* * *
Willem had never felt so happy. He squealed. The three youngsters laughed.
“I’m sorry,” Jenna told him telepathically. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
Willem reveled in the reestablished mental connection. Maybe Jenna had done something wrong, but he forgave her, of course. He would always forgive her.
The End
EXCEPT THE DUST
Robert Carter
A nostalgic meeting in the desert, but not all is as it seems ...
Chen squeezed her jewel and looked about her, captivated from the first by the beauty of what she saw. A magnificent slow desert day was starting, lit now by the fierce little eye of the sun. A pale sky, dawn pink. Long shadows cast across the land ... When Ryder had chosen this place he had chosen well.
The jewel that hung about Chen’s neck told her all she needed to know. She knelt, picked at a small vein of rock and examined it. It was gypsum - pale and wind-smoothed. Her effortless education told her much about the land around her and how it had come to be. It was sculpted by wind erosion, an eerily beautiful but desolate place. Once seething with water, it was almost waterless now, and, to use a loaded word - hostile.
The sandy plain was rust red, making it hard to scale visually. There were no straight lines here. It was raw, random, nothing here yet to hint at the interference of man. A cold desert with a thin wind that suggested extreme altitude. She had known other places like this and had always loved them. But Ryder’s choice had little to do with aesthetics, this particular desert landscape had a poignant significance for him personally.
Curious, she lifted up another rock. This was of a different kind, and thanks to her jewel she immediately knew all about it. A glittering crystal embedded in the rock-matrix briefly caught the distant sun, echoing her mind’s illumination. Where the rock had lain on the ground, undisturbed for eons, there were fine spicules of ice hiding. Left exposed, they would evaporate under the solar rays, so she put the rock back exactly as it had been. What was the use of making unnecessary changes, and so, as Ryder had said, leaving evidence?
A dark swirl of soil to the south-west drew her attention. Perhaps this was the track? She raised a hand and splayed her fingers. The wind was an easterly, and blowing at a little under eight meters per second, enough to drift a haze of rosy dust across the desert crust. But the track was still there after all this time, and quite visible.
A daily wash of ultra-violet sanitized this place, hard radiation, baking the surface. Nothing lived here now. Nothing had lived here for a very long time.
The six-wheeler had come this way - how many years ago was it? Ryder would know the exact figure. Ryder had been responsible, in his shepherd’s way, for sending the vehicle here. A helping hand, so to say. A nudge in the right direction. One of his many projects.
With her jewel she detected some white remnants. Clearly man-made. There must be other debris nearby too, remains of metal and plastic. Chen suppressed the impulse to range around and play with what might be discovered. These relics were best left untouched. What was it Ryder had once said in another, very different place about the importance of covering their tracks? “Tread softly, Chen. When they come this way again in the future - and they must - then they’ll know someone had been here, and won’t that make for a torrent of unanswerable questions?”
“If they come this way.”
He had been quick to turn. “Do you doubt it? I hope they do. I hope you can convince them, after your own fashion, of course, Chen. Oh, but I shouldn’t interfere. My time is nearly over, I know that.”
“It’s a pity we have to keep them in the dark,” she had said. “During your tenure, didn’t you ever want to let them know about us?”
“All the time.” He had smiled his most charming smile. “But I always reminded myself that letting them know would have done them no good in the long run. And that’s the question we must keep foremost in our minds: what is it that, in the long run, will be best for them?”
He had made it sound like a warning, and Chen had thought that Ryder’s long, lonely tenure must have been something of an ordeal, given the magnitude of the problems he had had to face. Rarely had so many difficulties beset a career. The course of human history had hardly run smooth since the day that baby Isaac had first come into the world and Ryder had sought out the farm house with his hopes and plans burgeoning. Little Isaac had been Ryder’s first project, and a stunning success he had been.
“You must love your work, Chen. And you must learn to love them, if you can. They can be infuriatingly stupid, wilfully destructive, immensely stubborn. There is no reasoning with the worst of them. And, as has been so often pointed out, they simply are not yet able to handle the truth.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh, be assured of that. They are still many centuries away from Revelation, but the day will come.”
She felt a pang of disappointment. “However, you don’t think it possible that that day will fall on my watch?”
“Oh, no. No, no. Perhaps the one who comes after you may be able to offer them the message. That rather depends on how you acquit yourself.”
“A thousand, perhaps two thousand years?”
“Who can say? I regret to tell you that some of them are still dying of malaria and famine.” And the sadness of his words had been like an admission of failure, or at least a suspicion that he, in his time, might have done more.
All that had been said at their first meeting, in the middle of a blistering high noon, ghosting among the awesome grey cliffs that rose above the so-called Eastern Sea of that dead companion world. Ryder had chosen that rendezvous too, ostensibly for the spectacular dawn view it afforded of her new home. And it had been no disappointment, her first sight of the so-called “Blue Dot” a little above a magnificent crater rim and suspended in a black sky.
And now, Chen was here, on another world, a true planet this one, where the sky was pink and the high cirrus clouds reminded her of home. Chen, dancing across dry ice, jewel-enhanced, membrane-wrapped against the elements, her delicate body was drifting in the wind, following the tracks of an ancient six-wheeler to where Ryder was waiting for her. What wisdom would be vouchsafed to her at this, their second and final meeting? Whatever it was, it would be worth listening to. Experience always was.
Yes, Ryder would certainly give good advice, but it would be her last. There would be no one to help her once she reached her final destination. In truth, the remote outpost to which she had been assigned was but a speck. Years and years would pass without any guidance. There would be decades of sending away reports with no echo and no sanction. She would be alone and would have to do as she saw fit. Appreciation, strategy, execution, all within the wide framework of policy. It would all henceforth be up to her.
An awesome responsibility, was it not, this steering of worlds? Yes, of course. But essential, to help them grow onward and upward. To ease them past the known hazards that could so easily trap the unwary and send them the way of the dinosaurs. As a good gardener must tend her garden, so must she tend those many billions of young shoots and help them come to greatness.
Her physical body felt good inside the membrane. It muted the cold, nullified the radiation, protected her. She experimented with the joints of her body, striking poses, drifting, dancing along lightly. The Plain of the Meridian, that was what someone had chosen to call this rock-strewn waste. The name was apt. It could easily be have been named for the fabled Middle of Nowhere, or The Abode of Hermits.
“And this breeze that kicks up the dust,” she said aloud and with the faintest trace of a smile, “is the wind from Nowhere.”
The debris, when she found it, was in the style of ancient makers, first-generation materials such as those shown in the museums and galleries, or discussed by the archaeologues. This one was hallmarked with a half-obliterated sign. She read it:
7dr
It made no sense, nor could her jewel help her. Its arc
ane meaning was lost, if ever it had had one.
Ridged tracks led away across the plain and she followed their strange squiggles and swivels, knowing that the tortured path must bring her to Ryder. This meeting would be another pleasure for her, but a bittersweet moment for Ryder. After all, he had constantly urged his charges to think about what was “up there.” He had whispered in ears and used his considerable political influence. Most of those he had tried to persuade could not see the value of such expenditure - “Twenty-five billion dollars for a box of rocks? What are we? Crazy?” But not all of them had been so small-minded. There had been real enthusiasm, hiding here and there, among the masses.
Ryder had been only the fifth permanent observer and now his time was done, after five hundred difficult years, give or take an orbit or two.
A World of Worlds Page 53