Once upon a time I myself lurched around stuffy classrooms, trying to insert a few predigested facts—I wonder how many of them were facts—into the minds of bored and preoccupied adolescents, some of whom may have liked me moderately well. I was even able to shake hands and be nice while their terribly well-meaning parents explained to me how they ought to be educated. So much of our human effort goes down the drain of futility, I sometimes wonder how we ever got as far as the Bronze Age. Somehow we did, though, and a short way beyond.
After that preliminary stage of an angel's education is finished, the baby is transferred to more ordinary surroundings, and his bodily growth completes itself in a very short time. Wings grow abruptly, as I have seen, and he reaches a maximum height of six inches by our measure. Only then does he enter on that lifetime of two hundred and fifty years, for not until then does his body begin to age. My angel has been a living personality for many years, but will not celebrate her first birthday for almost a year. I like to think of that.
At about the same time that they learned the principles of interplanetary travel, approximately twelve million years ago, these people also learned how growth could be rearrested at any point short of full maturity. At first the knowledge served no purpose except in the control of illnesses which still occasionally struck them at that time. But when the long periods of time required for space travel were considered, the advantages became obvious.
So it happens that my angel was born ten light years away. She was trained by her father and many others in the wisdom of seventy million years—that, she tells me, is the approximate sum of their recorded history—and then she was safely sealed and cherished in what my superamebic brain regarded as a blue egg. Education did not proceed at that time; her mind went to sleep with the rest of her. When Camilla's warmth made her wake and grow again, she remembered what to do with the little horny bumps provided for her elbows. And came out into this planet, God help her.
I wondered why her father should have chosen any combination so unreliable as an old hen and a human being. Surely he must have had plenty of excellent ways to bring the shell to the right temperature. Her answer should have satisfied me immensely, but I am still compelled to wonder about it.
"Camilla was a nice hen, and my father studied your mind while you were asleep. It was a bad landing, and much was broken—no such landing was ever made before after so long a journey. Only four other grown-ups could come with my father. Three of them died en route and he is very ill. And there were nine other children to care for."
Yes, I knew she'd said that an angel thought I was good enough to be trusted with his daughter. If it upsets me, all I need do is look at her and then in the mirror. As for the explanation, I can only conclude there must be more which I am not ready to understand. I was worried about those nine others, but she assured me they were all well, and I sensed that I ought not to ask more about them at present.
Their planet, she says, is closely similar to this, a trifle larger, moving in a somewhat longer orbit around a sun like ours. Two gleaming moons, smaller than ours—their orbits are such that two-moon nights come rarely; they are "magic," and she will ask her father to show me one, if he can. Because of a slower rotation, their day has twenty-six of our hours. Their atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and oxygen in the proportion familiar to us; slightly richer in some of the rare gases. The climate is now what we should call tropical and subtropical, but they have known glacial rigors like those in our world's past. There are only two great continental land masses, and many thousands of large islands.