Im not sure that there are actual steam engines down below. For all I really know, the engine room is staffed by a team of sorcerers who keep giant turbines going round and round by uttering spells. Truth is, I dont know whats down there, and neither does Prince Ram. Princes dont need to bother with such technological details, apparently. Id like to sleepwalk him down belowdecks so that I could have a look around, but I dont dare. Not until Im completely sure that my control over his mind is good enough to keep him asleep as long as I want. I dont want him suddenly waking up and finding himself down in the engine room, where somebody of his high rank ordinarily has no reason to go. And then starting to wonder if theres something funny going on inside his brain.
This much I can tell you, though. The ship is big, as large as a good-sized yacht, long and tapering, with a flat stern and a very high keel. The hull is of metal: iron, probably, but for all I know these people may be capable of fabricating steel. You may balk at that idea, but just keep on reading.
Theres a mast, a big one, but no sign of any rigging or lines. Either the mast has some sacred purpose or its some kind of antenna, but it isnt used to support sails. There are also two funnels, or smokestacks. I never see any smoke coming out of them. I can feel a very light but steady vibration, as though engines of some sort are at work. Thats all I know.
Oh, one other thing. These people use electricity.
I know, I know, I know. It sounds nutty. The first time I saw the lights coming on, I thought the Prince was hallucinating. Or else that I must be misreading the data, coming up with false sensory equivalents for what was passing through his mind. Or maybe I was the one who was hallucinating. I tell you, Lora, it hit me like an earthquake. I was rocked by it. Flustered, bewildered, disoriented. For a moment I wondered whether I could believe anything that I was perceiving. Maybe it was all equally cockeyed. Paleolithic electricity?
But I checked and doublechecked, and the signal was coming through clear and true from him to me. What I was perceiving was what Prince Ram was seeing, to the last decimal place. So it wasnt any fever dream. It was electric lighting, Lora. However incredible that sounds.
Where I was on the mainland, everything was lit by properly prehistoric-looking oil lamps, smelly and smoky, and no doubt its the same out your way. But every corridor of this ship that Ive seen so far, and every stateroom too, I suspect, has electric lights. I suppose they simply havent bothered to set up generators in the mainland outposts, or maybe theres no ready supply of fuel for them there. But they must have some kind of generator aboard ship, cranking out the kilowatts just like at home.
The light-globes are big and awkward, and the light they give is harsh and glaring, but theres no question that its electrical. Ive seen Prince Ram turn the light in his cabin on and off by touching a plate in the wall.
With no effort whatsoever I could make myself believe that Im aboard a twentieth-century vessela peculiar one, true, designed by someone from an obscure country who has invented the whole concept of the oceangoing ship from scratch without ever having seen one from Europe or the United States, but corresponding to them in all the important details. And yet I know that Im back here at the tail end of the Ice Age, with woolly mammoths and shaggy rhinoceroses still wandering around where Paris and London will someday be.
Who are these Athilantans, anyway? How could they possibly have achieved all this, tens of thousands of years out of the normal human sequence of cultural evolution? It doesnt make any sense. Suddenly, in the midst of a world that still uses flint axes and choppers, for a society to spring up that has mastered metals, engineering, architecture, even electricityits crazy, Lora. I dont get it. The old myths said that the Atlanteans were a great people, but not that they were miracle-workers.
Well, let that be for now. I have plenty of other things to tell you.
Im pretty sure now that the place we set out from was the coast of Brittany. We all knew in advance back at Home Era, when we began focusing on members of the ruling caste as my target, that important members of the royal family made regular inspection tours of the coastal provinces and that if they aimed me at the mind of one of the high princes I was just likely to come down in ancient France as in Athilan itself.
Certainly the stone tools that the mainlanders were using were the sort of things used in France at this time. And the harbor was a good one. Whether Thibarak was Cherbourg or Le Havre, I cant say; but unless I have my geography all cockeyed we have just sailed out through the English Channelon the clear days it seemed to me I could see the English shore to the northand now we are running far into the Atlantic, curving down past Portugal toward the mouth of the Mediterranean. Which is just where our archaeologists had decided was the most likely place for Atlantis to have been, of coursesomewhere between the Canary Islands and the Azores.
The weather gets milder and warmer every day. Birds, soft breezes (even in the middle of an Ice Age winter!), drifting masses of seaweed. There is a lot of rain, virtually daily,but its a gentle kind of rain and when the sun comes out afterward the rainbows are heartbreaking. Especially when I stop to think that Atlantis lies at the end of them.
Life aboard ship is
Uh-ohtrouble
Six or seven hours later, same day.
A narrow escape. I was using the Prince to write this letter, and I almost got caught.
Ram was in his stateroom, sitting in one of the hammocklike things that they use on this ship. I had him under trance, and I was telling you all about the weather at sea when suddenly his personal steward came in. To tidy up the room, I suppose.
It isnt the custom among the Athilantans to knock on doors. They make a kind of high whistling noise when they want to enter a room. I was so preoccupied with dictating my letter that I didnt even notice. So in walks the steward, and he sees the heir to the imperial throne sitting bolt upright in his hammock with a weird trance look on his face.
Your Highness! he says. And then, in real terror, Your Highness?!?
He rushes over, seizes the Prince, shakes him hard. Well, you can bet I broke contact with the Princes mind right away. He snapped out of it and looked around in confusion and got angry with the steward for bothering him while he was trying to take a nap. That part went all right.
But I couldnt put the Prince back into trance until the steward had left the cabin. And the steward took just long enough to get out of there so that the Prince had time to look down at the sheet of vellum he was holding, and stare at the nonsensical marks scribbled all over it.
So when the steward finally was gone, there was Prince Ram sitting there, wide awake, holding a sheet of vellum in one hand and an ink-stylus in the other, and the vellum was covered with strange marks. Marks that were, in fact, a script that nobody on Earth is going to be able to understand for another good many thousands of years.
He was absolutely mystified. He held it up close to his eyes, turned it upside down, shook his head in bewilderment. And I heard his thought loud and clear:
What in the name of all the gods is THIS?
Well, I put him back to sleep and tried to get down into his mind and eradicate all memory of what he had just seen. As you know, that isnt the easiest thing in the world to do. You poke around in your carriers short-term memory, trying to blot out a particular incident, and if youre not really careful, you can blot out half a day of other stuff, or a whole week, or even start ripping up the basic memory framework before you realize what youre doing. I didnt want to leave him feeling like an amnesia victim. So I tiptoed around in his memory bank, slicing here and there, doing my best. I think I did the job as nicely as anybody could have; but when I was done, I wasnt entirely confident that I had completely cleaned things up.
I hid the letter. And then I hid myself, getting down into stasis and just sitting quietly in a subconscious corner of the Princes brain all afternoon. I didnt try to make contact with his cerebral levels in any way whatever.
(Thats the hardest thing of all to do, I thinkwhen you have to lay low, sitting tight, doing nothing. After all, we arent capable of going to sleep. And disembodied entities like us cant just head out for a long walk to kill the time. So there we sit, unable even to twitch. Like prisoners in a cage no bigger than a human brain, absolutely immobilized, counting off seconds and minutes for lack of anything else to do. Its maddening, isnt it? Its almost unbearable.)
I guess I could have used the time to prowl through the Princes basic memory storage to pick up a little useful data about the Athilantan civilization, but I didnt dare. He might just be able to detect me poking arounda curious itchy feeling in his mind, lets say. I didnt want to arouse any more suspicions than I already had. And it seemed to me right then that there already was an odd new edge to the Princes mind, a kind of prickly wariness.
Ive seen that happen before. But on other occasions, when my carrier has been allowed to get an inkling of the real situation, it has passed in a few hours. Sure enough, thats what happened this time. Ram began to relax, the edge on his mind went away, he went about his princely duties as though nothing had occurred. And ten minutes ago he returned to his cabin to relax. I put him under trance and got this unfinished letter out of its hiding place.
What a strange business this is, hitchhiking through the past inside someone elses mind! Ive done it a dozen different times now, and Im still not fully used to the idea. Im not sure I really like it very muchtreating another human being as a mere vehicle, moving him this way and that for your own convenience, going through his most intimate thoughts and memories as though he were nothing more than software available for scanning. Sometimes it seems a little ugly. Like being a spy, in a way. What it amounts to is that nobody who ever lived has any secrets from us timetraveling, twenty-first century nosybodies.
On the other hand, since its physically impossible for us to travel through time except as intangible electrical impulses, this is how we have to do it. And it does allow us to recapture all kinds of astounding knowledge that otherwise would have been lost forever in the bottomless sea of the past.
Anywaypicking up where I left off so many hours ago
We are obviously moving into subtropical seas. Even in the Ice Age, it seems, the midsection of the world had pretty decent weather, much rainier than it is in Home Era but not particularly cold. Theres a springtime tenderness in the air that everyone aboard ship is responding to. The Prince and his whole retinue have been on the chilly mainland more than a year, and theyre as eager to get back to Athilan as I am to see it for the first time.
This afternoon the Prince was working on a report to his royal father about the current status of Athilantan trading posts on the mainlandevidently the thing that he was sent to Europe to investigate. There was a map open on his desk as he worked, and I was able to see the whole layout of the empire.
Incredible!
Theyve got outposts strung all along the southern half of Stone Age Europe as far east as Russia, and down into North Africa and the Middle East. Most of the trade is done by sea, but a network of roads links everything together inland. Its awesome how they have it all connected, couriers going back and forth over an elaborate network of highways. (No, I dont think they use automobilesall I saw while I was in Brittany were chariots, some drawn by small, sturdy, fierce-looking horses, and some by what looked like enormous reindeer.)
And all this will be lost. All this will be totally forgotten,-as though it had never been. The memory of it will survive only as fable and myth, which no one will really take seriously until the coming of the age of time exploration. Its heartbreaking to think about it.
The Athilantan highway system runs up as far as what I think is the middle of Germany, then zigs and zags through Central Europe, avoiding the most heavily glaciated areas. One of the roads goes straight to Naz Glesim, where you are,the easternmost outpost of the empire. It gave me a funny feeling to see that name on the map and know that youre there at this very moment.
Thibarak, the coastal trading post where I was, in Brittany, is a sort of headquarters for the imperial mainland operationsat least the Western European branch. Couriers go back and forth between Thibarak and Naz Glesim all the time, bearing directives from the home government and reports from the provincial governor. The trip takes a couple of months each way. I should be able to slip these letters into the diplomatic pouch, and if you really did make it into the mind of Provincial Governor Sippurilayl as they planned it when they did the preliminary time-search, youll eventually get to read them. Or not, as the case may be. Try to arrange it so that Governor Sippurilayl sends letters back to Prince Ramifon Sigiliterimor. That way Ill see them sooner or later. Then, of course, we both will have to wipe out of our carriers minds all memory of the strange messages in unknown gibberish that they keep getting from each other. But with practice that wont be too hard.
I think well reach Atlantis in another four days or so. At sundown the Prince was standing on the deck wearing only a light tunic and mantle, and soft warm breezes were blowing out of the south.
Poor Lora! You must be freezing your butt off out there on the barren Russian steppes while I sit here telling you about the sweet springlike weather were enjoying. Well, I dont mean to rub it in, you know. It was just the luck of the toss that sent me to Atlantis and you to Naz Glesim, and Im well aware that a mere matter of heads instead of tails and Id be the one stuck in the back woods right now. And next trip it may be the other way around for us.