House and herds slipped under the horizon. At an easy, space-devouring trot, he entered treeless solitude. Sky, sun, wind, grass, were all the world, a vast and healing presence. Day declined infinitely slowly. Yet when at last light ran level, washing the land with gold, it seemed he had barely left the house of his fathers.
Birdflight led him to a water hole. He drew rein, dismounted, cared for the horse, switched on his glowcoil, toasted some meat and made tea, readied for night, and in his bedroll looked at the stars of home.
Awake at dawn, mounted shortly after sunrise, he went on over country that rose faster than any map ever showed — no Gran Chaco to cross, no gradual upsurge of foothills, but sudden steeps, brush low and harsh among boulders, canyons through which rivers rang down from the snows that reared afar against heaven. Two condors wheeled on high. The air grew ever more cold. Trueno climbed, hour by hour, tireless, being now immortal.
Toward evening the castle hove in view, silhouetted gaunt on a ridge but with banners bright over the turrets, afloat in the whittering wind. Ricardo’s heart sprang. Yonder waited the mage who would tell him the goal of his adventure and the comrade who would fare at his side. He knew no more than that. He shouted and struck heels to flanks. The stallion broke into a thunderous trot.
They saw him. Trumpets sounded. A drawbridge lowered, its chains agleam with sunset. One rode across and galloped recklessly to meet him, cloak and plume flying scarlet behind, one slender and lithe, his friend of the road ahead. They lifted their swords in salute. Horses met, reared, halted. “Hola, camarada cam!” Ricardo greeted.
And “Welcome, skipper, a thousand welcomes,” said the husky voice; and below the helmet was the face of Jean Kilbirnie.
Nansen roused.
He lay for a while in darkness, weeping, before he could sit up and remove the apparatus. Afterward he swallowed a stiff whiskey, which was not his wont, and hurried to the gym. Nobody else was on hand to watch him work himself to exhaustion.
He would stay with reality.
CHAPTER 42
“Incredible, inexplicable,” Sundaram said. “Communication, a common language, established this swiftly and surely — when we and the Holont have nothing in common.”
He had invented that name for the quantum intelligence. Zeyd, who felt uncomfortable with the idea of mutable avatars — yes, God could do all things, but this raised difficult questions about the soul — suggested, “The great flowerings of civilization on Earth came about when different cultures met, didn’t they? Maybe it is like that with us and the holonts.”
“Do not forget Simon,” Yu said.
Mokoena’s eyes shone. “A galactic flowering —”
“Thousands of years hence, millions, if ever,” Dayan said. “What we need to know here is how the process goes so fast. Let’s concentrate again on asking about physics.”
The answer emerged in the course of daycycles, not through dialogue but through demonstration. When Dayan fully grasped its nature and explained to her teammates, the fine hairs stood up on her arms.
“Telepathy would have been spooky enough. This goes far beyond. The Holont knew we were coming and what we would try. It told itself — they told themselves — by a message that went back through time.”
“No, that cannot be!” Yu disputed, shocked. “It would violate every principle of logic and, yes, science. The conservation laws —”
Dayan shook her head. “When I began to suspect, I consulted our database.” As if defensively, her tone went into lecture mode. “The history’s lain forgotten because the whole thing was, in fact, deemed impossible. As prestigious a thinker as Hawking insisted nature must rule time travel out somehow, or the paradoxes would run wild. However, there are actually no paradoxes, provided self-consistency obtains. You cannot go back into the past and change what has happened, no matter what you do. But your actions can be a part of what did happen.
“Several of Hawking’s contemporaries, Kerr, Thorne, Tipler, described several kinds of time machine, each perfectly in accord with general relativity. But they all required structures that looked physically impossible — for instance, a torus with the mass of a giant star, rotating near the speed of light, with more electric charge than the interstellar medium would allow and a magnetic field stronger than anything in nature could generate. Or a cylinder of material denser than any nuclear particle, also spinning close to light speed and infinitely long. Or — Well, the theoretical possibility seemed to be a cosmic joke on us, a bauble forever dangling just out of reach.”