Poul Anderson - The Dancer from Atlantis

Well, wouldn’t the futurians make the effort? If only to be sure that the presence of this wrecked machine doesn’t change the past and obliterate them?

Would it do that? Could it? This was a point in my essay which may remain valid: that changing the past is a contradiction in terms. “The moving Finger writes, and having, writ ...” I suspect the machine’s presence here and now, and ours, are part of what happens. I suspect this night has “always” been.

For what can we do? Chances are we’ll die within days. The animals will dispose of our bones. Maybe local tribesmen, if any possess this grim land, will worship the glowing hull for a while. But finally its batteries, or whatever it’s got, must run down. The force field will blink out of existence. Unprotected, the metal will corrode away, or be ripped apart for the use of smiths. The fact that a strange thing once lay here will become a folk tale, forgotten in a few generations.

Oh, Pam, what will you think when I never come down to our cabin?

That I fell overboard accidentally? I imagine so. I trust so. Damn, damn, damn. I should’ve increased my insurance coverage!

“Duncan.”

Erissa had come back. Reid glanced at his wristwatch.

She’d been gone an hour. Not on an errand of nature, then.

“I was praying,” she said simply “and afterward casting a spell for luck. Though I never doubt you will save us.”

In her mouth, the throaty tongue she named Keftiu was softened; she had a low voice and used it gently. Reid had no idea what they called her speech in his era, if they had found any trace of it. His attempts to identify cognates were made extra difficult by the fact that, he, like Oleg and Uldin, had actually gained two languages which she spoke with equal fluency, plus smatterings of others.

He knew the term for the second, non-Keftiu tongue, as he knew the term “English” or “español.” He could pronounce its name, as he could her entire vocabulary from that rather harsh, machine-gun-rapid talk. He could spell the vocabulary; the language had a simplified hieroglyphic-type script, just as Keftiu had a more elaborate and cumbersome written form. But he could not readily transliterate into the Roman alphabet, to compare with words from his own world Thus his command of the language and his knowledge of its name—Ah-hyiii-a was a crude approximation—gave him no clue to the identity of its native speakers.

Since Erissa preferred Keftiu, Reid postponed consideration of the unrelated tongue, however important it probably was in this era. Keftiu was keeping him bemused enough. Though no linguist, he classed it as mainly positional, partly agglutinative, in contrast to its heavily inflected rival.

Perhaps trying to make conversation, she asked him something. Translated more or less literally, her question was, “Of what unknown-to-me nature is that like-unto-Our-Lady’s-moon jewel which you (for a sign of Her?) wear?” But his inner ear heard: “Please, what’s that? So beautiful, like a sigil of the Goddess.”

He showed her the watch. She fingered it reverently. “You didn’t have this before,” she murmured.

“Before?” Re stared at her. The sight was blurry in the dim light, amidst the thick shadows. “You do act as if you already know, me,” he said slowly.

“But of course! Duncan, Duncan, you cannot have forgotten.” She reached from beneath the smelly blanket that, perforce and grimacing, she had wrapped around her tunic. Her fingers brushed his cheek. “Or has the spell fallen on you likewise?” Her head drooped. “The witch made me forget much. You too?”

He jammed hands in coat pockets, clenching a fist around the home shape of his pipe. Breath smoked from him. He begrudged the moisture. “Erissa,” he said in his exhaustion, “I don’t know any more than you what’s happening or has happened. I said what Sahir told me, that we’re entangled in time. And that is a terrible thing to be.”

“I cannot understand.” She shivered where she stood. “You swore we would meet again; but I did not think it would be when a dragon bore me off to a country of death.” She straightened. “That’s the reason, not so?” she asked with renewed life. “You foresaw this and came to save me who have never stopped loving you.”

He sighed. “These are waters too deep to cross before we have even laid our ship’s keel,” he said, and immediately recognized a Keftiu proverb. “I’m empty. I can’t think beyond ... beyond what few hand-graspable facts we may collect between us.”

He paused, groping for words, more because his brain was dull than because there was any great problem about phrasing. “First,” he said, “we must know where we are and what year this is.”

“What year? Why, it’s been four and twenty years, Duncan, since last we were together, you and I, at the wreck of the world.”

“At the—what?”

“When the mountain burst and the fires beneath creation raged forth and the sea turned on the Keftiu who were too happy and destroyed them:’ Erissa lifted her double-ax amulet and signed herself.

The bottom dropped out of Reid’s mind. My God, gibbered through him, has the energy release already taken place? Did we arrive after instead of before it? Then we’re indeed stuck here forever. Aren’t we?

“You shudder, Duncan,” Erissa laid hands on his shoulders. “Come, let me hold you.”

“No. I thank you, no.” He stood for a while mastering himself.

It could be a misunderstanding. Sahir had been definite about an enormous disaster in this general neighborhood, somewhat futureward of this night. No use trying to untangle the whole skein in an hour. Knot by knot, that was the way. Erissa’s home wasn’t, too distant geographically, was it? Not according to Sahir. Okay, begin with that.

“Tell me,” Reid said, “where are you from?”

“What?” She hesitated. “Well ... I was many places after we parted. I’m now on the island Malath. Before then—oh, many places, Duncan, always longing for the home where you found me.”

“The what? Where? Say its name. Where were you then?”

She shook her head. Murky though the night was, he could see her tresses ripple beneath the stars. “You know that, Duncan.” she said puzzledly.

“Tell me anyhow,” he insisted.

“Why, Kharia-ti-yeh.” Land of the Pillar, Reid translated. Erissa went on, anxious to make herself clear in the face of his baffling ignorance: “Or, as they called it on the mainland, Atlantis.”

Awakening from sleep was strange. It locked the final door on escape out of a dream. The twentieth-century world had become the one remote, fantastic, not wholly comprehensible as existent.

“I’m going on scout while my horse can serve me,” Uldin declared, and took off. He appeared less worn than his companions, maybe because his best appearance was so uncouth. While he was gone, the rest sought refuge in the sea. Sticks, lashed together with thongs cut from Oleg’s belt, made a framework on which to hang clothes for protection against direct, sunlight and glare reflected off the water in which they would sit to their necks.

When the awning was ready to, be positioned, Erissa slipped off sandals and tunic. Oleg gasped. “What’s the matter?” she asked him innocently.

“You ... a woman ... a, well—” It couldn’t be seen whether the. Russian blushed under his beet-red sunburn.

Suddenly he laughed. “Well, if that’s the kind of girl you are, this needn’t be the worst day of my life!”

She bridled. “What do you mean? Put down those hands!”

“She’s not of your people, Oleg,” Reid explained. It was obvious to him: “Among hers, nakedness is respectable?” Nevertheless he felt shy about stripping before her Taut and lithe, scarcely marked by the children she had borne, her body was the goodliest he had ever seen.