Before him, almost at the extremity of the ellipse formed by the walls, an oblong block of metal reared up. Was it a chest, a table, or an altar? A shiver ran down his spine.
I hope I’m not scheduled to be sacrificed, he thought half jokingly. I’d rather not be cast in the role of one of those young virgins you find in historical novels!
In fact he had nothing of the kind to fear. The Urians had never invented the concept of divinities to be placated. They only accorded symbolic honors to their dead. Their world view—if that was the proper term—was founded exclusively on the idea of the clan. That was regarded as immortal, and the individual only as its transitory appendage.
The lights went down. An opening appeared in the wall at the tip of the ellipse, behind the block of steel. It widened, and complete silence fell. Ngal R’nda stepped through. He wore a sumptuous toga of brilliant blue, almost metallic, its folds trailing on the ground. He took his station behind the four-square block, facing the audience, raised his scrawny arms over his head, and declaimed a few words in archaic Urian, to which the crowd uttered a response in a shriller tone.
They are very much like us, Corson thought, in spite of our different origins. Is that pure chance? Or must intelligence always follow more or less the same paths?
Ngal R’nda fixed his yellow eyes on Corson. In a whistling voice he said, “Look, man of Earth, and see what no human has ever seen before!”
The metal block opened and slowly there rose from it an engraved column supporting a huge eggshell mounted on three claws of gold.
Corson almost burst out laughing. So this was the blue egg that Ngal R’nda was so proud of having hatched from! Someone must carefully have collected the pieces and stuck them together. From where he stood he could see the joins, like the sutures of a polished skull. What Ngal R’nda wanted was to put his followers in mind of his inheritance. Showing them the Blue Egg, he evoked the glorious saga of Uria, the long ancestry of their warlike princes. Without this egg Ngal R’nda, regardless of his personal talents, amounted to nothing. The egg was the indisputable sign, the ultimate proof, that he belonged to a family described in legend.
In spite of himself Corson was fascinated by the egg. The scientific part of his mind recalled scraps of history. Before the First Communal Civilization, back on Old Earth, families had played a role comparable—at least superficially—to that of the clans on Uria. In those days it was best to be born into a powerful family. The brutal destruction of the Communal Civilization, brought about by the Coexistence War, and the subsequent dispersion among the stars of mankind fleeing a planet rendered temporarily uninhabitable, had not however restored to families their former importance. Sociologists—at the time of Corson’s “first life,” as he was now coming to call it—claimed that that was because man had passed a threshold of technological achievement whose effects could not be undone. But why then had the Urians reached a comparable level without evolving past the stage of a society based on heredity? In the light of historical science, that smacked of paradox.
The solution, Corson told himself, was under his very nose. The Urians—or their upper caste, at any rate—must have practiced a ruthless system of genetic selection almost since the dawn of their history. They had discovered, possibly by trial and error, that the color of an eggshell had some connection with the intrinsic qualities of the Urian who would hatch from it. And no doubt it was much less emotionally exacting to decline to incubate, or even to smash, a motionless egg than to expose or kill a helpless squalling little creature like a baby… though even that had been done by some human societies. Still, the fact that the practice had been institutionalized indicated that humans and Urians were indeed profoundly different.
“Look, man of Earth,” the Urian repeated. “When I die, this egg will be pulverized as were those of my ancestors, and its dust will be mingled with my ashes. Behold the egg I came from, which first was broken by my own beak! Behold the egg which sheltered the last Prince of Uria!”
Uproar broke out at the back of the room. Ngal R’nda made a sign and the egg vanished back into the chest. A yellow-clad Urian who had with difficulty forced a way through the throng pushed Corson aside and bowed before his prince, chirping in an acid-shrill voice.
Ngal R’nda listened, then rounded on Corson and spoke in Pangal.
“A horde of armed humans has taken up a position fifty kilometers from here. They are accompanied by Monsters—that is, by pegasones. They are fortifying a camp. Is this some act of treason on your part?”
Veran!
“Not at all, Prince,” Corson said, trying to hide a smile. “As I told you, you need an army. And it’s just arrived.”
Chapter 25
They were walking through the forest.
It was strange to think that at any moment now he was about to fall, along with Antonella, into Veran’s hands…
A circle was being closed. Somewhere out yonder he was living his life for the first time, in ignorance, and here he already knew the outcome: the suffering, the camp, the flight in the wake of the masked stranger, the voyage through time, the fruitless stopover on the mausoleum world, the mad leap to the end of the universe, Aergistal, its battles, the balloon, the earthquake, the other side of heaven, the god’s speech, the return to Uria. Here and now.
Yonder he had entered, yonder he was this moment entering, a maze that ran clear around the universe and doubled back so tightly on itself that Corson was no longer separated from his own past by more than the thickness of one of its walls.
Now the maze stretched ahead of him, as completely unfathomable as it had been in the past. But because he knew what was going to happen to the other Corson, this scrap of the maze he was at present passing through took on a little sense. Back then, he had known nothing of the third threat looming over Uria, nor had he known how to cope with the other two. Now a faint idea had come to him. The future would reveal the rest, he was sure of that.
He had an intuition. That man from the mist, that pegasone rider with a mask full of darkness whom Antonella had said resembled him… would be him. Therefore he did have a future. The maze would fold back on itself again, and perhaps again and perhaps an infinite number of times, and he would repeatedly brush past himself until finally his selves would meet. And that Corson-to-come would know a new section of the maze because he would have explored it, and perhaps he would be able to grasp the plan and purpose of it, and thus apply the proper touches to change his life.
He recalled what the god had said. In that far distant future they controlled their own existence, and their destiny was no mere thread stretched from birth to death, but a whole fabric, or rather a multidimensional warp and woof outlining a space. The gods, he said to himself, create a universe simply by becoming themselves.
He also knew that in the future he would meet Antonella again because she recalled having met him. And he would lose her again because she had fallen in love with him and was sorry that—at the time when she had picked him up on the street in Dyoto—he had found out. He told himself that now in his turn he had fallen in love with her and regretted it and nonetheless hoped that at long last the tangled skeins of their lives would knot together. That was a possibility still hidden in the folds of time. There were these two points—fixed, he presumed, and known by his future self—where he would set himself free and where he would meet Antonella, and he hoped that they defined a curve which, somewhere in time, would be shared by both of them.