On a hilltop above the valley of the Kshatriya, old Michael Shaughnessy sat alone. Delta Pavonis warmed him, akin to the sun of his childhood, but two daylight moons hung wan among clouds whose whiteness was streaked orange and amber by tiny life. The air he breathed blew pure and sweet, but through its odors of grass and wild thyme drifted a sulfury hint of surviving firebrush. The land swept down to the shining river and rolled back upward on the farther side in familiar curves sculptured by wind and rain, but from one slope jutted a many-towered bulk of clay and small stones that had been the nest of animals now extinct. Beside the river stood a town, but its rounded pyramids and spiraling spires were like nothing he had ever beheld elsewhere. The people who dwelt there were peaceful and kindly, but time and their world had made them altogether foreign to him.
The old man sat on a log and plucked a harp. He had fashioned it himself, and he half spoke, half sang to its notes, in a tradition that died before he was born and would die anew, forever, when he who had resurrected it was gone.
"I have come to you, Feng Huang, who have never been another Earth and never can be nor should, I have come to lay my bones in your soil. First, however, I will tell you of Earth, I will say to your winds what Earth was when last I walked upon her.
"She lay bleeding, Feng Huang, and the shadow of many deaths over her, and the fear of many more to come. New dreams were astir, as ruthless as the new ever are, and the ancient overlords with their ancient ways stood against it, hoping to kill the newborn dreams and those who bore them. A mighty war was In the making, and none could foresee what ruin it would wreak or what the whims of chance might spare.
"I, who neared the end of my days, wept for the young. I, who was about to depart, went about bidding good-bye to those things that remained on Earth, wonderful, beautiful, and defenseless, from all the ages she had known. I would not be content with images and illusions; I wanted memories of having myself met what had been shaped by hands, seen by eyes, trodden by feet, kissed by lips long down in dust.
"In a green country wet with springtime I found the great stones of Newgrange, where a folk forgotten once buried their kings; and along its western cliffs, where the sea roared gray, I went into a little parish church from when the people found their hope in Christ, and I knelt before his altar.
"Light streamed on me in many colors through the windows of faerie York Minster and soaring Chartres Cathedral. At the University of Salamanca, which remembers the wise Moors, I lost myself in books.
"I looked into the big eyes of the Empress Theodora at Ravenna and knew why men had loved her. I saw Michelangelo's Judgment Day in Rome and wished that the doom in our cosmology had such a meaning.
"The columns of the Parthenon rose before me, broken, eroded, but softly golden from centuries of weather, and they made my spirit stand as true as they.
"In the tombs of Egypt, where the paintings still cried forth love of life, I wondered at the steadfastness that hewed them from the rock beneath that furnace sky.
"Shwe Dagon recalled another faith, which yearned beyond life for oneness but which wrought splendor.
"I stood on the Great Wall, where brave men had kept watch against the barbarians, and I searched through the Forbidden City for the loveliness that dynasty after dynasty had gathered together.
"Under blossoming cherry trees in a Kyoto twilight, it was as if I heard temple bells ringing again.
"The halls where Washington and Jefferson spoke of freedom are no more; but I have walked over the Virginia hills that they knew.
"On an Andean mountain I did homage to the stones of Machu Picchu, whose builders followed dreams of their own.
"I tell this to your winds, Feng Huang, that they may strew it wherever they will. There is no other remembrance known to me.
"Now soon I shall lay my bones in your soil, where my Eileen laid hers these many centuries ago."