“I’m not sure how smooth and easy it will be for them. They’re getting ready now to explore the foothills and mountains all around the prairie, all the way around to northern Bulgaria. They’re a people used to lots of room, who’ve been crowded together for months. They’ll need to decide on new clan and tribal territories.

“And a tougher job will be to decide on whether and how to change the laws governing feuds and wars among themselves. A lot of them feel they shouldn’t raid each other like they used to. They feel a lot closer to each other since they first met the orcs, and lots of them feel there are plenty of outsiders they can fight. But others feel that outsiders are too easy, that real warrior merit can be earned only by fighting worthy opponents-namely other Northmen. They’d fight outsiders only from necessity.

“And of course there’s the likelihood that if they fight other people too much, the others will pick up Northman tactics and methods of training and so forth and become a lot more dangerous.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “That last bit of reasoning sounds pretty sophisticated,” he said. “Are you sure you didn’t think of it yourself? It doesn’t strike me as a product of the barbarian mind.”

“No, I heard it down there, although I have to admit it was Nils who mentioned it. But there were primitives long ago who were fairly sophisticated in some respects, and we also need to keep in mind that these people may have carried down certain concepts and attitudes from the civilized past.

“At any rate they discuss their problems quite openly; it’s a remarkably open society. Even when I was a hostage they let me wander around camp freely. I talked to whoever didn’t seem too busy, and most of them were happy to visit with that naive and curious star woman. I learned to handle twenty-ninth century Scandinavian pretty well, too. The major changes have been simplifications. For example they’ve dropped the neuter gender, changed the past tense of almost… ”

“Whoa, stop! Enough!” Matt said. “No linguistic analyses.” He looked down the two lines of familiar faces for a moment before continuing. “Ram told me before we came in that one of the things we need to talk about is when we’re going to start home, and this is a good time to get into that. Ram?”

Ram leaned back in his chair. “I’ll let Jomo tell you what he told me,” the captain said quietly. “He’s got the major reasons for a prompt departure.”

The chief medical officer stood up. “Anne Marie and Chandra need treatment we can’t give them here. Especially Chan. All we can do on the Phaeacia is keep him alive, and I’m not sure we can do that for very long. Somewhere within that coma there seems to be a profound wish, or willingness at least, to die; his physical injuries are not actually severe. We need to start for home as soon as we can.”

“Not we, Jomo,” Matthew said. “Chan and Anne. And all they need to take them there is the ship and crew. The exploration team came here to learn, and most of us have hardly set foot on Earth.

“With a landing grid waiting back home, you don’t need the pinnaces; they can stay here with us. Nikko wants to spend more time with the Northmen, and I can base my operations with them. She swears that Big Nils is a new kind of human being, maybe a major new step in human evolution. Incidentally, did you know he’s only twenty-one years old? And there are the Psi Kinfolk that Ilse sprang from-a whole culture of telepaths scattered throughout central and western Europe.”

“The Kinfolk would really be interesting,” Celia broke in. “I wish I could stay and study them myself. From what Ilse told me, they must be a living repository of post-plague history and political lore.”

“And there are the orcs,” Nikko added. “Some of the surviving slaves are educated people, and one of Kazi’s daughters is with them. There’ll be a lot we can learn about the orcs from them, and especially from her.

“Nils insists that Kazi was born before the plague and was one continuous personality, one unbroken ego-memory sequence-he terms it ‘one being’-reincarnated time after time by taking over selected bodies. It sounds preposterous, but it would explain some of the things about orc culture, including the name orc and the black tower of the palace, both right out of the old twentieth-century fantasy classic, Lord of the Rings. And last night I found corroboration of sorts in the history bank. There was a Timur Karim Kazi born in 2064, Earth Reckoning, in Kabul, Afghanistan-a neurophysiologist and professor of Psionics, of which there probably weren’t more than a few dozen on the planet. He was something of a genius.”

“We hoped there’d be a lot to learn here,” Matthew put in. “Now we’re beginning to appreciate how much there is. That ingrown little culture of ours is in for one heck of a shot of ideas.”

Ram looked rueful. “That was Gus’s idea in pushing this project for so long, God rest him. Then, when we got here, too much happened too fast.

“And one thing about leaving you behind-when we get home, they’ll have to let us come back here. It makes an ongoing operation out of it, not an abortion.

“One other thing: Jomo and Cele agree that an optical transplant should be possible for Nils, back home, although apparently it would be more cosmetic than anything else. He is definitely able to see without eyes. But we can take him with us, if he’d like.”

Three days later the Phaeacia’s mass-proximity drive winked, sending her on the first phase of her trip back to New Home-their real home, their own culture, not a home of ancient history and sentiment. While the Alpha and Beta rode down into the troposphere on a gravitic vector through the Northmen’s encampment.

(From an interview with Professor Nikko Kumalo on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday.)

You might have thought that experiences like those we’d gone through would have made us more cautious, even frightened us off. But it didn’t work that way. The orcs had been our great bete noir- Draco our Gog and orcdom our Magog so to speak-and the orcs had been broken and we were disengaged from them. Thanks to the Neovikings and that remarkable young man they called their Youngling.

Oh, we all realized there were other hazards as deadly as the orcs, if somewhat less horrible: brigand bands and horse barbarians and feudal lords, as well as others we presumed must exist but didn’t know about. But we committed ourselves to stay-Now I don’t want you to imagine we were being brave and noble in the service of science or man. It was more a sense of adventure and destiny and something like innocence. It seemed like the only thing to do. So we turned and went back down, with no real misgivings or fear. We were still somehow eager to learn more, and for experiences that would make us feel even more alive, albeit at some risk of becoming dead. You have to remember that our engineered and programmed agrarian democracy had become deadly dull for people with the life and spirit needed to get into that first space program.

I mentioned a sense of destiny. That was part of it. And the feeling wasn’t just mine, or something an old woman has added to the rememberings of her youth. We’ve all reminisced on it together many times, those of us who could.

It’s good that we did go back, of course, despite the cost. Our world and our future would be quite different if we hadn’t-much less interesting. Much less promising. But even so, it’s well that we don’t know our future, or at least not clearly or with any certainty. First of all it wouldn’t be much fun that way. And secondly-no, there isn’t any secondly. It just wouldn’t be much fun. That’s why people like change and resent those who try to prevent it. To a large degree, quality of life is a function of not knowing what will happen, of trying to influence it, and experiencing some amount of success.