XIX Thule

1

As rr rose out of the darknesses that had severed it from Hanno, his machine self came back to him. Abruptly he was again down in the world that filled his human vision.

Clouds towered mountain-high. Their nether caverns were full of night and lightning. Then- flanks billowed and streamed, streaked with strange tawnies and ochers, where winds beyond all hurricanes roared. Their thunderhead peaks caught sunlight, to blaze white against imperial blue.

Moment by moment the robot lifted, air thinned, linkage strengthened toward fullness1: Hanno felt its haste in his bones, the jet thrust like blood and muscle. It burned, brawled, shouted into the storms that grabbed at it, spurned the monstrous gravity underneath. Heaven deepened to purple, to black and stars. Now he saw with eyes open to, every color of light from radio to gamma. He tasted and smelled the changing chemistries until they thinned away and radiation sharpened. Sound likewise died; when the ion drive kindled, that was barely a thrum, less in his awareness than the flows of mathematics by which the robot guided itself to rendezvous with his ship.

Throughout, he was also a man looking forth, afloat in silence. At synchronous-orbit distance, he must turn his head a little if he would look from edge to edge of Jupiter. The king planet was at present half daylit. Intricacies wove along the frontiers of belts and zones. The effect was of pallid serenity. Deceptive—how well he knew. He had been there.

After a fashion. No worthwhile transmission could be made from the lower atmosphere. He would never experience yonder world-ocean, he would watch reconstructions and replays of what the robot had known through robotic senses, unless he ordered the data downloaded into his brain; and that would not be the exploration, but merely the borrowed memory of a machine.

People on Earth had wondered why he went to so much trouble and, yes, risk, for so small and scientifically valueless an accomplishment. He had refrained from arguing, simply replied that he wanted to do this. Having arranged suitable precautions, for a torchcraft mishandled could work more havoc than most ancient wars, the authorities let him. After all, he was the oldest man in existence. One must expect him to keep archaic urges.

They never heard him say, “Trial run.”

The robot closed in. Hanno broke contact and uncoupled from the neuroinduction unit. Docking maneuvers would be both tedious and confusing to a human intellect. Masses moved readily enough, but the right phase-in was essential, lest the dance of electromagnetic fields around the ship be perturbed. Let it falter for one second, and the ambient radiation would end a life that began in the early Iron Age.

As always, for a span he felt stunned. The robot’s input had been so much greater than anything unaided flesh and blood could ever perceive. Still more had been his partnership, slight though it was, with the computer. Bereft of it, he seemed witless.

The longing receded. He was again Hanno, a man with a man’s unique part to play. Few on Earth understood that any longer. They thought they did, and in a way they were right, but they did not think like him.

He made his preparations. When the ship told him, “All clear” he was ready. Obedient to his orders, it calculated the vectors of an optimum course for his next goal. Well aft of him, matter met antimatter and energy flamed. Weight came back. Jupiter drifted across the viewfield until the forward screen held only stars.

Under a one-gee boost, the time between planets was measured in days. He did not have the total freedom of them. Certain regions were lethal, even within his land of shielding, such as the neighborhood of the sun. Certain were forbidden him, and rightly so. While he could pass near enough to the Web to admire its spidery vastness through his optical systems, a close approach could trouble some part of its functioning, garble the information it drank in from the universe. Subtlest, most enigmatic, was the scent of beings somewhere yonder in the galaxy.

Never mind. He was no passive passenger. Within the broad limits of law and its capability, the ship would do whatever he wanted. Recycling molecules in patterns tried and true or ingeniously new, it provided every necessity, roost comforts, many luxuries. Almost the entire culture of the human race was in its databank, immediately available for his use or pleasure. That included minds for him to summon up when he desired to converse.

Living bodies, besides his own, he forewent. This was a trial run, the ship well-nigh minimal. He expected his tour of the Solar System would take a year or two, maybe three if he got really fascinated. That was hardly a blink of time.

Nevertheless, already impatience quivered in him.

FROM THE height where it nestled, the shop overlooked the Great Valley of the Appalachians. Forest covered the land below, multitudinously green, a-ripple with wind. Slender spearshafts rose from among the trees, hundreds of meters tall, hundreds in number, each bearing a crown. Far down and across, made hazy by remoteness, the woods gave way to an immensity of lawns. There towers and lower buildings stood widely spaced. Iridescence played over their fantastical shapes.

Tu Shan knew the elven country for an illusion. He had seen the various, always precise forms of those trees close up. They lived not to leaf, flower, and fruit, but to grow materials that no natural plant ever made. The park held— not factories—a technocomplex where another kind of growth went on, atom by atom under the control of giant molecules, tended by machines and overseen by computer, wombs of engines and vessels and other things once made by hands wielding tools. The shafts were rectennas, receiving solar energy beamed as microwaves from collector stations on the moon. He spied it overhead, a wan crescent nearly lost in the blue, and remembered that “overhead” was also an illusion.

Once men sought enlightenment, escape from the mirage that is the world. Today they held that the phantasm was all there was.

Tu Shan trudged down the knob of rock where the aircab had found a spot to let him out. The shop was a pleasant sight before him, a house in antique style, timber walls and shake roof. Several pines reared behind it. The wind brought their sun-warmed fragrance to him.

He knew it wasn’t actually a shop. Bardon usually prepared his electronic displays here because this was where he lived more than anywhere else. However, Express Service took them to his customers, who were scattered across the globe.

He had seen the cab descend and waited on his porch. “Well, howdy,” he called. “Haven’t heard from you in quite a spell.” After a pause, “Goldurn, five years, I bet. Maybe more. Time sure flies, don’t it?”

Tu Shan kept still until he reached the other man. He wanted to study him. Bardon had changed. He remained tall and lanky, but he had discarded shirt and trousers hi favor of a fashionable scintillant gown; his hair was dressed into ram’s-horn curves; when he smiled, his mouth glittered. Yes, he too had decided it was unattractive to regrow outworn teeth every century or so, and gotten the celis in his jaws modified to produce diamond.

His handshake was the same as before. “What’ve you been up to, friend?” A trace of mountaineer drawl lingered. Perhaps he cultivated it. The past kept some small glamour.

Not respect. How could anyone revere old age when everyone was perpetually young?

“I tried farming,” Tu Shan said.

“What? ... Hey, come in, come in, and we’ll have a drink. Man, it is good to see you again.”

Tu Shan noticed how Bardon avoided noticing the box he carried.

Most furniture he recognized, but otherwise the interior of the house had become rather stark. It held no trace of wares, nor of a woman. That made for a sense of emptiness, when Anse and June Bardon had been together for as long as he had known them, but Tu Shan felt shy of inquiring.

He took a chair. His host splashed whiskey into glasses— .that, at least, was a constant—and settled down facing him.

“You farmed, you say?” Bardon asked. “What do you mean?”

“I sought... independence.” Tu Shan groped for words. He despised self-pity. “This modern world, I am not at home here. I spent all the basic share I had, together with my savings, and pledged the rest, to buy some hectares in Yunnan that nobody else wanted very much. And animals, and—”

Bardon stared. “You went clear back to subsistence farmin’?”

Tu Shan smiled lopsidedly. “Not quite. I knew that was impossible. I meant to trade what I did not eat for things I Deeded and could not make myself. I thought home-grown produce would have a novelty value. But no. It became a hard and bitter existence. And the world crowded in anyhow. At last they wanted my land for a recreation lodge. I did not ask what kind. I was glad, then, to sell for a tiny profit.”

Bardon shook his head. “You were lucky. You should have talked with me first. I would’ve warned you. If your food fad caught on, nanotech jvould duplicate it exactly and undersell you. But chances were, it couldn’t succeed in the first place. The computers dream up novelties of every kind raster than people can consume them, or even hear about them.”

“Well, I spent most of my life in a simpler world than yours,” Tu Shan sighed. “I made my mistake, I have learned my lesson. Now I have made more things for you.” He gestured at the box, which rested on his lap. “An elephant, a lotus pattern, and the Eight Immortals, carved in ivory.” Tank-grown ivory, but formed by hand, using traditional tools.

Bardon winced, tossed off a mouthful of whiskey, braced himself. “I’m sorry. You should have stayed in touch. I dosed down that business three years ago.”

Tu Shan sat mute.

“I don’t think anybody else is handUn’ stuff like this any more, either,” Bardon slogged ahead. “The value is gone. Uh, it’s not because they can grow perfect copies. Of course they can. The certification that it’s an original in a historic style, that made the difference. Till people stopped carin’.”

He hurried on into the silence: “They aren’t oafs. We haven’t turned into a race of featherheads, whatever you may be thinkin’. It’s just that, well, after you’ve got a few such items, do you want to spend the rest of eternity ac-quirin’ more? Especially when the computers keep gener-atin’ whole new concepts of art.”

“I see,” Tu Shan said. The words fell dull. “We, the Survivors, we have told and done everything that we had in us. ... Well, what do you do these days, Anse?”

“Different things,” Bardon answered, relieved. “Like you and your friends should.”

“What are yours?”

“M-m, well, I’m lookin’ around. Haven’t found any promisin’ line of work yet, but—oh, we’ve got our lives to develop, don’t we? Me, I think I might go into Pioneer Land for a while.” Bardon brightened. “You should try somethin’ like that. An Asian networkin’, maybe. You’d have a lot to contribute, with your background.”

Tu Shan shook his head. “Thank you, no.”

“Really, you don’t just lie around in an electronic dream. You give input to the network, to everybody else linked with you. You come out with memories the same as though you’d lived it in the flesh.”

Illusion twice over, Tu Shan thought.

“Are you scared you won’t be earnin’ anything meanwhile?” persisted Bardon. “Don’t worry. You told me you recovered your losses on the farm. Basic share will be plenty for you while you’re in retreat. Why, you should come out refreshed, full of ideas for new enterprises.”

“You may,” Tu Shan mumbled. “I would not.” He stared down at his hands where they lay on the box, his big useless hands.

FIERA, WHO had been Raphael, formed a slow smile. “Oh, yes,” she purred. “I do enjoy being a woman.”

“Will you always be?” asked Aliyat; and inwardly: Did he always want this, down underneath? Even when we were making love?

Half a cry: You were such a fine lover, Ray! Strong, sweet, knowing. Did you understand how it hurt when you told me you were going to get yourself remade?

The beautiful head shook. Tresses, naturally violet, rippled over shoulders. “I think not. Long enough to explore it, however long that may be. Afterward—we’ll see. By then they expect to have nonhuman modifications perfected.” Fiera stroked fingers down her flanks. “Half otter, or dolphin, or snake— But that’s for later, much later. I imagine first I’ll be some kind of man again.”

“Some kind!” escaped Aliyat.

Fiera raised her brows. “You are dismayed, are you not? Poor dear, is that why I’ve had no word or sign of you in all this time?”

“No, I, well—“ Aliyat looked away from the image that seemed wholly solid. “I was—“ She forced herself to meet the golden gaze. “I thought you didn’t care about me any more.”

“But I told you I did. Believe me, I was sincere. I still care. Why else would I finally have taken the initiative?” Hands reached out. “Aliyat, darling, come to me. Or let me come to you.”

“For what, ... now?”

Fiera stiffened the least bit. Some warmth dropped from her tone. “We’ll find out, won’t we? Don’t tell me you’re shocked. Or was I wrong? I thought you were by far the most open-minded of the Survivors.”

Aliyat swallowed. “It isn’t that. I’m not inhibited. It’s only— No, it isn’t ‘only.’ You’ve changed everything. Nothing could be what it was.”

“Certainly not. That’s the whole idea.” Fiera laughed. “Suppose you turn male. We should find that interesting. Not unique, but special. Piquant.”

“No!”

Fiera sat a minute silent. When she spoke, she had gone earnest. “You’re like the rest of your kind after all. Or perhaps worse. I gather most of them make some effort to cope. You, though, you ... accept. Suddenly I realize that’s what fooled me. You never railed against the world. You agreed it was bound to evolve onward. But under that surface, you’ve stayed what you were, a primitive, a leftover from the age of mortality.”

Aliyat’s defiance guttered out. She slumped. The sen-suousness of the seat reshaping itself as she did was lost on her. “No doubt you’re right.”

Fiera smiled anew, this time sweetly. “You aren’t condemned to that, you know. The whole organism is pliable, including the brain. You can have your psyche altered.”

“Long-drawn. Expensive. Actually, I couldn’t afford a simple sex change.” Simple! flickered through Aliyat. I remember when they faked it with surgery and hormone shots. Today they cause organs, glands, muscles, bones, everything to grow into something else. If I became a genuine man, what would I think like?

“Haven’t you understood modem economics yet? All goods and most services—all services a machine can give— are as abundant as the air we breathe. Or could be, if there were any reason. Share is simply the easiest means of, oh, keeping track, coordinating what people do. And, yes, allocating resources that are limited; land, for instance. If you genuinely need liberation from your misery, arrangements can be made. I’ll, help you make them.” Again the image extended its arms. “Dearest, let me.”

Aliyat straightened. The tears that she swallowed burned in her throat. “’Dearest,’ you say. What do you mean by that?”

Taken aback, Fiera hesitated before replying slowly, “I’m fond of you. I want your company available to me, I want your welfare.”

Aliyat nodded. “What love amounts to these days. Affection because of enjoyment.”

Flora bit her lip. “There you are, mired in the past. When the family was the unit for breeding, production, defense, and its members must needs find ways not to feel trapped. You can’t imagine the modern range of emotions; you refuse to try.” She shrugged. “Odd, considering the life you led then. But I suppose you nursed an unconscious longjng for security—what passed for security in those nightmare societies.”

Aliyat recalled explaining to Raphael what a nightmare was.

“How selfish were your feelings about me?” Fiera demanded.

Anger cracked a whip. “Don’t flatter yourself,” Aliyat said. “I’ll admit I was infatuated, but I knew that’d end. I did hope it would turn into something that would last, not exclusive, no, but something real. All right, I’ve learned better.”

“I had that hope too!” Fiera cried.

She sank back into her own seat. Once more she fell silent, thoughtful. Aliyat’s gaze went off in search of refuge. She occupied a single room on the fourth sublevel of the Fountains; technology would never synthesize space. It sel—dom felt cramped, when the walls formed facilities on command and otherwise provided any scenes she wanted. Earlier today, rather than a contemporary view, she had raised medieval Constantinople. Maybe that was due a nostalgia she knew was unjustified, maybe it was an attempt at getting back sett-esteem; she’d been a principal consultant to the developers of the simulacrum. Hagia Sophia soared above swarming, jostling humanity. Odors o{ smoke, sweat, dung, roasting food, tar, sea livened the air; it moved, a salt breeze off the Horn. When Fiera’s visicall came, Aliyat had stopped the sound but kept the vision. She could virtually hear wheels, hoofs, feet, raucous voices, snatches of plangent music. Those ghosts were as alive as the ghost that confronted her.

Finally Fiera said, “I believe I “know what drew you to me— what held you, after the first casual attraction. I was interested in you. I didn’t take you for granted. You eight were a sensation once you came into the open, but by now most people were born later than that. You’re simply here, getting along on share or on what occasional special jobs somebody happens to want done. Fewer and fewer of those, aren’t there? But I—to me you were a bit intriguing. I’m not sure why.”

Aliyat thought she heard her suppress whatever pain she had permitted before she went on: “I’ll be honest. I used you up. I found nothing further to discover. But then, I’d used myself up. I had to change. It was my escape from boredom and futility. Now we can find freshness in each other again, if you wish. Only for a while, though, a short while, until I’ve become used to perceiving you with a female mind and senses. Unless you change too. How, I can’t tell you. At best, I can offer a suggestion or two. The choice must be yours.

“If you refuse, if you stay in your narrow existence with your fossil soul, you’ll be more and more isolated, you’ll find less and less meaning in anything, and at last you’ll choose death because it is not that lonely.”

Aliyat drew the ancient air into her lungs. “I kept going this long,” she said. “I’m not about to give up.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I expected it of you. But think, my dear, think. Meanwhile, best I go.”

“Yes,” Aliyat said. The image vanished.

After some minutes Aliyat rose. She stalked the floor. It yielded slightly, deliciously to her feet. Byzantium surged around her. “Blank that scene,” she snapped. Pastel blue succeeded it. “Delivery Service.” A panel came into existence, ready to open an orifice.

What do I want? A happy pill? Chemistry tailored to me, harmless, instant cheerfulness, head quite clear, probably more clear than it is at this moment. In the bad old days we got drunk or smoked dope, abused our bodies and our brains. Now science has mapped how feelings work, and everybody is sane every hour of the twenty-four.

Everybody who decides to be.

Hanno, Wanderer, Shan, Patulcius, where are you? Or— never mind sex, that’s an old-fashioned consolation, isn’t it?—Corinne, Asagao, Svoboda—whatever you’re calling yourselves, a name’s become as changeable as a garment— where are you? Which of you can come to me, or I to you? We had our fellowship after we got together, we were the only immortals and the middle of each other’s universe whUe time blew by outside like the wind, but since we came forth we’ve drifted apart, we meet by accident and seldom, we say hello and try to talk and feel relieved when it ends. Where are my brothers, my sisters, my loves?

WHILE HE flew, communications verified that Wanderer was the person he claimed to be and had a permit to visit the control reserve. His car landed as directed, in a parking lot outside town, and he emerged suitcase in hand. Many everyday things, such as clothes, were not spot-produced here. He had reached—not exactly a hermit community, not a settlement of eccentrics trying to re-create a past that never was—but a society that went its own way and held much of the world at arm’s length.

The lot was near the water’s edge. Weather Service maintained the original Pacific Northwest climate as closely as was feasible. Clouds hung heavy. Mist swirled on the bay, making vague the rocks that towered from the waves, mysterious, like a Chinese painting. The conifer forest stood mighty behind the village, its darkness hardly relieved by splashes of bracken. Yet this was all alive, in silver-gray, white, black, greens deep or bright and asparkle with remnant raindrops. Surf boomed and whispered. Seals barked hoarsely, gulls hovered and dipped and mewed. Breath went cool, moist, tangy through nostrils to blood.

A man waited. Clad in plain shirt and work pants, he was stocky and brown-skinned. Not many whites among his ancestors, Wanderer decided. What had they been, then? Makah, Quinault? No difference. Tribes were hardly even names any more.

“Hello, Mr. Wanderer.” There was an anachronism for you. The man extended his hand. Wanderer took it, felt calluses and sturdiness. “Welcome. I’m Charlie Davison.” ‘ Wanderer had practiced old-time American English before he left Jalisco. “Glad to meet you. I didn’t expect this. Figured I’d get acquainted on my own.”

“Well, we talked it over in the Council and decided this was better. You’re not just another jako.” That must be local slang for the few hundred outsiders a year allowed to experience the wilderness. It sounded mildly contemptuous. “Nor a scientist or official agent, are you?”

“N-no.”

“Come on, I’ll see you to the hotel, and later I’ll sort of introduce you around.” They started off. Soon they were on an unpaved road where puddles glimmered. “Because you’re a Survivor.”

Wanderer’s smile twitched rueful. “I didn’t want to advertise that right away.”

“We ran a routine check before agreeing you could come, same as we do for everybody. You eight may go pretty much unnoticed, but you sure were famous once. Your background popped right out of the scan. Word got around. I hate to say this, nothing personal, but you’ll find some folks here who resent you.”

That was an ugly surprise. “Really? Why?”

“You Survivors can have children whenever you like.”

“I ... see.” Wanderer considered how to respond. Gravel scrunched underfoot. “Jealousy isn’t reasonable, though. We’re freaks of nature. A crazy combination of genes, including several unlikely mutations, that doesn’t breed true. Normal human beings who don’t want to age have to undergo the process. Well, we can’t then let them reproduce freely. Remember your history, population explosion, the Great Death, and that was before athanatics.”

“I know.” Davison sounded a bit miffed. “Who doesn’t?”

“Sorry, but I have met quite a few who don’t. They think history’s too depressing to study. I point out to them that they’ll have their chance to be parents eventually. There are accidental losses to make up, and interplanetary colonies may yet be founded.”

“Yeah. The waiting list for children was several centuries long, last time I looked.”

“Ufa-hub. But as for us Survivors, ever hear of a grandfather clause? By revealing ourselves, we opened up a treasure trove for scholars. Fair is fair. As a matter of fact, we hardly ever do become parents.” We hardly ever have partners who are eligible. And any offspring we have grew too soon alien.

“I understand all that,” Davison said. “I don’t object, myself, I’m only telling you we’d better be, uh, tactful. That’s a reason why I met you.”

“I do appreciate it.” Wanderer attempted to drive his point home: “You might remind those objectors to my status that they can beget kids every bit as lawfully, no limit.”

“Because they’re willing to shrivel and die in a hundred years or less.”

“That’s the bargain. They can drop out whenever they choose, get youth restored if they’ve lost it, join the immortals. There is simply that small, necessary price to pay.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” Davison snapped. “Think we’ve never heard?” After half a dozen strides: “My turn to say, ‘Sorry.’ I didn’t mean to sound mad. To most of us, you’ll be very welcome. What yarns you have to spin!”

“Nothing you can’t play off the databank, I’m afraid,” Wanderer said. “We were questioned and interviewed dry many years ago.”

Generations before you were born, Charlie, if your lineage is purely mortal. How old are you? Forty, fifty? I see white sown through your hair and crow’s-feet at your eyes.

“Not the same,” Davison answered. “Good Lord, I’m in company with a man who knew Sitting Bull!” Actually, Wanderer had not, but he let it pass. “Hearing it from you in person means so much more. Don’t you forget, our whole idea is to live naturally, like God intended.”

“That’s why I’ve come.”

Davison’s pace faltered. He stared. “What? We supposed you were ... interested, like the rest of our visitors.”

“I am. Of course. But more than that. I guess we’d better not mention this immediately. However, I think I might settle here, if people will have me.”

“You?” asked amazement.

“I go way back, you know. To the tribes, the brotherhoods, rites and beliefs and traditions, living by our wits and .hands off the land and of the land. Oh, I’m not romantic about it. I remember the drawbacks too clearly, and would certainly not want to revive, say, the horse barbarians. But still, damn it, we had a, a oneness with our world such as ‘doesn’t exist now, except maybe among you.”

They were entering the village. Boats rocked at the wharf; men fished for the local market. Kitchen gardens and apple trees burgeoned behind neatly made wooden houses. Mere supplements, Wanderer must remind himself, like their handicrafts. The dwellers spend share and order stuff delivered, same as the rest of us. For added earnings, some of them take care of these woods and waters; or they attend to the tourists; or they do brainwork out of their homes, over the computer net. They haven’t disowned the modern world.

He thrust away memories of what he had witnessed elsewhere around the planet, the deaths slow or swift, always anguished, that overtook obsolete communities and ways of hie, the ghost towns, empty campsites, forsaken graves. Instead, he searched about him for the secret of this folk’s endurance.

Those on the street were a mingled lot, every race of mankind, together in their faith, wish, and fear. A church, tallest of their buildings, lifted its steeple cloudward; the cross on top declared that life eternal was not of the flesh but of the soul. Children were the desire, the reward. When and where else had Wanderer last seen a small hand clutching mother’s, a round face turned his way to marvel? Calm gray heads bore the sense of having staved off dehumaniza-tion.

They recognized the newcomer; word had indeed gotten about. None crowded close. Their greetings to Davison were self-conscious, and Wanderer felt the looks, heard the buzz at his back. Not that the atmosphere was hostile. Doubtless only a minority begrudged him his privilege, as nearly meaningless as it was. Most seemed as if they looked forward to knowing him, and were simply too polite to introduce themselves at once. (Or else, since they were few and close-knit, it had been agreed they wouldn’t.) Adolescents instantly lost the sullenness that hung on them.

That last struck Wanderer first as peculiar, then as disturbing. He paid closer attention. The elderly were a bare handful. Drawn shades and neglected yards showed what houses stood vacant.

“Well, you begin by relaxing and enjoying yourself,” Davison advised. “Take the tours. Meet the jakos. They’re okay, we screen ‘em pretty carefully. How about dinner at my place tomorrow? My wife’s anxious to meet you too, the kids are starry-eyed, and we’ll invite two-three other couples that I think you’ll like.”

“You’re awfully kind.”

“Oh, I’ll benefit, and Martha, and—“ The hotel was ahead, a rambling structure whose antiquarian verandah looked over the bay and the sea beyond. Davison slowed his gait and lowered his voice. “Listen, we don’t just want to hear stories from you. We want to ask about... details, the kind that don’t get in the news or the databank, the kind we don’t notice ourselves when we go outside, because we don’t know what to watch for.”

The chill deepened in Wanderer. “You mean you wish I’d explain how life there feels to me—to a person who didn’t grow up in those ways?”

“Yes, that’s it, if you please. I realize I’m asking a lot, but, well—”

“I’ll try,” Wanderer said.

Unspoken: You’re giving serious thought to moving away, Charlie, to renouncing this whole existence and creed and purpose.

I knew the enclave is shrinking, that its children usually leave soon after they reach legal adulthood, that recruits have become vanishingly scarce. I knew it’s as doomed as the Shakers were in their day. But your middle-aged are also quitting, so quietly that the fact wasn’t in what I studied about you. I’d hoped for a mortal lifetime or two of peace, of belonging. Set that aside, Wanderer.

Guests were clustered on the porch. They pointed and jabbered. He stopped and turned to see. Barely visible through the haze, three giant shapes slipped past the mouth of the bay.

“Whales,” Davison told him. “They’re multiplying fine. We spot more every year.”

“I know,” said Wanderer. “Right whales, those. I remember when they were declared extinct.” I wept.

They were recreated in the laboratories, reintroduced to a nature that is completely managed. This is no wilderness other than in name. It’s a control reserve, a standard of comparison for Ecological Service to use. No true wilderness is left, anywhere on Earth, unless in the human heart, and there too the intellect knows how to govern.

I shouldn’t have come here. Now I’ll have stay a week or so, for courtesy’s sake, for the sake of this man and his kin; but I should have known better than to come.

I should be stronger than to let this hurt me so.

NOWHERE WAS Yukiko ever alone with the stars.

Solitude she could have, yes. The powers and, mostly, the people were gracious to Survivors. She often thought that graciousness had become the common and principal virtue of humanity. It led to an impersonal kindliness. Unhindered room was the sole good in which the world was impoverished. Nevertheless, when she expressed her longing, this atoll became hers. Minuscule though it be, that was an Aladdin’s gift.

Yet the stars were denied her.

A few blinked wan after dark, Sirius, Canopus, Alpha Centauri, sometimes others, together with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Their constellations lost in the nacreous luminance, she was rarely sure which she saw. Satellites twinkled swift across heaven. The moon shone mistily, and on its dark part she made out steady sparks, the light of tech-nocomplexes and the Triple City. Aircraft went in firefly swarms. Occasionally a spacecraft passed, majestic meteor, and thunders rolled from horizon to horizon; but that was seldom, most operations being off Earth and robotic.

She had resigned herself to the loss. Weather control, atmosphere maintenance, massive energy transfers were necessary; they caused fluorescence; that was that. She could fill the walls and ceiling of her house with a starscape as grand as if she stood in an Arizona desert before Columbus, or she could visit a sensorium and know naked space. Still, ungratefully, when she was outdoors in this her refuge, she wished she didn’t have to conjure the night sky out of memories.

The ocean murmured. Reflection sheened off much of it, where aquaculture did not blanket the waves. Brightnesses bobbed yonder, boats, ships, a bargetown plodding along. Surf made white unrest beyond the lagoon, which was a well of sky-glow. The noise felt hushed, less loud than coral gritting beneath her feet. Her lungs drank cool purity. Each day she wordlessly thanked untold gigabillions of microorganisms for keeping the planet clean. That humans—computers—had designed and produced them to do it made no difference; theirs was a wonderful karma.

She passed by her garden, dwarf trees, bamboo, stones, twining paths. A machine was noiselessly busy there. Newly returned from Australia, where she had found herself involved in one more “fleeting affair, she hadn’t thus far taken over that work again.

Well, she wasn’t very gifted for it. If only Tu Shan—but he didn’t like these surroundings.

Her house lay shadowy, a small and subtle blending of curves. Her worldlet, she was apt to think. It provided or had brought to her everything she needed and more. Self-repairing, it could do so for as Jong as the energy arrived. Now and then she wished it would make sense for her to take a dusting cloth in her hand.

And I was once a lady of the court, she thought. Wryness tugged her lips upward.

Dismiss those feelings. She had gone to sit by the sea and empty her mind, open her soul, until she felt ready to use her intelligence. Whatever harmony she had won to was fragile.

A wall opened for her. Light bloomed within. The room was furnished in ascetic ancient style. She knelt on a straw mat before the computer terminal and raised the electronic spirit.

A portion of that immense rationality identified her and spoke in suitable, musical language and phrases. “What is your desire, my lady?”

No, not really suitable. Desire was the snare. She had even forsaken her old, old name of Morning Glory and become—once again, after a thousand years—Small Snow, as a sign to herself of renunciation. But that too had failed. “I have meditated on what you told me about life and intelligence among the stars, and decided to learn as much of this as I am able. Teach me.”

“It is a matter complex and chaotic, my lady. As far as the exploratory robots have taken our knowledge, life is rare, and only three unmistakably sentient species are known, all technologically in an equivalent of the human paleolithic era. Three others are controversial. Their behavior may be elaborately instinctive, or it may arise in minds too unlike the Terrestrial to be recognizable as such. Whatever they are, these creatures too possess only simple implements. On the other hand, the Web has detected anomalous radiation sources at greater distances, which may mean high-energy civilizations analogous to ours. Depending on how the data are interpreted, they may number as many as seven hundred fifty-two. The nearest is at an estimated remove of four hundred seventy-five parsecs. Additionally, the Web is receiving signals that are almost certainly informational from twenty-three different sources, identified with bodies or regions that are astrophysically unusual. We doubt that these signals are directed at us especially. We do not know whether any transmitters are in direct contact with each other. There are indications that they use distinct codes. Data thus far are insufficient for more than the most tentative and fragmentary suggestions of possible meaning.”

“I know! Everybody does. You’ve told me already, and it was unnecessary then.”

Yukiko fought down irritation. The machine was godlike in its power, it could do a million years’ worth of human reasoning in a day, but it had no right to patronize her... It didn’t intend to. It habitually repeated itself to humans because many of them needed that. She eased, let the emotion surge and die like a wave. Calm, she said, “As I understand it, the messages are not about mathematics or physics.”

“They do not appear to be, and it seems implausible that civilizations would spend time and bandwidth exchanging knowledge that all must certainly possess. Perhaps they concern other sciences, such as biology. However, that implies that our understanding of physics is incomplete, that we have not by now delineated every possible kind of biochemistry in the universe. We have no evidence for such an assumption.”

“I know,” Yukiko repeated, but patiently. “And I’ve heard the argument that it can’t be politics or anything like that, when transmission times are in centuries. Do they compare histories, arts, philosophies?”

“Conceivably.”

“I believe that. It would make sense.” Unless organic life withers away. But won’t machine minds also wonder about the ultimate? “I want to master your ... analysis. I’m aware I can’t make any contribution, nothing original. Let me follow along, though. Give me the means to think about what you have learned and are learning.”

“That could be done, within limits,” said the gentle voice. “It would require much time and effort on your part. Do you care to explain your reasons?”

Yukiko couldn’t help it, her words trembled. “They, those beings, they must be advanced far beyond us—”

“Not likely, my lady. To the best of present-day knowledge, and it appears seamless, nature sets bounds on technological possibilities; and we have determined what those bounds are.”

“I don’t mean in engineering, I mean in, in understanding, enlightenment.” Inner peace was gone. Her pulse stammered. “You don’t see what I’m talking about. Would anybody nowadays, any human being?” Except Tu Shan and perhaps, if they tried, the rest of our fellowship. We hark back to when people felt these questions were real.

“Your purpose is clear,” said the electronics mildly. “Your concept is not absurd. Quantum mechanics fails at such levels of complexity. Mathematically speaking, chaos sets in, and one must make empirical observations.”

“Yes, yes! We must learn the language and listen to them!”

Did she hear regret within the inexorability? The system could optimize its reactions for her. “My lady, what information we have is totally inadequate. The mathematics leaves no doubt. Unless the character of what we receive changes in fundamental ways, we shall never be able to interpret it for any such subtleties. Be warned, if that is what interests you, studying the material will be an utter waste of your time.”

She had not dared lift hopes too high, but this smashed down upon her.

“Instead, wait,” counselled the system. “Remember, our robotic explorers travel at virtual light speed. They should begin arriving at the nearer sources, to observe and interact, in about a millennium. Perhaps fifteen centuries after that, we will begin to hear from them, and truly begin to learn. You are immortal, my lady. Wait.”

She smothered tears. I am .not a saint. I cannot endure that long while existence has no meaning.

SUDDENLY, WARNINGLESS, the rock gave way under Tersten’s boots. For an instant he seemed frozen, arms flung wide, against an infinity of stars. Then he toppled from sight.

Svoboda, second in file, had time to thump her staff down and squeeze the firing button. Gas jetted white from vents as a piton shot into stone. The barrel locked onto the upper part of the shaft. She clung. The line slammed taut. Even under lunar gravity, that force was brutal. Her soles skidded on a treacherously thin dust layer. Gripping the staff, she kept upright.

Violence ended. Silence pressed on the faint cosmic hiss in her earplugs. She had been yanked forward about two meters. The line continued upslope and over a verge formed when the ledge they had been following went to pieces. It should have been strained tight by Tersten’s weight. She saw with horror that it drooped slack. Had it broken? No, it couldn’t have.

“Tersten!” she cried. “Are you all right?” The wavelength diffracted around the edge. If he hung there, it was only about a meter below. She got no response. The seething gibed.

She turned her head more than her body toward Mswati behind her. His beltflash cast a pool of undiffused light at his feet. Through a well-nigh invisible helmet it dazzled her, made him a shadow against the starlit gray of the mountainside. “Come here,” she ordered. “Carefully, carefully. Take hold of my staff.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged. Though she hadn’t been leading the climb, she was the team captain. The expedition was her idea. Moreover, she was a Survivor. The others were in their twenties or thirties. Beneath all the informality and fellowship, they bore a certain awe of her.

“Stand by,” she said when he reached her. “I’m going ahead to look. If more crumbles, I’ll try to spring back, and may well fall off the ledge. Be prepared to brake me and haul me up.”

“No, I will go,” he protested. She dismissed that with a chopping gesture and set off on hands and knees.

It was a short crawl, but time stretched while she felt her way forward. On her right a cliff went nearly sheer into a nightful abyss. Flexible as skin, tough as armor, her space-suit wouldn’t protect her against such a fall. Vision searched and probed. Sensors in the gloves told her more through her hands than they could have learned naked. At the back of her mind, it annoyed that she should be aware of sweat-smells and dry mouth. While the suit recycled air and water, at the moment she was overloading its thermostat and capacity for breaking down wastes.

The suface held. The ledge continued beyond a three-meter gap. She made out pockmarks near the break in it. So, she thought—she must not agonize over Tersten, not yet—once in the past a shotgun meteoroid shower had struck here. Probably radiation spalling then weakened the stone further, turning that section into an unforeseeable trap.

Well, everybody had said this undertaking was crazy. The first lunar circumambulation? To go clear around the moon on foot? Why? You’ll endure toil and hardship and danger, for what? You won’t carry out any observations a robot can’t do better. You won’t gam anything but a fleeting notoriety, largely for your foolishness. Nobody will ever repeat the stunt. There are gaudier thrills to be had in a sensorium, higher achievements among the computers.

“Because it is real,” was the best retort she found.

She came to the edge and put her head over. On the horizon a sliver of rising sun shone above a crater. It turned desolation into a jumble of light and dark. Her helmet saved her eyesight by immediately stopping the glare down to a dull gold. Elsewhere it stayed clear. Her heart thuttered. Tersten dangled beneath her, limp. She loudened radio reception and heard snoring breath.

“He’s unconscious,” she reported to Mswati. Examining: “I see what the trouble is. His line caught in a crack on this verge. Impact jammed it in tight.” She rose to her knees and tugged. “I can’t free it. Come.”

The young man joined her. She rose. “We don’t know how he’s injured,” she said. “We must be gentle. Secure the end of my line and lower me over the side. I’ll clasp him and you haul us both in, me on the bottom to absorb any shocks and scrapes.”         

That went well. Both were strong, and, complete with spacesuit and backpack full of intricate chemistries, a person weighed only some twenty kilos. While he was in her arms Tersten opened his eyes and moaned.

They laid him out on the ledge. Waiting till he could speak, Svoboda gazed west. The heights dropped down toward a level darkness that was Mare Crisium. Earth hung low, daylit part marbled white and blue, unutterably lovely. Memories of what it had once been struck like a knife. Damnation, why did that have to be the one solitary planet fit for humans?

Oh, the lunar cities and the inhabited satellites were pleasant, and unique diversions were available there. She was more at home in them than on Earth, actually—or, rather, was less an exile. Their people, such as these her comrades, sometimes thought and felt much as people used to think and feel. Though that too was changing. On which account you scarcely ever heard talk about terraforming Mars and Venus any longer. Now when it could be done, hardly anybody was interested.

Well, she and her seven kin had always known change. Merchant princes and brawling warriors were strangers to petty bourgeoisie and subservient peasants under the Tsars, who in turn were foreign to twentieth-century engineers and cosmonauts... Yet they had all shared most of what they were with each other, and with her. How many still did?

Tersten brought her from her memories when he gasped, “I’m awake” and struggled to sit up. She knelt, urged caution, helped and supported him. “Water,” he said. The suit swung a tube to his mouth and he drank greedily. “A-a-ah, good.”

Concern furrowed Mswati’s chocolate countenance. “How are you?” he asked. “What happened?”

“How should I know?” Clarity and a little vigor returned to Tersten’s voice as he talked. “Sore in the belly, sharp pains in my lower left chest, especially when I bend or take a deep breath. Earache, also.”

“Sounds like a cracked or broken rib, maybe two,” Svoboda said. Relief overwhelmed her. He could have been killed, suffered such brain damage that revivification would have been pointless. “My guess is that a falling boulder hit you with more force than your suit could withstand. Hm, yes, see.” Her finger traced the semblance of a scar. The fabric had been ripped open, and promptly closed itself again. Within an hour it would be completely healed. “Everything: conspired against us, didn’t it? We’re not going to scale this mountain. No matter. It was hardly more than a whim of ours. Let’s get you back down to camp.”

Tersten insisted he could walk, and managed a gait halfway between a step and a shuffle. “We’ll call for a vehicle to fetch you,” Mswati said. As if to confirm, a relay satellite flitted across the constellations. “The rest of us can finish. It will be easier going from here than it was on farside.”

Tersten bridled. “No, you don’t! I’ll not be cheated out of this.”

Svoboda smiled. “Have no worries,” she reassured. “I’m sure you’ll just need a knitpatch or two injected, and they can return you to us in fifty hours or so. We’ll wait where we are. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind slacking off that long.” An inner glow: My kind of human is not altogether extinct.

Bleakness: How many years can you remain what you are, Tersten? You’ll have no reason to.

Do I keep young in spirit, or merely immature? Has our history damned us, the Survivors, to linger retarded while our descendants evolve beyond our comprehension?

The plateau and camp came in view. Genia ran to meet the party. Someone must stay behind in case of trouble. She had gotten the shelter deployed. More a mothering organism than a tent, it spread beneath the radiation shields that curved like wings from the top of the freight carrier. “Tersten, Tersten!” she called. “I was terrified, listening in. If we’d lost you—“ She reached them. All four embraced. For that moment, at least, under the stars, Svoboda was again among beloved friends.

“You SEE,” Patulcius strove to explain, “what I have done is what the old Americans would have called ‘worked myself out of a job.’“

The curator of Oxford, who for reasons unrevealed to him currently used the name Theta-Ennea, lifted her brows. She was comely in a gaunt fashion, but he never doubted that under the plumes growing from her otherwise bare scalp lay a formidable brain. “The record indicates that you served well,” she said—or did she sing? “However, why do you suppose you might find occupation here?”

Patulcius glanced from her, through the glass window of her almost as anachronistic office. Outside, wind chased sunlight and cloud shadows along High Street. Across it dreamed the beautiful buildings of Magdalen College. Three persons wandered by, looking, occasionally touching. He suspected they were young, though of course you couldn’t tell. “This isn’t simply a museum,” he replied after a moment. “People do live in the town. The preservation of things puts them in special relationships among themselves and to you. I imagine that makes a kind of community. My experience— They must have problems, nothing too serious but nevertheless problems, questions of conflicting rights, duties, wants. You must have mediational procedures. Procedures are my strong point.”

“Can you be more specific?” Theta-Ennea asked.

Patulcius turned his gaze back to her. “I would first have to know the situation, the nature of the community, customs and expectations as well as rules and regulations,” he admitted. “I can learn quickly and well.” He smiled. “I did for two thousand years and more.”

“Ah, yes.” Theta-Ennea gave back the smile. “Naturally, when you requested an interview, I tapped the databank about you. Fascinating. From Rome of the Caesars through the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the Turkish Republic, the Dynasts, and— Yes, a story as marvelous as it is long. That is why I invited you to come in person.” Ruefully: “I too have an outmoded preference for concreteness and immediacy. Therefore I hold this position.” She sighed. “It is not a sinecure. I confess I have not had time to assimilate everything about you.”

Patulcius manufactured a chuckle. “Frankly, I’m glad of that. I didn’t enjoy the burst of fame when we Survivors manifested ourselves. Gradually becoming obscure again was ... pleasant.”

Theta-Ennea leaned back behind her desk, which was of plain wood, possibly an antique, and bore nothing except a small omnitenninal. “If I recall rightly, you joined the other seven quite late.”

Patulcius nodded. “After the bureaucratic structure finally and irreversibly collapsed around me. We’d kept in touch, of course, and they made me welcome, but I’ve never been, m-m, intimate with them.”

“Is that why you made more of an effort than they to become integrated with the modern world?”

Patulcius shrugged. “Perhaps. I’m not given to self-analysis. Or perhaps I just happened to have an opportunity none of them did. My talent, such as it is, is for—no, ‘administration’ claims too much. Operations maintenance; the humble but essential chores that keep the social machinery running. Or that used to.”

Theta-Ennea drooped her lids and regarded him closely before she said, “You have done more than that in the past fifty or a hundred years.”

“Conditions were unique. For the first time in a long time, they were such that I was qualified to take a hand in coping. No credit to me. Historical happenstance. I am being honest with you. But I did gain experience.”

Again she pondered. “Would you please explain? Give me your interpretation of those conditions.”

He blinked, surprised, and spoke hesitantly. “I have nothing but banalities... Well, if you insist. The advanced countries—no, I should say the high-technology civilization—had gone so far, so fast. It and the societies that had not assimilated the revolution, they became like different species. It had to absorb them, the alternatives were all horrible, but the gap in ways of living, thinking, understanding, was huge. I was among the few who could ... talk, function ... more or less effectively on both sides of that gap. I gave what assistance I could to those poor people, developing suitable organization to get them through the transition— when your people no longer had an old-fashioned, paper-shuffling, purely human bureaucracy, and were not sure how to build one. That is what I did. I did not do it alone by any means,” he finished. “My apologies for lecturing on the obvious.”

“It is not absolutely obvious,” Theta-Ennea said. “You speak from a viewpoint that has no counterpart anywhere. I would like to hear much more. It should help me come nearer empathizing with those scores of generations who made this place what it was. Because I never quite could, you see. With all the curiosityand, yes, all the love in the world, I have never quite been able to feel what they felt.”

She rested her arms on the desktop and went on compassionately, “But you, Gnaeus Cornelius Patulcius, and the many other names you have borne—in spite of them, in spite of your recent engagements, you also have yet to understand. No, I have no job for you. You should have known as much. Since you did not, how can I explain?

“You assumed this must be a community in some sense, like those where you were, where the dwellers share certain interests and a certain sense of common identity. I have to tell you—this isn’t simple, it isn’t ever spelled out; hardly anybody realizes what is happening, just as hardly anybody in the time of Augustus or of Galileo realized what was happening—but I spend my life trying to fathom the currents of history—“ Her laugh was forlorn. “Pardon me, let me back up and start over.

“Except for a few moribund enclaves, community hi a general sense has dissolved. We still use the word and go through some of the forms, but they are nearly as empty as a fertility rite or an election would be. Today we are purely individuals. Our loyalties, if ‘loyalty’ has any meaning left, are to various and ever-varying configurations of personalities. Has this fact wholly escaped you?”

“Well, uh, well, no,” Patulcius floundered, “but—”

“I can offer you nothing in the way of work,” Theta-En-nea finished. “I doubt anyone anywhere can, any longer. However, if you care to stay a while in Oxford, we can talk. I think we might learn something from each other.”

For whatever help that may be to you afterward, she left unsaid.

8

THE WORLD abides. I am still I, bone, blood, and flesh, aware of the induction unit that enwraps me but also of walls and their views across the outside, silvery-hued turf, a fountain arcing in fractals, an enormous shell of diamond within which, I have heard, grows a new kind of comet-mining spacecraft, flashes in the sky as a weather control module implants energy, the allness exterior to me. So quiet is this room that I hear my breath go in and out, my pulse, the rustle of hair when my head moves on the couch. What happens to me is a waxing of interior cognizance until soon it is the outside that is the ghost.

I descend into myself. My whole past opens to my ranging. Again I am a slave, a fugitive, a servant, a leader, a companion; again I love and lose, bear and bury. I lie on a sunlit hillside with my man, the clover smell and buzz of bees are sweet to know, we watch a butterfly pass; it is gone, these five hundred years.

There are blurs, there are gaps. I am not sure whether lichen grew on yonder stone. Yes, quantum randomness gathers its tax—but slowly, and I can renew what matters, even as my body renews itself. A neuropeptide links to the receptor on a nerve cell...

Come, The thought is not mine. It becomes mine. I am conducted, I conduct myself, onward and inward.

Thus far went my training. Today I am ready for oneness.

I do not go into the network. Nothing moves but those fields, mathematical functions, that the world perceives as forces, particles, light, itself. In a sense the network enters me. Or it unfolds before me, as I before it.

My guide takes form. No shape walks beside me, no hand holds mine. Nonetheless I am conscious of the body, though it may lie halfway around the planet, hi the way that I am conscious of my own. His person is tall, slender, blue-eyed. His personality is blithe and sensuous. You were once Flora (I learn of you), he thinks to me. Then I will be Faunas. He would like us to meet afterward for purposes of exploration. That is the merest ripple through an intelligence born of a brain made flawless. He has the gift of sympathy too, that he may help a neophyte such as me begin to partake.

Timidly, then warily, then ardently I mesh the flow of my identity with his. Thereby I more and more know the entire linkage. I have studied an abstraction. Today I am in and of the reality. Currents go like billows, cresting, troughing, weaving new waves. From them spring figures many-patterned and crystalline as snowfiakes, brilliancies that expand outward through multiple dimensions, shift, nicker, dance in eternal change; and this is the language and the music that speak to me. Afar, immanent, core, outermost, the great computer sustains the matrices of our beings, vivifies them, sends them on then- orbits andTsummons them home. Yet it is at our behest. We are what happens, the oneness, the god.

We. Minds reach forth, touch, join. Here is Phyllis, my human teacher, who first accompanied me along the fringes. I have her self-image, small, dark, long-haired, though in dim wise because she is not thinking about her body. I recognize the gentleness, patience, toughness. Suddenly I can share her interest in tactile harmonics and microgravity laser polo. Her warmth embraces me.

And here is Nils. Even without image or name, I would know that laughter. We are good friends, we have sometimes been lovers. Did you truly never want to be more than that, Nils? Do immortality and invulnerability breed fear of permanence?

You belong to an age that is dead, my dear. You must free yourself of it. We will aid you.

How is it I feel cold, here where space is a fiction and time an inconstant? No, this is not really you, Nils. I haven’t sensed your thoughts before, but surely they would not float free of all feeling tike these.

You are right. I am not in the network. This is my double, the downloaded configuration of my mind. Whenever I rejoin it, I grow the richer by what it has known while I was away. (Increasingly I have found you dull and shallow. I had not the heart to tell you so, then, but now there is no more hiding-)

By his emotion I know that Faunus—glands, nerves, tb’e whole animal heritage—is physically linked like me. Be of good cheer, Flora. You have boundless choices. Evolve with us.

Another mind comes to the forefront of me. It too is bodiless, but forever. A certain kindliness glows yet (because memories of loss and sorrow do, no longer felt yet still, in shadow fashion, understood?) to make it bid me Behold.

He was a physicist who dreamed of discoveries. Already the unification had been achieved, the grand equation written. Defiant, he.cherished his hopes. He knew full well how unlikely it was that any law remained unknown, that any experiment would ever again give a result for which the synthesis could not account. Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible, though. And if he never stumbled on some basic new phenomenon, the interplay of the quanta must keep casting forth surprises for him to quest through.

The computer system perfected itself. Nothing he had found with his subtlest and most powerful instrumentation was beyond its analysis. Everything he might find in his laboratories, it could predict beforehand, in ultimate detail. His science had reached the end of its search.

Idle hedonism repelled him. He set a device to shut down his body while it programmed the patterns that were bis mind into the system.

Are you happy?

Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments. Time is mine to do with as I will. For it may take an hour to plan Earth’s weathers a year ahead, with the measures necessary to contain chaos; it may take a day to design an extension of the Web or compute the fate of a galaxy ten billion light-years hence on which it has accumulated sufficient data; but each bit of information processed is an event, and to me those hours are as a million years or more. Afterward I may descend to the pace of human thought and learn what went on while I was transfigured. On this I meditate. It is small but interesting. Grow into augmentation, Flora, and at last you will share splendor, promises the shade.

From Phyllis I understand that few desire such a destiny. They will stay organic, however mutable. Linkage is pleasure, enlightenment, challenge. Joined, we realize what we cannot realize singly, about each other and about the cosmos. We bring our revelations back and refashion them in our separate ways. New arts, skills, philosophies, joys, newnesses for which no old name exists, spring into being. Thus “do we enlarge and fulfill ourselves.

Come. Try. Surrender what you are to find what you are.

I merge into Phyllis, Faunus, phantom Nils. We are a self that never was before. I am slave who won to freedom, teacher and sportswoman, photosculptor and sybarite, dilettante mathematician and serious athlete. We will need many unions to ease the conflicts and create a single creature—

A whirl, a wheeling, a measure in the dance. Others have been with us. I withdraw and merge again. I am servant who won to a sort of queenship, gilled inhabitant of the sea, professional imaginer, artificial personality designed by the whole in conjunction with the computer—They fly together, they lose themselves, the hive mind Mazes and thunders—

No!

Let me out!—and I flee down endless echoful corridors. Fear howls at my heels. It is myself that pursues.

She was alone, save for the medical machine that watched over her. For a while she merely shuddered. The breath sawed in her throat. Her sweat stank.

Terror faded. The sense of unspeakable loss that followed went deeper and lasted longer. Only as that too drained from her did she gain the strength to weep.

I’m sorry, Phyltis, Faunus, Nils, everybody, she called into the empty room. You meant so well. I wanted to belong, I wanted to find meaning in this world of yours. I cannot. To me, becoming what I must become would be to destroy all I am, the whole of the centuries and the folk forgotten by everyone else and the comradeship in secret that formed me. I was born too soon for you. It is now too late for me. Can you understand, and forgive?

THEY MET in reality. You cannot embrace an image. Fortune favored them. They were able to use a visitor house at Lake Mapourika control reserve, on the South Island of what Hanno to this day thought of as New Zealand.

The weather was as lovely as the setting. They gathered around a picnic table. He remembered another such board beneath another sky, long and long ago. Here a greensward sloped down to still waters in which forest and the white mountains behind stood mirrored. Woodland fragrances arose with the climbing of the sun. From high overhead drifted birdsong.

The eight matched the quietness of the morning. Yesterday passions had stormed and clamored. At the head of the table, Hanno said:

“I probably needn’t speak. We seem to be pretty well agreed. Just the same, it’s wise to talk this over calmly before making any final decision.

“We have no more home, anywhere on Earth. We’ve tried in our different ways to fit in, and people have tried to help us, but we finally face the fact that we can’t and never shall. We’re dinosaurs, left over in the age of the mammals.”

Aliyat shook her head. “No, we’re left-over humans,” she declared bitterly. “The last alive.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Macandal replied. “They are changing, more and faster than we can match, but I wouldn’t take it on myself to define what is human.”

“Ironic,” Svoboda sighed. “Should we have foreseen? A world where we could, at last, come forth would necessarily be a world altogether unlike any that ever was before.”

“Self-satisfied,” Wanderer said. “Turned inward.”

“You’re being unfair too,” Macandal told him. “Tremendous things are going on. They simply aren’t for us. The creativity, the discovery, has moved to—what? Inner space.”

“Perhaps,” Yukiko whispered. “But what does it find there? Emptiness. Meaninglessness.”

”From your viewpoint,” Patulcius replied. “I admit that I too am unhappy, for my own reasons. Still, when the Chinese stopped their seafaring under the Ming, they did not stop being artists.”

“But they sailed no more,” Tu Shan said. “The robots tell us of countless new worlds among the stars; and nobody cares.”

“Earth is pretty special, as we should have expected all along,” Hanno reminded him needlessly. “The nearest planet reported where humans might be able to live in natural surroundings is almost fifty light-years from here. Why mount an enormous effort to send a handful of colonists that far, possibly to their doom, when everybody’s doing well at home?”

“So they truly could live their—our own kind of lives again, on our own land,” Tu Shan said.

“A community,” Patulcius chimed in.

“If we failed, we could seek elsewhere.” Svoboda’s voice rang. “If nothing else, we would be human beings out yonder, doing and daring for ourselves.”

Her look challenged Hanno. The rest likewise turned toward him. Although until now he had barely hinted at his intentions, it was no great surprise when he spoke. Yet somehow the words came before them like a suddenly drawn sword.

“I think I can get us a ship.”

10

THE CONFERENCE was not a meeting of persons, nor even their images. That is, Hanno’s representation went around the globe, and faces appeared shiftingly before his eyes; but this was mere supplement, a minute additional data input. Some of yonder minds were computer-linked, or in direct touch with each other, from time to time or all the time. Others were electronic. He thought of them not by names, though names were known to him, but by function; and the same function often spoke with differing voices. What he confronted, what enveloped him, were the ruling intellects of the world.

We’ve come a long way from you, Richelieu, he thought. I wish we hadn’t.

“Yes, it is possible to build such a spacecraft,” said the Engineer. “Indeed, preliminary designs were drawn up more than a century ago. They showed what the magnitude of the undertaking must be. That is a major reason why it was never done.”

“It can’t be so far beyond the one I was flitting around the Solar System in,” Hanno protested. “And the robotic vessels already push the speed of light.”

“You should have studied the subject more thoroughly before you broached your proposal.”

Hanno bit his lip. “I tried,”

“It is transhumanly complex,” the Psychologist conceded. “We ourselves are employing only a semitechnical summary.”

“The basic principles involved ought to be obvious,” the Engineer said. “Robots have no need of life support, including the comforts necessary for human sanity, and they require minimal protection. For them, an interstellar carrier can be of very low mass, with small payload. Nevertheless, each represents a substantial investment, notably in antimatter.”

“’Investment’ means resources diverted from other uses,” observed the Economist. “Modern society is productive, rich, yes, but not infinitely so. There are projects closer to home, that an increasing body of opinion maintains should be started.”

“The sheer size of the universe defeats us,” sighed the Astronomer. “Consider. We have received the first beam-casts from robots that have gone about a hundred and fifty light-years. It will take longer before we hear from those few we have sent farther. The present sphere of communication contains an estimated forty thousand stars, much too many for us to have dispatched a vessel to each, the more so when the vast majority are dim red dwarfs or cold sub-dwarfs. The suns not too unlike Sol have generally proved disappointing. True, a flood of scientific discoveries already overwhelms the rate at which we can properly assimilate them; but the public finds little of it especially exciting, and nothing that could be considered a revolutionary revelation.”

“I know all that, of course I do—“ Hanno began.

The Engineer interrupted him: “You ask for a manned ship that can reach the same speeds. We grant you, no matter how long-lived you are, anything else makes little sense. Even for a handful of people, especially if they hope to found a colony, the hull must be spacious, correspondingly massive; and the mass of their necessities will exceed that by a large factor. Those necessities include laser and magne-tohydrodynamic systems able to shield against radiation as well as to draw in sufficient interstellar gas for the reaction drive. The drive in turn will consume an amount of antimatter that will deplete our reserves here in the Solar System for years to come. It is not quickly or easily produced, you know.

“Moreover, the robot craft are standardized. A scaleup such as you have in mind demands complete, basic redesign. The preliminary work stored in the database indicates how much computer capability it will take—enough to significantly curtail operations elsewhere. Production, likewise, cannot use existing parts or facilities. Whole new plants, both nanotechnological and mechanical, and a whole new organization, must come into being. The time from startup to departure may well be as long as a decade, during which various elements of society will endure noticeable inconvenience.

“In short, you wish to impose a huge cost on mankind, in order to send a few individuals to a distant planet which, it seems, may be habitable for them.”

Yes, Hanno thought, the job will beggar the Pyramids. And after a while the Pharaohs stopped building pyramids. It was too expensive. Nobody wanted it any more.

Aloud, with a stiff smile: “I am aware of everything you’ve told me, at least in a general way. I’m also aware that today’s world can do the job without imposing hardship on anyone. Please don’t poor-mouth me. You must see some merit in my idea, or we wouldn’t be having this meeting.”

“You Survivors are unique,” murmured the Artist. “To this day, you keep a certain appeal, and a certain special interest for those who care about whence we came.”

“And where we may be going!” Hanno exclaimed. “I’m talking about the future, all humanity’s. Earth and Sol won’t hist forever. We can make our race immortal.”

“Humankind will deal with geological problems when they arise,” the Astronomer said. “They won’t for several billion years.”

Hanno refrained from saying: I think anything that might be called human will be long extinct by then, here. Death, or transfiguration? I don’t know. To me, it hardly matters which.

“Any idea of large-scale interstellar colonization is ludicrous,” declared the Economist.

“If it could be done,” said the Astronomer, “it would have been done already, and we would know about it.”

Yes, I’ve heard the argument, over and over, from the twentieth century onward. If the Others exist, where are They? Why have Their exploring robots, at least, never visited Earth? We ourselves, we’re interested enough to send follow-ups to those primitive sapients we’ve found. What little we’ve learned thus far has touched our thinking, our arts, our spirits in subtle ways—if nothing else, as much as Africa touched Europe when the white man opened it up. If only life and awareness weren’t so seldom, so incidental or accidental. I think we’d be out there today, seeking, had the loneliness not reached in to freeze us.

Nevertheless, They exist!

“We must be patient,” the Astronomer went on. “It seems clear that They are. In due course, robots will get there; or we may establish direct communication earlier.”

Across light-centuries- That long between question and answer.

“We don’t know what They are like,” Hanno said. “What the x many different Theys are like. You’ve read the written proposal I submitted. Haven’t you? I went over each of the old arguments. They get down to simply this, that we do not know. What we do know is what we are capable of.”

“The limits of feasibility are contained within the limits of possibility,” declared the Economist.

“Yes, we have studied your report,” the Sociologist said. “The reasons you give for mounting the enterprise are logically inadequate. True, some thousands of individuals believe they would like to go. They feel frustrated, bewildered, out of place, confined, or otherwise discontented. They dream of a fresh start on a fresh world. Most of them are immature and will outgrow it. Most of the rest are visionaries who would retreat, shocked, if offered the opportunity in reality. You are left with perhaps a few score, for whose emotional convenience you want the entire society to pay a high share-cost.”

“They’re the ones that matter.”

“Do they, when they are so selfish that they will actually subject their descendants—for they will reproduce if they live—to the hazards and deprivations?”

Hanno’s grin was stark. “All parents have always made that kind of decision. It’s in the nature of things. Would you deny your race the opportunities, discoveries, whole new ways of thinking and working and living, that this civilization forecloses?”

“Your point is not ill taken,” said the Psychologist. “Still, you must agree that success is not guaranteed. On the contrary, you would take a rather wild gamble. It is not yet proven that any of the half-score planets thus far found which seem to have Earthlike environments and biochemistries, is not a long-range death trap.”

“We could look farther if need be. We’ve got the tune. What we need is something worth doing with it.”

“You would indeed find marvels,” said the Artist. “Perhaps you could understand them and convey them back to us in fashions that no robot is, quite able to.”

Hanno nodded. “I have a notion that intelligent life can only communicate fully with its own kind. Maybe I’m wrong, but how can we be certain before we’ve tried? We build our limitations and the limitations of our knowledge into our machines and their programs. Yes, they learn, adapt, modify themselves according to experience; the best of them think; but it’s always along machine lines. What do we know about experiences they can’t handle? Maybe scientific theory is complete, maybe not; but in any case it’s a mighty big universe yonder. Much too big and full for us to predict. We need more than one breed of explorer.”

The Engineer frowned. “So your petition maintains. Did you imagine its contentions are new? They have been brought up again and again, to be rejected as insufficient. The probability of success, and the value of any success that might be had, are too slight in relation to cost.”

Hanno noticed himself lean forward. It seemed a strange act in this disembodied conversation. “I did not bring up my new argument,” he told them. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. But ... the situation has changed. You’re dealing with us now, the Survivors. You said it, we are unique. We still have our special prestige, mystique, fallowings—nothing great, no, but we well know how to use such things. I in particular recall ways of raising holy hell with the powers that be. I got quite good at it, back in ancient times.

“Oh, yes, a gadfly. You can pretend to ignore us. If need be, you can destroy us. But that will cost you. We’ll leave troublesome questions behind in many minds. They won’t fade, because you’ve abolished death and databases don’t forget. You’ve had your world running so smoothly for so long that you may think the system is stable. It isn’t. Nothing human ever was. Read your history.” The sweep and violence of it, the hidden reefs on which empires foundered with their pride and dreams and gods.

The Psychologist spoke in steely imperturbability: “It is true that sociodynamics is, mathematically, chaotic.”

“I don’t want to threaten you,” Hanno urged quickly. “In fact, I’d fear the outcome too. It might be small, but it might be enormous. Instead—“ he fashioned a laugh— “malcontents traditionally were a favorite export of governments. And this will be something adventurous, romantic, in an age when adventure and romance are almost gone except for electronic shadow shows. People will enjoy it, support it... long enough for the ship to get under way. You’ll find the kudos for yourselves quite useful in whatever else you want to do. Afterward—“ He spread his palms. “Who knows? Maybe a flat failure. But maybe an opening to everywhere.”

Silence thrummed.

The calm of the Administrator struck Hanno harder than any physical blow. “We have anticipated this, too, from you. The factors have been weighed. The decision is positive. The ship shall be launched.”

Like that? In this single instant, victory?

Well, but the computers can have given it thousands of years’ worth of human thinking time while I talked.

O Columbus!

“There are conditions,” tolled through his hearing. “Suspended animation or no, the mass of fifty or more colonists, with supplies and equipment, is excessive, when the odds are so poor. You eight Survivors must go alone. Of course, you will have a complement of robots, up to and including the intelligent and versatile but subservient, personalityless type, toward which you can develop no hostility. You will have such other materiel as appears called for. If your venture prospers, larger numbers may someday follow in slower carriers. We expect you will agree that this is reasonable.”

“Yes—“ And the symbolism of it, uh-huh, shrewd. My God, I’ll be glad to get out from under a system that calculates everything.

But I should not be ungrateful, should I? “You’re very generous. You always have been, to us. Thank you, thank you.”

“Thank society. You think in terms of kings, but personal power is obsolete.”

True, I suppose. As obsolete as the personal soul.

“Furthermore,” the Administrator continued, “you shall not go to the planet suggested in your report. It does lie less than fifty light-years hence, but distance differences on that order of magnitude are comparatively unimportant when relativistic travel speeds are available. It is the best known of the terrestroid candidates, therefore the most promising for settlement. However, other considerations enter. You spoke of exploration. Very well, you shall explore.

“The sun and planet chosen” for you lie in Pegasus, near the present limit of our communication sphere. You will recall that in that direction, beyond it, about fifteen hundred light-years hence, is the nearest of those radiation sources that may be high-energy civilizations.

“We do not know whether it is in fact any such thing; the anomalies are numerous. Nor do we know whether your presence can significantly advance the date at which we make contact. Probably not, since the robots en route to there have reported nothing but natural phenomena as far as they have gone. Going to that planet means you will face more unknowns, therefore more dangers, than otherwise— although we shall be receiving additional information about it while your ship is under construction. But, assigning the most plausible weights to the various uncertainties and imponderables, we have concluded that, on the whole, it is best that your expedition be toward the nearest neighbors comparable to ourselves that we may possibly have.”

It makes sense. I should have thought of it beforehand. But I’m only one man. We’re only eight, only human, woundable flesh and sheddable blood.

“Do you and your associates accept these terms?”

“Yes.” Boundlessly yes.

11

BID EARTH farewell.

Something of her as once she was abides yet, an enclave, a reserve, a restoration, things small and ahVe in crannies, simple folk, archaisms, remembrance. Most people are gracious. They grant permission, they draw aside to create solitude or they come together in fellowship, they give whatever may be in their gift throughout these last few days.

Ocean roars, rises, rushes downward and up again. The waves are gray-green in a thousand hues and wrinkles along their backs, white-maned above the steep troughs. The boat surges to their swing and tramp, rigging sings, sails strain. Shrill and chill, the wind tastes of salt.

Wheat goldens toward harvest. It rustles whenever the air stirs, and ripples run across the leagues of it. Bees buzz in a clover meadow, from which the sun bakes sweetness. Some ways off, several cows rest, vividly red, by a chestnut tree whose crown snares light and scatters it back. A clod crumbles warm in the hand.

Candleglow turns faces as soft as the lilting music. Silver, porcelain, linen sheen with it. In tall goblets, champagne sends jewels aloft. It tickles the palate. Laughter runs around the table with the same lightness. The soup is leek-pungent, cream-rich. Fragrance from courses to come eddies about like a promise of merrymaking afterward until dawn.

The canyon wall lifts rusty red toward indigo heaven. Eons band it. Crags rear wind-whittled out of the down-slope; but today is so still that a raven’s “Gruk!” explodes through the heat. That blackness wings over pungency of sage and scrub juniper, which clutch at every roothold. The green is less sparse at the bottom, where a streamlet gleams and whispers.

Though pilgrims come no longer to the shrine, a latter-day kind of piety maintains it, and memories are many. Near its doorway an ancient cypress grips a ledge, limned in gnarled and silvery austerity. Thence vision descends the mountain, past a cliff cloven by a waterfall, over groves and terraces and the curve of a roof, into dawn mists filling the valley and on to blue heights beyond. Breath is cool. Suddenly a cuckoo calls.

A rainshower has ended. The birch forest sparkles with drops, on the blades that shiver overhead, on fern and moss beneath. Trunks rise girl-slim out of dappled shadows. Ahead, their whitenesses open on reeds, a lake, a deer that looks about startled and soars away. The mould is soft and wet underfoot. The odors are green.

Things and places may be had again in future, but as illusion, a ghost dance of electrons, photons, neurons. Here is the graspable reality. This picture on the wall came from a riverside stall long ago, that one was taken back when folk employed cameras. The table is nearly as old, its wood scarred by use, twice charred where a lighted cigar fell. The rest of the furniture is as comfortably shabby. The book has weight, its brown-spotted pages crackle between fingers, a name penned on the flyleaf is faded but unforgotten.

There are no more graveyards. Death is too rare, land too precious. The burial records of the humble seldom endured anyway. It is guesswork what sites to seek—in a city turned alien, in a remnant of countryside where grass and wild-flowers have taken back the plowland—and stand for a while, feeling not altogether alone, before saying very quietly, “Goodbye now, and thank you.”

12

FIRE RAISED the wind on which Pytheas fared outward. Sol dwindled aft, slowly at first under the low acceleration, but already, as the ship approached Jupiter, scarcely more than the brightest among the stars.

They filled the encompassing night with keen and steady radiances, white, silver-blue, amber-yellow, ruby-red. The Milky Way coursed heaven like a river of frost and light. Nebulae glowed in the death and birth of suns. Southward gleamed the Clouds of Magellan. Exquisite at its distance, a spiral, a sister galaxy, beckoned.

Hanno and Svoboda stood in the command center, looking at the optically enhanced sky. They often did. “What are you thinking about?” he asked at last.

“Finality,” she answered low.

“What?”

“This maneuver ahead of us. Oh, yes, it’s not absolutely irrevocable. We could still turn back—for quite some time to come, can’t we? But what’s soon going to happen, the course change, it’s like—I don’t know. Not birth or marriage or dying. Something as strange.”

He nodded. “I believe I know what you mean, and I’m the hardheaded pragmatist. Wanderer certainly does. He mentioned to me that he and Corinne are planning a ceremony. Maybe we should all attend.”

She smiled. “Rite of passage,” she murmured. “I should have realized Wanderer would be the one who understands. I hope he can make a part for me.”

Hanno gave her a sharp glance. They had all paired off, informally and more or less tacitly, he with her, Wanderer with Macandal, Patulcius with Aliyat, Tu Shan and Yukiko renewing their alliance. Not that each man and each -woman had never shared one another. It had been inevitable that they’d swap around occasionally, during the long time of their masquerade. But since, they had been more apart than together. How much emotional risk dared they take on this voyage? Fifteen years under way, with God knew what at the end—Separations or no, after centuries a couple gained considerable mutual sensitivity. Svoboda’s hand caught Hanno’s. “Not to worry,” she said in the American English that was their favorite dead language. “I only have a, a solemnity in mind. We do need something to lift us out of ourselves. It’s wrong to carry our pettinesses along to the stars.”

“We will, though,” he said. “We can’t help it. How do you escape being what you are?”

13

SCREEN FIELDS warded particle radiation off as Pytheas slipped close by Jupiter. The planet laid its mighty gravitational hand upon the ship and swung it out of the ecliptic, northerly toward Pegasus. Inboard a drum tbuttered, feet danced, a song called to the spirits.

When it was safely away, robots went outside. Flitting around the hull, they deployed the latticework of ramscoop and fire chamber. By this time, low boost under torch drive had built up a considerable speed. Interaction with the interstellar medium was becoming significant. By terrestrial standards it was a hard vacuum, averaging about one atom per cubic centimeter, overwhelmingly hydrogen. Yet a wide funnel traveling fast would gather a great deal. When the robots returned inside, Pytheas resembled a btunt torpedo caught in the net of a giant fisherman.

Its folk flashed their last laser beam to Earth, made their little speeches, received ceremonial good wishes. The ions and energies that were to surround them would blank out electromagnetic communications. Modulated neutrinos passed easily through, and Pytheas was equipped to receive them, but the beams it could cast dispersed too rapidly. That huge facility which was capable of sending an identifiable message hundreds or thousands of light-years was fixed in place, locked on remote targets that might eventually respond.

Now, through the net and beyond it, out to thousands of kilometers, the harvester fields came into being. Their forces meshed, intricate, powerful, precise, an ever-changing configuration molded by the controlling computers and what came to them through their sensors. New laser beams sprang from the ship’s bows, swordlike, cleaving electron from nucleus. The fields seized on the plasma and swept it backward, well away from the hull; impact on metal would have released X-rays in swiftly lethal concentration. Aft to the fire chamber, which was itself a magnetohydrodynamic vortex, the gas went.

Another immaterial engine released a little of the antimatter it held suspended, ionized it, sped it into the maelstrom and the star gas. Particles met, annihilated, became energy, the ultimate conversion, nine tunes ten to the twentieth ergs per gram. That fury lit fusion reactions among other protons, and continued them. Behind the heavily shielded stern of Pytheas, a tiny sun blazed forth.

Powered by it, the fields hurled most of the plasma aft. Reaction drove the ship forward. Full weight came back to her crew, an Earth gravity of acceleration, nine hundred eighty centimeters per second added every second to velocity.

At that rising pace, in just less than a year the voyagers would transit half a light-year of distance, and their speed would be close to that of light.

14

NOTHING NATURAL could have steered the ship. It did itself, a set of systems joined in a unity as complex as a living organism, maintaining its motion and existence outwardly, its livable environment inwardly. Humans became passengers, occupying their tune as best they might.

Living quarters were bleakly functional, eight individual staterooms, a gymnasium, a workshop, a galley, a dining saloon, a common room, certain auxiliaries such as bathrooms and a dream chamber. Making them pleasanter gave enjoyment to those whose talents lay in that direction. Yukiko urged that they begin with the common room. “It is where we shall most be together,” she said. “Not simply for ease and company. In trouble too, or communion, or awe.”

Hanno nodded. “Our marketplace,” he agreed. “And markets began with temples.”

“Well,” cautioned Tu Shan, “we’d better plan things so the decorating doesn’t interfere with the use.”

The three found themselves alone there one evening. The ship maintained Earth’s immemorial cycle of day and night, the clock to whose beat life had arisen and evolved. It would gradually shift to the different rhythm of the destination world. Dinner was past and others had withdrawn to their rest or their recreations, none of which happened to be here. In the corridor beyond, twilight deepened toward darkness. Soon the widely spaced soft ganglights would turn on.

Tu Shan fixed a box to wall brackets he had forged in vine shapes. “I thought you were going to carve decorations on that first,” Hanno remarked.

“I want to put soil in it now and begin raising flowers,” Tu Shan explained. “Later I will make an ornamental railing and attach it.1’

Yukiko gave him a smile. “Yes, you do need flowers,” she agreed. “Living things.” What grew beneath her own hands was a mural painting, a landscape of hills, village, bamboo, in the foreground a blossoming cherry bough.

“I will carve the railing in animal shapes.” He sighed. “If only we could have animals aboard.” Their DNA patterns reposed in the databank. Someday, if all went well, there would be synthesis, growth tanks, release.

“Yes, I miss my ship’s cats,” Hanno admitted. “But a sailor got used to doing without most things. It made going ashore that much the happier.” His fingers plied rope, knot-work to hang at certain spots. Its Phoenician pattern would not clash with the Asian motif. He glanced at the mural. “That’s becoming lovely.”

Yukiko bowed in his direction. “Thank you. A poor copy, I fear, of what I can remember from a building that perished centuries ago.” —before things were recorded, for presentation at will in total-sensory imaging.

“You should have done it on Earth.”

“Nobody seemed interested.”

“Or had you simply lost heart? Never mind. We’ll beam it back from our planet. It’s as special as anything we’re likely to find there.” Its physical self would long since have gone down into the databank, its materials into the nanotech processors, converted to whatever was needed for the next project.

Aliyat had contended that the whole idea was foolish. No one wanted to spend fifteen years staring at a changeless picture. Why make it, to destroy and replace with something else, when projection panels could instantly create any of thousands of simulacra?

“I think before then, our friends will accept that this work was worth doing,” Hanno added.

“They kindly let me indulge in my pastime,” Yukiko said.

“No, I mean for its own sake. More than a pastime. We could invent plenty of mere amusements. We doubtless will. If necessary, we can just wait. A year goes by fast after you’ve had hundreds or thousands of them.”

“Unless much happens,” Tu Shan observed.

Hanno nodded. “True. I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”

“Perhaps the old man was finding his way toward wisdom,” Yukiko ventured. She lowered her brush. Her tone grew troubled. “For me, that was never possible. My years of quietness always Became, at last, a burden. It is the penalty of never aging. The body does not ease its hold on the spirit.”

“Nature meant us to die, get out of the way, leave whatever we gahied to the new generations,” Tu Shan said heavily. “Yet nature brought forth our kind. Are we monsters, freaks? Today everybody is like us. Should that be? Will it in the end cost the race its soul?”

Hanno kept busy with his ropework. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t even know if your questions mean anything. We are unique, we Survivors. We were born into age and death. We grew up expecting them for ourselves. Then we endured them, over and over and over, hi everybody we loved, till we found each other; and that didn’t end the losing. The primitive world shaped us. Look at what we’re making here. Maybe that’s why it’s us going to the stars. We’re the oldest people alive, but maybe we’re also the last of the children.”

15

A STATEROOM had space for little more than a seat, a dresser that doubled as a desk with terminal, and a bunk; but the bunk had width for two. Patulcius had stuck printouts of pictures onto his walls, scenes that existed no longer in their cities. The sonic playout gave a muted background of early twentieth-century jazz. That was the single kind of music on which he and Aliyat could agree. Later styles were too abstract for her, older Near Eastern tunes roused bad memories.

They lay side by side, sharing warmth and sweat. His passions were always rather quickly slaked, though; he liked to laze for a while afterward, daydreaming or talking, before he either fell asleep or went in search of refreshment.

Presently she stirred, kicked, sat up, hugged her knees, yawned. “I wonder what’s happening now at home,” she said.

“As I understand it, ‘now’ means very little to us ... now,” he answered in his plodding fashion. “It will mean less and less, the faster and farther we go.”

“Never mind. Why can’t they stay in touch?”

“You know. Our drive screens out their beams.”

She glanced at him. He lay hands behind head, look upon the ceiling. “Sure, but, uh, neutrinos.”

“Those facilities are tied up.”

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “We weren’t worth building new ones for. But aiming at some star a million light-years away—”

He smiled. “Not that far. Not quite. Although a rather daunting distance, true.”

“Who cares? I mean, all they ever get is stuff they can’t figure out. They don’t think it’s even meant for us, do they?”

“Yes and no. It’s a reasonable guess that those are messages addressed ‘to whom it may concern.’ To anyone who may be listening. But why should the senders think enough tike us that we can easily decipher their codes? Besides, they’re almost certainly robots. Very possibly, what we detect are nothing but beacons, meant to attract more robots—like those we have sent toward them.”

She shivered a bit. “Nothing really alive there?”

“Doubtful. Have you forgotten? Those are the strange places of the galaxy. Black holes, condensing nebulae, free matrices—is that the term I want? Modern cosmology baffles me too. But they’re bound to be dangerous, generally lethal environments. At the same time, each is unique. Surely all starfaring civilizations will dispatch robots to investigate them. They are where everybody’s machines will eventually meet. Therefore it makes sense that those already there will send messages they—or their builders— hope somebody new will catch. Those always were the likeliest places to find signs of intelligence, the best for us to focus our instruments on.”

“I know, I do know!” she snapped.

“As for why we have received nothing unambiguous from the mother civilizations—”

“Never mind! I wanted a breath of outside air, not a lecture!”

He did turn his face toward her. The heavy features drooped. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said. “I find the subject fascinating.”

“I might, if I hadn’t heard it all before, again and again. If something new could ever be said about it.”

“And if somebody new said it. Right?” he asked sadly. “I bore you, don’t I?”

She bit her lip. “I’m out of sorts.”

He avoided remarking that she had not answered his question. However, his tone sharpened a bit. “You knew you were leaving the social whirl behind.”

She jerked a nod. “Of course,” she replied curtly. “Do you suppose I didn’t learn how to bide my time, already in Palmyra? But I don’t have to like it.”

She swung her legs around, stood, reached for the robe she had hung on a hook. “I’m not sleepy, either,” she said. “I’m going to a dream box and get relaxed.” Unspoken was that evidently he had not eased her, though she had faked.

He sat up. “You go too often,” he protested without force.

“That’s my business.” She pulled the garment over her head, paused for a moment, met his eyes, glanced away again. “Sorry, Gnaeus. I am being bitchy. Wish me a better mood tomorrow, will you?” She leaned down to ruffle the shag on his chest before she departed, barefoot as she had arrived. The deck surfacing was soft, springy, almost like turf.

The corridor reached empty, dimly lit at this hour. Ventilation gave a breeze and a susurrus. She rounded a corner and stopped. Wanderer did too.

“Why, hello, there,” Aliyat said in American English. “Haven’t seen much of you for a while.” She smiled. “Where are you bound for?”

16

THE CLOSER Pytheas flew on-the heels of light, the more alien it and the outside universe became to each other. One did not care to look long into the viewscreens any more, if at all. The interior hull became like a set of caves, warm bright huddling places. Escape from their closeness lay in whatever work could be found or made; in sports, games, skills, reading, music, shows, traditional diversions; in the pseudo-lives of every sort that that computer engendered for those who linked with it.

The circumstances were by no means bad. Most of mankind throughout most of history would have considered them paradise. Still, as Hanno had once implied, it was as well that to immortals, a year could feel like quite a short span. And perhaps that was only true, or only true enough, of the Survivors. Had any modern human lived sufficiently long? Would any ever learn how to tough out hard times, especially the hard times of the spirit? Was a subliminal doubt of it the underlying reason why none had hitherto ventured this faring?

Be that as it may, challenges became welcome.

Phaeacia—Hanno had suggested the name—was not Earth. The robot explorers reported an extraordinary degree of similarity: sun, orbit, mass, composition, spin, tectonics, satellite; countlessly many factors seemed necessary to beget life chemistry closely resembling the terrestrial. Such worlds were few indeed (though “few,” given the size of the galaxy, might add up to hundreds). Yet nothing was identical and much, perhaps most, utterly foreign. The absence of anything sentient was merely the difference plainest to humans, and probably the least important.

Moreover, Phaeacia was less known than the goal Hanno had originally had in mind. It lay almost one hundred fifty light-years from Earth, near the edge of the communication sphere. Thus far a single mission had reached it and, when Pytheas left, a dozen years’ worth of reports had been received. It was a world, as various and mysterious as ever Earth herself in her prehistory.

The robots were still investigating. Pytheas couldn’t catch their messages while en route, but they would download tHeir entire data-hoard when it arrived. Doubtless the astonishments that waited were enormous. The travelers might spend a year or more in orbit, assimilating, before they took their first boat to the surface.

Meanwhile, why not practice? To gain familiarity with the material was elementary prudence, incomplete and often wrong though it must be; hands-on experience was best gotten in advance, illusory though it must be.

The senses no longer knew the gymnasium. Overhead arched sky, virginaUy blue save for clouds that were like breaths off the snowpeaks at the horizon. The countryside round about lay verdant with blades that were not really grass; trees swayed to a lulling wind that smelled of their resin and the sun; wings swept that air, and afar a herd of beasts galloped, swift and graceful. Wanderer remembered Jackson Hole as once it had been. His bean cracked.

Mastering himself, he stooped to pluck a rock out of the spring bubbling at his feet. It glittered quartzlike. The heft of it was cold in his hand. Yes, he thought, I’d better brush up my geology.

“Cut some timber,” Tu Shan ordered the robots. He pointed. “Over there. See if you can make planks.”

“So,” acknowledged the principal, and led its work gang off with their energy projectors, fluid reactants, and solid tools.

Wanderer swung his head toward his companion. The weight of the induction helmet reminded him that he wasn’t in a dream box. He was supposedly training his entire organism; but he stood in a place that surely didn’t exist as it was being presented to him. Well, he could believe that something not too unlike it did, on his new world. “What’re you doing?” he demanded.

“We’ll need wood suitable for construction, wherever we decide to settle,” Tu Shan explained. “We don’t want to depend on the wretched synthesizers, do we? Wasn’t that the point of leaving Earth?” He smiled, narrowed his eyes against the brilliance, dilated his nostrils, breathed deep. “Yes, I like it here.”

“You won’t farm this kind of site!” Wanderer cried.

Tu Shan stared at him. “Why not?”

“There’ll be plenty of others. This, it would be ... wrong.”

Tu Shan scowled. “How much of the planet do you want to keep for your private hunting preserve, forever?”

It shocked Wanderer: Have we carried the enmities of our forefathers through all these centuries and now through these light-years?

17

THE NANOPROCESSORS would take any material and transform it, atom by atom, into anything else for which they had a program. Out of their recycling came air, water, food. They could produce a complete, excellent meal, and often did according to individual choice. However, as a rule Mac-andal took just the basic ingredients and, aside from drink, made dinner for everybody. She was a gifted cook, enjoyed the work, and felt it was a service, something that lent her life some meaning. No pretense; machines lacked the personal touch that this archaic crew needed.

Certainly they did at a time of celebration. The ship’s calendar held many feasts, holy days and national days that Earth had mostly forgotten, private anniversaries, special occasions upon the voyage. Each fulfilled year of it was among them. That was by inboard time, of course. The faster Pytheas flew, the shorter a span became in relation to the galactic wheel.

“It’s getting kind of drunk out,” she remarked to Yukiko on the third of those evenings.

Having dined, folk had moved from the saloon to the spacious common room. Simulacrum panels had been raised, hiding the murals. They gave no scenes from home; it had been found that such were too likely to make an alcoholic party go somber. Patterns of light shifted and drifted, glowed and sparkled, through a violet-blue dusk. Nevertheless Hanno and Patulcius sat, goblets in hand, reminiscing about the twentieth century—the two widely sundered twentieth centuries that had been theirs. Wanderer and Svoboda revived the waltz, rotating embraced over the floor, earplugs giving Strauss to them alone; their eyes also excluded the world. Tu Shan and Aliyat danced, whooping and hand-clapping, to some livelier melody.

Kneeling as of old, Yukiko sipped at the bit of sake she was allowing herself. She smiled. “It is good to see cheer-fujness/’ she said.

“Yes, I’ve felt tension in the air,” Macandal replied. “Not that it’s gone away.”

“—poor old Sam Giannotti, he tried so hard to get a little modern physics into my head,” Hanno related slurrily. “Hell, I could barely manage a half-notion of what classical physics had been about. Made a song, I did, at last—”

Sweat darkened Tu Shan’s tunic beneath the arms and sheened on Aliyat’s bare shoulders and back.

“You should go join the fun,” Macandal said. sang Hanno off-key,

“Black bodies give off radiation,’ “And ought to continuously. Black bodies give off radiation, But do it by Planck’s theory.

“Bring back, bring back,

Oh, bring back that old continuity!

Bring back, bring back,

Oh, bring back Clerk Maxwell to me.”

Yukiko smiled again. “I am enjoying myself,” she said, “But why don’t you go? You were never a passive person, like me.”

“Ha, don’t you kid me. In your peculiar ways, you’re as active, as much a doer, as anybody I ever met.”

“Though now we have Schrodinger functions,

Dividing up h by 2ir

That damn differential equation

Still has no solution for V.

“Bring back, bring back—”

Aliyat and Tu Shan laughed into each other’s mouths. Wanderer and Svoboda circled as if through a dream.

“Well, Heisenberg came to the rescue, Intending to make alt secure. What is the result of his efforts? We are absolutely unsure.

“Bring back, bring back—”

Aliyat left her partner, approached, beckoned to Yukiko. Macandal stepped aside. The two whispered together.

“Dirac spoke of energy levels, Both minus and plus. Oh, how droll! And now, just because of his teaching, We don’t know our mass from a hole.

“Bring back—“ Aliyat returned to Tu Shan. They left the room arm in arm.

“She asked if you’d mind, didn’t she?” Macandal inquired.

Yukiko nodded. “I don’t. I truly don’t. She surely remembered that. But it was good of her to ask.”

Macandal sighed. “His nature too, isn’t it? I’ve wondered—I’m a trifle in my own cups—don’t be offended, please, but I’ve wondered how much you really love him.”

“What is love? Among my people, most people, what counted was respect. Affection normally grew out of it.”

“Yeah.” Macandal’s gaze followed the pair still on the floor.

Yukiko winced. “Are you in pain, Corinne?”

“No, no. Nothing’s going to happen with those two. Though, as you say, it shouldn’t matter if anything did, should it?” Macandal made a laugh. “Johnnie’s a gentleman. He’ll ask me for the next dance. I can wait.”

“Bring back, bring back,

Oh, bring back that old continuity—”

18

STRANGER AND ever stranger gjew the cosmos that the ship beheld. Aberration of light sent star images crawling aside, while Doppler shift blued those forward and reddened those aft until many no longer shone at any wavelength the eye could perceive. In the ship’s measure, the mass of the atoms that its fields scooped up increased with the rising velocity; distances that it was traversing shrank, as if space were flattening under the impact; time passed more quickly, less of it between one atomic pulsebeat and the next. Pytheas would never reach the haste of light, but the closer it sped, the more foreign to the rest of the universe it became.

Alone among the eight, Yukiko had taken to seeking communion yonder. She would settle in the navigation chamber, otherwise unused until journey’s end drew nigh, and bid the screens give her the view. It was a huge and eerie grandeur, there around her shell of humming silence— blacknesses, ringfire, streams of radiance. Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.

She did not let herself go wholly into it. Had she become able to, that would have been a desertion of comrades and dereliction of duty. She hoped she might help Tu Shan, and others if they wished, toward the serenity behind the awe-someness, once she herself had gone deeply enough. Not as a Boddhisatva, no, no, nor a guru, only as a friend who had something wonderful to share. It would help them so much, in the centuries to come.

They had need of every strength. Hardships and dangers counted for little, would often be gladdening, a gift of that reality which had slipped from their hands on Earth. The loneliness, though. Three hundred years between word and reply. How much more distanced might Earth become in three hundred more years?

Never before had the eight been this isolated for this long; and it would go on. Oh, it was scarcely worse than isolation had grown at home. (And if shiploads of settlers arrived, once Pha-eacia was proven habitable—if it was; if they did—what would they really have in common with the Survivors?) But it worked on them more than they had foreseen. Forced in upon themselves, they discovered less than they perhaps had looked for.

Horizons and challenge should open them up again. Yet they might always be haunted by the understanding that they were not actually pioneers, mightily achieving what they had determined they would do. They were ... not quite outcasts ... failures, leftovers from a history that no longer mattered, sent on their way almost casually, as an act of indifferent kindness.

Their children, however; there was the future that Earth had lost. Yukiko ran a hand down her belly. Mother of nations! This body was not foredoomed in the way that women otherwise were, even today. The technology could keep you youthful, but it could not add one ovum to those with which you were born. (Well, doubtless it could, if people so desired, but of course they didn’t.) Hers made new eggs as it made new teeth, during her entire unbounded life. (Don’t scorn the machines. They’ll save you from ever again having to watch your children grow old. They’ll create the genetic variety that will allow four couples to people a planet.)

Yes, hope ranged yet. May it never go out of reach.

“Ship, what of the flight?” she called.

“Velocity point nine-six-four c,” sang the voice, “mean ambient equivalent matter density one point zero four proton, all mission parameters within zero point three percent, navigating now by the Virgo cluster of galaxies and seven quasars near the limits of the observable universe.”

Stars across farness,

Drift of dandelion seeds— ‘What, springtime again?

19

AFTER SEVEN and a half of its own years, ten times as many celestial, Pytheas reached the halfway point of its journey. There was a brief spell of weightlessness as the vessel went on free trajectory, lasers and force-fields withdrawn except for what was required to shield the life within. Majestically, the hull turned around. Heavily armored, robots went out to reconfigure the generator net. When they were back inside, Pytheas unfurled snare and kindled engine. Fire reawakened. At one gravity of deceleration, the craft backed down toward its goal. Trumpet notes rang through the air.

Surely the travelers had spesial cause for festival. Macan-dal took three days preparing the banquet. She was in the galley, chopping and mixing, when Patulcius appeared. “Hi,” she greeted him in English, which remained her language of choice. “What can I do for you?”

He barely smiled. “Or I for you. I think I have remembered what went into that appetizer I mentioned.”

“Hm?” She laid down her cleaver and brought finger to chin. “Oh ... oh, yes. Tahini something. You made it sound good, but neither of us could recall what tahini was.”

“How much else has faded out of us?” he mumbled. Squaring his shoulders, he spoke briskly. “I have brought the memory back, at least in part. It was a paste made from sesame meal. The dish I thought of combined it with garlic, lemon juice, cumin, and parsley.”

“Splendid. The nano can certainly make sesame, and here’s a grinder, but I’ll have to experiment, and you tell me how wide of the mark I am. It ought to go well with some other hors d’oeuvres I’m planning. We don’t want anything too heavy before the main course.”

“What will that be, or is it still a secret?”

Macandal considered Patulcius. “It is, but Til let you in on it if you’ll keep mum. Curried goose. A twenty-one-boy curry.”

“Delicious, I’m sure,” he said listlessly.

“Is that all you’ve got to say, you, our champion trencherman?”

He turned to go. She touched his arm. “Wait,”_she murmured. “You’re feeling absolutely rotten, aren’t you? Can I help?”

He looked elsewhere. “I doubt it. Unless—“ He swallowed and grimaced. “Never mind.”

“Come on, Gnaeus. We’ve been friends a long time.”

“Yes, you and I, we could somehow relax with each other better than— Okay!” he spat. “Can you speak to Aliyat? No, surely not. Or if you do, what use?”

“I thought that was it,” said Macandal low. “Her sleeping around. Well, I can’t say I’m overjoyed when Johnnie spends a night with her, but it is something she needs. I’ve been thinking Hanno does wrong to ignore her passes at him.”

“Nymphomania.”

“No, not really. Grabbing out for love, assurance. And ... something to do. She spends too much time in the dream box as is.”

He struck fist in palm. “But I am not something for her to do, am I?”

“Not any more? I suspected that too. Poor Gnaeus.” Macandal took his hand. “Listen. I know her well, better than anybody else. I don’t believe she wants to be unkind. If she avoids you, why, she feels—ashamed? No, more like being afraid of hurting you worse.” She paused. “I’m going to take her aside and talk like a Dutch aunt.”

He flushed. “Not on my account, please. I don’t want pity.”

“No, but you deserve more consideration than you’ve gotten.”

“Sex isn’t that big a thing, after all.”

“A sound philosophy,” Macandal said, “but not too easy to put in practice when you aren’t a saint and your body never grows older. How well I know. We can’t have you racking yourself apart, Gnaeus. If I—“ She drew breath, then smiled. “We had some pretty good times in the past, you and I, didn’t we? It was long ago, but I’ve not forgotten.”

He stared. A minute passed before he could stammer, “You, you don’t really in-mean that. It is sweet of you, but no, really, not necessary.”

Calm had come upon her. “Don’t think ‘mercy hump.’ I like you. Well, no hurry. Best we take our time and see how things develop. Lord knows we have plenty of time, and if we haven’t learned a little patience by now, we might.as well open the airlocks. I mean all of us aboard.”

After a moment: “Too bad, isn’t it, that this tremendous quest of ours hasn’t made us worthy of itself. We’re the same limited, foolish, mixed-up, ridiculous primitives we always were. Today’s Earth people wouldn’t have our problems. But it is we, not they, who’ve gone out here.”

Pytheas flew onward. Another three and a half years passed inside the hull before the universe broke through, like a storm wave crashing over the rail of a Grecian ship.

20

IT CAME as suddenly, through the musical robotic voice: “Attention! Attention! Instruments detect anomalous neutrino input. It appears to be coded.”

Hanno cried aloud, a seafaring oath not heard these past three millennia, and sprang from his bunk. “Light,” he ordered. Illumination filled the room. It glowed amber in Svoboda’s hair, the warmest color between the walls.

“From Earth?” she gasped, sitting straight. “Did they build a transmitter?”

He shivered. “I should think Pytheas would recognize—”

The answer interrupted him: “The direction of origin is becoming clear, somewhat forward of us, broadcast rather than beamcast. Modulation is of pulse, amplitude, and spin. I am still engaged in observation and analysis, to determine the velocity of the source and compensate for Doppler shift and time dilation. At present the pattern appears mathematically simple.”

“Yeah, start by making us aware it’s artificial.” Hanno’s finger stabbed the intercom touchdisc. “Has everybody heard? Meet in the saloon. I’ll report to you there as soon as possible.” Needlessly—or was it?—he reached for his clothes. “Want to come, Svoboda?”

Her grin was a hunter’s. “Try and stop me.”

Perhaps it was equally superfluous to seek the command room. It might even be unwise, to wait there amidst the terrible glory in the viewscreens. Too easily could that daunt the spirit and numb the mind. But sitting hand in hand, watching the numbers and graphic displays the ship generated for them, was like keeping a grip on a reality that otherwise would blow away into emptiness.

“Have you learned more?” Svoboda must ask.

“Give the computer a chance,” Hanno tried to laugh. “It’s only had a few minutes.”

“Every minute for us is—how much outside? An hour? How many millions of kilometers laid behind us?”

“I detect a similar source, much weaker but strengthening,” the ship told them. “It is on the opposite side of our projected course.”

Hanno stared a while into distorted heaven before he said slowly, “Yes, I think I understand. They know how we’re headed, more or less, and have sent ... messengers ... to intercept us. However, of course they can’t tell exactly— several different destinations may have looked possible to them, nor could they foresee factors like the boost we’d use—so they sent a number of messengers, pretty widely distributed, to lie radiating in the zone, or zones, we’d probably pass through.”

“They?” Svoboda asked.

“The Others. The aliens. Whoever and whatever they are. We’ve found a starfaring civilization at last. Or it’s found us.”

Her own gaze went outward, gone rapt. “They will rendezvous with us?”

He shook his head. “Not quite, I think. Given all the uncertainties, and the distances, and the long, unpredictable time out here till we might arrive—they’d not dispatch living crews. Those must be low-mass, high-thrust robot craft, maybe made for this one purpose.”

She was silent half a minute. When she spoke, it sounded almost annoyed. “How can you be so sure?”

“Why, it’s obvious,” he answered, surprised. “The radiation from our powerplant ran well ahead of us only during the first year, till we got close to light speed. That wouldn’t give them nearly enough warning, if they set out to meet us when they picked it up. They can’t live close by, or we’d have detected them from the Solar System.”

“Obvious, or smug?” she challenged. “How much do we know? We have barely begun our first tiny venture into deep space. How long have they been exploring? Thousands of years? Millions? What have they discovered, what can they do?”

His smile twisted. “I’m sorry. This is no moment to cast a shadow on.” He sighed. “But I’ve met a great many dreams over the centuries, and most of them turned out to be no more than that. It’s been quite some time since our physicists decided they’d found all the laws of nature, all the possibilities and impossibilities.” He lifted a hand. “I realize that’s a proposition that can never be proven. But the likelihood has come to seem very high, hasn’t it? I’d love to learn the aliens own magic carpets flitting faster than tight; but I don’t expect to.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. “At least, we roust reason on the basis of what we do know. I suspect that’s far less than you think, but— What shall we do?”

“Respond.”

“Of course! But how? I mean, we’re slowing down, but we’re still near light speed. By the tune the, tile machine, any of those machines up ahead receives our signal, won’t we be past it? Won’t its answer take ... years to overtake us?”

He squeezed her hand. “Smart girl. You always were.” To the ship: “We want to establish contact as soon as may be. What do you advise?”

The answer jarred them both into bolt uprightness. “That is contingent. The transmission has changed character. It has become considerably more complex.”

“You, you mean they know we’re here? Where are they, anyway?”

“I am refining those figures as I obtain more parallax. The nearest source is approximately a light-year off our path, approximately twice that distance vectorially.”

“Baal! Then they can detect us instantly?”

“No. No, wait, Hanno.” Svoboda’s words came a little unsteadily, but fast. “That needn’t be. Suppose the broadcast is automatic, a cycle. First a simple alert signal, then the message, then the alert signal again, over and over. The message alone—we might not have recognized it for what it is, supposed it was just some natural thing.”

“When I first acquired it,” Pytheas volunteered, “I assumed it was a fluctuation in the background noise, conceivably of interest to astrophysicists but irrelevant to this mission. It was Dopplered and otherwise warped out of identifiability. The low-information transmission that succeeded it made clear that here is no random flux. It also provided unambiguous data by which the warp functions could be determined. I am now compensating for them and thus reconstructing the message proper.”

Hanno sagged back. “How often have they done this,” he whispered, “with how many others?”

“The reconstruction is not yet perfect, but it continually improves as additional data come in,” Pytheas went on. “Since the cycle is short, in shipboard time, I should soon have good definition. The message itself must be fairly brief, with high redundancy, although I anticipate high resolution as well. This is a visual mapping.”

Darkness brimmed in a screen. Suddenly it was full of tiny light-points, uncountably numerous. Their blumness dissipated, they sharpened, minute by minute. Colors appeared in them, and with that help eyes began to make out three-dimensional shapes, self-recurrent in infinite complexity.

“Prime numbers define a coordinate space,” said the ship. “Digital impulses identify points within it, which hi turn are members of fractal sets. Those functions should provide images, but the proper combinations must be found empirically. My mathematical component is running the search. When something intelligible emerges, that should give clues to obtaining further refinement and eventually extracting the entire content.”

“Well,” said Svoboda dazedly, “if the computers on Earth could design you in a single year—”

Hanno at her side, she waited. The unrolling dance of curves and surfaces flowed together. A picture grew into being. It was of stars.

21

THE six around the saloon table looked sharply around when the two entered. Coffee and remnants of food bespoke what hours had passed; more so did haggardness and tension. “Well,” Patulcius snapped, “about time!”

“Hush,” Macandal murmured. “They’ve come as soon as they could.” Her glance added: An immortal ought to have more patience. But it has been hard, waiting.

Hanno and Svoboda benched themselves oppositely at the doorward end. “You’re right,” the Phoenician said. “Getting a clear, complete message and deciding what it means took this long.”

“We do apologize, however,” Svoboda added. “We should have given you ... progress reports. We didn’t think to, didn’t realize how time was passing. There was never any, oh, revelation, any exact moment when we knew.” Weariness weighted her smile. “I’m ravenous. What’s available immediately?”

“You sit still, honey,” Macandal said, rising. “I’ve got sandwiches already made. Figured this would be a long session.”

Aliyat’s look followed her eut, as if to ask: Has she, in our snared bewilderment, gone back to her Old South, or simply to her old caring?

“She’d better bring me some too, or you’ll have a fight on your hands and halfway up your arms,” Hanno said to Svoboda. The jape rattled from nerves drawn wire-thin.

“All right,” Wanderer demanded, “what is the news?”

“Corinne’s entitled to hear from the start,” Svoboda replied.

His fingers clutched the table edge. The nails whitened. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

She reached to stroke a hand. “You merely forgot. We’re beyond dqrselves, every one of us.”

“Well, Corinne isn’t fond of technical details,” Hanno said. “I can start with those. And, uh, with apologies to those of you who aren’t either. I’m no scientist myself, you know, so this will be short.”

Macandal returned while he was sketching the theory of the communication. Besides food on a tray, she bore a fresh pot of coffee and a bottle of brandy. “Celebration,” she laughed. “I hope!”

The fragrances were like blossoms in spring. “Yes, yes,” Svoboda exulted. “The discovery of the ages.”

“Theirs more than ours,” Hanno said. “The aliens’, I mean. But we have to decide what to do about it.”

Tu Shan leaned forward, elbows on table, heavy shoulders hunched. “Well, what is the situation?” he asked lev-elly enough.

“We’re receiving the same message, repeated and repeated,” Hanno told them while he ate and gulped. “It’s from two sources, one closer to our path than the other. Quite likely there are more that we haven’t come in range of. If we continue on our present track, we may pick them up. The nearest is a couple of light-years from us. It appears to be on station relative to a line drawn between Sol and Phaeacia’s sun, roughly the path we’re following. Pytheas says that’s easy to do; just keep yourself from orbiting away. As I was saying while you were out, Corinne, everything suggests that the aliens sent robots to sit broadcasting continuously. A little antimatter would provide ample power for centuries.”

“The message is pictorial,” Wanderer interjected.

“Well, graphic,” Hanno proceeded. “You’ll all see it later. Often, no doubt, trying to squeeze extra meaning out of it. I suspect you’ll fail. No real images, just several ... diagrams, maps, representations. Transmission to a ship traveling at Einsteinian speed, a changing speed at that, must be a tough problem, especially when the aliens can’t know what our capabilities are for receiving and decoding— or how we think, or much of anything about us. Detailed pictures might be impossible for us to untangle. Evidently they composed the simplest, least ambiguous message that might serve. I would, in their place.”

“But what is their place?” Yukiko wondered.

Hanno chose to take her literally. “I’m coming to that. What we got, first, was a lot of light-points in three-dimensional space. Then little bars appeared next to three of them. Then we got those three points in succession—it must be same ones—each by itself with the bar enlarged so we could see vertical lines on it. Then the view returned to the light-points in general, with a red line between two of those that are marked. Finally another line appeared, from about two-thirds along the first one, offside to the third marked tight-point.

“That’s all. Each exposure lasts about a minute. The sequence finishes and starts over. After sixteen cycles, it becomes a plain series of flashes, that could just as well be rendered by dots and dashes in sound waves. This goes on for the same total time, after which we return to the graphics. And so on, over and over.”

Hanno sat back. He grinned a bit. “What do you make of h?”

“That isn’t fair,” Patulcius complained.

“No, don’t be a tease,” Aliyat agreed.

“Hold on.” Macandal’s eyes shone darkly bright. “It’s worthwhile making us guess. Bring more minds to bear on the problem.”

“The ship’s mind must already have solved it,” Patulcius said.

“Nevertheless— Lord, let’s have a little fun. I think those fight-points stand for stars, a map of this neighborhood in the galaxy. One of the three special ones has got to be Sol, the other Phaeacia Sun, and the third—where the aliens are!”

... “Right.” Wanderer’s tone quivered with an equal excitement. “The bars, are they spectrograms?”

“Brilliant, you two,” Svoboda said happily.

Wanderer shook his head. “Naw, it’s pretty obvious, though I do look forward to actually seeing it. A sending from the Others—”

Hanno nodded. “Pytheas ran through the astronomy database and confirmed those identifications,” he related. “The third was hardest, because the three-dimensional representation is on such a small scale. But by expanding the fractals as well as searching the records— Anyhow, it turns out to be a star on our port quarter, if I may speak two-dimensionally. About thirty degrees off our course and about three hundred fifty light-years from our present position. It’s type G seven, not as bright as Sol but not too unlike.” He paused. “It’s still less unlike that star in Pegasus, the one we believe may be the home of the nearest high-tech civilization to us, more than a thousand light-years.”

“Then they have come this far,” Yukiko said in awe.

“If they are from that civilization, if it is a civilization,” Svoboda reminded. “We know nothing, nothing.”

“What powers have they, that they know about us?”

“We’ve tried to guess, we two,” Hanno said. He drew breath. “Listen. Think. They—that third star—is about four hundred thirty light-years from Sol. That means it’s within the radio sphere of Earth. For a while, starting in the twentieth century, Earth was the brightest radio object in the Solar System, outshining Sol in that band. That was interrupted, you remember, and afterward people developed communications that didn’t clutter the spectrum so grossly; but the old wave front is still expanding. Even beyond Star Three, it’s still detectable if you have instruments as good as ours, which the aliens certainly do.

“Very well. However they got to Star Three, they soon found that Sol had a brilliant radio companion. Nobody has spotted that at Pegasi, the Mother Star, assuming that is where the aliens originated. It’s too distant; nothing from us will reach it for centuries. So the, uh, colonists or visitors at Three are on their own.

“Now take things from their viewpoint. In due course, Sol ought to be sending out ships too, if it hasn’t already begun. It will be especially interested in contacting the nearest neighbor high-tech civilization it can identify, Mother Star’s. The aliens could send robots to lie along the general path between those two. Our robots bound that way are smart and versatile. They would, at the least, beam word back to Earth. You recall they’re equipped to do that from space, as we aren’t, because they don’t boost all the while; tune touches them less than us. Unfortunately, I think, they must already have gone too far to acquire the signal—which indicates the aliens have not been at Three extremely long.

“There is another good possibility for the aliens. Sol folk should also be especially interested in stars like their own. Phaeacia Sun is that sort, and it lies in the same general, attractive direction as Mother Star. It’s much the nearest to Sol that fits both requirements. So the aliens sent robots to lie along that path too. We’ve encountered those.”

Silence closed down, eyes dropped in thought or stared at walls, until Aliyat said, “But robots went ahead of us to Phaeacia. Why haven’t they reported anything about this?”

“Maybe the messenger craft hadn’t gotten here when they passed by,” Patulcius said. “We don’t know when the messengers arrived.” He pondered. “Except that it must have been less than—four hundred thirty years ago, did you say, Hanno? Otherwise the aliens could have had robots at Sol by now.”

“Maybe they do.” Aliyat shivered. “We’ve been gone a long time.”

“I doubt it,” said Wanderer. “That would be one hell of a coincidence.”

“They might not want to, for whatever reason,” Macan-dal pointed out. “We’re completely ignorant.”

“You’re forgetting the nature of those robots at Pha-eatia,” Svoboda said. “They’re not like the ones bound for Pegasi in the wake of messages beamed beforehand—great, intelligent, flexible machine minds intended to attempt con-versation with other minds able to understand what they are. The Phaeacia robots were designed and programmed to go there and collect information on that specific planetary system. Almost monomaniacs. If they noticed these neu-trino bursts en route, they paid no attention.” She smiled sardonically. “Not their department.”

Yukiko nodded. ‘”Nobody can foresee everything,” she said. “Nothing can.”

“But when we’re surprised, we can Investigate and learn.” Hanno’s words rang. “We can.”

Their looks shot to him and struck fast, all but Svoboda’s. The color mounted in her cheeks.

“What do you mean?” Tu Shan rumbled after several breaths.

“You know what,” Hanno replied. “We’ll change course and go to Star Three.”

“No!” Aliyat screamed. She half sprang to her feet, sank back down, and shuddered.

“Think,” Hanno urged. “The diagram. That line between our course, this very point of our course, and Three. What is it but an invitation? They must be lonely too, and hopeful of hearing marvelous things. Pytheas calculated it. If we change direction now, we can reach them in about a dozen years, ship’s time. It’s three light-years more than we planned, but we are still at close to light speed and— A dozen little years, to meet the farers of the galaxy.”

“But we only had four to go!”

“Four years longer to our home.” Tu Shan knotted his fists on the tabletop. “How far from it would you take us?”

Hanno hesitated. Svoboda answered: “Between Three and Phaeacia Sun is about three hundred light-years. From a standing start, sixteen or seventeen ship years. We won’t abandon our original purpose, only postpone it.”

“The hell you say,” Wanderer rapped. “Whichever star we go to, we’ll need more antimatter before we can take off for anywhere else. Building the production plant and then making the stuff, that’s probably ten years by itself.”

“The aliens should have plenty on hand.”

“Should they? And will they share it, freely, just like that? How do you know? How can you tell what they want of us, anyway?”

“Wait, wait,” Macandal broke in. “Let’s not get paranoid. Whatever they are, it can’t be monsters or, or bandits or anything evil. At their stage of civilization, that wouldn’t make sense.”

“Now who’s being cocksure?” Aliyat shrilled.

“What do we know about Star Three?” Yukiko asked.

Her quietness smoothed bristles down a little. Hanno shook his head. “Not much, beyond its type and inferred age,” he admitted. “Being normal, it’s bound to have planets, but we have no information on them. Never been visited. My God, a sphere eight or nine hundred light-years across holds something like a hundred thousand stars.”

“But you say this one’s not so bright as ours,” Macandal reminded him. “Then the chances that it’s got a planet where we could breathe are poor. Even with much better candidates—”

The table thudded beneath Tu Shan’s smiting. “That is what matters,” he said. “After fifteen weary years, we were promised, we shall walk free on living ground. You would keep us locked in this hull for ... eight years longer than that, and then at journey’s end we still would be, for decades or centuries or forever. No.”

“But this chance, we cannot pass it by,” Svoboda protested.

Wanderer spoke crisply. “We won’t. Once we get to Phaeacia, we’ll have the robots build us a proper transceiver and send a beam to Three, start conversation. Eventually we’ll go there in person, those of us who care to. Or maybe the aliens will come to us.”

Hanno’s countenance was stark. “I told you, it’s about three hundred light-years between Phaeacia and Three,” he said.

Wanderer shrugged. “We have time ahead of us.”

“If Phaeacia doesn’t kill us first. We were never guaranteed safety there, you know.”

“Earth should be getting in touch too, once we’ve informed them,” Macandal said.

Svoboda’s tone lashed. “Yes, by beam, and by robots that beam back. Who but us will ever go in person, and get to know the Others as they are?”

“It is true,” Yukiko said. “Words and pictures alone, with centuries between, are good, but they are not enough. I think we here should understand that better than our fellow humans. We knew the dead of long ago as living bodies, minds, souls. To everyone else, what are they but relics and words?”

Svoboda regarded her. “Then you want to set for Star Three?”

“Yes, oh, yes.”

Tu Shan’s look upon her was stricken. “Do you say that, Small Snow—Morning Glory?” He straightened. “Well, it shall not be.”

“Absolutely not,” Patulcius vowed. “We have our community to found.”

Aliyat caught his arm and leaned close against him. Her eyes defied Hanno. “Our homes to make,” she said.

Macandal nodded. “It’s a hard decision, but ... we should go to Phaeacia first.”

“And last?” Hanno retorted. “I tell you, if we let this chance escape us, we can very well never get it back. Do you want to change your mind, Peregrino?” Wanderer sat expressionless for a while before he answered, “It is a hard decision after all. The greatest, most important adventure in history, which we risk losing, against—what may be New Earth, a fresh start for our race. Which is better, the forest or the stars?” Again he was mute, brooding. Abruptly: “Well, I said it before. The stars can wait.”

“Four against three,” Tu Shan reckoned, triumphant. “We continue as we were.” Softening: “I am sorry, friends.”

Hanno’s voice, face, bearing went altogether bleak. “I was afraid of this. Please think again.”

“I have had centuries to think,” Tu Shan said.

“To wish for the Earth of the past, you mean,” Yukiko told him, “an Earth that never really was. No, you wouldn’t deny humankind such a chance for knowledge, for coming closer to oneness with the universe. That would be nothing but selfish. You are not a selfish person, dear.”

He shook his head, ox-stubborn.