So far, Ive probed Ram very cautiously about this whole matter. It may be a really sensitive area for him, in which case he might become aware of me as I go poking around in his mind. Thats the last thing I need.
What Ive learned, though, seems to indicate that they really do have some way of merging minds, personalities, stored memories, and such. And its done in stages, each one marked with a big ceremony.
First comes the Rite of Designation, in which the young child is named as heir apparent. This is done at the age of ten.
Then theres the Rite of Joining, at thirteen. I dont quite understand what this is, but it involves creating some kind of deep bond between the ruler and his heir. My guess is that its the opening of a sort of mental conduit through which psychic impulses flow from the older one to the youngerthe beginning of the transfer.
The third step is the Rite of Anointing. That happens when the heir apparent is eighteen, which means the Anointing of Ram ought to be due to take place very soon now. In this, the Prince enters full adulthood and heavy responsibility. He receives certain mystic powers, which are so secret that not even Ram himself seems to know what they are yet. He gets to live in a palace of his own. And he becomes a kind of viceroy of the realm, a junior king, with areas of authority and obligation far beyond anything hes had to undertake before. Once this rite is performed, he is permitted to marry. Is expected to marry, as a matter of fact.
(As far as I can tell, Prince Ram, with the Rite of Anointing just around the corner, has no particular woman in mind to become his Princess. Perhaps shell be chosen for him by his father and her identity wont be made known to him until the official moment. Brrr!)
The fourth and final rite is the Rite of Union. This, I assume, is the ultimate transfer of identity from king to prince, as the time gets close for the handing over of the throne to the chosen heir. When this takes place, or how, I dont know. All details concerning this rite are buried so deeply in Prince Rams consciousness that Id need to do major excavation to get to them. Obviously its something he doesnt want to think about, or isnt allowed to.
What will it be like for me, I wonder, when Prince Ram experiences the Rite of Union? What will it feel like when all those additional mental impulses come flooding into his mind? Pretty chaotic, I imagine. I suspect itll be something like sitting up in the top of a tall tree while a hurricane is going on all around you.
But of course I might not even be here by the time he does the Rite of Union. Weve only got a six-month assignment here, after all. As I say, I have no way of telling how soon Ram is due for the fourth rite, but my guess is that its going to be more than six months down the line.
Some real mixed feelings here. On the other hand Im uneasy about the impact of the Rite of Union on me if Im still inside Rams mind when it happens. On the other hand I suddenly realize that Im hoping Home Era will let me stick around long enough to observe it, regardless of the dangers. The rite would probably give me answers to a lot of the questions Im starting to ask myself about Athilan. I dont want to be yanked back to our own time until Im good and ready to go. Until Ive soaked up everything I can possibly learn about this place.
But of course Ive got no control over that. When the times up, back to Home Era I go, whether or not I want to. I return to reality. I return to you. But I give up Atlantis. Dont misunderstand me, Lora. Id give anything to be with you again after this separation. And yet, and yetto be here for the Rite of Unionto have a ringside seat when all the accumulated memories of all the kings of Athilan go pouring into Prince Rams mind
Well, well see. Its entirely out of my hands. I dont care for that very much. There are times when I feel like a puppet on a string. Which I know is a dumb attitude. It was understood from the start that we were here only for a specific length of time and then wed be brought back to Home Era. That was the deal, and no use complaining about it now. All the same, I have a funny feeling that Im going to resent it when they yank me back, because its going to come just as something tremendously important is about to happen.
Why am I worrying so much? All this fidgeting and dithering about things?
Just lonely, I guess. Thinking of you. Missing you.Maybe sending emotionally connected pairs on these trips into the past isnt such a great idea after all.
The Prince is an active and vigorous young man, and his days are full ones.
Hes up at dawn. Prayers, first. (These Athilantans are very devout. They seem to have a couple of dozen gods, who are, however, all regarded as aspects of the One God.) Then, before breakfast, he swims in the marble-lined pool in the courtyard of the palaces rear wing. Fifty laps. ( Everything here seems to be made out of marble. Theres a big stone quarry somewhere on the far side of Mount Balamoris, but also they bring finer grades of marble in by ship from Greece and Italy.)
Breakfast, then. Fruits, most of them strange tropical ones that I cant identify, followed by roast lamb. And a rich, sweet red wine. Wine for breakfastwell, that isnt anything Id care to do. But the Prince is strong as an ox and it doesnt even make him a little bit tipsy. And these Athilantans, like all the Mediterranean peoples who I believe are descended from them, love their wine. There are vineyards all over the island. (All their wines are sweet. I know that real wine connoisseurs claim that the best wines are dry ones, but the Athilantans probably wouldnt care. They like it the way they like it. I suppose a Frenchman wouldnt approve, if there were any Frenchmen in existence. But there arent any yet. Nor are there any vineyards right now, over there in the icebound land that will someday be France. And there arent going to be for thousands of years.)
After breakfast Ram meets with the King. They go over all sorts of official documents and reports.
Most of what they deal with concerns the flow of raw materials that Athilantan ships bring in from Africa and southern Europe. These Athilantans are the worlds first imperialists. Theyve colonized every part of the world within reach, importing things they needminerals, mostly, but certain foodstuffs alsoand giving not very much in return. Of course there isnt much that they could give, considering how primitive all the other humans of this era are. Your typical modern-era colonial power imports raw materials from backward countries and exports manufactured goods, but semi-nomadic Stone Age hunters dont have a lot of need for light bulbs, fancy plumbing fixtures, or rubber tires.
Theres a tremendous cultural gulf between the Athilantans and the rest of the Stone Age world. Its incredible. They are so far beyond everybody else here in all ways that I cant even begin to explain it. A mutant race of supergeniuses that mysteriously arose out of nowhere during the late Paleolithic Era? That sounds too hokey to be believed. But what other explanation can there be?
The King and the Prince also discuss local matters at their morning conference. They decide which government officials deserve promotions and which need to be reprimanded for slacking off. They talk about street repair and new building construction. They make plans for upcoming religious festivals. None of this is very romantic. Its just their jobruling the Athilantan Empire. And its a lot of work, which never eases off.
Lunch is light: some grapes, some cheese, and the strange bread, hard as rock, that they make out of the wheat that grows here. Wheat is still in its early evolutionary stages and such wheat as they have isnt very different from grass seed. But even that is amazing, considering how far in the past we are. Still, it doesnt make remarkably good bread. The Prince drinks a light white wine with lunch, as sweet as perfume. Ugh.
Then a nap. And then he goes off for afternoon exercise: horseback riding, javelin throwing, another swim, and the like. Hes a terrific athlete. Youd have to be, to ride the horses they have in this eramean little guys, short legs, long manes, angry dispositions. Theyre wild animals and they dont pretend otherwise. The Athilantans understand the principle of the saddle but they dont know anything about bridles and bits, and their technique for controlling their horses is basically to grab them around the necks and wrestle them into submission.
After exercise, theres usually some ritual to perform. This is a very religious country, in its way. The place swarms with priests and priestesses of the various gods. All these gods constantly demand worship. The various rituals invariably involve the King and the Prince, because the King of Athilan is not only the monarch but also the high priest, and the Prince is his right-hand man. So they have to put in an hour or so in this temple or that one almost every day, presiding over these godly matters. The chants and prayers they utter are highly stylized and I dont have a clear idea of what they mean. A lot of animal sacrifice goes on, too. I still dont find that very easy to take.
In late afternoon the whole royal family gets together for a kind of relaxation hour, warm and affectionate, everybody funny and loving. Then they have dinner together, a terrific feast. The servants are mainlanders. (Slaves, I suppose. I have to keep reminding myself not to expect the Athilantans to abide by all our nice modern democratic institutions, like freedom. Like the Romans, like the Greeks, like a lot of advanced civilizations of antiquity, the Athilantans dont seem to see anything wrong with enslaving people. Its always a surprise, isnt it, when people who seem generally enlightened, like the Athilantans, turn out to practice something as cruel and wrong as slavery. But the past is the past, and things are different there, and no use expecting it to be otherwise. At least they seem to treat their slaves pretty well, for what thats worth.)
Theres food galore at these royal feasts, a simply incredible amount of food, usually with a roasted ox as the main event, and amazing quantities of wine. (But everybody seems to stay sober. Is the wine very weak, or do these people have unusual tolerance for alcohol?)
Minstrels come in and sing when dinner is over. The favorite is a long historical epic, something like the Iliad and the Odyssey rolled into one. It sounds very stirring, but it also happens to be snug in some ancient version of the Athilantan language, and its as hard for Prince Ram to understand as Chaucers English would be for us. I can get only the vaguest drift of it, something about exile and wandering and the eventual building of this great city on the island of Athilan.
Listening to the minstrels gives me a wonderful feeling of what it must have been like to sit around the banquet hall in ancient Greece, listening to Homer strumming on his lyre and chanting the first editions of his poems. But then I have to tell myself that Greece isnt ancient yetthat it wont even exist as a concept for another 17,000 years and some and that Homer, Achilles, Agamemnon, and the rest of that legendary crowd are unknown figures of the unimaginably misty future, so far as the Athilantans are concerned.
It gets dark early here. The Prince goes to sleep when the minstrels are finished, and sleeps like a marble statue until the first rays of dawn.
Or, at least, would sleep like a marble statue if I didnt insist on hauling him out of bed somewhere during the night so that he could write the letters for me. Of course hes completely unaware of that. I keep the letters hidden in a leather case underneath a stack of old togas that he doesnt seem to wear any more. Whenever I hear that a courier is about to set out for Naz Glesim, I put the Prince into trance and have him get the current letter and pack it up for shipment. I wonder, of course, if any of my letters will ever get to you. The distances are so great, the situation so tricky. But I have to keep on writing them. I need this contact with you so very mucheven one-sided as its been up till now.
I wish I had some way of dictating my impressions of this world into a recorder that I could take back to Home Era with me. The big trouble with being a disembodied web of electrical impulses, I keep thinking, is that you cant carry anything across time with you except the contents of your own mind. Better than nothing, but pretty frustrating all the same. Id like to come home with bulging notebooks describing everything Ive seen here, and maybe a suitcase or two of Athilantan artifacts. No way, though. No way at all.
Time to go. Rams writing hand is cramping badly. He needs to rest. And, I think, so do I.
Roy
6.
Day 5, Month of Western Wind, Year of Great River.
Almost a week since my last letter. I havent wanted to write. Strange things have been going on in my mind and I didnt particularly care to talk about them, hoping theyd vanish of their own accord. But they havent.
Whats happeningnot to be mysterious about it any longeris that Ive been feeling a powerful urge to let Prince Ram know Im here.
I realize that this is a classic malady of time-travelers. The compulsion to stand up and shout, Look at me! Look at me! Im sitting right here inside your head! Theres even a name for it, isnt there? Observer Guilt Syndrome, I think. But knowing that Im not the first one to experience this doesnt make it any easier for me.
The thing is that I have now spent several weeks observing-Prince Ram at the closest possible range. I feel closer to him than any friend or wife could ever be. I know which side of his mouth he prefers to chew his food on, which gods name he takes in vain when he stubs his toe, and the details of the really nasty trick he pulled on his kid brother when he was nine years old. (And which he still feels guilty about, although Prince Caiminor was only four at the time and probably doesnt remember a thing.)
All this is producing the predictable Observer Guilt reactions in me. Maybe youre feeling a little of it yourself. I talked about this a few letters backwhen I compared being an observer to being a spy, and said that it felt a little ugly. But its starting to seem like something a lot worse than spying, now. It feels like being a Peeping Tom. A spy, at least, is serving his country. Peeping Toms are simply slimy.