The rest of the time he spent swimming, chatting, or playing with Antonella, or taking part in the activities of the Council. At first sight they did not appear to be very demanding, but little by little he realized the extent of the responsibilities weighing on Cid, Selma, and the other woman, whose name he now knew to be Ana.
Now and then, for periods of hours or days, they disappeared. Several times Corson saw them come back worn out, incapable of uttering a word. Strangers sometimes sprang from nowhere, demanding advice or bringing information. For long hours, almost every day, one at least of the councillors was in communion with Aergistal. Most often it was one of the women. Were they perhaps more advanced than Cid along the road to mastery of time? Or was it simply that Those of Aergistal preferred them as intermediaries?
Some of the communions seemed to be especially trying. Once he was awakened by screams. Ana was twisting and rolling on the sand as though in an epileptic fit. Before Corson had time to intervene, Cid and Selma had lain down beside her and gone into communion themselves, and in a few minutes Ana’s cries and writhing ceased. The next day Corson did not dare ask what had happened.
Something he did inquire about, on the other hand, was the six-thousand-year history of Uria which he had overleaped. The answers he received, though, were unsatisfying. Six thousand years was an almost unimaginable span of time. Not so long had elapsed between the first space flight from Earth and Corson’s birth. Science must have made incredible progress. A whole gazetteer of new worlds must have swollen the empire of mankind. And had not explorers made contact with the very ancient races legend spoke of, those millions of times more advanced than men? The answer to this last question appeared to be negative, and anyway Corson doubted whether humanity would have withstood the shock. Such races must have attained the Aergistal level, where—as the god had said—“there is no more difference.” If they intervened in human evolution it would not be under the crude guise of aggression or peaceful trade. It would be across time.
What surprised Corson most was the nature of the answers the councillors gave him; one could almost describe them as parochial. They knew a little of the history of Uria and of a few score neighboring star systems, but nothing coherent on the galactic level. Even the concept of galactic history seemed foreign to them.
Corson thought at first that must be because it was too vast for any human mind to grasp. Then he realized their very notion of history differed from his. They viewed it as an assemblage of situations and crises of which none was irreversible and all were obedient to complex laws. They were no more interested in a catalog of all possible crises than an engineer in Corson’s day would have been in an exhaustive tabulation of solutions to technical problems, or a doctor in a list of every cellular change caused by viruses. Principles were known to exist which accounted for the vast majority of actual situations. The rare occurrence of an event which could not be thus explained led, sooner or later, to the formulation of a new principle, or even a whole new system of principles. The only History which they could conceive of, as Corson found out, was the History of the successive sciences of history. None of them was a specialist in that field.
Moreover at any given moment—inasmuch as that phrase meant anything—there could be found on the various human and alien worlds almost the entire imaginable range of situations. Galactic civilization was one of islands. Each island had its own history and customs, and interference between them was relatively rare. Corson came to understand that war had been the principal bond between the worlds which had been baptized the Solar Powers, just as it had been between those of the Empire of Uria and all subsequent empires.
The question remained, how to find out whether Uria was indeed a key world because it had happened to attract the attention of Those of Aergistal. To Cid the question was meaningless. In Ana’s view the Urians were called on to play a special part in the universe because they had been the ones to find a way of conquering time. For Selma, all worlds were equally important and the mastery of time would have been revealed to those species which were sufficiently advanced by Those of Aergistal through means and at a moment which they judged suitable. Corson was no further forward.
He started to have doubts. Sometimes he wondered whether they were altogether sane, watching the way they behaved around him. Was their confidence in their powers a mere delusion? He had scarcely any evidence of their ability to time-jump except their absences. They could be deceiving him, consciously or unconsciously.
On the other hand they knew too much about him, his past, Aergistal… and they had shown that they were capable of intercepting a pegasone. Corson was sure they had forced it to lock on to this present. And at least as far as he could tell under normal circumstances they showed no hint of derangement. They acted like ordinary people, perhaps rather better adjusted than the average individual Corson had known before, in a time of war. That too was surprising. People belonging to a culture six thousand years older than his own ought to be different.
Then he remembered Touray, snatched from the mythical days of Old Earth, back when men had hardly ventured beyond the limits of their own world. He had detected no real difference in him, either. And Touray had adapted astonishingly well to life at Aergistal, which would not be created for a million years, or more likely for a billion.
He had reached about this stage in his musings when he found out that his companions were indeed different. They were united by a deep personal bond, whereas Corson’s society had recognized only the individual and the functional group. There was an especially strong attraction between Cid and Selma, but it did not exclude Ana—on the contrary. All three of them now and then mentioned larger groups.
They did their best not to shock Corson; while life on a beach might have its idyllic aspects, it did impose some limits on intimate relationships.
Oddly enough, Antonella seemed to remain apart, even more of an outsider than Corson. The three others did not shut her out of their group and even remained on superficially affectionate terms with her, but she was not attuned to them. She had neither Selma’s appealing spontaneity nor Ana’s rather casual sensuality. She was, or so it seemed, no more than a pretty young girl buzzing around Corson like a bee around a jam tart. She had a less forceful personality than the other two women but—Corson had at least to grant her this—she seemed in no way jealous of them. He ascribed the almost imperceptible, but nonetheless real, sense of distance between her and the others to her lesser experience of life, her more inhibited background, and the fact that she hailed from another time zone. He had never asked her which one. Without reference points any answer she gave would be meaningless. Each time he inquired about her previous life she replied only with commonplaces. She seemed to have no memories worth mentioning. He wondered for a moment why, in her future when she met him for the second time, she would say nothing—or from his standpoint had said nothing—about this restful period on the beach. It was hard to figure that out. Maybe she was afraid of a short circuit in time. Or, more simply, she might have no reason to speak of Cid, Selma, and Ana, who to her by then would be no more than meaningless names.