“I’ve seen that, about you,” the girl said. “Were all the people of your world so curious, always asking how and why?”
Daniel laughed. “A good many of them,” he said. “But this, now… it’s too much of a mystery. It’s worse, to me. Listen; I’m a man of a…
different
world, so different I couldn’t explain it to you in a million words. To me, this is an impossible place; a…” He stopped, helplessly seeking words. “Your people… from what I’ve found so far, they were beginning to become civilized. They had writing, tools… I found a knife that seems to be made of steel. Damn it, I was reasonably well-read, but archaeology, now, that wasn’t important to me.”
Ammi looked puzzled, and Daniel stopped, grinning apologetically.
“That word means old history, about things before mankind…” he said, and then, “But this is a human world, too, isn’t it? There are probably plenty of people out there, northward.”
“Is that what you wish to do, then?” the girl asked in a low voice. “I heard others speaking of this, too. To sail out, northward, away from Eloranar…”
“Is there anything left here, really?” Daniel asked.
“It is home,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment
“I know what you mean,” he said, then.
“Most of the younger people wish to go, now,” Ammi said. “Since you spoke of what will happen here. How the ice will come, in the end, and take even this away from us. After the spring comes, and the sea dancing, many will begin to make their boats ready for a long voyage.”
Daniel stared at her.
“The sea dancing,” he said, after a while. “I’ve heard this talked of; and these sea folk…” He shook his head. “When you say you speak to them…”
“You…” Ammi began,
then
flushed suddenly. “No, not you, but he that was called Egon… he was one of their Brothers. He could call them, at a long distance. But we can speak and understand each other in the ordinary way, too, land folk and sea folk. Why do you find that so strange?”
“In my world, certain wise men said that dolphins could speak, and that their brains were larger than man’s,” Daniel said. “But that made no difference; we still thought of them as animals. After all, they have no hands; they cannot make tools, or build…”
Ammi looked surprised. “But other creatures do those things for the sea folk!” she said. “Did you not even know that much, in your world? Under the sea, many kinds of creatures work for the folk… and of course, they made us for the same reason.”
Daniel laughed. “Come now, Ammi. Do you think humanity was made by… these sea creatures you’re talking about?”
She shook her head. “Oh, not the way the old stories had it,” she said, but her expression was quite serious. “We know, from what the sea folk tell us, how it happened. We were like some of the other animals that live near the water, swimming in rivers and in the sea…” Her eyes grew sad. “There were great rivers in Eloranar once.
But I…
I have never seen a river, only heard of them. But at any rate, the sea folk themselves once lived on the land, they say. When they found our ancestors swimming and playing in the water, they began to teach them things. Then land people brought gifts, and that was how it all began.”
Daniel looked thoughtful. “Do you mean you trade with these sea folk?” he asked. “Exchanged goods, for instance?”
“There’s little to exchange, now,” she said. “But yes; when Eloranar was great, we made many things that the sea folk needed, and they brought us other things in return. Have you not seen the pictures in the old books you found?”
“I thought that was mythology,” Daniel said in a low voice.
“My God.
If what you say is true… intelligent dolphins!”
She stared at him for a moment, then, “It will soon be sunlight again, in a few more weeks. You will dance under the sea and meet the sea folk for yourself.” And abruptly she walked away, into the ancient city.
Dance under the sea, he thought, and grinned. Swim, in the Antarctic? Well, it was no more insane a thought than all the rest.
Waking up in the body of a primitive, in a prehistoric world; talking dolphins, and all the rest.
Why had no one ever suspected, Daniel thought, staring out into the red-lit mists? There had been expeditions to the South Pole itself; there had been bases built on the ice. The ice must have crushed everything, every trace, in time.
But… how much time?
How far in the past was he? He glanced up into the dark sky where a few stars were faintly visible in spite of the foggy air. He had a good knowledge of navigation, enough to guide himself by the star patterns, but not enough to guess how much they might have changed, if at all. And though he had been a well-read man, he now realized how little he really knew of the prehistory of the world.
But what still troubled his thoughts most was a strange, clear certainty; that what had happened to him was not by chance. Somehow, he felt, he had been snatched out of his world by an act of will; he had been brought to this place for some reason.
He had been an agnostic in his former life. The God of his fathers had been the fierce old tyrant deity of the Presbyterians; Daniel had rejected that God early in his life. He had been an engineer, a materialist, a believer in rational reality. He could not believe in occult forces or gods; whatever had done this had been neither a god nor a devil, he was sure.
But then, he remembered, he had never believed in a soul, either. When you died, it was “Out, brief candle,” and an end to it.
But he was alive, and he remembered dying too clearly. So, something survived after all, something that could be dragged across time and space and thrust into a new body.
He stared down at his big hands, the black hair curling on their backs; not the hands he remembered having had all his life.
He had been wrong, then. Maybe, he considered grimly, I may have been wrong about gods and devils, too. Then, somewhere, there was
a somebody
who had a reason for bringing a man back to life. Very well, how do I discover that person… or that creature, and ask him for his reason?
Maybe I’ll never know, he thought. That’s the way it always seemed to be, with gods in my time. You weren’t supposed to ask questions. But I’ll ask, he thought. I’ll go on asking.
Now the sun remained higher each day; though the mists were heavier, too. Among the people there was a stirring of activity; even more than usual in the warmer weather, at the approach of the sea dancing. Groups worked on the boats that were drawn up on the strand, caulking and repairing the largest of them. Smoke rose from fires where fish were drying, and people gathered food plants in the gardens outside the city.
At least three groups were planning to sail away to the north as soon as possible. Their boats were small; the same kinds of craft were used to fish, out in the open sea, though, and would be safe enough, barring heavy storms. Once, Daniel was told, there had been much larger ships, but either they had sailed away long ago, or had rotted, unused.
There were ancient maps, Daniel found, and copies, on wooden boards, were made for the use of those who would leave. He doubted their accuracy, but these were all that were available.
The world, as these maps showed it, was strangely like his own, and yet unlike it too. The continents were there, just as they had been in the atlas as he remembered it; seeing them, he felt a new wonder at the extent of knowledge of the lost nations of Eloranar. They must have sailed long distances, to be able to map so much, he thought.
South America was distorted; a vast curving bite gone from Brazil. There was no isthmus, either; and in North America there were seas through the center, where the Mississippi ran in his own time. Africa was even more strangely misshapen, and the Asian areas were almost unrecognizable. Farther north, it seemed as if the British Isles were joined to a queerly distorted Europe. Strangest of all to Daniel’s eyes, there was no Mediterranean; only a winding series of rivers and lakes from Gibraltar to the Bosporus. But the Black Sea was still there, larger than he recalled it, in fact.
With fair winds and great good luck, it would take some weeks for a small sailing craft to reach the nearest land, Daniel thought. That seemed to be the tip of South America; he could find no trace of the Falkland
islands
. Tierra del Fuego, as Daniel remembered it, was no paradise, but it was a land on which people could live, at least.
Some of the people came to him, shyly; there was still a fear in their minds, the vague idea of demonic possession. But they also believed that he knew more than they did of the world beyond their ice-locked corner. Egon, it seemed, had known something of other shores, possibly had even traveled to such places. It seemed that this new man might also know more than they did. And it was because of Daniel’s description of their future that they had given up hope of remaining here in Alvanir. So they came to him.
“How many days sailing, do you think?” one man asked, drawing a finger across the wood-carved map. He was a middle-aged man with a strong, leathery face, grey-bearded; his name was Gannat. He would have three women, two men and four children with
him,
he had told Daniel; his wife, his daughter and his son’s wife, his son and son-in-law, and their brood, the youngest a mere baby. And the boat, as Daniel knew, would be crowded with four aboard. He had seen it; to his eyes it looked frighteningly tiny and frail, a crudely planked boat with a single mast and a triangular sail. It was open to the weather, too.
But Gannat and the others had gone out to the open sea for days at a time in just these boats, Daniel remembered. Then, he remembered that Egon too, whose body he inhabited, had gone out in such a boat, and died. He stared down at the map uncomfortably.
“A long time, Gannat,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Can you carry enough food and water for all your people?”
Gannat grinned wryly. "I've no choice,” he said. “There’s none I could leave behind.”
Daniel knew there would be no use in arguing the point. He had heard the same words from others, already; and the same calm, incredible conviction that “the sea folk will help.”
“Damn it, man,” Daniel said, putting down the map. “Do you have to do this? Look, I told you and the others about the ice, of course. It’ll come, in time… but it may not come for centuries. You’ll be dead and gone. Why not stay here? Why risk everything?”
“We were never sure,” Gannat said, a little sadly. He looked back toward the crumbling wall of Alvanir. “Some of us thought the ice would go, some day. But now you say it will not. And I would like my sons to have a new land of their own.” He was silent for a moment. “It will be strange to see the sun rise and set every day,” he said, after a while. He looked at Daniel. “Was it so, in your other Life?”
“It didn’t seem strange to me,” Daniel said. “You’ll grow used to it.” If you get that far, he thought.
“There will be few left after this year,” Gannat said quietly. “This may be the last dancing. There will be none but the oldest, who do not want to
go,
and too old to dance under the sea any longer.” He sighed. “But the sea is there, too, and we will dance again.”
That again, Daniel thought. It seemed so important to these people, and yet, no matter how he tried, he could not get them to describe it in any detail. Apparently he would be expected to take part, too; the idea gave him a slight chill of fear.
All that he could learn about it was that the people swam, en masse, out into the fjord, and that there they dived, to meet the… others. Dolphins, apparently; he had seen them from a distance, leaping and playing in the dark water. Daniel could still not believe the story of “speaking.” Dolphins did make sounds, he knew, and they were playful. It was a superstition, the kind of primitive belief he had read about in books. The Eloran only imagined that the dolphins replied.
Gannat went away, back to the shore where he and his sons were caulking their boat; and Daniel wandered, thinking hard, through the emptiness of Alvanir.
Most of the people lived close to the shore; in the ancient city itself there were columned halls and broad, empty ways where no one came anymore. Daniel did not want to return to the house where he usually slept and ate, Egon’s, and now his. Egon’s woman, though, Daniel thought with a touch of anger; still Egon’s, though the man was dead and gone. He was strongly drawn to Ammi, but he concealed it, knowing how she felt.
He had come here often; explored the endless ruins with deepening wonder, day after day. If he could only return to his own world, with even a little of what he had found, he thought. There would be something left, under the ice; it could be dug out. The oldest of man’s civilizations, greater and more ancient than Sumer or the Indus Valley… and then, Daniel remembered, he would never return. And if I did, he asked himself, who would believe such a story?
Walking, he had come into a wide avenue with crumbling buildings on either side.
Once this had been a tree-lined avenue with reflecting pools in its center.
Now the trees were gone, except for a few black stumps, and the pools were dry.
He remembered that he had found a few crumbling books in one of these houses; in a chest, where there were scraps of rotting cloth and a few curious oddments. Something forgotten, or cast aside, when the owners had gone away forever; books, in a flowing script no one could read. Pictures, nearly invisible, painted on the walls; Daniel remembered puzzling over them for days.
In a few years the ice would cover it all.
He stopped and kicked idly at a stone, staring into the mist. The secret had to be somewhere; the key to his own existence.
But not here, in this graveyard.
He swung around and walked back toward the shore; at least there were living people there.
He came out of the ruins farther away from that part of the beach where most of the people lived and worked; looking toward their distant shapes, he could see Gannat and his son near their boat.
Others, too—a tall woman, crossing the strand.
That had to be Ammi, Daniel thought with a slight twist of anger. She had stopped to talk to a young man; now her head was tilted back in a characteristic gesture of laughter. She never laughed when she was with me, Daniel thought. He turned and walked farther along the beach.