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“John Havig, you recall, thereupon quietly dropped out of circulation. Since he had no intimates in the twentieth century, apart from his mother and his old hometown doctor, only these would ever miss him or wonder much; and it was easy to drop them an occasional reassuring letter.”
“Postcards to me, mainly,” I said. “You had me wondering, all right.” After a pause: “Where were you?”
“Having covered my tracks as well as might be,” he answered, “I went back to Constantinople.”
In the burnt-out husk of New Rome, order was presently restored. At first, if nothing else, troops needed water and food, for which labor and some kind of civil government were needed, which meant that the dwellers could no longer be harried like vermin. Later, Baldwin of Flanders, lord over that fragment of the Empire which became his portion and included the city, desired to get more use than that out of his subjects. He was soon captured in war against the Bulgarians and died a prisoner, but the attitude of his brother and successor Henry I was the same. A Latin king could oppress the Greeks, squeeze them, humiliate them, tax them to poverty, dragoon them into his corvées or his armies. But for this he must allow them a measure of security in their work and their lives.
Though Xenia was a guest, the nu
The old nun frowned and took a step toward them. Havig waved wildly. “No, no, Xenia!” he exclaimed. “I’m as mortal as you are. I swear it. Strange things did happen, that day last year. Maybe I can explain them to you later. Believe me, though, my dear, I’ve never been anything more than a man.”
She wept awhile at that, not in disappointment. “I, I, I’m so g-glad. I mean, you … you’ll go to Heaven when you die, but—” But today he was not among her stiff stern Byzantine saints.
“How is your mother?” Havig asked.
He could barely hear: “She … has taken the veil. She begs me to do l-l-likewise.” The thin fingers twisted together till nails stood white; the look raised to him was terrified. “Should I? I waited for you-to tell me—”
“Don’t get me wrong, Doc,” Havig said. “The sisters meant well. Their rule was severe, however, especially considering the unsureness when overlords both temporal and spiritual were Catholic. You can imagine, can’t you? She loved her God, and books had always been a main part of her life. But hers was the spirit of classical antiquity, as she dreamed that age had been — I never found the heart to disillusion her. And her upbringing — my influence too, no doubt — had turned her early toward the living world. Even lacking that background, a round of prayer and obedience inside the same cloisters, nothing else till death opened the door — was never for her. The ghastly thing which had struck her did not take away her birthright, which was to be a sun-child.”
“What’d you do?” I asked.
“I found an elderly couple who’d take her in. They were poor, but I could help them financially; they were childless, which made them extra glad, extra kind to her; and he, a scribe, was a scholar of sorts. It worked out well.”
“You made periodic checkups, of course.”
Havig nodded. Gentleness touched his mouth. “I had my own projects going,” he said. “Still, during the next year or so of my lifespan, the next three of Xenia’s, I went back from time to time to visit her. The times got to be oftener and oftener.”
11
THE SHIP was a trimaran, and huge. From the flying bridge, Havig looked across a sweep of deck, beautifully grained hardwood whereon hatches, cargo booms, donkey engines, sun-power screens, and superstructure made a harmonious whole. There was no brightwork; Maurai civilization, poor in metals, must reserve them for the most basic uses. The cabins were shingled. Bougainvillea and trumpet flower vines rioted over them. At each forepeak stood a carven figure representing one of the Trinity-Tanaroa Creator in the middle, a column of abstract symbols; Lesu Haristi holding his cross to starboard; to port, shark-toothed Nan, for death and the dark side of life.
But they were no barbarians who built and crewed this merchantman. The triple hull was designed for ultimate hydrodynamic efficiency. The three great A-frame masts bore sails, true, but these were of esoteric cut and accompanied by vanes which got their own uses out of the wind; the entire rig was continuously readjusted by small motors, which biological fuel cells powered and a computer directed. The perso
Captain Rewi Loha
A stocky brown man in sarong and bare feet, he said, slowly for the benefit of his passenger who was trying to master the modern speech: “We kept science after technology’s worldmachine broke down. Our problem was to find new ways to apply that science, on a planet gutted and poisoned. We’ve not wholly solved it. But we have come far, and I do believe we will go further.”
The ocean rolled indigo, turquoise, aquamarine, and aglitter. Waves rushed, wavelets chuckled. Sunlight fell dazzling on sails and on the wings of an albatross. A pod of whales passed majestically across vision. The wind did not pipe in the ears, at the speed of the ship before it, but lulled, brought salty odors, stroked coolness across bare sun-warmed skins. Down on deck, a young man, off duty, drew icy-sweet notes from a bamboo flute, and a girl danced. Their nude bodies were as goodly to see as a cat or a blooded horse.
“That’s why you’ve done a grand thing, Brother Thomas,” Loha
(“I think that brought home to me as much as anything did, the truth about Maurai society in its best days,” Havig said to me. “They were-will not be back-to-nature cranks. On the contrary, beneath the easygoing affability, they may well be more development-minded than the U.S.A. today. But they won’t have the fuel for heavier-than-air craft, anyhow not in their earlier stages; and they won’t have the helium for blimps like ours. We squandered so much of everything.”)
“Your discovery waited quite a few centuries,” Loha
(“If I wanted to study the Maurai in depth, to learn what percentage of what Wallis said about them was true and what was lies or blind prejudice, I needed an entrée. Begi