He could see the Pentland Hills to the south, the central lowland plain stretching off to the west, and the river to the north, the city splashed along its southern coast. He could make out the docks and the twin stacks of the Port Seton power station; the water beyond looked so flat and still it might have been moulded from steel. And there was the rocky northern coast of the Forth; on a good day you could see the peaks of the Highland massif, all of seventy or eighty miles away.
Venus was setting, but it was still bright enough to cast a reflection from the small waves on the Forth.
The air, blowing off the Forth, was fresh and laced with salt; he breathed it deeply, swinging his arms, invigorated, exhilarated.
All this out of his back door, and a Moon rock waiting for him back at the lab. Already he had more than a good feeling about how his relationship with this Henry Meacher was going to pan out. God, he thought, I love this job.
But first, he had to see his sister. He patted his pocket, to make sure the little vial of dust he had secreted there was safe.
Then he made his way down Arthur’s Seat, by a different track.
He descended towards a sandstone ruin called St Anthony’s Chapel.
This was a grey heap of rubble not far below the summit of the Seat, in the lee of an exposed crag; time had left one wall intact, with a door and window gaping into nothing. The chapel was thought to date from the fifteenth century, but nobody actually knew; Edinburgh’s history had been chaotic.
As he headed towards the Chapel, through a steep-walled old glacial cwm called the Dry Dam, Mike could hear a single voice – a man’s – floating into the morning air.
‘… I want to tell you the story of the original Bran. With twenty-seven companions, he was lured away to a place called the Land of Women, an island supported by four pillars of gold. There was a great tree full of sweet singing birds that was permanently in blossom, and the air was full of music …’
Mike, descending into the Dry Dam, saw that the speaker was a kid – seventeen or eighteen, hair shaven, so skinny the bones showed in his face and skull. He was dressed in what looked like purple pyjamas. He was sitting beneath the steep rear wall of the cwm, as if cupped by the geology; there were maybe thirty people sitting in the grass in a circle facing him. They were all clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair; they were slim, even gaunt-looking. Mike, in fact, had trouble telling the men from the women, even what age they were. They were all wearing the purple jim-jams, as far as Mike could tell, and they must be cold – he could see where the morning dew had seeped into the thin fabric of their uniforms – but they didn’t seem to be reacting to it. They looked relaxed, obviously fascinated by what the speaker was saying.
Beyond the pyjama party there was a thin, scattered circle of onlookers, dog-walkers and ramblers, a few tourists. Amongst them he could see Jane, in a woollen hat and sheepskin jacket.
The speaker’s voice echoed around the natural amphitheatre.
‘… Bran landed. There was a bed – and a wife – for each man, and the food and drink were constantly replaced. Bran’s men stayed in this wonderful place for what they thought was a year – but when they returned home, they found a hundred years had passed. Nobody believed he was Bran, who they only knew as a distant legend. Bran was forced to sail away, into oblivion … Come.’
Mike started; he hadn’t been hiding, but it wasn’t obvious how the speaker could have spotted him. But here he was, waving a skinny arm at Mike.
‘Come and join us. You’re very welcome. Everyone’s welcome to listen.’
Mike would have backed off, but there was Jane, waving at him. So he nodded at the story-teller, and stepped cautiously through the pyjama party circle, and crouched in the damp grass close to Jane. She was wearing a bottle-green necklace he hadn’t seen before.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ he whispered.
She raised a forefinger to her lips to shush him.
‘… Now you can see why I took the call-sign I did: Bran.’ The kid looked around his flock; some were nodding, but others looked a little confused.
‘Think about it,’ Bran said. ‘The pillars of gold, the birds singing – the sort of lurid detail you’d expect after three thousand years of retelling. But what about the replenished food and drink? What does that sound like, to you, but replicator technology?’ He opened his hands, rested them on the back of his folded legs, and looked around the group, nodding persuasively. ‘Just like Star Trek. Right? And what about the women that just happened to be available for every man? Were they just hanging around, waiting for visitors? Isn’t it more likely that these were some kind of constructs – what we might call holograms, or even androids?
‘Which is why, of course, we find all that sci-fi stuff so easy to accept. Because it’s not part of our future – it’s part of our past.’
Jane leaned to Mike and whispered, ‘Here comes Einstein.’
‘What?’
‘Wait and see.’
‘What is this?’
‘A staff meeting of Egress Hatch,’ Jane hissed back. ‘Morning prayers.’
‘Egress Hatch? That new cult?’ He’d heard pub talk about this; the cult had come out of nowhere to gather, apparently, a couple of thousand adherents in a month. But then, since Venus, it seemed as if the whole human race was splintering into cults and enclaves and pressure groups … He studied his sister. ‘What are you doing here?’
She frowned. ‘I think I know him.’ She pointed at Bran.
‘… And, of course, the clinching element in the whole story is the time lag. A century passing on Earth for a year of the travellers’ time! It’s just the twin paradox of relativity – the time dilation effect suffered by every interstellar traveller up to, but not including, Captain Kirk – foreshadowed in a story first told three thousand years before Einstein was born. Now, how can that be? …’
‘I told you,’ Jane whispered.
Bran’s sermon was a mish-mash. The underlying theology seemed to be Celtic, but it was mixed in with a bit of New Age, a bit of post-millennial anxiety, a lot of sci-fi stuff about UFOs.
‘… Our faith is rooted in that of the Celts. But this was the native religion of Britain and Western Europe, before it was suppressed by the conquering Romans, three thousand years ago, and then absorbed by Christianity, and so emasculated. Now, we’re reclaiming it …’
Mike straightened up to speak; he could feel Jane plucking at his sleeve, but he ignored her.
‘So what’s that got to do with spacemen?’
Bran smiled. ‘The old religion, long buried, is a memory of an even older human experience. It’s only now, in our modern age, we can make sense of it. Look – have you ever had the feeling that your conscious self is sitting somewhere inside you? Like an inner person in a vehicle, looking out on the world and controlling the actions of your body –’
‘Like the Wizard of Oz?’
That got him a laugh from the outer fringe. Bran laughed along with them. ‘Something like that. Well, that’s a common feeling –’
‘A common illusion –’
‘Because it’s based in reality.’ Bran patted his rib cage. ‘These are not our true bodies. This is not our native world. We believe that we are from somewhere else, and we’re destined to return.’
Intrigued despite himself, Mike asked, ‘So what are