She was curious again. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t look around?” she asked.
“Go ahead.”
She followed the stream down to a path that joined the cart track. It led to the outskirts of the village. There was a small marketplace with stalls and crude, wooden-shuttered shops displaying meat, vegetables, dairy produce, all plentiful and fresh, fabrics and linen, pottery and pans. And there was a cast of players to complete the scene, correct in character and role: farmers, merchants, tradesmen, housewives; gentry on horseback, a miller with a cartload of sacks, a jolly-faced innkeeper, two Highlanders in kilts, and children, rosy cheeked and well fed, playing around doorways.
All of it crushingly bland, empty, and uninteresting. It came across as a not very imaginative stage set, populated by moving pieces of scenery added to finish the effect. Which, indeed, was what the inhabitants were.
Gina stopped by a gray-haired old man sitting on a doorstep, smoking a pipe. Alongside him was a sleepy-looking, black-and-white collie. “Hello,” she said.
“Aye.”
“It’s a fine day.”
“‘Tis an’ all.’”
“This looks like a nice place.”
‘‘It’s no’ sa bad.”
“I’m not from around here.”
“I can see that.”
Gina stared at him. His gray eyes twinkled back at her with good-humored, imbecilic indifference as he continued puffing his pipe. Her frustration turned to exasperation. “I’m from three hundred years in the future,” she said.
“We dinna get vera many o’ those around here.”
“VISAR, this isn’t going to work,” Gina flared. “These are just dummies. Don’t they know anything? Don’t they have anything to say?’’
“What do you want them to say?”
“Use your imagination.”
“It’s your imagination that matters.”
“Well, can’t you figure it out from whatever you see in my head?” Gina demanded.
“I’m not permitted to,” VISAR reminded her.
“Okay, then, I’m permitting you. Go by whatever you find. Don’t take any notice of the things we humans fabricate to fool ourselves.”
This time the transition was not quite instantaneous.
There was music, muted to a background level. Gina found herself clad in a plain but gracious, classically styled gown. It felt deliciously light and sheer. She was standing among others in a reception room of a large house. It was a solid, mature house, dignified but not pretentious, with high, paneled rooms, lofty gables, and intricately molded ceilings, and it stood by the sea. Across the hail was her library, and off the landing at the top of the curving stairway, the office where she worked, with its picture window framing a rocky shoreline. How she knew these things, she wasn’t sure. But she smiled inwardly and gave VISAR full marks. Yes, it was a kind of life that she had sometimes conjured up in her daydreams.
The room that she and her guests were in had tall windows with heavy drapes, a fine marble fireplace, and furnishings in character. Above the fireplace was a crest, showing arms: unicorn and lion rampant, and a fleur-de-lis surmounted by . . . a shamrock. The music, she realized, was Celtic harp and flute. But from the dress of those present, and as she knew, somehow, anyway, the times were modern.
The words from one member of a group of people talking nearby caught her ear. “Ah, yes, but it would have been a different thing if this country hadn’t overcome its internal squabbles and resisted the English.” The speaker, a roundly built man with thinning hair and a pugnacious bulldog jaw, stood holding a cigar in one hand and a brandy glass in the other. He spoke with an English accent; his voice had a rasping tone and a hint of a lisp. “Ireland might even have gone solidly over to Rome when Henry VIII went the other way.”
“Oh, impossible!” one of the listeners exclaimed.
“Seriously. Purely out of defiance. Then who knows what we might have seen today? The Reversion might never have happened, and England could conceivably have dominated the Irish Isles. Then, America might have been started by some kind of Protestant, Puritan, monogamy cult. Then where would all of the freedoms be that we take for granted today?”
Gina stared in sudden astonishment as she recognized the speaker. It was Winston Churchill, one of her favorite historical figures.