The First Protector ec-2

by James White

  Ma'el inclined his head and looked at them for a long moment, then said, "A few of them. But the sympathy from you is unexpected and deeply appreciated. You have been exposed to sights and knowledge that could well have sent your minds into gibbering madness. Instead, my more than servants, you are thinking of me."

  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?"


  The old man looked slowly from Sinead to Declan and back again before replying.

  "What I tell you now is partly speculative rather than entirely factual," he said, "because, regrettably, we Taelons do not have the intense levels of physical attraction and emotional involvement that are possessed by your shortlived species. It is possible that, even though you disliked each other intensely in the beginning, when continued close proximity and shared dangers forced you into recognizing each other's better qualities and depths of character, the emotional potential that built up between you was so intense that when the change of feeling came and you joined, the stimulation of your future time sense was unique in its strength. On Taelon such an intensity of emotional bonding is unknown, and on your own world it must be rare. That is the best answer I can give you."

  Sinead looked uncomfortable and said, "Ma'el, are you telling us that we are the greatest lovers there have ever been?"

  Declan gave a small laugh to hide his embarrassment. "I would think that all lovers feel like this about each other," he said, then added thoughtfully, "but in this case it is probably true."

  Before Sinead could reply, Ma'el raised a hand to point and said, "Your moon is less than two of its diameters distant and you have work to do. Declan, position the vessel for a landing in that large crater with the low, central peak."

  "Someday," Sinead said in a quiet voice, "somebody is going to name it Tycho." At last the lessons were over for the day in a place where there was neither day nor night, Ma'el had urged them to rest and placed them in a small room whose walls had been made opaque except for the one that looked out on the beautiful blue and white Earth that was hanging low above the crater's rim and dimming the background stars only slightly. Sinead was trying to do the impossible, which was to move her body closer than it already was to his.

  "Earlier," she said softly, "you told Ma'el that the most beautiful and wonderful thing you had ever seen was the Earth and the stars in space. You also said that we were the world's greatest lovers, probably. Probably?"

  Declan raised a hand to caress the back of her neck at the hairline, then moved his fingers slowly and lightly down the length of her spine, hearing her soft, ragged intake of breath.

  "The Earth and stars don't wrap themselves as tightly around me as you do," he said, "and as for being the world's greatest lovers, we need more practice…"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Ma'el Report. Day 112,178…

  The advanced instruction in ship handling was completed with the period it took for their moon to circle twice around its parent planet, a learning time that I consider not only satisfactory but impressive. The operating principle governing instantaneous navigation through the dimensional layers of quasireality, while they learned to perform the required hand movements with precision, were difficult for them to grasp. In a gross oversimplification, I finally explained it by spreading out Sinead's white linen burnoose, marking it with a spot of dark liquid, and then fold it so that the stain was copied onto a different part of the garment before spreading it flat again to show the distance that could be traveled instantaneously between the two marked places. The demonstration enabled them to understand how, if not why, interdimensional travel worked.

  "This illustrates once again the essential difference between intelligence and education. These people of Earth are uncivilized, technologically backward, and woefully ignorant, but they are highly adaptable and intelligent. With the possession of intelligence, especially where these two are concerned, ignorance is a temporary condition.

  "With this purely organic life-form, a prolonged stay in the light gravity of their moon means that muscular deterioration with a consequent loss of physical coordination will gradually take place. This could prove embarrassing and even dangerous for them in the Earth environment, so their return should not be long delayed.

  "The lack of a breathable atmosphere on this world means that they have been unable to leave the ship, but this close confinement together does not seem to worry them…"

  –

  They had come out of orbit over the Mediterranean and were descending toward Alexandria to overfly the course they had been following in the wagon at an altitude at which the vessel's physical shape would be mistaken for that of a high-flying bird, but low enough for them to see clearly the remembered contours until they passed over the caravanserai and new territory began to unroll like an endless carpet below them.

  They continued to follow the well-used camel trail that some poetically minded merchant had named the Golden Road to Samarkand and on to the famed Dzungarian Gate in the mountains above Lake Ebi Nor, and thence across central India with its green jungles, lush grassland, deserts, and richly decorated palaces to the Jade Gate that was set in the spectacular and recently completed Great Wall which guarded the eastern flank of the world's most ancient civilization and empire of Cathay. They were staring in awe and wonder at the structure that followed the contours of the mountains and valleys like an endless square worm of stone, when Ma'el broke a lengthy silence.

  "This is the surface route I originally intended to follow," he said, looking at Sinead in the control position but addressing both of them, "when it seemed desirable to conceal from you my true nature and that of the work I came to do on this world. You can estimate for yourselves the proportion of your short lives that would have been wasted merely in traveling to visit the far-flung places and people in order to update my report. That wastage, and the secrecy that would have caused it, is no longer necessary because your limited life spans and abilities, especially your timesight, and those of Declan as a protector and emissary, must be put to more effective use. When we pass over the Imperial City of Xian, bear south and cross the coast to the islands of Nippon and thence across the ocean until you pass over the eastern seaboard of a vast, rich, and beautiful land that is as yet unknown to you except in legend. It is a land of great mountain ranges, rich forests, and vast plains teeming with animal life beyond number as well as the life of its hunting tribes that is far above the animal level. There are the beginnings of empires, too, and civilizations built on human sacrifice and unthinking cruelty. We will return to visit all these places, but for now it is only necessary to prove to you that they exist. You will find a desolate and deserted place in this land and alight there…"

  'These animals that you say are numerous beyond counting," said Sinead sadly, her eyes seeming to look far into space and time, "so that the thunder of their hooves makes the very land tremble. They are like monstrous, hairy cattle with heavy shoulders, enormous heads, and wide-spreading horns. I see them extinct."

  Ma'el was silent for a moment, then he went on as if she had not spoken, "… So that you can both learn how to make this vessel obey you while you are at a distance from it. You will also exercise and strengthen muscles grown weak during your stay on the moon when you are not listening to me explaining more of my magic."

  Apart from it having air to breathe, the place where they landed was as lifeless and arid as the Moon they had left. Instead of being surrounded by crater walls there was a strange, flat-topped mountain and several enormous, rocky pinnacles that poked out of the surrounding desert like black, misshapen fingers. They would provide ideal navigational obstacles, Ma'el insisted, while he was showing them how to remotely control their ship.

  On the ground outside their tents, Ma'el unfolded and spread before them a new chart. Instead of showing pictures of the land relayed from orbit, this one reproduced in half of the original dimensions all of the control symbols from the surface of the vessel's forward canopy. He explained that the smaller size would require their hand and finger movements across it to be even more precise than those they had learned on the moon, that this was the means by which he had called down the so-called djinn which had ended the attack on the caravans, and that he had every confidence in their ability to perform the task.

  Soon they were both able to move the vessel accurately and make it perform
complicated maneuvers within their line of sight, and then to send it into orbit and bring it down again. With the other chart to guide them, they learned how to position the vessel during the night at various ground locations specified by their instructor and, in daylight, above different seaports and cities where they were able to remain invisible by interposing it between the sun and would-be observers on the ground When they were able to do that consistently with a placement error of less than twenty paces, they were very pleased with themselves until Ma'el told them gently mat they had passed the first and easiest examination.

  "… When we were in the clear and open space around your moon," Ma'el went on to explain, "I introduced you briefly to interdimensional travel. This is a rapid and safe form of travel provided you ensure that you do not materialize the ship inside a planetary body or a sun. In future, however, you will be called on to move through the hyper dimension, not over a distance of thousands of miles but by a few paces. You must learn how to move the vessel with precision into an enclosed space, the inside of a building, for example, or into a buried cavern without having to demolish the intervening walls. This would be necessary if you wished to conceal the vehicle from the local inhabitants or, if they proved to be unfriendly, to call it to your assistance for the purpose of rescue and evacuation.

  "When you are ready we will begin…"

  They began in the late spring, alternating the lessons between them day by day, but late summer had given way to midwinter and the desert was cold in the daylight hours and frigid at night before the old man pronounced them ready for their final examination for precision of control. Sinead took hers first.

  Declan had lost count of the times they had each sent the vessel through the solid masses of the tall, rock pinnacles and the strange, flat-topped mountain that dominated their landscape. Each time the operation had been accompanied by a sharp detonation and an expanding circle of blue light as the vessel entered its self-created fold in space beyond one face of the obstruction and emerged on the other, with a comfortable margin for error on either side. During the final stages of the examination, however, the allowed clearances were gradually reduced to no more than a small fraction of the vessel's overall length, no more than a few paces, beyond the entry and exit positions.