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Your world is dead three thousand years. In most places that means that nothing, nothing of what you love and what makes up your inmost soul remains; your people, their poets and Kings, their Gods and their dreams, their hates and fears, the words your mother sang you to sleep with, all gone down into dust and shadow-
A little more of Babylon would endure, which perhaps would be worse; to have those parched bones dug up and studied by an academic curiosity equally dry.
"That's why we have arts that you don't," Justin went on aloud. "We have three thousand years more history… more time to learn things."
The concept of development through time puzzled her at first; Babylonians thought of history as decline from a previous Golden Age, not of progress. They did know that there had been a time before metal or agriculture, though; he reminded her of that, and went on:
"And it's why we command so few of the arts we had before the Event."
Her eyes went wide. "I… don't understand. You have thunderbolts to knock down city walls, you can fly, your ships of the ocean sail about the earth as if it were a pond, you really know what causes diseases and how to cure them…"
"What we've shown is just the shadow of what we had. Think of it this way. If this palace-the palace and its dwellers alone- were to be thrown back to the time before men knew how to cultivate the earth or make bronze or write on clay, what would happen?"
Her brows knitted in thought. "The palace artisans-there would be none to bring them food, without peasants to grow the barley. So they would have to go into the fields with plow and hoe and sickle themselves… and there would be no traders to bring tin and copper and hard woods when those in the storerooms were used up… and no work for all the scribes, without a kingdom to administer… too many priests… they would all have to go to the fields or make bricks."
Smart girl! Clemens thought admiringly. It was a long time before Adam Smith's observations on the division of labor, but she'd grasped the principle that specialists depended on a big population.
"Exactly," he said aloud. "We were faced with starvation, because almost none of us were farmers or fishermen; and very few were even artisans, because Nantucket had few… places-of-making, workshops." That was as close as he could get to factory in this language; they were speaking Akkadian, to improve his command of it.
"We had-have-the knowledge to make, oh, carts that run without horses or oxen, or flying ships much larger and faster than what you've seen, or- " He shrugged. "But not the skilled workers and special machines, or the machines that made the machines, or the smelters and forges to make the metal, or to find and refine the fuel, or the farmers to grow the food and the roads to bring it to us. What we were able to make and maintain was only a shadow of what our whole realm, the United States, was able to do."
A buzz of voices rose from city and palace, a snarling roar echoed from the sky, and a long teardrop shadow fell over them. They looked up, leaning out from beneath the awning and shading their eyes with a hand. The orca shape of the Republic of Nantucket Air Service's Emancipator was passing over Babylon. Five hundred feet of canvas, birch plywood, and goldbeater's skin, the dirigible droned along with six ex-Cessna engines pushing it through the warm Mesopotamian air, the Stars and Stripes on its cruciform tailfins and the Coast Guard's red slash and anchor on its flank.
Azzu-ena shuddered. "That is but a shadow of your arts?" she said.
"A faint shadow," Clemens said. "We have to hope it's enough. It's more than the rebel Walker has."
To himself he added: We think. So far.
"Then how can he hope to stand before you?"
"He'll be fighting close to the lands he's made his own, near to Ahhiyawa, Greece. The lands of our strength are far, far away from here."
"On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves."
"That's Wenlock Edge," Commodore Marian Alston-Kurlelo went on, pointing to a looming darkness in the south, an escarpment beyond the river they sought. Her hand swung westward toward a conical shape. "And we're on the slopes of Wrekin hill. An English poet named Housman wrote that, a little before my time."
Adventure, bah, humbug, she thought. A Shropshire Lad I could read back home in front of the fire, with a cup of hot cocoa.
She gripped the hairy warmth of her horse more tightly with her thighs, as rain hissed down through the tossing branches above. It ran around the edges of her sou'wester and rain slicker into the sodden blue wool of her uniform, leaching her body's warmth. If you absolutely had to be out in weather like this, nine hundred pounds of hay-fueled heater were a comfort.
Marian Alston had joined the Coast Guard at eighteen, a gawky bookish tomboy furiously determined to escape her begi
They paused at a slight rise, where a fold in the ridge gave them a view over swaying forest and the country that fell away before them. She went on:
'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood
"It's a good poem," the younger woman riding beside her said.
Swindapa, Dhinwarn's daughter, of the Kurlelo lineage, lifted her billed Coast Guard cap and shook her head. Droplets flew off the clubbed pigtail that held long wheat-blond hair in check, save for a few damp strands that clung to her oval, straight-nosed face. Her smile showed white even teeth, and her English-rose complexion was ta
She went on: "But why are so many Eagle People poems sad? Don't you ever make poems about beer? Or roast venison and playing with babies and making love in new-mown hay on warm summer afternoons?"
One of the Marines riding behind them chuckled, barely audible under the hiss of rain, the soughing and wind-creak of branches, and the slow clop-plock of hooves in wet earth. Alston smiled herself, a slight curve of her full lips.
"I've got gloomy tastes," she said. "If we're benighted out here and we can find anything that'll burn, we can at least arrange the venison." An extremely unlucky deer was slung gralloched across one of their packhorses. "Still, he catches the area, doesn't he?" she went on, waving.
She'd visited here as a tourist before the Event-even now her mind gave a slight hitch; English tenses were not suited to time travel-and the bones of the land were the same.
And the weather's just as lousy, she thought, sneezing.
But there were no lush hedge-bordered fields here, no half-timbered farmhouses or little villages with pubs where you sat with the ghosts of cavaliers and highwaymen, no ruined castles and Norman churches, no shards of Roman Viroconium-Uri-con, in Shropshire legend. No Iron Age hill forts, either, on the "blue remembered hills." Not yet, and now not ever, here. Sometimes back on Nantucket among the buildings and artifacts of that future you could forget, or your gut could forget. Forget that an entire history-three mille