"What you see before you," William spread his hands and looked down at his body, "would qualify as a human by the standards you now employ. This body is genetically human. But I am only a temporary resident in it, in the same way that many individuals among you now live in cloned bodies, and will live in other bodies in your lifetimes."
The scene shifted again. Lilo felt a sense of expectancy and was not sure why. She saw the Grand Concourse in King City, Luna, a place she had visited many times. People walked in front of the camera, going about their business.
"Here comes the stinger," Javelin whispered. "Hold onto your credit meter and your gold fillings." Her nostrils dilated and her eyes were bright. She smelled a deal coming up, and it was all she needed to make her happy.
"We call ourselves the Traders. You know what it is we give; you have been getting it for centuries. No one thought to ask us if we wanted anything in return. We do, and what it is is both very simple and rather difficult to explain.
"What we want is your culture."
23
How could I tell of my ten years on what used to be the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America?
What made me so sure I was on the American continent was for a long time a source of considerable bewilderment. For several days after the death of Makel I wandered in a more or less dazed condition. It seems as though it took nearly a month before I dared to ask any of the questions that would continue to puzzle me for ten years. They can be summed up as What happened?
One moment I had been falling through Jupiter's atmosphere, and the next, I was in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. And I knew it was the Atlantic.
But that wasn't quite right. One event didn't follow the other; rather, they merged into each other. I'm sure I recall sitting under the bushes, shivering, before I was in the water. I recall crawling out of the water before I remembered being in it.
The whole experience was so subjective that I doubted from the first I would ever get any good answers by thinking about it. But it didn't stop me thinking. The conclusions I came to were so tenuous they might be worthless, and yet I felt good about them in the same way that I had no doubts about where I was.
I had fallen into an Invader—or a Jovian, if it makes any difference. For reasons of its own, the Invader had moved me. Perhaps I was told something in those scrambled seconds, minutes, hours, or centuries during which the transition took place. Or perhaps some level of my mind had been able to see how and to where I was moved.
Why? Why should the Invader care enough about me to do whatever was done? Was it accidental? I didn't know, but I had the persistent feeling that I had been displaced in space and time for some reason, and that it would become clear to me later. In the meantime, I had the hard task of survival facing me.
There were adventures by the hundreds. In a sense, every day was an adventure. But I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them. I never knew in the morning if I would live to see the sun set.
And yet with all the troubles, all the close calls, the story is mostly one of wandering, of slogging day after day down the woods and marshes and beaches of the Atlantic.
I always moved south. My knowledge of geography was not as good as it might have been, but I did know that it had to get warmer the farther south I went. After my first winter I had an abiding interest in staying warm.
My method was to pick an encampment when the leaves were starting to change colors. I would either build a hut from mud and sticks—Tweed, your training paid off!—or find an indigenous group of people and live with them while the snow fell.
I learned many skills: how to build a rude boat for crossing rivers, how to make and shoot a bow and arrows, how to set traps and track game. On a good day I might cover three kilometers, or I might settle down for weeks or months with some friendly group.
My size was a great help in everything I did. The people I met were in religious awe of me because of it. I never met anyone who was as tall as my shoulders.
It was tricky at first, learning to get along with them, finding the best way to enter a camp and set myself up as a sort of traveling goddess. But while they spoke a thousand dialects, they were all based on English. I could communicate with them. Tales of Diana, the great silver huntress with the legs of a horse, spread before me. Villages turned out to welcome me, and to see me turn into an apparition for a few seconds by switching on my nullfield. They eagerly and fearfully touched the metal flower above my breast. I became the warrior princess of legend, the metal-bodied Bride of Frankenstein, the Cyborg Diana.
I was subservient in their eyes to one thing only, and that was the Dolphin. Every holy place in every village had a wooden statue of a great fish with horizontal flukes and a blowhole.
She had been going north for some weeks now. She had gone northward before on her long journey, but it was always to go far enough up a river to find a suitable crossing. Once over, she had resumed her route south.
This time it looked as though it might be different. She had not been able to see any land to the west of her, and the ocean seemed to be a different color, more green than blue. The land was marshy, and she did most of her traveling with a canoe and a long pole. Huge reptiles lazed in the mud or swam slowly by her, but she did not fear them.
She had not seen snow for two years. The winters were mild, if this land could be said to have winters at all. She had kept moving from force of habit, and from the inability to decide what to do with her life. No call had come from the Invaders, no sign to tell her why she was there. But to stop moving would have been to face becoming part of a tribe. Even as a goddess, she did not think she could stand it.
She had done what she could, imparting to the people she met what knowledge she had that might be of use to them. There was no way to know if they heeded what she said after she was gone. And, truthfully, she did not know if it would do them any good. Possibly the solutions they had evolved to deal with their environment were the best for them, but they were not for her. Their lives were short, full of pain and suffering. The only thing they had that was good was the sense of community, the security of being surrounded by comrades, and she knew she could never participate in that. She was different, and could not be assimilated into a tribe except as a woman apart from the others.
Lilo was not the woman she had been. Her skin was brown and weathered now, her hair bleached by sun and salt water. She had no mirror, but knew there were unfashionable lines on her forehead, around her eyes and mouth. Ten years had aged her from a clone of the standard decanting age of nineteen apparent years to a woman of forty. There was a white, puckered scar from her right temple to her jaw, and another on her left thigh. The palms of her hands and the soles of her feet were thick with callous, and the hair on her calves was not as smooth and luxuriant as it used to be.
At the end of the fourth week of northward travel, Lilo decided she had come to the end of the long peninsula at the southeast of the continent. The natives called it Florda.