He paused while his hands gestured briefly and on the clear surface of the canopy before him appeared the gray outlines of circles, squares, and long curving shapes so strange that they had no names for them.
"At first I thought of introducing this knowledge to you one item at a time. Instead I was unkind, perhaps even harsh, and confronted you with all of it at once. This was because, having come to know both of you well, I decided that facing you with many shocks at once would keep your minds from being affected too seriously by any one of them. It seems that I was right and later, while your minds and bodies are at rest, you will be able to assimilate this material without mental dysfunction. But one more shock, although later you will look back on it as just another learning experience, awaits you."
He rose from his seat, stood aside and nodded toward the symbols that had appeared on the forward canopy. Looking at Sinead he said calmly, "Your hands, like my own, are small and precise in their movements, so you will be first. The markings you see have been placed there as a visual reminder of their shapes, positions, and control functions. Later, when you become more experienced, they can be removed so as not to interfere with forward visibility. You will be given verbal guidance at every stage. Take the control position, now, and prepare to fly my ship…"
Declan had no way of judging the passage of time except for the dawn to dusk alteration in daylight and the changing positions of the sun, moon, or stars. But out here there was only night and the heavenly bodies gyrated wildly in random directions as Sinead sought, with an early lack of success, to make the djinn go where she wanted it to go. And so it was that for what seemed to be a very long time Declan sat gripping the sides of his chair while it gripped him just as tightly. Then it was slowly borne in on him that the movements of the Earth and stars had become smoother and more precise and that Sinead's features, although still beaded with moisture, were showing pleasure and excitement through their concentration. Beyond the canopy, one of the smaller orbiting djinns, looking like an alien, square-winged butterfly with what Ma'el called its power receptors extended, was coming to a halt close by.
"Enough," said Ma'el. "Your ability to think and move in the three dimensions of normal space is excellent. Later you will be shown how to navigate through the interdimensional folds of space, and to travel great distances in an instant. But for now you must return to your place and rest both your body and overworked mind."
She nodded gratefully and moved back to the chair beside him, but the old man remained standing.
"Now, Declan," he said, "it is your turn…"
Keeping the vessel on the heading indicated by Ma'el, he thought as the perspiration trickled down his face and soaked his body, was like trying to balance with a single pole on an ice-covered pond. The slightest misjudgment sent the vessel sliding and spinning in every direction but the one he wanted it to follow. While sitting in a comfortable chair he was working harder than he had ever done in his life while the muscles of his arms ached with the effort of not forming his hands into the wrong gesture or moving them in the wrong direction or at the incorrect speed. He knew that his great, awkward, weapon-wielding hands had not the same delicacy and precision of movement as those of Sinead, but he felt that slowly he was learning how to make the Earth and sky hold steady and to guide the vessel in the direction it was supposed to go. But suddenly he had to place his sweating hands on his lap and stare through the unobscured side of the canopy and do nothing.
Ma'el made a worried, interrogatory sound.
Carefully so as not to change the control settings, Declan indicated the scene outside where the surface below was in a night lit only by a half moon that made the whole world look like a tenuous ghost of itself. The darkness of the past few hours had so sharpened his eyesight that stars, large and bright and others so faint that he had never been able to see them from the surface, crowded the sky so thickly that it seemed that he could reach out and touch them. He felt no hurt but suddenly his eyes stung with tears.
'That,'' he said, clearing his throat, "is the most tremendous and beautiful sight I have seen or ever will see. It makes me almost forget to breathe."
Ma'el inclined his head and regarded him for a long moment, then he pointed with an arm outstretched and said gently, "Position the vessel along this line of travel, then you will engage the main thrusters as you have been shown and fly us to your moon for low-level flight, approach, and landing practice."
Once the course was set there was nothing for Declan to do and Ma'el suggested that Sinead and he might like to rest. Before he could voice exactly the same sentiments, she said that they were too excited to think of sleeping amid all this splendor. So they watched the moon grow slowly larger and change from the silvery orb they had known to a dead and grossly pock-marked world that looked as if it had been visited by some gargantuan plague but still, withal, retaining its own terrible beauty.
They watched and listened to Ma'el as he talked about his plans for them, and filled their minds with answers to questions they knew not how to ask, which were even more exciting and wondrous than the scene outside. He told them that he was the only member of his race to visit Earth. He had been sent there by the Synod, which was the ruling group of the Taelon people, to investigate Earth for as long as he deemed it necessary and to report on his findings-"
"… The completion of my report has become an urgent necessity for several reasons," he went on. 'Time is not a problem for me, but it is for you and the short-lived race to which you belong. That was why I have decided to disobey the Synod's specific instructions and reveal this and lesser secrets to you…
"That is also why," he continued, "I shall take you to Cathay, and to many other lands, by a faster and more direct means than hazardous sailing ships and camel caravans that are prey to robbers. Such methods of travel, while attracting less attention to myself, would waste years of traveling time as well as placing your already short lives in jeopardy.
"You have been given this knowledge because you two, more than any other members of your race previously employed by me, are capable of performing a unique service for myself and ultimately for my people."
"But who are we," said Sinead, "that we should be singled out for this revelation? A young woman damaged in mind and body as a child, but now recovering…" she squeezed Declan's hand, "… and a hulking great warrior with so many muscles that the sharpness of his mind is often hidden by them. I ask again, why us?"
"I am trying to tell you," said Ma'el gently, "but you must have the patience to wait until you receive the whole answer. Voluntarily separated as I am from the Commonality and the immaterial mental force that holds the thinking of all our people together, my own ability to foretell my future has been diminishing to a frightening extent The timesight is a vital necessity to the continuance and completion of my work here, but I am fast losing it That is why I have ignored another Taelon prime directive and given timesight to your people so that, through yourself among others, I would be able to see into this world's future. Initially you were a disappointment to me, not through any fault of your own but because of the mind-damaging incident in your past which, I thought wrongly, had rendered you physically and emotionally sterile and, as a result without a genetic extension into the future. I was considering letting both of you go. That would have been the greatest mistake of my life because you, Sinead, have acquired a timesight that is unique in its power, accuracy, and temporal range…"
"But why?" Sinead broke in. She squeezed Declan's hand again and went on, "I know that I had a change of feeling and that now I will have descendants who will form the organic pathway that gives me timesight into the far future. But why am I so good at it?"