"Yeah. He'd like to pair off with me. Of course he would. Hasn't gotten laid for months now, has he? I suggested what he could do instead, and walked off. But I was volcano angry."
"You were overreacting; you, of all people. Stress—"
"I s'pose." Faintly surprised at how rage and loss alike had eased within her, Aliyat said, "Look, I'm not addicted to dreams. Really I'm not. Everybody uses them once in a while. Why don't you share with me sometime? I'd like that. An interactive dream has more possibilities than letting the computer put into your head what it thinks you've demanded."
Svoboda nodded. "True. But—" She stopped.
"But you're afraid I might learn things about you you'd rather I didn't. That's it, nght?" Aliyat shrugged. "I'm not offended. Only, don't preach at me, okay?"
"Why did you resent Hanno's attempt?" Svoboda asked quickly. "It was quite natural. You need not have cursed him for it."
"After what he's done to us?" Counterattack: "Do you still have a soft spot for him?"
Svoboda looked elsewhere. "I shouldn't, I know. On se veut—"
"What?"
"Nothing, nothing. A stray memory."
"About him."
Svoboda met the challenge. Probably, Aliyat thought, she wants to be friendly toward me; feels she has to. "Yes. Of no importance. Some lines we saw once. It was . . . the late twentieth century, a few years after we—we seven had gone under cover, while Patulcius was still keeping his own camouflage. Hanno and I were traveling about incognito in France. We stayed one night at an old inn, yes, old already then, and in the guest book we found what somebody had written, long before.
I was reminded now, that's all."
"What was it?" Aliyat asked.
, Again Svoboda looked past her. The wry words whis-jjjered forth as if of themselves.
"On se veut On s'enlace Ons'enlasse ; On s'en veut."
9
'Before Aliyat could respond, she nodded adieu and hurried on down the corridor.
| 23
ONCE MORE Yukiko was redecorating her room. Until she finished, it would be an uninhabitable clutter. Thus she
.flpent most of her private hours in Tu Shan's, as well as deeping there. In due course they would share hers while
Idle worked on his. It was her proposal. He had assented
•without seeming to care. The brushstroke landscape and caJ-jjpgraphy she earlier put on his walls had over the years been ween until they were all but invisible. However, she had a ^feeling that he would never especially have noticed their dis-
•appearance. -
. Entering, she found him cross-legged on the bed, left P*nd supporting a picture screen, right hand busy with a
||ght pencil. He drew something, considered it, made an ai-kation, studied it further. His big body seemed relaxed
pod the features bore no mark of a scowl.
|! "Why, what are you doing?" she asked.
| He glanced up. "I have an idea," he said almost eagerly.
;;**It isn't clear to me yet, but sketching helps me think."
V She went around behind him and leaned over to see. His
^drawings were always delicate, a contrast to much of his
^work in stone or wood. This showed a man in traditional peasant garb, holding a spade. On a large rock beside him jiquatted a-monkey, while a tiger stood below. Through the
^breground flowed a stream wherein swam a carp.
tev'"So you are finally going to try pictures?" she guessed.
H'He shook his head. "No, no. You are far better at them num I will ever be. These are just thoughts about figures I Bean to sculpture." He gazed up at her. "I think pictures 472
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may not help us much when we get to Tritos. Even on Earth, in old days, you remember how differently people in different times and countries would draw the same things. To the Alloi, any style of line, shade, color we might use may not make sense. Photographs may not. But a three-dimensional shape—no ghost in a computer; a solid thing they can handle—that should speak to them."
Tritos, Alloi, he pronounced the names awkwardly; but one needed better words than "Star Three"
and "Others," and when Patulcius suggested these, the crew soon went along. Greek still bore its aura of science, learning, civilization. To three of those in the ship, it had been common speech for centuries. "Metroaster" for "Mother Star" had, though, been voted down, and "Pegasi" was back in use. After all, nobody could say whether the Alloi at Tritos had come from there, or even whether it was sun to a sentient race.
Hanno sat mute through the discussion and merely nodded his acceptance. He spoke little these days, and others no more to him than was necessary.
"Yes, an excellent thought," Yukiko said. "What do you mean to show?"
"I am groping my way toward that," Tu Shan replied. "Your ideas will be welcome. Here, I think, might be a group—more creatures than these—arranged according to our degrees of kinship with the animals. That may lead the Alloi to show us something about their evolution, which ought to tell us things about them."
"Excellent." Yukiko trilled laughter. "But how can you, now, keep up your pretense of being a simple-minded fanner and blacksmith?" She bent low, hugged him, laid her cheek on his. "This makes me so happy. You were sullen and silent and, and I truly feared you were going back to that miserable, beastly way of living I found you in—how long ago!"
He stiffened. Harshness came into his voice. "Why not? What else had our dear captain left us, before this came to me out of the dark? It will help fill a little of the emptiness ahead."
She let go and slipped about to sit down on the bed in front of him. "I wish you could be less bitter toward "Hanno," she said, troubled. "You and the rest of them."
"Have we no reason to?"
"Oh, he was high-handed, true. But has he not been punished enough for that? How dare we take for granted that what he's done is not for the best? It may prove to be what saves us."
"Easy for you. You want to seek the Alloi."
"But I don't want this hateful division between us. I dare BOt give him a friendly word myself, I'm afraid of making matters worse. It makes me wish we'd never received the message. Can't you see, dear, he is—like a righteous emperor of ancient times—taking on himself the heavy burden Of leadership?"
Again Tu Shan shook his head, but violently. "Nonsense. You are drawn to him—don't deny—" , Her tone went calm. "To his spirit, yes. It isn't tike mine, but it also seeks. And to his person, no doubt, but I've honestly not dwelt on that in my mind." She closed hands upon Iris knee. "You are the one I am with."
•; It mildened him to a degree. Sternness remained. "Well, stop imagining he's some kind of saint or sage. He's a Scheming, knavish old sailor, who naturally wants to sail. Ibis is his selfishness. He happens to have the power to force it on us." He slapped the screen down onto the blanket, as if striking with a weapon. "I am only trying to help us outlive the evil." . She leaned close. Her smile trembled. "That is enough to
•take me love you."
I 24
i_
Yet ANOTHER Christmas drew nigh, in the ship's chro-nology. It was meaningless to ask whether it did on Earth just then—doubly meaningless, given the physics here and the forgottenness yonder.
Hanno came upon Svoboda hang-ing ornaments in the common room. Evergreen boughs from the nanoprocessors were fresh and fragrant, bejeweled with berries of hotly. They seemed as forlorn as the Danish carols from the speakers. She saw him and tautened. He halted, not too close to her. 'Hello," he proffered. 'How do you do," she said.
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He smiled. Her face stayed locked. "What sort of party are you planning this year?" he asked.
She shrugged. "No motif."
"Oh, I'll keep out of the way, never fear." Quickly: "But we can't go on much longer like this.
Well lose skills, including the skills of teamwork. We must start having simulations and practicing in them again."
"As the captain directs. I suppose, though, you're aware that Wanderer and I, at least, are doing so. We'll bring others in presently."
Hanno made himself meet the blue gaze, and made it stay upon his. "Yes, naturally I know. Good.
For you two above aU. A phantom wilderness is better than none, right?"
Svoboda bit her lip. "We could have had the real thing."
"You will, after we're through at Tritos. You wanted to go there first yourself. Why don't you look forward to it?"
"You know why. The cost to my comrades." She closed a fist and clipped: "Not that we can't cope. I outlived many bad husbands, dreary decades, tyrants, wars, everything men could wreak. I will outlive this too. We will."
"Myself among you," he said, and continued on his way.
It was to no particular goal. He often prowled, mostly at shipnight or through sections where nobody else had occasion to be. An immortal body needed little exercise to keep fit, but he worked regularly at his capabilities and developed new ones. He screened books and shows, listened to music, played with problems on the computers. Frequently, as in the past, when stimuli palled and thought flagged he disengaged his mind and let hours or days flow by, scarcely registering on him.
That, however, was in its way as seductive, easily overdone as the dream chamber which he shunned.
He could but hope that his crew rationed themselves on illusions.
Today impulse returned him to his stateroom. He sealed himself in, not that anyone would come calling, and settled down before his terminal. "Activate—" The command fell so flat across silence that he chopped it short. For a while he stared at the ceiling. His fingers drummed the desktop.
"Historical persons," he said.
"Whom do you wish?" inquired the instrumentality.
Hanno's mouth writhed upward. "You mean, what do I wish?"
, What three-dimensional, full-color, changeably expressive, freely moving and speaking wraith?
Siddhartha, Socrates, Hillel, Christ — Aeschylus, Vergil, Tu Fu, Firdousi, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mark Twain — Lucretius, Avicenna, Maim on ides, Descartes, Pascal, Hume — Pericles, Alfred, Jefferson — Hatshepsut, Sappho, Murasaki, Rabi'a, Mar-grete I, Jeanne d'Arc, Elizabeth I, Sacajawea, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Isak Dineseri — yes, or if
: you liked, the great monsters and she-devils — Have your machine take everything history, archaeology, psychology knew of a person and that person's world, down to the last least scrap, with probabilities assigned to each uncertainty
-«nd conjecture; let it model, with subtle and powerful abstract manipulations, the individual whom this matrix could
. have produced and who would have changed it in precisely those ways that were known; make it write the program, activate; and meet that human creature. The image of the dy was a mere construct, as easily generated as any other; but while the program ran, the mind existed, sensed,
'thought, reacted, conscious of what it was but seldom troubled thereby, usually enthusiastic, interested, anxious to dis-Old myths and nightmares have become real," Svoboda 8atd once, "while old reality slips away from us. On Earth they now raise the dead, but are themselves only half alive." "That isn't strictly true, either side of it," Hanno had re-\ plied. "Take my advice from experience and don't caU up
'anybody you ever actually knew. They're never quite right. Often they're grotesquely wrong."
Unless memory failed after centuries. Or unless the past was as uncertain, as flickeringly quantum-variable, as everything else in the universe of physics.
Seated alone, Hanno winced, partly at recollection of a ;time when he sought advice from the electronic revenant of Cardinal Richelieu, partly at recalling how he and Svoboda ; had been together, then. "I don't want any single companion," he said to the machine. "Nor a synthetic personality. i<Jrve me ... several ancient explorers. A meeting, a coun-can you do that?"
Certainly. It is a nonstandard interaction, requiring creative preparation. One minute, please."
Sixty bil-non nanoseconds.
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The first of the faces looking out was strong and serene, "I don't quite know what to say," Hanno began hesitantly, well-nigh timidly. "You've been . . . told about the situation here? Well, what do I need? What do you think I should do?"
"You should have taken more thought for your folk," answered Fridtjof Nansen. The computer translated between them. "But I understand it is too late to change course again. Be patient."
"Endure," said Ernest Shackleton. Ice gleamed in his beard. "Never surrender."
"Think of the others," Nansen urged. "Yes, you lead, and so you must; but think about how it feels to them."
"Share your vision," said Marc Aurel Stein. "I died gladly because it was where I had wanted to go for sixty years. Help them want."
"Ha, why are they sniveling?" roared Peter Preuchen. "My God, what an adventure! Bring me back to see when you get there, lad!"
"Give me your guidance," Hanno entreated. "I've discovered I'm no Boethius, to console myself with philosophy. Maybe I have made a terrible mistake. Lend me your strength."
"You'll only find strength in yourself, sir," declared Henry Stanley. "Not in spooks like us."
"But you aren't! You're made out of what was real—"
"If something of what we did and were survives to this day, we should be proud, my friends," said Nansen. "Come, let us put it back into service. Let us try to find good counsel."
Willem Barents shivered. "For so strange a voyage, most likely to a lonely death? Commend your soul to God, Hanno. There is nothing else."
. "No, we owe them more than that," said Nansen. "They are human. As long as men and women fare outward, they will be human."
25
MACANDAL SENT her glance slowly from one to the next of the six who sat around the table in the saloon with her. "I suppose you've guessed why I've asked you to come," she said at length.
Most of them stayed unstirring. Svoboda grimaced. Wanderer, beside her, laid a hand on her thigh.
Macandal took a bottle and poured into a glass. The claret gurgled dusky rose; its pungency sweetened the air. She passed the bottle on. Glasses had been set out for everyone. "Let's have a drink first," she proposed.
Patulcius attempted a jest. "Are you taking a leaf from the early Persians? Remember? When they had an important decision to make, they discussed it once while sober and once while drunk."
"Not the worst idea ever," Macandal said. "Better than these modern drugs and neurostims."
"If only because wine has tradition behind it," Yukiko murmured. "It means, it is more than its mere self."
"How much tradition is left in the world?" Aliyat asked bitterly.
"We carry it," Wanderer said. "We are it."
The bottle circulated. Macandal raised her goblet. 'To the voyage," she toasted.
After a moment: "Yes, drink, all of you. What this meeting is about is restoring something good."
"If it has not been wholly destroyed," Tu Shan grated, but he joined the rest in the small, pregnant ceremony.
"Okay," Macandal said. "Now listen. Each of you knows I've been after him or her, arguing, wheedling, scolding, trying to wear down those walls of anger you've built around yourselves.
Maybe some haven't noticed it was in fact each of you. Tonight's when we bring it out hi the open."
Svoboda spoke stiffly. "What is there to talk about? Reconciliation with Hanno? We have no breach.
Nobody has dreamed of mutiny. It's impossible. A change of course back to Phaeacia is impossible too; we haven't the antimatter. We're making the best of things."
"Honey, you know damn well we are not." Steel toned beneath Macandal's mildness. "Cold courtesy and mechanical obedience won't get us through whatever waits ahead. We need our fellowship back."
•• "So you've told me, us, over and over." Wanderer's voice was raw. "You're right, of course. But we didn't break it. ': He did."
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Macandal regarded him for a quiet spell. "You're really hurting, aren't you?"
"He was my best friend," Wanderer said from behind his mask.
"He still is, Johnnie, It's you who've shut him out."
"Well, he—" Speech trailed off.
Yukiko nodded. "He has made approaches to you also, then," she deduced. "To everyone, I'm sure.
Tactful, admitting he could be wrong—"
"He has not groveled," Tu Shan conceded, "but he has put down his pride."
"Not insisting we are the ones mistaken," Svoboda added, as if unwillingly.
"We may be, you know," Yukiko argued- "The choice had to be made, and only he could make it. At first you wanted this way yourself. Are you certain it was not just your own pride that turned you against him?"
"Why did you change your mind and join us?"
"For your sakes."
Tu Shan sighed. "Yukiko has worked on me," he told the others. "And Hanno, well, I have not forgotten what he did for us two in the past."
"Ah, he has begun to make himself clear to you," Pa-tulcius observed. "Me too, me too. I still don't agree with him, but the worst rancor has bled off. Who advised him how to speak with us?"
"He's had a long time alone for thinking," Macandal said.
Aliyat shuddered. "Too long. It's been too long."
Svoboda's words fell sharp. "I don't see how we can ever again be whole-hearted about him. But you are right, Cor-inne, we must rebuild . . . as much faith as we can."
Heads nodded. It was no climax, it was the recognition of something foreseen, so slow and grudging in its growth that the completion of it came as a kind of surprise.
Macandal need merely say, "Grand. Oh, grand. Let's drink to that, and then relax and talk about old times. Tomorrow I'll cook a feast, and we'll throw a party and invite him and get drunk with him—" her laugh rang—"in the finest Persian style!"
—Hours afterward, when she and Patulcius were in her room making ready for bed, he said, "That was superbly handled, my dear. You should have gone into politics."
"I did, once, sort of, you recall," she answered with a slight smile.
"Hanno put you up to this, from the beginning, didn't he?"
"You're pretty shrewd yourself, Gnaeus."
"And you coached him in how to behave—carefully, patiently, month after month—with each of us."
"Well, I made suggestions. And he had help from ... the ship. Advice. He never told me much about that. I think it was an experience too close to his heart." She paused. "He's always guarded his heart—too carefully; I guess because of the losses he suffered in all those thousands of years.
But he's no fool either, where it comes to dealing with people."
Patulcius looked at her a while. She had slipped off her gown and stood dark, supple before him.
Her face1 against the wall, which was muraled with lilies, made him remember Egypt. "You're a great woman," he said low.
"You're not a bad guy."
"Great for ... accepting me," he slogged on. "I know it pained you when Wanderer went to Svoboda.
I think it still pains you."
"It's good for them. Maybe not ideal, but good; and we do need stable relationships." Macandal flung her head back and laughed afresh. "Hey, listen to me, talking like a twentieth-century social worker!" She swung her hips. "C'mon over here, big boy."
26
'CLOUDS MASSED huge, blue-black over the high place. Lightning flared, thunder crashed. The fire before the altar leaped and cast sparks like stars down the wind. The acolytes led the sacrifice to the waiting priest. His knife glimmered. In the grove below, worshippers howled. Afar, the sea ran white and monsters rose from its depths. "No!" Aliyat wailed. "Stop! That's a child!" "It is a beast, a lamb," Wanderer called back against the noise; but he kept his glance elsewhere. "It is both," Hanno said to them. "Be still." Knife flashed, limbs threshed, blood spurted and flowed dark over stone. The priest cast the body into the flames.
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Flesh sizzled on coals, fell away from bones, went up in fat smoke. Through the storm, terrible in their splendor, came the gods.
Pillar-tall, bull-broad, beard spilling down over the lion skin that clad him, eyes capturing the fire-gleam, Melqart snuffed deep. He licked his lips. "It is done, it is well, it is life," he boomed.
Wind tossed the hair of Ashtoreth, rain jeweled it, lightning-light sheened on breasts and belly.
Her own nostrils drank. She clasped his gigantic organ as if it were a staff and raised her left hand into heaven. "Bring forth the Resurrected!" she cried.
Baal-Adon leaned heavily on Adat, his beloved, his mourner, his avenger. He stumbled, still half blind after the murk of the underworld; he trembled, still half frozen from the grave. She guided him to the smoke of the offering. She took the bowl filled with its blood and gave him to drink.
Warmth returned, beauty, wakefulness. He saw, he heard how men and women coupled in the grove and across the land in honor of his arising; and he turned to his consort.
More gods crowded about, Chushor out of the waves, Dagon out of the plowlands, Aliaan out of the springs and underground waters, Resheph out of the storm, and more and more. Clouds began to part.
Distantly gleamed the twin pillars and pure lake before the home of El.
A sunbeam smote the eight who stood on the topheth near the beryl, invisible to priest and acolytes. The gods stared and stiffened. Melqart raised bis club that had smitten the Sea, primordial Chaos, in the dawn of the world. "Who dares betread the holy of holies?" he bellowed.
Hanno trod forward. "Dread ones," he said calmly, with respect but not abasing himself, looking straight into those eyes, "we are eight from afar in space, time, and strangeness. We too command the powers of heaven, earth, and hell. But fain would we guest you a while and learn the wonders of your reigning. Behold, we bear gifts." He signalled, and there appeared a treasure of golden ware, gems, precious woods, incense.
Melqart lowered his weapon and stared with a greed that awoke also in the features of Ashtoreth; but her regard was on the men.
27
ONE BY one, they disengaged. That was a simple matter of removing induction helmets and feedback suits. The web of union between them and the guiding, creating computer had already vanished; the pseudo-experience was at an end. Nonetheless, after they had emerged from their booths into the commonplaceness of the dream chamber, it took them silent minutes to return altogether to themselves. Meanwhile they stood side by side, hand in hand, groping for comfort.
Eventually Patulcius mumbled, "I thought I knew something about the ancient Near East. But that was the most damnable—"
"Horror and wonder," Macandal said unevenly. "Lust and love. Death and life. Was it really like that, Hanno?"
"I can't be sure," the captain answered. "The historical Tyre we visited seemed about right to me." —in a full-sensory hallucination, where the computer drew on his memories and then let the seekers act and be acted on as they would have in a material world. "Hard to tell, after so long.
Besides, you know I'd tried to put it behind me, tried to grow away from what was bad in it. This, though, the Phoenician conceptual universe— No, I don't believe I ever thought in just that way, even when I was young and supposed I was mortal."
"No matter authenticity," Yukiko said. "We want practice in dealing with aliens; and this was amply alien."
"Too much." Tu Shan's burly frame shivered. "Come, dear. I want a time gentle and human, don't you?" She accompanied him out.
"What society shall we draw on next?" asked Svoboda. Her attention sought Wanderer. "Those you knew must have been at least as foreign to the rest of us."
"No doubt," he replied rather grimly. "In due course, yes, we will. But first a setting more . . .
rational. China, Russia?"
"We have plenty of tune," Patulcius said. "Better we digest this before we think about anything else. Kyrie eleison, to have witnessed the gods at work!" He tugged at Macan-482
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dal, "I'm exhausted. A stiff drink, a long sleep, and several days' idleness."
"Right." Her smile was fainter than usual. They left.
Wanderer and Svoboda seemed aroused. Their gazes came aglow. She reddened. His breast rose and fell. They also departed.
Hanno took care not to watch. Aliyat had clasped his hand. Now she let go. He spoke dully. "Well, how was it for you?"
"Terror and ecstasy and—a kind of homecomjng," she said, barely audible.
He nodded. "Yes, even though you started life as a Christian, it wouldn't be totally foreign to you. In fact, I suspect the program used some memories of yours as input where mine weren't sufficient."
"Weird enough, though."
He stared beyond her. "A dream within a dream," he murmured, as if to himself.
"What do you mean?"
"Svoboda would understand. Once she and I imagined what kind of future it might be where we dared reveal what we were." Hanno shook himself. "Never mind. Goodnight."
She caught his arm. "No, wait."
He stopped, lifted his brows, stood alert in a fashion weary and wary. Aliyat grasped his hand again. 'Take me along," she said.
"Eh?"
"You're too lonely. And I am. Let*s come back together, and stay."
Deliberately, he said, "Are you tired of subsisting on Svoboda's and Corinne's leavings?"
For a moment she lost color. She released him. Then she reddened and admitted, "Yes. You and me, we're neither of us the other's first pick, are we? And you've never forgiven me for Constantinople, not really."
"Why," he said, taken aback, "I've told you I have. Over and over I've told you. I hoped my actions proved—"
"Well, just don't let it make any difference that counts. What's the point of our living all these centuries if we haven't grown up even a little? Hanno, I'm offering you what nobody else in this ship will, yet. Maybe they never
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will. But we are getting back something of what we had. Between us, you and I could help that healing along." She tossed her head. "If you aren't game to try, to give in your turn, okay, goodnight and to hell with you."
"No!" He seized her by the waist. "Aliyat, of course I— I'm overwhelmed—"
"You're nothing of the sort, you calculating old scoundrel, and well I know it." She came to him.
The embrace went on. ,
Finally, flushed, disheveled, she said against his shoulder, "Sure, I'm a rogue myself. Always will be, I guess. But—I learned more about you than I'd known, Hanno. It wasn't a dream while we were there, it was as real to us as—no, more real than these damned crowding walls. You stood up to the gods, outsmarted them, made them take us in, like nobody else alive could have. You are the skipper."
She raised her face. Tears were on it, but a grin flashed malapert. "They didn't wear me out.
That's your job. And if we can't entirely trust each other, if the thing between us won't quite die away, why, doesn't that add a pinch of spice?"
28
*
THROUGHOUT THE final months, as Pytheas backed ever more slowly down to destination, the universe again appeared familiar. Strange that a night crowded with unwinking brilliant stars, girded by the frost-road of the galaxy, where nebulae querned forth new suns and worlds while energies raged monstrous around those that had died and light that came from neighbor fire-wheels had left them before humanity was—should feel homelike. Waxing ahead, Tritos had barely more than half the brightness of Sol, a yellow hue that stirred memories of autumns on Earth. Yet it too was a hearth.
Instruments peered across narrowing distance. Ten planets orbited, five of them gas giants. The second inmost swung at somewhat less than one astronomical unit's radius. It possessed a satellite whose eccentric path indicated the primary mass was slightly over two and a third the terrestrial.
Nevertheless that globe, though warmer on the average, was at reasonable temperatures, and its atmo-484
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spheric spectrum revealed chemical disequilibria such as must be due to life.
Week by week, then day by day, excitement burned higher within the ship. There was no quenching it, and presently even Tu Shan and Patulcius stopped trying. They were committed; magnificent things might wait; and here was, for a while at least, an end of wayfaring.
Hie peace with Hanno that each had made on his or her own terms did not strengthen into the former fellowship. If anything, it thinned, stretched by a new guardedness. What might be want next, and how might someone else react? He had promised that eventually they would go on to Phaeacia; but when would that be, would it ever, could he then betray it? Nobody made accusations, or indeed brooded much on the matter. Conversation was generally free and easy, if not intimate, and he joined again in some recreations—but no more in shared dreams, once their training purpose had been served. He remained half the outsider, in whom none but Aliyat confided, and she little except for her body.
He did not attempt to change their attitudes. He knew better; and he knew, as well, how to pass lifetime after mortal lifetime among strangers to his spirit.
Tritos grew in sight.
Pytheas cast signals ahead, radio, laser, neutrino. Surely the Allot had detected the ship from afar, roiling the dust and gas of space, braking with a flame out of the furnace engine. Receivers caught no flicker of response. "Have they gone?" Macandal fretted. "Have we come this whole way for nothing?"
"We're still many light-hours off," Wanderer reminded her. Hie hunter's patience was upon him.
"Can't talk very readily. Not at all by electromagnetic waves, while our drive blazes in front of us. And ... I would scan a newcomer first, before leaving my cover."
She shook her head, half angrily. "Forget the Stone Age, John. Anything like war or piracy between the stars isn't just obscene, it's absurd."
"Can you be absolutely certain? Besides, we could be dangerous to them, or they to us, in ways neither party has managed to imagine."
Tritos brightened. Without magnification, simply with the fight stopped down, eyes beheld the disc, spots upon it,
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flares leaping aloft. Offside stood a bluish-white steady spark that was the second planet. Now spectroscopy gave details of land and water surfaces, air mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The travelers changed course to intercept. The name they bestowed was Xenogaia.
The hour came when Pytheas called, "Attention! Attention! Coded signals detected."
The eight crowded into the command room. That wasn't physically necessary. They could quite well have perceived and partaken from their separate quarters. It was merely impossible for them not to be side by side, breath mingling with breath.
The message employed the same basic system as had the robots—a dozen years ago ship's time, three and a half cosmic centuries—minus relativistic adjustments no longer required. It arrived by UHF
radio, from somewhat aft, to avoid ionization that was no longer enormously strong but could still interfere. "The source is a comparatively small object about a million kilometers distant,"
Pytheas reported. "It has presumably lain in orbit until we came this near. At present it is accelerating to match our vectors. Radiation is weak, indicating high efficiency."
"A boat?" Hanno wondered. "Has it a mother ship?"
Pytheas assembled the images transmitted. They sprang into vivid existence. First appeared a starscape, then an unmistakable Tritos (you could compare what was in a view-screen), then a dizzying zoom in on ... forms, colors, a thing that swept lopsidedly around a larger. "That must be Xenogaia," Patulcius said into a thick silence. "It must be where they stay."
"I think they are preparing us for what comes next," Yukiko said.
The representation vanished. A new form was there.
They could not, at once, properly see it. The contours, the mathematical dimensionality were too exotic, too far beyond any expectation. Thus had it been for Svoboda and Wanderer when first they glimpsed high mountains—snow-clouds, heaven gone wrinkled, or what? "More art?" Tu Shan puzzled.
"They do not make pictures like any that humans ever did. I think they do not sense like us."
"No," Hanno said, "this is likelier a straightforward hologram." The hair stood up on his arms.
"Maybe they don't
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know how we see, either, but die reality is die same for all of us ... I hope."
The image moved, a stow and careful pirouette revealing it from every angle. It reached out of the scene and brought back a lump of something soft, which it proceeded to mold into a series of geometrical solids, sphere, cube, cone, pyramid, interlinked rings. "It's telling us it's intelligent," Aliyat whispered. Blindly, she crossed herself.
Vision began to understand. If the image was tire-size, the original stood about one hundred forty centimeters tall. Central was a stalk, a green that glittered and shimmered, supported on two thin limbs mat were flexible or multiply jointed, ending in several bifurcated digits. At the top sprouted two similar arms. These forked, subdivided, sub-subdivided, dendriticaUy, till the watchers were unable to count the last, spidery-delicate "fingers." From the sides spread a pair of—wings? membranes?—to a span that equaled the height. They looked as if made of nacre and diamond dust, but rippled tike silk.
After a long time, Tu Shan muttered, "If this is what they are, how shall we ever know them?'*
'The way we knew the spirits, maybe," Wanderer answered as softly. "I remember kachina dances."
"For God's sake," Svoboda cried, "what are we waiting for? Let's show them us!"
Hanno nodded. "Of course."
The spacecraft moved on together toward the living world.
29
So PYTHEAS came to harbor, took orbit about Xenogaia.
That required special care. There were other bodies to give a wide berth. Foremost was the moon.
Scarred and ashen as Earth's, it had only a tenth the mass, but its path brought it inward to about a third the Lunar distance from its primary, then out again to three-fifths. Some cosmic accident must have caused that, more recent than the impacts that formed the planet.
A number of artificial satellites wheeled in their own courses. None resembled any in the Solar System. Boats, as Hanno dubbed them, came and went. His folk were THE. BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS
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unsure how many, for no two seemed alike; only slowly did they realize that form changed according to mission, .and force-fields had more to do with it than crystal or fiber.
The Allosan mother ship (another human phrasing) orbited well beyond the moon. It appeared to be of fixed shape, a cylindroid almost ten kilometers in length and two in diameter, majestically rotating on its long axis, mother-of-pearl iridescent. Aft (?) was a complex of slender, curved members which might be the drive generator; it put Hanno in mind of interwoven vine patterns he had seen on Nordic mnestones and in Irish Gospels. Forward (?) the hull flared and then came to a point, making Patulcius and Svoboda recall a minaret or a church spire. Yukiko wondered about its age. A million years did not seem unthinkable.
"They probably live aboard," Wanderer opined. "Uh, what weight does that spin provide?"
"Sixty-seven percent of standard terrestrial gravity," the ship responded.
"Yeah, they look as if they come from that kind of environment. It means—let's see, you told us Xenogaian pull equals one point four tim«s Earth's, so for them—no, no, let me show off," Wanderer laughed. "It's twice what they're used to. Can they take it?"
"We could, if we had to," Macandal said. "But the Al-k)i do seem fragile." She hesitated. "Like crystal, or a bare tree iced over on a clear winter day. They are quite beautiful, once you learn how to look at them."
"I think we shall have to," declared Tu Shan harshly. "I mean, bear an added forty kilos on each hundred.'* 1 Their gazes followed his to that viewscreen in the common room which held an image of Xenogaia. They were passing the day side, the planet nearly full. It was brighter than Earth, for it was more clouded. Whiteness swirled and billowed, thinly marbled with the blue of oceans, spotted with greenish-brown glimpses of land. Though the axis tilted a full thirty-one degrees, neither pole bore a •Cap; snow gleamed rarely on the tallest mountains.
Aliyat shivered. The motion loosened her hold on a table edge and sent her slowly off through the air. Hanno
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caught her. She clung to his hand. "Go down there?" she asked. "Must we?"
"You know we can't stay healthy in weightlessness," he reminded her. "We can for longer than mortals born, and we've got medications that help, but finally our muscles and bones will shrink too, and our immune systems fail."
"Yes, yes, yes. But yondert"
"We need a minimum weight. This ship isn't big enough to spin for that by itself. Too much radial variation, too much Coriolis force."
She glared through tears. "I am not an idiot. I have not forgotten. Nor have I f-f-forgotten the robots can fix that."
"Yes, separate the payload and engine sections, hitch a long cable between, then spin them. The trouble is, that immobilizes Pytheas till it's reassembled. I think you'll all agree we'd better hang on to its capabilities, as well as the boats', at least till we know a lot more."
"Shall we shelter on the first planet?" Tu Shan.asked. "A seared hell. The third isn't this large either, but a frozen, barren waste; and likewise every outer moon or asteroid."
Svoboda looked still toward Xenogaia. "Here is life," she said. "Forty percent additional weight won't harm us," given our innate hardiness. "We will grow used to it."
"We grew used to heavier burdens in the past," Macandal observed quietly.
"But what I'm trying to say, if you'll let me," Aliyat yelled, "is, can't the Alloi do something for us?"
By this time considerable information exchange had taken place, diagrams, interior views of vessels, whatev«r the non-humans chose to offer and the humans thought to. It included sounds.
From the Alloi, those were notes high and coldly sweet that might be speech or might be music or might be something incomprehensible. It seemed likely that they were going about establishing communication in systematic wise; but the naive newcomers had not yet fathomed the system. They dared hope that the first, most basic message had gotten through on both sides and was mutually honest: "Our will is good, we want to be your friends."
Hanno frowned. "Do you imagine they can control gravitation? What about that, PytheasT'
"They give no indication of any such technology," anTHE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS
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swered the ship, "and it is incompatible with known physics."
"Uh-huh. If it did exist, if they could do it, I expect they'd have so many other powers they wouldn't bother with the kind of stuff we've met." Hanno rubbed his chin. "But they could build a spinnable orbital station to our specs."
"A nice little artificial environment, for us to sit in and turn to lard, the way we were doing here?" exploded from Wanderer. "No, by God! Not when we've got a world to walk on!"
Svoboda uttered a cheer. Tu Shan beamed. Patulcius nodded vigorously. "Right," said Macandal after a moment.
"That is provided we can survive there," Yukiko pointed out. "Chemistry, biology—it may be lethal to us."
"Or maybe not," Wanderer said. "Let's get busy and find out."
The ship and its robots commenced that task. In the beginning humans were hardly more than eager spectators. Instruments searched, sampled, analyzed; computers pondered. Boats entered atmosphere.
After several sorties had provided knowledge of surface conditions, they landed. The mtelligent machines that debarked transmitted back their findings. Then as the humans^gained familiarity, they became increasingly a part of the team, first suggesting, later directing and deciding. They were not scientific specialists, nor need they be. The ship had ample information and logic power, the robots abundant skills. The travelers were the embodied curiosity, desire, will of the whole.
Hanno was barely peripheral. His concern was with the Alloi. Likewise did Yukiko's become. He longed most for what they might tell him about themselves and their tarings among the stars; she thought of arts, philosophies, transcendence. Both had a gift for dealing with the foreign, an intuition that often overleaped jumbled, fragmentary data to reach a scheme that gave meaning.
Thus had Newton, Planck, Einstein gone straight to insights that, inexplicably, proved to explain and predict. So had Darwin, de Vries, Oparin. And so, perhaps, had Gautama Buddha.
When explorers on Earth encountered peoples totally foreign to them—Europeans in America, for instance—the
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parties soon groped their way to understanding each other's languages. Nothing like that happened at Tritos. Here the sundering was not of culture and history, nor of species, phylum, kingdom. Two entire evolutions stood confronted. The beings not only did not think alike, they could not.
Compare just the human hand and its Allosan equivalent. The latter had less strength, although the grip was not negligible when all digits laid hold on something. It had vastly more sensitivity, especially in the fine outer branchlets: a lower threshold of perception and a wider, better coordinated field of it. The hairlike ultimate ends clung by molecular wringing, and the organism felt how they did. Thus the subjective world was tactilely richer than ours by orders of magnitude.
Was it optically poorer? Impossible to say, quite likely meaningless to ask. The Allosan "wings"
were partly regulators of body temperature, partly excretors of vaporous waste, mainly networks (?) of sensors. These included organs responsive to light, simpler than eyes but, in their numbers and diversity, perhaps capable of equal precision. Whether this was so or not depended on how the brain processed their input; and there did not seem to be any single structure corresponding to a brain.
Enough. It would probably take Hanno and Yukiko years to learn the anatomy; it would certainly take them longer to interpret it. For the moment, they understood—borrowing terrestrial concepts, grotesquely inappropriate—they were dealing not only with software unlike their own, but hardware.
It was not to be expected that they would readily master its kind of language. Perhaps, beyond some kind of rudiments, they never would.
Presumably the Alloi had had earlier practice among aliens, and had developed various paradigms.
The pair found themselves acquiring facility as they worked, not simply struggling to comprehend but making contributions to the effort. More and more, intent clarified. A primitive code took shape. Material contacts began, cautious to start with, bolder as confidence grew.
The fear was not of violence, or, for that matter— "under these circumstances," said Hanno, grinning—chicanery. It was of surprises that might lurk in a universe where life seemed to be incidental and intelligence accidental. What condition taken for granted by one race might harm the
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other? What innocuous or necessary microbes might elsewhere brew death?
Robots met in space. They traded samples that they took to shielded laboratories for study. (At any rate, it happened aboard Pytheas.) Nanotech and biotech gave quick responses. While the chemistries were similar, even to most arnino acids, the deviations were such as to bar cross-infection. Yes, the specimens sent by the Alloi had things in them that probably corresponded somewhat to viruses; but the fundamental life-stuff resembled DNA no more than a file does a saw.
After repeated experiments of that general sort, robots paid visits to ships. The Allosan machines were graceful, multi-tentacular, a pleasure to watch swooping about. Within the Allosan vessel, the air was thin, dry, but humanly breathable. Temperatures went through cycles, as they did in Pytheas, the range being from cool to chilly. Light was tinged like that from Tritos, less bright than outside but adequate. Centrifugal weight was as predicted, two-thirds of a gee, also sufficient.
As for what else the great hull bore—
Work on Xenogaia proceeded more straightforwardly. Planetology was a mature discipline, a set of techniques, formulas, and computer models. This globe fitted the pattern. Meteorology and climatology were less exact; some predictions could never be made with certainty, for chaos inhered in the equations. However, the overall picture soon emerged.
A strong greenhouse effect overcompensated a high albedo; other things being equal, every clime was hotter than at the same latitude on Earth. Of course, things seldom were equal. Thus the tropics had their pleasant islands as well as their steaming continental swamps or blistering deserts. Axial tilt and rotation rate, once around in slightly more than twenty-one hours, made for powerful cyclonic wind patterns, but the heavy atmosphere and warm polar regions moderated weather almost everywhere. Though conditions were unstable compared to the terrestrial, subject to swifter and often unforeseeable change, dangerous storms were no commoner than on Earth before control. In composition the air was familiar: higher humidity, rather more carbon dioxide, several percent less oxygen. For hu-p;
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mans, the latter was more than made up by the sea-level pressure, twice their standard. It was air they could safely inhale, and uncorrupted.
Life covered, filled, drenched the planet. Its chemistry was akin to the terrestrial and Allosan, with its own uniquenesses. Given considerations of energy, followed by the scores of cases robots had reported to Earth, that was expected. As always, the astonishments sprang from the details, the infinite versatility of protein and inventiveness of nature.
On the prosaic side, humans could eat most things, though probably few would taste very good, some would be poisonous, and none would provide complete nutrition. Probably they would be safe from every predator microbe and virus; mutation might eventually change that, but modern biomedicine should handily cope. For the Survivors, with their peculiar immune and regenerative systems, the hazard would almost be nonexistent. They couki grow terrestrial crops if they chose, and then animals to feed on the grass and grain.
This was not virgin Earth given back to them. It was not Phaeacia of their dreams. Yet here they could make a home.
Here they would have neighbors.
"—and he's been so lonely," Macandal said to Patulcius. "She and Hanno—no, no monkey business between them. Might be better if there were. It's just that they're both wrapped up in their research till it's as if nothing and nobody else quite exists for them. Aliyat's complained to me.
I can't do much for her, but I've gotten an idea about Tu Shan."
She singled out others and gave them the same thought, privately, in words she deemed suited to each. Nobody objected. On the chosen evening, after she had done the poor best that could be done to produce a feast in weightlessness, she called for a vote, and Tu Shan received his surprise.
A spaceboat descended. Assisted by two robots, because initial problems with gravity were unavoidable after this long in orbit, he stepped forth, the first human being on Xenogaia. He had left off his shoes. The soil lay warm and moist. Its odors enriched his breath. He wept.
Shortly afterward, Hanno and Yukiko returned from the
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Allosan ship. The visit had been their first. The six aboard Pytheas gathered around them in the common room. All floated watchful as pikes in a hike. A mural, enlarged from "Falaise d Varengeville"—sea, sky, cliff, its shadow on the water, brush golden with sunlight—seemed more remote in time and space than Monet himself.
"No, I cannot tell you what we saw," Yukiko said, almost \_ like one who speaks in sleep. "We haven't the words, not even for the images they've sent here. But . . . somehow, that interior is alive."
"Not just dead metal and electronic trickery," Hanno added. He was altogether awake, ablaze. "Oh, they've £ much to teach us! And I do believe we'll have news for them, once we've found how to tell it. But it seems they can't come to us in person. We don't know why, what's wrong with our environment, but I think that if they were able to, they would."
"Then they doubtless have the same handicap on the planet," Wanderer said slowly. "We can do what their machines never can. They must be glad we came."
"They are, they are," Yukiko exulted. "They sang to
«o__w US——
"They want us to come live with them!" Hanno cried.
A kind of gasp went around1 the room. "Are you sure?" Svoboda's question was half demand.
"Yes, I am. We've achieved some communication, and it's a simple message, after all." The words tumbled from Hanno. "How better can we get to really know each other and work together? They showed us the section we can have. It's plenty big and we're free to bring over whatever we want, make whatever we like. The weight's enough to keep us fit. The air, the general conditions are no worse than in mountains we remember. We'll get used to that; and we can set up cozy retreats.
Besides, we'll spend a lot of time in space, exploring, discovering, maybe building—**
"No," said Wanderer.
The single sound was a hammerfall. Silence echoed behind it. Eyes sought eyes. One by one, faces stiffened.
"I'm sorry," Wanderer went on. 'This is marvelous. I'm tempted. But we've sailed too many years with the Flying Dutchman. Now there's a world for us, and we're going to take it."
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"Wait, wait," Yukiko protested. "Of course we mean to study Xenogaia. Mainly it, in fact. It, the sapients, they must be why the Alloi have lingered. We'll establish bases, work out of them—"
Tu Shan shook his heavy head. "We will build homes," he answered.
"It is decided," Patulcius said. "We will cooperate with the Alloi when we have seen to our needs.
I daresay we can investigate the planet better, living on it, than in a series of ... of junkets.
Be that as it may—" he smiled coldly—"je suis, je reste."
"Hold on," Hanno argued. "You talk as though you mean to stay on permanently. You know that was never the idea. Xenogaia may be habitable, but it's far from what we had in mind. Eventually we'll take on fresh antimatter. I think the Alloi have a production facility near the sun, but in any case, they'll help us. We'll go to Phaeacia as we intended."
"When?" challenged Macandal.
"When we're finished here."
"How long will that take? Decades, at least. Centuries, possibly. You two will enjoy them. And the rest of us, sure, we'll be fascinated, we'll help whenever we can. But meanwhile and mainly, we have our own lives and rights. And our children's."
"If in the end we leave," Svoboda said low, "it will not be the first home any of us forsook; and first we will have had a home."
Hanno captured her gaze. "You wanted to explore," he recalled.
"And I shall, in a living land. Also ... we need every pair of hands. I cannot desert my comrades."
"You're outvoted," Aliyat said, "and this time you can't do anything about it." She reached to stroke fingers over Hanno's cheek. Her smile quivered. "There are seas down there for you to sail on."
"Since when were you a bold pioneer?" he taunted.
She flushed. "Yes, I'm a city girl, but I can learn. Do you suppose I liked lolling useless? I thought better of you. Well, in the past I crossed deserts, mountains, oceans, I survived in alleys, through wars and plagues and famines. Go to hell."
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"No, please, we must not quarrel," Yukiko pleaded.
"Right," Wanderer agreed. "We'll take our time, think, talk this over like friends."
Hanno straightened, so that he floated upright before the cliff and the sky. "If you want," he said bleakly. "But I can tell you now, in the teeth of your old tribal hope for a consensus, we won't reach any. You're bound and determined to strike roots on the planet. And I, I will not throw away this opportunity the AUoi have offered. I cannot. Instead of fighting, let's plan how we can make the best of what's to be."
Tu Shan's countenance twisted. "Yukiko?" he croaked.
She flew to his arms. He held her close. What she gulped forth was, "Forgive me."
30
"I THINK you should go," Macandal said. "It seems to be something you'd understand best among us."
"No, really," Aliyat began, "you've always—"
Macandal smiled. "You've gotten too shy, honey. Think back. Way back, like to New York."
Still Aliyat hesitated. She wasn't simply unsure whether she could deal with the Ithagene in. what was clearly a critical situation. As a matter of fact, she had gotten more grasp of their language and ways—in some aspects, at least—than anybody else. (Had her earlier life made her quick to catch nuances?) But Tu Shan could ill spare her help, nursing the fields through this season of a drought year; and in spare moments, she was collating the mass of data and writing up the significant experiences that Wanderer and Svoboda sent back from their exploration of the northern woodlands. "I'd have to stay in touch with you anyway," she said.
"Well, that's wise," the other woman replied, "but you'll be on the spot and the only one really qualified to make decisions. I'll support you. We all will."
She was not the boss at Hestia, nobody was, yet it had tacitly come to pass that her word carried the most weight in the councils of the six. More lay behind that than finding the advice was sound. Wanderer had remarked once, "I think we, with our science and high technology, four and a third
•
I
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light-centuries from Earth, are discovering old truths again: spirit, mana, call it what you will.
Maybe, even, God.'*
"Besides," Macandal continued, "I've got my hands full," She always did, her own work, what she shared with Pa-tulcius, what belonged to the community; and at three years, Joseph was several handsful by himself. Her laugh rolled. "Also my belly." Their second. Pregnancy was not disabling, bodies had hardened to Xenogaian weight, but you had better be careful. "Don't worry, we'll pitch in to see your man through; and maybe you won't be gone long." Soberly: "Take what time you need, though. This means a great deal to them. It might mean everything to us."
Therefore Aliyat packed her gear and rations, and departed.
Coming out of her house in the morning, she stopped for a minute and looked. Not yet was the scene too familiar to see. The sky reached milky, an overcast riven in places to reveal the wan blue beyond. Nowhere beneath were the clouds that should have brought rain. Air hung still and hot, full of sulfjury smells. The stream that ran from the eastern hills through the settlement had become little more than a trickle; she barely heard it fall over the verge nearby and tumble to the river. Down in the estuary, banks and bars shone wider than erstwhile at low tide.
Regardless, Hestia abided. The three homes and several auxiliary buildings stood foursquare, -
solidly timbered. Russet native turf between them had withered, but watering preserved the shade trees and the beds of roses, hollyhocks, violets along walls. A kilometer northward, robots were busy around the farmstead and in the fields; the meadow and its cows made a fantastic vividness of green and red. Farther off, the spaceboat reared above the aircraft hangar, into heaven, like a watchtower over the whole small realm. From this height Aliyat spied a brighter gleam on the eastern horizon, the Amethyst Sea.
We'll survive, she knew. At worst, the synthesizers will have to feed us and our livestock till the drought breaks, and next year we'll have to start over. Oh, I hope not. We've worked so hard—machines too few—and hoped so much. An enlarged base, surplus, the future, the children— All right, I have been selfish, not wanting to be bothered
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with any of my own, but isn't Hestia glad that I'm free today?
Elsewhere Minoa reached as of old. South, across the river, forest crowns bore a thousand hues, ocher, brown, greenish bronze, dulled by dryness. The same growth bordered the cleared land on the north; then, westerly on this side, hills climbed. Above their ridges lifted a white blur, Mount Pytheas wrapped in its mists.
Human names. Throat and tongue could form the language of the dwellers after a fashion, understandably if they paid close attention, but soon grew hoarse. The concepts behind that speech were more difficult.
Aliyat turned to kiss Tu Shan goodbye. His body was hard, his arms strong. Already at this hour he smelled of sweat, soil, maleness. "Be careful," he said anxiously.
"You be," she retorted. Xenogaia surely harbored more surprises and treacheries than had struck thus far. He'd been injured oftenest. He was a darling, but drove himself overly hard.
He shook his head. "I fear for you. From what I have heard, this is a sacred matter. Can we tell how they will act?"
"They're not stupid. They won't expect me to know their mysteries. Remember, they asked if somebody would come and—" And what? It wasn't clear. Help, counsel, judge? "They haven't lost their awe of us."
Had they not? What did a creature not of Earth, no kin whatsoever, feel? The natives had certainly been hospitable. They readily gave this piece of ground, had indeed offered a site closer to their city; but the humans feared possible ecological problems. There had been abundant exchange of objects as wejl as ideas, useful as well as interesting or beautiful. But did this prove more than that the Ithagene— another Greek word—had their share of common sense and, one supposed, curiosity?
"I've got to go. Keep well." Aliyat walked off, as fast as was safe under a backpack. She'd developed muscles like a judo black belter's, which gave a terrifically sexy figure and gait, but bones remained all too breakable.
Someday we'll leave. Phaeacia waits, promising us to be
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like Earth. Does she lie? How much will we miss this world of toils and triumphs?
Four Ithagene waited at the head of the path. They wore mesh mail and their hook-halberds gleamed sharp. They were an honor guard; or so she thought of them. Deferential, they divided to precede and follow her down the switchbacks across the fjord wall to the river. At the floating dock, the envoy was already in the vessel that brought them. Long, gracefully curved at prow and stern, it little resembled the two human-made boats tied nearby. No more did it have rowers, though, and the yards were bare of sails. A motor, such as the fabricator robots had lately, accumulated the resources to make, was an imperial gift. Supplies of fuel renewed it ongoingly.
The humans often wondered what they were doing to this civilization, for good or ill—ultimately, to this world.
Aliyat recognized S'saa. That was as closely as she could render the name. She did her best with a phrase that they guessed, in Hestia, was half formal greeting, half prayer. Lo responded in kind.
("Lo, le, la." What else could you say when sexes were three, none corresponding quite to male or female or neuter, and the language lacked genders?) She and her escort boarded, a crew member cast off, another took the rudder, the motor purred, they bore upstream.
"May you now tell me what you want?" Aliyat asked.
"The matter is too grave for uttering elsewhere than in the Halidom," S'saa answered. "We shall sing of it."
The notes keened forth to set an emotional tone, prepare both body and mind. Aliyat heard distress, anger, fear, bewilderment, resolution. Surely much escaped her, but in the past year or two she had finally begun to comprehend, yes, feel such music, as she had failed to do with many kinds on Earth. Wanderer and Macandal were experimenting with adaptations of it, composing songs of quiet, eerie power.
You wouldn't have thought of these beings as artists. Barrel torsos, some one hundred fifty centimeters tall on four stumpy limbs, covered with big scales or flaps, brown and leathery, that could individually lift to show a soft pink un-dersurface for fluid intake, excretion, sensing; no head to speak of, a bulge on top where a mouth underlay one scale and four retractable eyestalks protruded; four tentacles below, each terminating in four digits, that could be stiffened THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS
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at will by turgor. But how repulsive did a body look that was scaleless as a flayed corpse? The humans took care always to be fully clothed among Xenogaians.
Rapidly driven, the boat passed several galleys bound the same way, then numbers of lesser craft
"fishing" or freighting. None were going downstream; the tide had begun to flow, and although the moon was fairly distant today, the bore up the river would be considerable. At ebb the argosies would set forth. This was a seafaring nation (?) whose folk hunted great aquatic beasts and harvested great weed fields, traded around the coasts and among the islands, occasionally fought pirates or barbarians or whatever their enemies were. As tactfully as possible, the six at Hestia refused to give any military aid. They didn't know the rights or wrongs, they only knew that this appeared to be the most advanced civilization on the planet but someday they'd want to start getting acquainted with more. Of course, doubtless .their local friends had found uses both warlike and peaceful for what they acquired from them.
A pair of hours slipped by. On the south side, forest gave way to orchards and croplands. Foliage drooped sere. On die north, while hills heightened in the background, bluffs declined to gentle slopes. Towers came into hazy view, grew clearer, loomed sheer above masts crowded along the wharfs; and Aliyat went ashore into Xenoknossos.
Warded by stream and fleet, the city had no need of outer walls. Along wide, clean streets, colonnades and facades rose intricately sculptured. Glass flashed in color patterns of contrasting simplicity. The effect was not busy but harmonious, airy, like trees and vines in wind or kelp in currents, undersea, strange to behold on a world that dragged so heavily. The raucous turbulence of human crowds was absent. Dwellers moved deliberately; even the looks and remarks that followed Aliyat were decorous. It was their voices that danced, twittered, strove, joined together—their voices and the sounds of instruments from places where they took their pleasure.
Not all was thus. Climbing a hill, she saw down to a camp outside the city, a wretched huddle of makeshift shelters. The beings within stood ominously bunched. Armed guards were posted about.
Chill touched her. This must, somehow, be the reason she was called.
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On the hilltop fountained the building she knew as the Halidom. Its stone had weathered pale amber. Nothing like its interwoven, many-branched vaults and arches, spiral wm-dows and calyx eaves, was ever on Earth. Imagination yonder had never ranged in those directions. When the images arrived, architecture, together with musk and poesy and much else, might well have a rebirth, if anybody still cared about such things.
S'saa accompanied her inside. A chamber vast and dim opened before them. The mighty of Xenoknossos had gathered, expectant, in a half circle before a dais. Thereon were those three, one of each sex, who reigned or presided or led. Hearing tell of them, Hanno had from space proposed dubbing them the Triad, but later those at Hestia thought a better word might be the Triune.
She approached.
—That night she radioed back from the apartment lent her. She camped in it, really, as ill suited as the furnishings were; but it served. A window was unshuttered to warm darkness, the booming of a breeze. The small horned moon tinted clouds and cast ghostly shimmers on the river. Fires burned sullen among the squatters in the field.
Exhaustion flattened her voice, though her mind had seldom felt more awake. "We've been at it all day," she said. "Not that the trouble is complicated in itself, but it involves beliefs, traditions, prejudices, everything that's so knitted into a person— Think of a pagan Celt and a pious Muslim trying to explain, to justify, the status and rights of women to each other."
"The Ithagene did have the wisdom to ask for an outside opinion," Patulcius remarked. "How many human societies ever did?"
"Well, this is unprecedented," Wanderer answered from the outback. "We never had any real aliens among us on Earth. Maybe in future we'll benefit— Go on, Aliyat."
"It's how they breed," copulating in fresh water, which must be still if conception was to result; a certain concentration of certain dissolved organic materials was essential. That set no more of a handicap, on a world where most regions were normally wet, than loss of the ability to synthesize vitamin C in the body had done for her species. "You remember, the city people use that lake in the hills behind
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town." Holy Lake became the human name, for it seemed lovemaking was a religious rite in this society. "Well, throughout the hinterlands, most others have dried up to the point where they're useless. The habitants have gotten together and demand access to Holy Lake till the drought's over. It's badly shrunken too, but enough is left for everybody if triples ration their turns."
Aliyat's laugh clanked. "How that would go over with our race! But of course the Ithagene don't think of it the way we do. What has the Xenoknossians up in arms is the thought of ... outsiders profaning their particular mystery, the presence of their, their tutelary spirit or god or whatever it is. The Triune told the countryfolk to go home and wait out the bad times. They shouldn't breed anyway till the rains come again. But you know about the sacred Year-Births—"
"Yes," Tu Shan said. "Besides, they live primitively, infant mortality is always high, they feel they must be fecund whatever happens."
"The realm, this whole section of Minoa, is close to civil war," Aliyat told them. "There've been killings. Now the, uh, tribes have jointly sent two or three thousand here, who insist that soon, come what may, they'll go to the lake. Nothing can stop them, short of a massacre. Nobody wants that, but to give in could tear things apart almost as terribly."
Macandal whistled low. "And we had no idea. If only they'd come to us sooner."
"I don't suppose it occurred to them before they got desperate," Patulcius guessed. "If we don't find a solution fast, I suspect it will be too late."
"That's why you went, Aliyat." Macandal's tone wavered. "I gathered, from S'saa's hints, that it concerned this kind of thing, and you, with your experience— Don't misunderstand!"
"No offense," Aliyat said. "I did, I hope, slowly get a feel for what's going on, and a notion. It may be worthless."
"Tell us," Svoboda begged.
—If you could use human words for Ithagenean emotions and make sense, Aliyat thought, then the assembly next morning was appalled. "No!" exclaimed the le of the Triune. "This is impossible!"
"Not so, Foreseers," she maintained. "It can be quickly 502
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and easily done. Behold." She unfolded a sheet of paper. Copied thereon, a transmission from Hestia to a machine she had earned along, was an enlarged aerial photograph of Holy Lake and its vicinity. The Ithagene didn't object to overflights, though none had ever accepted an invitation to ride. (Did some instinct forbid, was it a prohibition, or what?) She pointed. "The lake lies as hi a bowl, fed by rain and runoff. Here, a short way below, is a hollow. Let us clear it of trees and brush, then dig a channel through the hill above. Some of the life-giving water will drain out to fill it, while enough will remain for yon after the channel is closed again. There, out of sight of your people, the countryfolk can engender according to their own customs. For you this would be a huge undertaking, but you know of our machines and explosives. We will do it for you."
Hissings and rustlings filled the, gloom. S'saa must explain to Aliyat, patching out the native language with what human speech lo commanded: "Although they are reluctant, they would agree, lest worse befall. However, they fear the habitants will refuse, will take the proposal as a deadly threat. Knowing Kth and Hru'ngg, the leaders, I think this is true. For a life-site is not any pond; it is hallowed by ancient use, by the life it has given in the past. To triple elsewhere would be to set the work) awry. The rains might never return, or the violators might never have another birth." Dismay struck whetted. "You don't believe that!" "Not we who are here, no. But those are simple upcoun-try folk. And it is true that not all bodies of water grant the blessing.
Many do not, though surely they were tried at some time."
"That is because—oh—oh, Christ, what's the use?" "Water flows from your eyes. Do you invoke?" "No, I— You have no word. Yes, I invoke the dead, and the loss, and— Wait! Wait!" "You leap, you raise your arms, you utter noises." "I, I have a new thought. Maybe this will serve. I must ask the council. Then I must. . . must doubtless go to the habitants and . . . learn if it feels right to them." Aliyat turned around to face the Triune.
—For days heaven had been almost dear, an iron-hard blue, clouds nowhere but in the west. Heat lightning sometimes nickered yonder, and thunder muttered into wind-THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS
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lessness. Now sunset reddened those reaches. Its beams struck through gaps and down valleys until they splashed the new tarn as if with human blood. Trees bulked black against h. More and more, the Ithagene gathered in their hundreds became masses of shadow, a wall around the water. Their singing beat like a heart.
Out of them trod the Eldritch Ones, three couples, for it was known that that was their nature. On their right walked the Foreseers of the City, lanterns aloft on poles to cast many-patterned light; on their left, torches flared and smoked among the Sower Chieftains. These halted at the marge. The six went onward.
Aliyat felt drowned turf crisp beneath her feet. The water lapped around her ankles, knees, loins.
Warmth from the day remained in it, but a coolness was rising from below, a pledge to years unborn. "Here's where we stop," she said. *The bottom slopes fast. Farther on, we'd soon be over our heads." She couldn't fight back a giggle. "That'd make it bard to go about this dignified, wouldn't it?"
"I am not sure what we should do," Tu Shan confessed.
"Nothing much. We have our clothes on, after all. They don't know how we make babies anyway. But we must take our time and—" A sudden odd shyness: "And get them to see we love each other."
His arms enfolded her. She pressed herself close. Their mouths met. Vague in the twilight, she glimpsed Patulcius and Macandal, Wanderer and Svoboda. The hymn from the shore reached into her.
A necking party in a pool, she thought craztty. Ridiculous. Absurd as real lovemaking, as everything human, everything alive. We've sailed from those stars blinking forth overhead, to stage a Stone Age fertility rite.
But it was working. It consecrated the mere, it kindled the magic. In peace would Minoa await the resurrection of the land.
"Tu Shan," she whispered, straining against him, "when we get home, I want your child."
31
"JOYFUL is the word that has come to us," related the Allos whom the humans thought of as Lightfall. "Share it. From rendezvous has it fared, the closest rendezvous, 147 light-years yonder." Many-branched fingers marked off a part of 504
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the sky, then closed on a point within. Made by a shape that looked so frail, limned against naked space as revealed in a transparency of the ship, the gesture became doubly strong.
The direction was well away from Sol, but not toward Pegasi. The Alloi had roved widely from the world that mothered their race.
"Rendezvous," said Yukiko, perforce aloud and in a language of Earth. She was understood, as she understood what was communicated to her. However, difficulties and failures of comprehension were still many. That was inevitable, when minds could not translate directly what senses perceived, but must pass it through a metalanguage worked out in the course of years. "I do not quite identify your reference."
"Starfarers have established stations, orbital about chosen suns, to which they report their discoveries and experiences," Quicksilver explained. "These pass the information on to the rest.
So do nodes of knowledge grow, and the beams between them form nets that piece by piece knit together."
Hanno nodded. He had been aware of this; his explorations with Alloi companions had taken him near the vast gossamer web they had made to circle Tritos, while Yukiko was searching into their arts, philosophies, dreams. "There's a primitive version in the Solar System," he reminded her. "Or was, when we left. After they start receiving our 'casts, they can upgrade it and join the community."
"If they care to." She looked out to where stars drowned in the icy cataract of their own numbers, and away again, with a slight shudder. What she and he had learned here gave scant hope of that.
Hanno was less daunted. "What is this news?" he asked avidly.
"A ship came to the rendezvous," Lightfall told. "All do thus from time to time, that they may take in the fresh data; for the stations cannot well broadcast continuously to those who may be anywhere, at any velocity. Such of. our report on this system as had arrived by then determined the crew on proceeding next to Tritos. We have encountered them before; it is clear to us that the Xenogaians hold special interest and promise for them. May we have an image?"
"Provided," agreed Star Wing, and activated a projector.
A hulking form sprang forth. Hanno's immediate thought was of a rhinoceros. Granted, the resemblance was faint and fanciful, like comparing a man to a caterpillar. The body was of minor interest in any case, except insofar as it was the matrix of mind, of spirit.
"Y-yes," he ventured, "they're from a big planet too, aren't they? I daresay they see just enough cultural similarity here to themselves that they may reap a harvest of ideas from the differences."
Yukiko's eyes shone. "When will they come?"
"Their message is that they wished to spend a few years at the rendezvous first, studying and thinking about the data," Lightfall imparted. "That is usual, to take advantage of facilities that no vessel can accommodate. Doubtless they are on their way at this moment. Since they are accustomed to high accelerations, they should arrive just a few months later than their announcement that they have set forth."
"Several years yet, then." Yukiko smiled. "Time to prepare a festive reception."
"Do they travel by the same doctrine as you?" Hanno Inquired.
"Yes," Lightfall answered, "which we recommend you also adopt."
"I'm thinking about it. We'd need some basic modifications hi our ship, you know."
"More in your thoughts."
"Toucht!" Hanno laughed. "Conceded, we are impatient parvenus."
The Alloi did not boost continuously between stars. They got close to tight speed, then went on free trajectory, using centrifugal weight. The saving in antimatter allowed huge hulls, with everything that that implied. The price was that time dilation became less. A journey that might have been accomplished in ten shipboard years would take perhaps twice as long; and the farther you went, the larger the factor grew. All voyagers were ageless, but none escaped from time.
The practice accounted for observers at Sol never having picked up sign of starcraft. Enormous though the energies were, radiation was only at beginning and end of a passage, a candle-flicker; and starcraft were very few.
"Perhaps you do yourself an injustice," suggested Volant.
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"Perhaps your hastiness will fill a need we older spacegoing races did not know we had. You may go beyond this tiny segment of the galaxy that we have reached, from end to end of it, in less than a million cosmic years. You may be those who weave it together."
Yukiko's hands fluttered. "No, no. You honor us far beyond what we deserve,"
"Let us abide the future," flowed from Star Wing: the patience of ancientness. These beings had left Pegasi fifteen thousand years ago; no individual lifetime of theirs was shorter than half of that. They knew of explorations that had been going on, in other directions, a hundred times as long.
"Well, this is ... wonderful," Hanno said. Glancing at Yukiko: "Maybe you can find words, dear.
I'm dumbstruck."
She caught his hand. "You brought us here. You."
They had become able to sense when AHoi turned grave. "Friends," Lightfall told them, "you must make certain decisions among yourselves. Soon after the—(?)—arrive, we will leave." Through shock and suddenly racketing pulse, they gathered: "You may remain if you desire. They will be rapturous at meeting new members of the fellowship. You can help them, and they help you, to know Xenogaia and its awarenesses, quite likely even more than you and we have helped each other. Everything that we have built in this system shall stay for your use."
"But, but you go away?" Yukiko stammered. "Why?"
Stalky limbs traced symbols. Membranes quivered; opalescences ran over them. The declaration was calm, inexorable, and maybe, maybe regretful. "We have spent more than four centuries at Tritos. I believe you realize that was partly because of what we had detected from Sol: our hope, which was fulfilled, that we could call travelers from there to us. Meanwhile we explored these planets and above all the diverse Me-ways, histories, achievements, horrors, glories of the sentients on Xenogaia. It was effort richly rewarded, as we foreknew it would be. Another whole concept of the universe opened for us. Something of what we learned has entered our inwardness.
"And yet you humans, in your decade and a half, have gathered more than we imagined was there. It happens your
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home world, your evolution, more closely resembles theirs. Nature has better prepared you to comprehend them.
"For our part, we found ourselves drawn to you as never to them. You too are the kind of beings who reach for the stars.
"We could stay here till this sun begins to die, and not discover all that there is to discover; for it is so much, and always changing. Life is a rare thing, sapience more seldom yet. Why, then, will we not linger?
"It is that we hope for more than we have gained here; and we know that if we seek long enough, we shall find it."
Hanno had nothing but merchant words. "I see. You've gone past the point of diminishing returns.
Your best strategy is to start fresh."
As it seemed mother civilizations did not, could not.
"Will you go on to Sol?" Yukiko asked unsteadily.
"Someday, perhaps," Star Wing conveyed.
"Likelier not," Quicksilver asserted. "I think that what you have revealed to us will suffice—for they have been evolving onward."
"Let Sol and Pegasi communicate," Volant scoffed.
"No, you are too impetuous, and too thoughtless of our friends," Lightfall admonished. "We have years ahead of us in which to consider." To the mimans: "You too, with your kindred down on the planet, you must take thought. Do you wish to commence at once?"
Hanno and Yukiko traded a look. Mutely, she nodded. After a moment, he did likewise. They bowed, one of many motions that had gradually acquired eloquence, and went from the coralline room.
A passageway took them along the great curve of the ship. Past the part of it that was alive stretched, today, a simulated vista of ruddy hills, lean crags, fronds rippling around a frozen pool, beneath a violet-blue sky where rings arched tike undying rainbows—a world the AJloi had once come upon and found beautiful, for it was much as then* mother world was before the machines.
They had left colonists.
Beyond lay a room of exercise equipment made for the humans. It could be spun through a hollow ring around the hull to provide higher weight. Thus did they maintain a physical condition that allowed them to visit the planet with-508
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out being too badly handicapped in relation to those who lived there.
Farther on was their home section, Yukiko's little garden, a post upholding the model of a caravel that Hanno had once constructed, the compartment that housed them. Air inside it remained thin and dry, but it was warm and to their eyes the lighting was pure white.
The three rooms held their possessions, a few carried from Earth, more that were remembrances of their years here, but there was no clutter. He kept his sailor's tidiness, she her basic austerity. Opposite the electronic complex a calligraphic scroll hung above a low table where a bowl of water contained a single shapely stone.
They removed their outer garments. "Shall I make tea?" she proposed.
"Do, if you like." His face drew taut. "I want to call plan-etside now."
"Well, it is tremendous news, but we shall have to talk about it over and over—"
"In person. We're going down and stay a while, you and I."
"That will be very welcome," she sighed. "Yes, I admit I'll enjoy some unfaked shirtsleeve outdoors, a sea, a salt wind."
"And our comrades, not images but real flesh again. How the children must have grown."
He missed the wistfulness, and not until later did he recall how ardently she entered into the life around her when they touched down. The occasions had been infrequent and brief. You must live with the Alloi, work side by side with them, share hardships and dangers as well as victories and celebrations, if you would reach an understanding of them and of what they had won on their endless voyage. To him the sacrifices were small.
"Never mind how many years we may have to make ready," he said. "We'd better begin straightaway."
She smiled. "You mean that you cannot sit still for a cup of tea."
Ignoring the gentle gibe, he settled before the complex and ordered a beam to Hestia. The ship was at present above the opposite hemisphere, but the Alloi had long since orbited relay satellites.
The screen came alight. "Summon-
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ing," said the artificial voice. A minute passed, and another. "Summoning."
Yukiko brought up an outside view. The planet shone blue-veined white. Lightnings threaded the darkened edge. She smote hands together. "We forgot!" she cried. "It's night where they are."
"Damn," said Hanno without remorse.
Svoboda's likeness entered the screen, three-dimensional, as if she herself stood behind a shut window. Her hair was tousled. A robe hastily thrown on gaped over milk-heavy breasts. "What's wrong?" she exclaimed.
"No emergency," Hanno replied. "News. I'll tell you, you tell whoever else got roused, and then go back to sleep if you can."
She bridled. "It couldn't wait?"
"Listen." He made his announcement in short, clanging words. "We need to begin studying what information the Alloi can give us about these other beings, as soon as they've assembled it.
Before then we need to confer. Yukiko and I— Expect our boat, m-m, shortly after sunrise. . . .
What's the matter?"
"What is the hurry?" Svoboda's response crackled. "Aren't you aware this is harvest season? We'll be working ourselves sweatless, people an8 robots both, for the next several days. We already are.
I heard the summons only because I'd just fallen asleep after the baby kept me awake for hours.
Now you want us to sweep and garnish quarters for you and meet in instant council."
"Don't you core? Why in hell's name did you sign on?"
"We're sorry," Yukiko interjected. "We were so excited, everything else dropped from our minds.
Pardon us."
The other woman fleered. "Is he sorry?"
"Hold on," Hanno said. "I made a mistake. But this that's happening—"
Svoboda cut him off. "Yes, it's important. But so is your arrogance. The main thing you're forgetting is that you, sit-ttag up there in the sky, are not God Almighty."
"Please," Yukiko begged.
• Hanno spoke coldly. "I am the captain. I'll have respect ,ftom you."
• 'J Svoboda shook her head. A blond lock tossed on her temple. "That has changed. Nobody is indispensable any
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longer. We'll accept whatever leader we may need, if we judge that person will serve us well." She paused. "Somebody will call tomorrow, when we've conferred, and make proper arrangements." With a smile: "Yukiko, this isn't your fault. Everybody knows that. Goodnight." The screen blanked.
Hanno sat staring into it.
Yukiko went to stand behind him, a hand on his shoulder. "Don't take this hard," she said. "She was simply short on sleep, therefore short on temper. After she has rested, she will shrug it off."
He shook his head. "No, it goes deeper than that. I hadn't realized—we've been away too much—down underneath, they carry their resentment yet."
"No. I swear not. No more. You did bring them, us to something far more wonderful and meaningful than we had dared hope for. It is true, you are not vitally necessary now. Your captaincy is not unquestioned. And you did act thoughtlessly. But the wound is nothing, it will heal by morning."
"Some things never heal." He rose. "Well, no use brooding." A crooked grin. "What about that cup of tea?"
She regarded him in silence before she said, most quietly, "You two can still hurt one another, can you not?"
His voice went brusque. "How often do you miss Tu Shan?" He drew her to him. "Regardless, these have been good years for me. Thank you."
She laid her cheek against his breast. "And for me."
He forced a chuckle. "I repeat, what became of the tea?"
32
FIRST LIGHT grayed the east, made dull silver of the stream. Heights westward hulked black and haze dimmed a sinking huge moon. The waterfall rushed loud down its cuff into the river, which clucked and purled. Coolness blew, laden with silty odors.
Hanno and Wanderer stood on the dock. Then- tongues felt awkward. "Well," said Wanderer, "have fun."
"You too," Hanno replied. "Uh, how long did you say you'd be gone?"
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"Don't know for sure. Three, four days. But you come home this evening, hear me?"
"Of course. We Phoenicians never spent a night at sea if we could help it."
Wanderer's shadowed countenance darkened further. "I wish you wouldn't go at all. Especially alone."
"I heard you before. You're going alone yourself, and not even taking a communicator along."
"That's different. I know those woods. But none of us really know the waters. We've just puttered around a little in our boats or taken passage with natives, and that was to study the crew, not the seamanship."
"Look, Peregrino, I know perfectly well the conditions aren't identical with Earth. I've tried them out, remember? Please remember, too, that I was sailing, in flimsier vessels than I like thinking about, two thousand years before you
--were born. Always the second law of the sea is 'Take care."'
"What's the first?"
"'It's in the bilge!"'
They laughed together a bit. "Okay, okay," Wanderer said. "So we both need to go walkabout, in our different ways. I suspect the same's true for Corinne. She didn't really have to confer with the Triune at this exact time." He left unspoken: Escape, relief, slack off the tension that has built up in us through these past days of wrangling. Shall we abide here, shall we accompany the Ailoi when they leave, or what? Seek within ourselves for our true desires. We have years yet in which to decide, but the divisions between us have festered longer than that, ranker than we knew.
"Thanks for your help," said Hanno.
"De nada, amigo." They shook hands. It was the heartiest clasp Hanno had ever felt, or given, in Hestia. He couldn't ask outright, but he believed Wanderer had altogether forgiven him. Well, whatever rift had occurred was not over something fundamental to the man's life, as for some others; and from Wanderer's viewpoint, events had fairly well vindicated his old friend. At these latest con-daves of the eight, they had argued side by side.
-.', -It wasn't the same with Macandal, Patulcius, Aliyat, Tu Sfaan, Svoboda—Svoboda— Oh, she was perfectly gracious;
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agreement, she and Yukiko stayed abed when their men got up to carry the gear down to the boat.
Wanderer turned. His stride whispered over the dock, bis tall form strode up the path and disappeared hi remnant darknesses. Hanno boarded. Quickly he uncovered and unfurled the mainsail, took the jib from its bag, raised them, cleated the sheets, cast off. Hie fabric stood ghost-white athwart strengthening dawn, slatted, caught wind and filled. Ariadne listed over and slipped downstream.
She was a sweet little craft, a six-meter sloop that on Earth would once have been an ocean racer (who there went sailing any more?), built at odd moments by Tu Shan with robot help according to plans in the database. Mainly, he had wanted to make something beautiful as well as purposeful. It turned out that nobody found time to use her much, finally not at all. The Ithagene were intrigued, but the layout was wrong for them. Hanno patted the deck beside the cockpit. "Poor girl," he said. "Did you cry sometimes at night, lying always alone? We'll take a real run today, we will." Surprised, he noticed he had spoken hi Punic. When had he last?
The estuary broadened. Unhindered, the land breeze blew harder. He had it, the current, and the tide to bear him. Ebb should end just about when he reached the sea; stack water for the transition was desirable. Waves, rips, every kind of turbulence went faster, more forcefully, less foreseeably on Xenogaia, under its gravity, than on Earth. The sun rose ahead, blurred and reddened by overcast, not so far to starboard as it would have been on Earth at this latitude and time of year. Though the planet rotated somewhat faster, the axial tilt promised him a long, long summer day. Cloud banks towered murky in the south. He hoped they wouldn't move northward and rain on him. The wettest season had passed, but you never knew. Xenogaian meteorology was still largely guesswork. The parameters were unfamiliar; the humans and then* computers had too much else, too much more interesting, to consider. Also, it seemed the weather was highly unstable. Chaos, in the physics sense of the word, took over early in any sequence. Well, this was a sturdy, forgiving boat; he and Wanderer had carried down an outboard for her; if he got in bad trou-THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS
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ble, he could call, and an aircraft would come take him off. He scowled at the thought.
Think about pleasanter things, then. Faring out again among the stars— No, that cut too near. That was what divided the house of the Survivors against itself.
You couldn't blame those who wanted to stay. They'd toiled, suffered, wrought mightily; this had become home for them, it was the cosmos for their children. As for those who wanted to quest, why, Minoa with its multitudinous realms was only one continent on an entire world. For those who would liefest dwell near nonhumans, a whole new race of them was coming. What more dared you wish?
Dismiss it for now. Lose yourself in this day.
The sea opened before Ariadne, eunmetal whitecaps, surge and brawl, wind abruptly southeast and stiff. She leaped, leaned, ran happily lee rail under. It throbbed in deck and tiller. The wind sang. Spindrift blew salt kisses. Hanno closed his jacket and drew up its hood against the chill.
Fingers brushed the gas cartridge that would at need inflate it. Tricky sailing, and nis muscles not yet fully retrained to bear his weight. He couldn't have singlehanded -were it not for the servos and computer. At that, he must pay constant heed. Good. So did be wish it to be.
A native ship was inbound, beating across the wind, a bravery of sails. She must have lain out, waiting for the tide to turn. Now she would ride the flow upstream, doubtless to Xenoknossos.
Probably she would have to take shelter in one of the bays .the Ithagene had dug along the banks, while the bore went rumbling by. It would be especially dangerous today; the moon was both full and close.
Northward, some five kilometers off the mainland, water churned and jumped white, black forms reared up—the Forbidden Ground, a nasty patch of rocks and shoals. A current from the south swept strongly around it. Hanno trimmed his sails. He wanted to be well clear before the incoming tide reinforced that rush.
Tacking, he made for the nearest of three islands that lay dim in the eastern distance. He would scarcely get that far before midafteraoon, when prudence dictated he turn back, but it was something to steer by.
A goal, he thought. A harbor I won't make. Odysseus, setting forth from ashy Troy for Ithaca, lured by the Lotus
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Eaters, bereaved by the Cyclops, at strife with winds and wild men, seduced by an enchantress who took away humanity, descending to the dead, raiding the fields of the sun, passing through the gate of destruction, made captive by her who loved him, cast ashore at Phaeacia—but Odysseus came home at last.
How many ports had he, Hanno, foiled to make in his millennia? All?
Tritos climbed to a breach hi the overcast. Light flamed. He sailed on the Amethyst Sea, and it was strewn with diamond dust and the manes of the waves blew white. It was as lovely and wild as a woman.
Tanithel, her black hair garlanded with anemones, who whispered her wish that she had not had to sacrifice her virginity in the temple before she came to him; Adoniah, who read the stars from her tower above Tyre—twice he cast anchor, the lights of home glimmered through dusk, and then ebb tide bore that country off and he lay again on empty waters. Afterward—Merab, Althea, Nirouphar, Cordelia, Brangwyn, Thorgerd, Maria, Jehanne, Margaret, Natalia, O Ashtoreth, the dear ghosts were beyond counting or remembering, but had they ever been much more than ghosts, belonging as they did to death? To men he felt closer, they could not bear the same thing off with them— Baalram, Thuti, Umlele, Pytheas, Ezra, rough old Rufus, yes, that hurt, somewhere inside himself Hanno had forever mourned Rufus. Stop sniveling!
The wind skirled louder. Ariadne heeled sharply. The sun disappeared behind gray, beneath which wrack began to fly. CLoud masses bulked mountainous, drawing closer. Lightning sprang about in their blue-black caverns. The islands were lost in scud-haze, the mainland aft lay low and vague.
"What time is it?" Hanno asked. He whistled when the computer told him. His body had sailed for him while his mind drifted awash hi the past, longer than he knew.
He'd grown hungry too without noticing, but would be rash to trust the helm to the machinery even to duck below and fix a sandwich. "Give me Hestia," he ordered the communicator. "Summoning."
"Hello, hello, is anybody there? Hanno calling."
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Wind tore Yukiko's voice from the speaker, seas trampled its tatters underfoot. He barely heard:
"—frightened for you . . . satellite report . . . weather moving faster and faster . . . please—"
"Yes, certainly, I'll return. Don't worry. This boat can take a knockdown and right herself. I'll be back for supper." If I catch the tide right. Got to keep well offshore till I can run straight down the slot- Well, the motor has plenty of kilowatts. Better that to claw off with than men rowing till their hearts burst.
He didn't want to use it unless and until he must. He needed a fight, wits and nerve as well as sinews against the wolf-gods. Coming around was a long and tough maneuver. Once a wave smashed clear across the deck. Ariadne shuddered, but still her mast swayed on high, an uplifted lance.
Gallant girl. Like Svoboda—like all of them, Yukiko, Cor-inne, Aliyat, all of them Survivors in ways their men had never had to be.
He did let the servos keep the tiller while he shortened sail. A sheet escaped his grasp and slashed his wrist before he captured and cleated it. Spume washed the blood off. The world had gone dark, driving gray, save for the lightning flashes southward. Water swung to and fro in the cockpit till the pump flung it overside. He remembered bailing Pytheas' ship during a Baltic storm. As he took the helm back, a song abruptly lilted through his head. "Oh, hand me down my walking cane—" Where had it come from? English language, old, old, nineteenth or early twentieth century, impudent, a pulsing, railroad kind of tune.
"—Oh, Mama, come go my bail, Get me out of this God damn jail. All my sins are taken away."
Railroad, the West, a world that had seemed boundless but lost its horizons and itself in a blink of centuries and was one with Troy. Then some looked starward and dreamed of New America. The upshot . . . machines, eight human beings, immensities as impassable and unanswering as death.
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"Oh, hett is deep and hell is wide, Oh, hell is deep and hell is wide, Oh, hell is deep and hell is wide, Ain't got no bottom, ain't got no side. All my sins are taken away."
Hanno showed the wind his teeth. Odysseus went there and won back. If the stars held no New America, they offered what was infinitely more.
The noise rammed him. It was a monstrous rush and boom, pierced by a risen screech. To port the cloud wall had vanished behind a whiteness that overran waves and kilometers.
"Strike sail!" he bawled. That was not merely a gale, that was a line squall come from behind sight and bound for him. Weather on Xenogaia heeded no law of Grecian Aeolus. Wind speeds were commonly low, but when they did go high, they bore twice the weight of violent air. His left hand took the switch that lowered the outboard. Point bows into seas and hold them fast!
Trie fist smote. Rain flayed and blinded. Waves topped the rails. Ariadne climbed, swayed amidst cataracting foam, plunged into troughs. Hanno clung.
Something snatched him.
He was down in roaring black. He whirled and tumbled. At the middle of it rested a cold steadiness, his mind. I'm overboard, he knew. Inflate the jacket. Don't breathe water or you're done.
He broke surface, gasped air full of rain and salt foam, threshed limbs against heaviness that tore. The hood swelled into a pillowlike collar, upbearing his head as the rest of the garment floated his body. He squinted about. Where was the boat? No sign of her. He didn't think she'd gone under, not that staunch little lady, but wind and waves must have borne her from him, maybe not very far as yet— far enough, though, when he could see only the billows savaging him.
What had happened? His brain cleared, shook off shock, became a computer programmed to calculate survival. Wind might have caught the unfurled loose mainsail, swung the hull around, shoved it so low that a broaching sea swept him out. Well, if he kept alert, he'd drift free till rescue came.
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That should be soon after this flaw of weather had passed. Yukiko was probably trying right now to call him. An aircraft— Those carried aboard Pytheas were designed for Phaeacia. They flew on Xenogaia, but it was rather precarious; given conditions at all unusual, you needed a human pilot as well as the machine. Maybe the Hestia folk should have ordered modifications, but the job was big, they had so much else on hand, they could stay aground when in doubt.
Pilots. Wanderer's the best, I think that's generally agreed. He's out of touch today. Otherwise Svoboda; and she's got her kid to think about. The colony is tiny, a beachhead on a shore not made for our kind. She has no right to risk herself needlessly. Of course, she will take off the moment it looks practical, which should be when this gust is over. High winds aren't an unacceptable hazard in themselves, if they're reasonably steady.
The trick will be to stay alive till then. Exposure is the enemy. This water isn't too cold, it's a warm current from the south. However, a few degrees below skin temperature will suck the heat out in time. I remember— But that was on another voyage, and besides, the men are dead. I also know some ancient Asian ways of controlling blood flow; at dire need, I can call up my* ultimate reserves, while they last.
Swim. Save your strength, but do not let yourself be rolled about and smothered. Find the rhythms.
Who was it, what goddess, who lived at the bottom of the sea and spread her nets for sailormen?
Oh, yes, Ran of the Norse. Shall we dance, my lady Ran?
Wind screamed, seas crashed. How long had this gone on? No telling. A minute could amount to an hour, reverse time dilation, the cosmos flying away from a man. He'd been mistaken about the blow.
It wasn't any quick squall. Though rain had thinned, the wind raved wilder. Unforeseen, unforeseeable, as ignorant as men and, yes, their smug machines still were. The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you.
Thunder ahead. Hanno rose onto a crest. He saw black teeth, the rocks and skerries, the Forbidden Ground. Water seethed, geysered, exploded. The current had swept him to 518
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this. Flashingly, he hoped Ariadne remained free, for her people to recover. He readied himself.
It was hard to do. A sense of warmth hi hands and feet crept treacherously toward his breast. He knew that consciousness was dimming; he couldn't tell which lights had by now gone out.
A comber took him along.
He smashed into the white.
White. ... He lay on stone. Weed wrapped him, yellow-brown ropes. Waves roiled and roared under a low, flying sky. Oftener and oftener, water rushed over the roughness beneath him. He would inhale it, choke, cough, reach for air.
He scarcely noticed. Cold, pain, struggle were of the world, the storm. Impersonal, he watched them, like a man drowsy at his hearthside watching flames. The rising tide would claim him, but he would not be here. He would be— where? What? He didn't know. It didn't matter.
So this is how it ends. Not too bad a way for an old sailor-man. I do wish I could lie remembering. But memory slips from me, wishing does, being does. Farewell, farewell, you ghosts.
Fare always well.
A whickering whine through wind and surf, a shadow, a shape, a jolt that awakens awareness.
You fool! he raged dimly. Go back! You could lose your life!
The aircraft bucked and rocked, fell, climbed, did battle. From its teardrop snaked a tine. The cord passed half a meter above Hanno. His hand tried to reach and grab it, but couldn't. It whirled on past. Again. Again.
It withdrew. The engine overhead snarled louder. The line descended afresh. A loop was at the end, for the feet of a clinging man.
Tu Shan hit the reef. He took the impact in his muscles, got his foothold, stood while a surge ran ankle-deep around him. With his left hand he kept hold of the tine; and he advanced step by gripping step.
The strongest among us, thought Hanno bewilderedly. But I've been all this time with his woman.
Tu Shan's right arm wept under his shoulders, raised him, held him fast. The aircraft winched the line in. They swung
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tike a bell clapper. "Proclaim Liberty throughout the world—"
They were aboard. Svoboda gained altitude and made for snore. Tu Shan laid Hanno out in the aisle, which shivered and banged. He examined him with rough skill. "Slight concussion, I think," he growled. "Maybe a broken rib or two. Mainly a bad chill, uh, hypothermia. He'll live."
He administered initial treatment. Blood quickened. Svoboda brought the aircraft slanting down.
"How did you know?" Hanno mumbled.
"Yukiko called the Alloi," Svoboda said from the controls. Rain dashed across the viewscreen before her. "They couldn't enter atmosphere themselves. Even their robots have trouble in bad weather. But they sent a spaceboat on low trajectory. Its detectors registered an infrared anomaly in the rocks. That was where you might well be."
"You shouldn't have, you shouldn't—"
She made a near-vertical descent. Contact jarred the machine. She snapped off her harness and came to kneel beside him. "Did you think we'd want to be without you?" she asked. "Did we ever?"
33
*
SELDOM WAS a day this brilliant. Sunlight spilled from a sky in which clouds were blue-shadowed white, tike enormous snowbanks. It gleamed off wings cruising aloft; glimpses of river and sea shone molten. The eight seated around a plank table were thinly clad. From the top of their knoll vision ranged between Hestia, at its distance a toy box, westward to where Mount Pytheas rose pure beyond the hills.
Twice before have we met this way, in open air, remembered Hanno. Do we have some unknown need?
Yes, the reasons are practical, be undistracted, leave the children in care of the robots for these few hours, and hope that fresh surroundings will freshen our thinking. But do our souls be-tieve that when we most want wisdom, we must seek it from earth and heaven?
They are not ours, even now. This close-knit turf that is not grass, yonder squat trees and serpentine bushes, somber lues of everything that grows, sharp fragrances, the very 520
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taste of spring water, none came from the womb of Gaia. Nor can any of it ever truly become hers, nor should it.
The looks upon him were expectant. He cleared his throat and sat straighten The motion hurt, his injuries were not yet entirely healed, but he ignored that. "I won't ask for a vote today," he said. "We have years ahead before we must commit ourselves. But my news may change some minds,"
Unless that had already happened. Certainly it had done so as regarded him. He didn't know whether his near death had been necessary to snuff out the last rancor. Maybe that would have faded away in time; but maybe it would have smoldered on and on, eating hearts hollow. No matter. The fellowship was whole again. Little had been spoken outright; everything had been felt. He had an intuition, moreover, that in typical irrational human fashion, this was in turn catalyzing another oneness.
We'll see, he thought. All of us.
"As you know," he went on, "Yukiko and I have been communicating a lot with the AUoi these past few days. They've reached a decision of their own."
He raised a hand against anxiety. "Nothing radical, except in what it can mean for the long haul.
They will stay on till the new ship arrives, and for several years afterward. There'll be an unforeknowably great deal of information to exchange and, well, rapport to build and enjoy. In due course, though, the Alloi are going elsewhere.
"What's new is—if we, at that time, leave for Phaeacia, they will come with us."
He and his partner smiled into the amazement, savored it. "In God's name, why?" exclaimed Patulcius. "What have they to gam there?"
"Knowledge, to start with," Hanno answered. "A whole different set of planets."
"But planetary systems are common enough," Wanderer said. "I thought that what interests them most is intelligent life."
"True," Yukiko told them. "At Phaeacia, that will be us; and for us, they will be."
"They want to know us better," Hanno said. "They see tremendous potential in our race. Far more than in the Ithagene, much though they've gotten from them in the way of scientific discovery and artistic inspiration. We are space-farers too. The odds are, the Ithagene never will be, none of diem; at best, in the remote future."
"But the Alloi need only stay here, and they can observe both races, and interact with that other set of travelers to boot," Patulcius argued.
Yukiko shook her head. "They do not expect we can or win remain. Certainly our numbers could only grow slowly, and never become large, on Xenogaia; and therefore what we, humans in space, were able to do, or at last cared to do, would be hopelessly limited."
"You six—no, we eight have been like the English Puritans on Earth," Hanno said. "Looking for a home, they meant to settle in Virginia, but weather drove them north and they ended in New England. It wasn't what they'd hoped for, but they made the best of it, and that's how the Yankees came to be. Suppose New England had been all there ever was for them. Think of such a country, stagnant, poor, narrow and narrow-minded. Do you want that for yourselves and your children?"
**The Yankees put down strong roots," Tu Shan responded. "They did have America beyond.*'
"We have nothing like that," Macandal said. "Xenogaia belongs to its people. We have no right to anything but this Ktde patch they gave us. If we took more, God ought to strike us down."
Wanderer nodded.
"So you have often said, dear," Patulcius demurred, "and I have tried to point out that as a practical matter—"
**Yes, we have our investment here," Svoboda interrupted, "sweat and tears and dreams. It will hurt to scrap that. But I always believed, myself, that someday we must." Her voice clanged. "And now we've been given this opportunity!" '
"That's it," Hanno chimed in. "Phaeacia has no natives for us to harm. It seems to be almost a reborn Earth. Seems. Maybe it's a death trap. We can't know till we've tried. We fpderstood the risk of failure, extinction. Well, with the Al-./.• ,,-toi at our backs, that won't happen.
United, we can over-pHtpo anything. You see, they want us to live, to Sourish. They want humans among the stars." ^ '"Why us?" asked Macandal. "I realize—our psyches, our tpecial talents, we and they doing more, becoming more,
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than either could alone, like a good marriage—but if they'd like human company, why not go on to Earth?"
"Have you forgotten why?" retorted Hanno grimly.
Her eyes widened. Fingers touched lips. "How can they be sure?"
"They aren't, not absolutely; but from what we've described, they can guess with pretty high probability. Earth is going the selfeame way Pegasi did, and the rest that they know about. Ob, we'll swap messages with it, no doubt. But it's too far off"—a galactically minuscule four and a third light-centuries—"to make the voyage appear worthwhile. The Alloi would rather help us get established, come really to know us, and finally plan ventures together."
Tu Shan gazed upward. "Phaeacia," he breathed. "Like Earth. Not truly, but . . . green leaves, rich soil, clear skies." He closed his eyes against the sun and let its warmth lave his face.
"Most nights we will see stars."
Patulcius shifted about on the bench. "This does put quite a different complexion on matters," he admitted. As much eagerness as his heavy features ever showed danced across them. "The survival of more than simpty us. Of humanity, true humanity."
It blazed from Wanderer: "Not just a settlement or nation. A base, a frontier camp. We can be patient, we and the Alloi. We can make the planet ours, raise generations of young, till we're many and strong. But then we'll go to space again."
"Those of you who wish," said Tu Shan.
Macandal's tone shook. "To learn and grow. To keep life alive."
Aliyat spoke through sudden, brief tears. "Yes, take the universe back from the damned machines."
4
"Where are they?"
The story is that Enrico Fermi first raised the question in the twentieth century, when scientists first dared wonder publicly about such things. If other thinking beings than us existed—how strange and sad if none did, in the entire vast-ness and diversity of creation—why had we on Earth found no trace or track of them? There we were, on the verge of making our own starward leap. Had nobody gone before us?
Perhaps it was impractical or impossible for flesh and Mood. It certainly was not for machines we knew in principle how to make. They could be our explorers, sending home their findings. Reaching far planets, they could build more like themselves, instilling the same imperative: Discover. (No menace to Me in their proliferation; at any given sun, a few tons of raw material from some barren asteroid or moon would suffice.) Under conservative assumptions, calculation showed that such robots would spread from end to end of the galaxy in about a million years. That was the merest eyeblink of cosmic time. Why, a million years ago our ancestors were approaching full humanness.
Had no race anywhere even that much of a head start? All it would take was one.
Still easier to send were signals. We tried. We listened. Silence, until we thought to try in certain new directions; then, enigma.
Guesses teemed. The Others were transmitting, but not by means that we yet knew. They had come here, but in the prehistoric past. They were here, but concealed. They destroyed themselves, as we feared we might, before they could send or go. They had no high-technological civilizations among them; ours was unique. They did not exist; we were indeed alone. ... *
Fermi went to his grave, time blew onward through its night, humankind entered upon a new path of evolution. The answer to his question was less found than it was created, by what the children of Earth themselves did; and it proved to be twofold.
Dispatch your robots. They go forth to marvels and magnificences. Every star is a sun, every planet a world, multifarious, astounding, its secrets not exhaustible in less than many decades.
When it bears life, they are inexhaustible forever, because life is not only infinite in its variousness, it never remains the same, it is forever changing. When it is intelligent, this rises to a whole new dimensionality, a different order of being.
The farther your emissaries range, the fester grows the •Veahn of the unknown. Double the radius, and you roughly octuple the number of stars to ransack. You also double the time of faring and the time for a signal to cross between ship and home.
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C
Ten or twelve years from departure to arrival, ten years more to receive the first recounting, are reasonable. Fifty years are not unreasonable. But a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years either way? Suns and planets have fallen into classes; they no longer hold revelations. If you know the basic parameters, you can compute their properties. It is pointless to lengthen your list of them.
Life forms are something else. Yet if you desire to study these, you have a sufficiency on worlds already attained. Indeed, you have overwhelmingly much. Your information-processing capabilities, that part of them devoted to this endeavor, grow saturated.
The data include data on sapient beings. Those are rare, but they do occur and are fascinating beyond measure. Nevertheless, when the time lag grows much greater than lifetimes of theirs, and moreover your field scientists are machines, how can you truly come to know them? (Those that have been found are primitive and mortal. Science and high technology result from chains of unlikely historical accidents.) Wiser to hold your attention on those near enough that you can to some limited extent follow what the robots do and observe.
There is no precise limit. There is simply a radius, on the order of a light-century or two, beyond which it is unprofitable to search farther. Having foreseen this, you have never built self-multiplying von Neumann machines.
Exceptions exist. When your instruments detect the radiations that suggest a civilization at some star, you will send your beams and perhaps your robots; but the span until anything can come of that, if anything does, is multimillennial. At the end, will your race still care?
Other exceptions are cosmic, astrophysical—extraordinary stars, clouds where stars are coming to birth, recent supernovae, black holes in peculiar circumstances, the monstrosities at the core of the galaxy, and comparable rarities. You will dispatch your observers that far (thirty thousand light-years from Sol to galactic center) and wait.
All of the few starfaring civilizations will do likewise. Therefore all that have reached these goals will beamcast from them, in hopes of making contact. They will wait.
All have become entities that can wait.
Here is the second half of the solution to the riddle.
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It is not sentient organic life that the robots seek to summon. It is other robots.
Machines do not conquer their mother worlds. They gently, gradually absorb their creators into their systems, at the wish of those beings, whose overmatching physical and intellectual superiors they have become. Then in the course of time, more and more they direct their attention from mere life, toward problems and undertakings they find wormy of themselves.
When the original thinking animals five on, as happens occasionally, it is because they too have turned their concerns elsewhere, inward, searching for joys and fulfillments or possibly imaginary enlightenments toward which no machine can aid them, realms quite outside the universe of the stars.
**No," said Svoboda, "we do wrong if we feel hostile. Postbiotic evolution is nevertheless evolution, reality finding newness in itself." She colored and laughed. "Oh, but thai sounds pretentious! I only meant that the advanced, independent robots are no threat to us. We'll continue keeping robots of our own, we have to, but for purposes of our own. Well do what the postbiotics not only don't care to do any more, they never really could. That's to deal with life of our kind, the old kind, not by peering and listening, centuries between question and answer, but by being there ourselves, sharing, yes, loving. And so we'll come to understand what we can't now imagine."
"Those of you who choose to be seekers." Patulcius* remark fell doubly dry after her torrenting enthusiasm. "Like Tu Shan, I shall cultivate my garden. I daresay most of our descendants will so prefer."
; "No doubt," Hanno said. "That's fine. They'll be our reserve. Peregrine's right; some will always want more than
'The Phaeacians won't settle down into rustic inno-Macandal predicted. "They can't. If they aren't to the way of Earth—and that would make their whole meaningless, wouldn't it?—they'll have to find some path for themselves. They'll have to evolve too." And those of us in space will, along our own lines,"
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Wanderer added. "Not in body, in genes; I aim to be around for a mighty long spell. In our minds, our spirits."
Yukiko smiled. "The stars and their worlds for our teachers." Earnestly: "But let us remember what a hard school that will be. Today we count for nothing. Every crew of starfarers the Alloi have any knowledge of—and they are less than a dozen—are like us, leftovers, malcontents, atavisms, outcasts."
"I know. I don't admit we count for nothing, though. We are."
"Yes. And if we are wise, if we can humble ourselves enough to hear what the lowliest of living beings have to tell us, at last we will meet the postbiotics as equals. In a million years? I don't know. But when we are ready, it will be as you said, we will have become something other than what we are now."
Hanno nodded. "I wonder if, at the end, we and our allies won't be more than the equals of the machines."
His comrades regarded him, a little puzzled. "I've been playing with an, idea," he explained. "It seems to have worked this way on Earth, and what we've seen here and heard from the Alloi suggests it may be a general principle. Most steps in evolution haven't been triumphal advances. No, the failures of the earlier stages made them, the desperate ones—in Yukiko's words, the atavisms and outcasts.
"Why should a fish doing well in the water struggle onto the land? It was those that couldn't compete that did it, because they had to go somewhere else or die. And the ancestors of title reptiles were forced out of the amphibians' swamps, the birds forced into the air, and mammals forced to find niches where the dinosaurs weren't, and certain apes forced out of the trees, and—and we Phoenicians held only a thin strip of territory, so we took to the sea, and hardly anybody went to America or Australia who was comfortable at home in Europe—
"Well, we'll see. We'll see. A million years, you guessed, Yukiko." He laughed. "Shall we make a date? One million years from this day, we'll all meet again and remember."
"First we must survive," said Patulcius.
"Surviving is what we're good at," replied Wanderer.
Macandal sighed. "So far. Let's not wax overconfident.
r
No guarantees. Never were, never will be. A million years are a lot of days and nights to get through. Can we?"
"We shall try," said Tu Shan.
"Together," vowed Svoboda.
"Then we'd better learn," said Aliyat, "better than before, how to share."
34
THE SHIPS departed, Pytheas and friend. For a while, some months, until speeds grew too high, word went between them, imagery, love; rites celebrated the mysteries of community and communion; for everywhere around them thronged suns.
"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?"
Hanno and Svoboda stood in the darkened command center, looking out. Through clasped hands they felt each other's nearness and warmth. "Is this why we were born?" she whispered.
"We'll make it be," he promised.
Chronology
EXCEPT FOR the first, all dates are Anno Domini. Each is the year in which its chapter begins. Occasionally the narrative thereafter moves forward or backward in time.
I Thule 310 B.C.
n The Peaches of Forever 19
III The Comrade 359
IV Death in Palmyra 641
V No Man Shuns His Doom 998
VI Encounter 1050
VII The Same Kind 1072
VIII Lady in Waiting 1221
DC Ghosts 1239
X In the Hills 1570
XI The Kitten and the Cardinal 1640
XH The Last Medicine 1710
XHI Follow the Drinking Gourd 1855
XIV Men of Peace 1872
XV Coming Together 1931
XVI Niche 1938
XVII Steel 1942
XVin Judgment Day 1975
XIX Thule ?
r.
Glossary
CHINESE NAMES are transcribed according to the Wade-Giles system. This probably remains somewhat more familiar to Anglophone readers than Pinyin or Yale, and is no more inaccurate a rendition of ancient or regional pronunciations.
Armorica: Brittany.
Berytus: Beirut.
Bravellir: Probably near modern Norrkoping, Sweden.
Britannia: England and Wales.
Burdigala: Bordeaux.
Ch'ang-an: Near modern Sian (Pinyin "Xian").
Constantinople: Istanbul. *
Damasek: Damascus.
Dumnonia: Cornwall and Devon.
Duranius: The River Dordogne.
Emesa: Horns.
Falemia: An area in the region of Naples, anciently noted for its wines.
Gadeira: Cadiz (Lathi "Gades," Semitic "Agadir"). Gallia: Gaul, France with parts of Belgium, Germany, and
Switzerland.
Gardhariki: Western Russia. Garumna: The River Garonne. Gauiland: Southern Sweden, apparently between Scania
and Lake Vanern. &ffeian-kyo: Kyoto.
Lejre, in Denmark. Aleppo. Kiev.
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Lakota: Dakota (Sioux).
Lugdunensis: A province in Gaul, comprising most of north-em and a fair portion of central France.
Lugdunum: Lyons. Makkah: Mecca.
Massatia: Marseilles (Latin "Massilia"). Medina! Rasul Allah: Medina. Nidharos: Trondheim, in Norway. Pariki: Pawnee. Peking: Beijing.
Poitou: Former French province, now divided into the departments of La Vend6e, Deux-Sevres, and Vienne. Pretania: Britain, including Scotland. Sor: Tyre.
Stalingrad: Volgograd.
Syria: A province of the Roman (later the East Roman or Byzantine) Empire, approximately the same as the modern country. Tadmor: Palmyra, in Syria. Tartessos: Southwestern Iberia (conjectural).
Thute: Southern Norway (conjectural). Tripolis: Tripoli, in Lebanon, also known anciently as "Tar-abulus." Wendiand: A region bordering on the southern Baltic shores.
Wichita mountains: In southwestern Oklahoma. Yathrib: Original name of Medina.
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