“Can you be more specific?” Theta-Ennea asked.
Patulcius turned his gaze back to her. “I would first have to know the situation, the nature of the community, customs and expectations as well as rules and regulations,” he admitted. “I can learn quickly and well.” He smiled. “I did for two thousand years and more.”
“Ah, yes.” Theta-Ennea gave back the smile. “Naturally, when you requested an interview, I tapped the databank about you. Fascinating. From Rome of the Caesars through the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the Turkish Republic, the Dynasts, and— Yes, a story as marvelous as it is long. That is why I invited you to come in person.” Ruefully: “I too have an outmoded preference for concreteness and immediacy. Therefore I hold this position.” She sighed. “It is not a sinecure. I confess I have not had time to assimilate everything about you.”
Patulcius manufactured a chuckle. “Frankly, I’m glad of that. I didn’t enjoy the burst of fame when we Survivors manifested ourselves. Gradually becoming obscure again was … pleasant.”
Theta-Ennea leaned back behind her desk, which was of plain wood, possibly an antique, and bore nothing except a small omnitenninal. “If I recall rightly, you joined the other seven quite late.”
Patulcius nodded. “After the bureaucratic structure finally and irreversibly collapsed around me. We’d kept in touch, of course, and they made me welcome, but I’ve never been, m-m, intimate with them.”
“Is that why you made more of an effort than they to become integrated with the modern world?”
Patulcius shrugged. “Perhaps. I’m not given to self-analysis. Or perhaps I just happened to have an opportunity none of them did. My talent, such as it is, is for—no, ‘administration’ claims too much. Operations maintenance; the humble but essential chores that keep the social machinery running. Or that used to.”
Theta-Ennea drooped her lids and regarded him closely before she said, “You have done more than that in the past fifty or a hundred years.”
“Conditions were unique. For the first time in a long time, they were such that I was qualified to take a hand in coping. No credit to me. Historical happenstance. I am being honest with you. But I did gain experience.”
Again she pondered. “Would you please explain? Give me your interpretation of those conditions.”
He blinked, surprised, and spoke hesitantly. “I have nothing but banalities… Well, if you insist. The advanced countries—no, I should say the high-technology civilization—had gone so far, so fast. It and the societies that had not assimilated the revolution, they became like different species. It had to absorb them, the alternatives were all horrible, but the gap in ways of living, thinking, understanding, was huge. I was among the few who could … talk, function … more or less effectively on both sides of that gap. I gave what assistance I could to those poor people, developing suitable organization to get them through the transition— when your people no longer had an old-fashioned, paper-shuffling, purely human bureaucracy, and were not sure how to build one. That is what I did. I did not do it alone by any means,” he finished. “My apologies for lecturing on the obvious.”
“It is not absolutely obvious,” Theta-Ennea said. “You speak from a viewpoint that has no counterpart anywhere. I would like to hear much more. It should help me come nearer empathizing with those scores of generations who made this place what it was. Because I never quite could, you see. With all the curiosityand, yes, all the love in the world, I have never quite been able to feel what they felt.”
She rested her arms on the desktop and went on compassionately, “But you, Gnaeus Cornelius Patulcius, and the many other names you have borne—in spite of them, in spite of your recent engagements, you also have yet to understand. No, I have no job for you. You should have known as much. Since you did not, how can I explain?
“You assumed this must be a community in some sense, like those where you were, where the dwellers share certain interests and a certain sense of common identity. I have to tell you—this isn’t simple, it isn’t ever spelled out; hardly anybody realizes what is happening, just as hardly anybody in the time of Augustus or of Galileo realized what was happening—but I spend my life trying to fathom the currents of history—“ Her laugh was forlorn. “Pardon me, let me back up and start over.