificial gravity fields are different. In a way, they're more of a shock. Except for gravity control, the rest of New City can be explained in terms of technology and insights brought by the Followers or by the knowledge that Engee could have attained through self-examination and passed on.' I paused and looked across the lake.
'Go on ... don't leave me in the middle of a thought,' Cerrelle prompted.
'That means' - I smiled more broadly - 'that the Authority will have to recognize Engee as something - another culture, an equal ... and they'll have to recognize the Believers, the Followers of the Angel of the Lord, or whatever they officially call themselves. Oh, the Authority can still require some service obligation, but it would be difficult - and stupid - not to set up some way of letting at least some go to New City. The Authority's not stupid.' I smiled. And for millennia people have been pursuing the dream of conquering gravity. Gravity dreams, if you will. But the Authority can't beg, or steal, or borrow, the gravity technology without contact... so... sooner or later, probably sooner, some accommodation will be worked out. Over time, that will change things.' I set down the empty mug. And for a while, it will make Rykashans a bit less arrogant.'
'That pleases you,' mused Cerrelle.
'I'd like to see a muting of the Rykashan arrogance. This might help.'
'It might.' An amused smile crossed her face. 'Do you think they'll send you out on another flight - ever?'
'Not for a while ... but they will. They will.' I took a last sip of the tea and set the mug on the table. 'After it becomes clear that Engee kept his word.'
Cerrelle looked at me. 'You have to finish it.'
I knew what she meant. 'In Dorcha, yes. Because I never really said good-bye to the past. What about you?'
'I did before I left Dezret. You never did.'
As usual, she was right, but I didn't have to finish it at that moment. So we sat in the warmth of the chalet and watched the sun set behind frosted hills on the other side of the lake.
Epilogue
In the shadow of the Cataclypt of the Rykasha, not of Dyanar as I had once erroneously thought, two children kissed, and a demon watched, and smiled.
That cataclypt, where I had once seen two other children kiss, had not changed, but the dark gray stone was different ... softer ... edges blurred by rain and time. In thirty years, rain could not have made that difference. My eyes went to the carvings, to the images of the winged men that represented the ancients, and to the tailed figures in the background, background figures more clearly denned than the foreground angels.
Art? Artifice? Or a hand that had left hints, hints I had been too young and too full of Dzin to see when I had first come to Henvor. Once I had recalled a day when I had kissed Esolde behind the grape trellis in her parents' garden. Esolde was now mid-aged, a medical doctor of high reputation in Halz, her hair possibly graying. And I remained brown-haired and sharp-featured.
On that day of my posting, more than three decades past, with the slow swirl of the river below and the dampness of the morning mist in my nostrils, I had let the two kiss unmolested. At the time, I had wondered. Later, I had thought it had been the beginning of my undoing. Now ... now, I had just watched two children kiss in an innocence I still could recapture on a lake to the north ... because honesty begets innocence of the deeper kind.
My eyes went back to the cataclypt, and after studying the carvings, again noting the less-defined shapes of the ancient angels and the harder-edged forms of the demons, I turned to retrace my old path along the foot-polished stones of the River Walk. The mist was thicker this year, and no warmth came from the brume-hidden sun.
Old as Henvor is, old as it seemed, cold as the early winter day was, the mist fell gently on my shoulders, like a blessing, as I walked northward beside the Greening River. All the myths of the time before the Great Hunger and Devastation, all the stories that had seemed so impossibly distant, all seemed fresh-printed on the pages of a history text barely written.
My face solemn, I smiled within as I walked the river path before returning to the north, to a Rykasha that had yet to learn what I had discovered twice - that there is always a greater knowledge, a greater challenge, and that deception is everywhere.
Deception ... all life is deception, for without deception few can face the cold impartiality of the universe or the fact that it will go on and we will die, never benefiting fully from what was or at all from what we have struggled to create, but striving against the darkness of self-deception. Yet ... the struggle in itself has meaning because the universe only exists. Merely existing, the universe lacks meaning, and only a deceptive being can bring meaning to the impartial fact of meaninglessness.
And, as I can, that is what I will do, knowing that we, or the ancients, have created a being that some call God. Our old dreams have been found wanting, even as we are more than gods, and more than truth, for truth does not exist, and never has. I will fail, and failing, will succeed. I will die, later or sooner, and what I understand will be lost, for when men and women seek truth, what they find is as deceptive as lies, and neither truth nor lies exist outside of a deceptive soul.
I watched when two children once kissed in a cataclypt, and what I did not see has made all the difference.