Dornvald flipped over the picture that he had been keeping as final proof.
Kleippur and his two aides stared down at it speechlessly. It showed Dornvald,
Thirg, Geynor, and several other robeings standing with a group of ungainly,
tubby-looking, domeheaded figures in front of what looked like a huge,
smooth-skinned beast of some kind with stiff, tapered limbs. Fenyig passed more
pictures. One showed Thirg and a Domehead with their arms draped jovially around
each other’s shoulders and the Domehead making a curious gesture in the air with
an extended thumb; another showed a Domehead perched precariously on Thirg’s
steed, and Rex watching suspiciously in the background.
“We were being pursued by Kroaxian Royal Guards,” Dornvald said. “The Skybeings
destroyed them. They talked to us through signs and brought us here. They are
friends, and wish to come here to Menassim to meet its ruler. That is the
message that they asked us to convey. They will be watching from the sky for
signs laid out on the ground as your answer.”
As Thirg looked again at the pictures of the Skybeings and the strange animals
and other life forms that served them, he thought back to the Carthogian
projectile-hurling weapon and the devices constructed by the Carthogian
builders. All were examples of the simple beginnings of new arts that mimicked
the processes of Life itself. Was it possible that the weapons of the Skybeings
and the vehicles that the Skybeings were carried in could be products of the
same arts taken to a far more advanced stage of perfection?
Products?
Could the Skybeings have created the weapons and the dragons? But the weapons
and the dragons were machines. The first machine must have been constructed by
something that was not a machine. So could the Skybeings be the Lifemaker? No,
surely not. Surely the thought was preposterous.
And then Thirg remembered that the idea of turning wheels with vaporized methane
had once seemed preposterous too.
19
“OH, NO QUESTION OF IT, I’M SURE,” PENELOPE RAMELSON said over the breakfast
table. “Burton would be happy to talk to him.” She turned her head to look
across at her husband. “When do you think would be a convenient time, dear?”
Penelope’s cousin, Valerie, who was from Massachusetts and staying for a long
weekend, smiled expectantly.
Burton Ramelson realized that he had been allowing his mind to wander back to
the storm of protest that the announcement the major Western powers had made of
their intention to claim Titan unilaterally had provoked inside the UN. “Er . .
. what?” he said, blinking as he dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “I do beg your
pardon—I don’t think I can be quite awake yet.”
Penelope sighed. “Valerie was talking about Jeremy,” she said, referring to the
elder of Valerie’s two sons. “Now that he and Gillian will be starting a family,
he feels he needs a job to … well, you know—it’s psychological more than
anything, I suppose—to feel he’s doing something to provide for them . . .
something through his own efforts, as it were.”
“I was hoping that perhaps GSEC might have something suitable that it could
offer him,” Valerie said, coming more directly to the point.
Ramelson frowned as he sipped the coffee that he was taking with the ladies
before joining Buhl and some others for a business breakfast later. “Hmm, I see
… So what would you consider ‘suitable’? What can he do? I mean, it is true
that he and Gillian have been spending all their time gallivanting around the
Far East and the Riviera practically since they got married . . . and he didn’t
do much more than sail his sloop before that, did he?”
“Oh, don’t be such a crusty old gripe, Burton, even if it is first thing in the
morning,” Penelope chided. “They’re young, and they’re making the best of it.
What’s wrong with that? You’re always telling us how short you are of capable
managers these days. Well, Jeremy has always struck me as very talented and
highly capable. I’d have thought there’d be plenty of room to fit him in
somewhere like that . . . After all, it wouldn’t have to be a terribly