He followed them, and now remembered to shut the door on his steed. Turning around, he saw how everybody stared at him, while they shrank away. “Be not afraid,” he said thickly. “No harm is here. I have but fetched a wise-woman to help Jorith.”
For a while they all stood in stillness and gathering murk.
The stranger trod forth and beckoned to Carl. There was that about her which drew a groan from him. He stumbled to her, and she led him by the elbow into the bedroom. Silence welled out of it.
After another while folk heard voices, his full of fury and anguish, hers calm and ruthless. Nobody understood that tongue.
They returned. Carl’s face looked aged. “She is sped,” he told the others. “I have closed her eyes. Make ready her burial and feast, Winnithar. I will be back for that.”
He and the wise-woman entered the secret room. From the midwife’s arms, Dagobert howled.
2319
I’d flitted uptime to 1930’s New York, because I knew that base and its personnel. The young fellow on duty tried to make a fuss about regulations, but him I could browbeat. He put through an emergency call for a top-flight medic. It happened to be Kwei-fei Mendoza who had the opportunity to respond, though we’d never met. She asked no more questions than were needful before she joined me on my hopper and we were off to Gothland. Later, however, she wanted us both at her hospital, on the moon in the twenty-fourth century. I was in no shape to protest.
She had me take a kettle-hot bath and sent me to bed. An electronic skullcap gave me many hours of sleep.
Eventually I received clean clothes, something to eat (I didn’t notice what), and guidance to her office. Seated behind an enormous desk, she waved me to take a chair. Neither of us spoke for a minute or three.
Evading hers, my gaze shifted around. The artificial gravity that kept my weight as usual did nothing to make the place homelike for me. Not that it wasn’t quite beautiful, in its fashion. The air bore a tinge of roses and new-mown hay. The carpet was a deep violet in which star-points twinkled. Subtle colors swirled over the walls. A big window, if window it was, showed the grandeur of mountains, a craterscape in the distance, heaven black but reigned over by an Earth nearly full. I lost myself in the sight of that glorious white-swirled blueness. Jorith had lost herself there, two thousand years ago.
“Well, Agent Farness,” Mendoza said at length in Temporal, the Patrol language, “how do you feel?”
“Dazed but clear-headed,” I muttered. “No. Like a murderer.”
“You should certainly have left that child alone.” I forced my attention toward her and replied, “She wasn’t a child. Not in her society, or in most throughout history. The relationship helped me a lot in getting the trust of the community, therefore in furthering my mission. Not that I was cold-blooded about it, please believe me. We were in love.”
“What has your wife to say on that subject? Or did you never tell her?”
My defense had left me too exhausted to resent what might else have seemed nosiness. “Yes, I did. I… asked her if she’d mind. She thought it over and decided not. We’d spent our younger days in the 1960’s and ’70’s, remember…. No, you’d scarcely have heard, but that was a period of revolution in sexual mores.”
Mendoza smiled rather grimly. “Fashions come and go.”
“We’d stayed monogamous, my wife and I, but more out of preference than principle. And look, I always kept visiting her. I love her, I really do.”
“And she doubtless reckoned it best to let you have your middle-aged fling,” Mendoza snapped.
That stung. “It wasn’t! I tell you, I loved Jorith, the Gothic girl, I loved her too.” Grief took me by the throat. “Was there absolutely nothing you could do?”
Mendoza shook her head. Her hands rested quietly on the desk. Her tone softened. “I told you already. I’ll tell you in detail if you wish. The instruments – no matter how they work, but they showed an aneurysm of the anterior cerebral artery. It hadn’t been bad enough to produce symptoms, but the stress of a long and difficult primiparous labor caused it to rupture. No kindness to revive her, after such extensive brain damage.”