Across A Billion Years

TEN

November 16? 17? 18? 2375

Somewhere in Ultraspace

A month has passed, I know, since I last fingered a message cube. Something about voyages in ultraspace discourages my impulse to communicate. I’m not even sure what day it is. There’s an Earthstyle calendar somewhere aboard, but I can’t bother to look for it.

We closed up shop on Higby V right on schedule, leaving the site sealed so that the next archaeologists to work it — hopefully, a less flighty bunch than we turned out to be — will find it intact. The cruiser arrived and picked us up on the twenty-first. We did not inform Galaxy Central that we’ve taken the globe with us. That makes us renegades of sort, but it’ll be months before the bureaucrats back home find that out, and by then, maybe, we’ll have some gaudy new find to calm them. As Mirrik learned after his boozy prance through the lab, any sinner can find redemption if the yield of his sin is spectacular enough.

Our ship is a standard interstellar cruiser, making an upper quadrant run between Rigel and Aldebaran. The stop at GGC 1145591 is slightly out of the way, but not too much, and wasn’t hard to arrange. All it took was stash. Old Earthside proverb: Stash buys. We will have a rented planetship at our disposal so that we can search the GGC 1145591 system for our asteroid. It’s already on its way there from Aldebaran to await us. That took stash too. Dr. Schein overdrew our thumb account long ago, but he has a glib way with computers and is running on credit now; we’ll manage so long as Galaxy Central doesn’t find out. May the Almighty Proton protect us if we draw a blank on this expedition — if we have, to use the fine medieval expression, gone off to chase the wild duck.

Our quarters are comfortable, as before. Spacious cabins, good library, recreation facilities, decent food. The crewmen keep to themselves, we to ourselves. Time blurs strangely aboard an ultradrive trip, and I find myself doing without sleep for what may possibly be two or three days in a row, and then sleeping for days. Or so it seems.

Everybody is much keyed up, especially Drs. Schein and Horkkk. They walk around perpetually surprised that they ever found the slice to abandon Higby V for the present quest. Dr. Horkkk, you know, is hardly a charming romantic liberated adventurous type, and as near as I can read his expression, he seems to be saying, “How can this be me?” Dr. Schein looks equally baffled. Pilazinool, on the other hand, is quietly confident, rarely unlaces his limbs any more, seems to feel that we have been blessed by destiny. We’ll see.

My chief social accomplishment on the trip so far has been to push Jan back to her obsession with Saul Shahmoon.

I’m not sure how I managed that. I thought Jan and I were working on the same wavelength.

I don’t mean that anything very passionate had happened between us, or that we were about to apply even for temporary marriage status, or anything remotely like that. Our contacts have been surprisingly chaste. We’ve done a little quiet biologizing, yes, but nothing has occurred between us that would have been amiss even in a fairly puritanical era. Maybe I’m a spinless feeb for having been so restrained. We are adults. It says right here.

However, despite all this chastity, Jan and I did seem to be blending into a sort of team, and I don’t think anyone really minded it, Leroy Chang excepted. As the youngest and (let’s face it) most attractive Earthfolk in the group, Jan and I were drawing a kind of paternal approval from the others. They beamed at us a lot. I always feel put down when I’m beamed at, don’t you?

They don’t beam at us lately, because Jan’s been spending her time with Saul again. When I see her I get the freeze, right down to absolute zero.

I don’t know what I did or said or didn’t do or didn’t say that made her chill off on me. Maybe I started to bore her. I can be so terribly clean-cut and bright-eyed, sometimes — my worst fault, you’d agree.

Maybe she’s suddenly developed a terrific interest in philately.

Maybe she never was in tune with me at all, but just was using me to heat up some jealousy in Saul.

Who knows? Not I. Not a clue.

It’s been going on for ten, twelve days now. Not to sponge syllables about it, I’m upset. I don’t have any right to feel possessive toward Jan, considering that all that went on with us was a kind of glorified hand-holding, more or less. But I don’t enjoy seeing her disappear into Saul’s cabin for two and three hours at a stretch. With the door locked, too.

Having an imagination can be an awful burden sometimes.

One marginal benefit of this leg of the trip is that I’ve had a chance to get to know Kelly Watchman better. As you know, androids don’t turn me on a lot, and until a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t said anything to Kelly, aside from shoptalk as we dug, but “Lousy weather, isn’t it?” and “Please pass the tingle tablets” and “Do you have the time?” and like that.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever really talked with an android before. I knew a few at college, but they stuck together and didn’t go out of their way to solicit the company of flesh-and-blooders, and I never tried to impose myself on them. And of course Dad has some androids working for him in fairly high-level jobs, but it didn’t occur to me to make friends with them, either. I’ve always been a bit edgy and withdrawn around minority people; it’s the well-known guilt feelings of the overprivileged classes that hold me back.

The night I first talked with Kelly was before Jan and I had started to drift apart. The reason I wasn’t with Jan that evening was that she’d been feeling headachy and cranky, and had gone off to use the ship’s nothing chamber in the hopes that a few hours cut off from all sensory stimuli would help her relax. Nobody else much was around, either; Dr. Schein and Dr. Horkkk were writing reports, Pilazinool and Mirrik were battling to the death over the chessboard, 408b had locked itself up for meditation, and so on. I was wandering around the ship, feeling left out and adrift, when Kelly came up to me in the library cabin and said, “May I sit with you a while, Tom?”

“I’d love it, Kelly,” I said grandly, hopping up to draw her a chair, making a big chivalrous gesture out of it — the overcompensation of guilt again.

We settled down facing each other across a glittering single-crystal table. I asked her if she’d like a drink and she said no — of course — but wouldn’t mind if I had one. I said I’d pass also. These genteel maneuvers occupied a couple of minutes.

Then in a low voice she said, “That man has been following me around all evening. How can I make him go away?”

I looked toward the cabin door and glimpsed Leroy Chang skulking in the corridor. Leroy is the only true skulker I’ve ever known. He glared at me really furiously, as though telling me how loathsome I was to keep getting between him and the women he was chasing. Then he stalked away, no doubt hissing a little and wishing he had a mustache to twirl.

“The poor quonker,” I said. “He’s got a sex problem, I guess.”

Kelly flashed a dazzling smile. “When will he learn that I have no interest in helping him solve it?”

I felt a pang of sympathy for skulking Leroy. The android sitting opposite me looked fantastically desirable. Kelly’s sparkling auburn hair tumbled almost to her shoulders; it gleamed and glowed with the sheen that comes only out of android creation vats. Her deep green eyes seemed like precious jewels; her flawless skin was not the skin of mere mortals; and in her careless way she had donned a clinging sprayon wrap that amounted to not much more than a bit of fluff up here and a bit more down there. She was a vision of seductiveness — a cruel joke played by the lab technicians who had put her together out of amino acids and electricity, because they hadn’t conditioned any sex into Kelly at all. I imagine she could have made Leroy Chang happy in a way, if she had wanted to, but she didn’t want to, and didn’t even want to want to, and couldn’t begin to understand what Leroy was looking for. The sweaty urges of humanity are as alien to her as the hunger of a Shilamakka to convert himself into machinery is to us.

Still, she was beautiful. The radiant image of voluptuous nineteen-year-old womanhood, a kind of dream creature. All androids are attractive, in a kind of standardized stereotyped way, but whoever had written the program for Kelly must have been a poet of the vats. Sitting there making sophisticated-type chatter with her, I felt vaguely like the hero of one of those tridim movies, forever enmeshed in romantic talk with mysterious beauties aboard spaceliners bound for remote ports.

However, nobody had been kind enough to hand me a script. I had to make up the dialogue as I went along. Kelly, now that I had rescued her from pestiferous Leroy, seemed willing to sit in the library and talk all night with me, but after the first ten minutes I found that I had exhausted my stock of light conversation. It isn’t easy to find much to say when you’re aboard an ultradrive cruiser, locked up in a sealed container where contact with the rest of the universe is impossible. You can’t even discuss the weather. Once you’ve talked about your reactions to the twisty-twisty of entering ultraspace, you’ve run dry.

For the sake of that mental image I had of myself as the star of a cool tridim (Tom Rice, Intergalactic Secret Agent), I had to find something to say. And so my mouth kept moving while my brain stalled. What is the one topic you should not discuss with a minority person? Why, what it feels like to be a minority person, of course. One should not risk stomping on toes, rubbing salt in wounds, focussing curiosity on a subject of which the minority person is heartily sick, etcetera. Naturally.

In horror and dismay I listened to my mouth say to Kelly Watchman, “I’ve never really had much social contact with androids, you know.”

She was adroit. “There aren’t very many of us.”

“No. That’s just it. You’ve always seemed so different that I’ve felt uneasy about you. I mean androids in general, not you in particular. It’s so hard for me to comprehend what it must be like to be android. To be just like a human being in every respect, and yet not to be…”

My voice trailed off stupidly.

“Not to be really human?” Kelly completed for me.

I was appalled. “Something like that.”

“But I am human, Tom,” she said mildly. “At least, in every legal sense. That’s been through the courts and settled. Whether you’re conceived in a womb or in a vat, you’re human if you have the human chromosome pattern, and you aren’t if you don’t. I do and I am.” She didn’t sound defensive or belligerent about it. She was simply stating facts. Kelly can’t ever get really emotional, no matter what her chromosomes are like.

I said, “Even so — I don’t need to explain this to you, Kelly — most people have this thing about looking upon androids as — well, not quite real.”

Kelly said serenely, “Perhaps it’s simply envy. The fact that we don’t age, that our predictable life-span is three times that of naturally conceived humans, must stir some hostility. I myself came from the vat in 2289, did you realize that?”

Nearly ninety. As I guessed.

“It’s partly that,” I conceded. “But there’s more. It’s that we created you. That makes you — this isn’t how I feel, you understand, but I know plenty of people who do — that makes you somehow occupy a rung below us in the order of things.”

“When a man and a woman create a child, do they therefore look upon it as something inferior to them?”

“Sometimes they do,” I said. “But that’s a side issue. Conceiving a child naturally is one thing. Making life in a laboratory vat is another. It’s almost godlike.”

“And so,” Kelly said, “you godlike ones show your godlike natures by feeling superior to the artificial humans you create. Even though androids outlive you and outperform you in most ways.”

“We feel superior to you and inferior at the same time, Kelly. And that’s why most of us dislike and distrust you.”

She pondered that. “How intricate you naturals can be! Why must you be so concerned about superiority and inferiority? Why not simply accept all distinctions and concentrate on matters of real importance?”

“Because,” I said, “it’s in the nature of human beings to boost their own heat by chilling on somebody else. In the old days the victims were Jews or Negroes or Chinese or Catholics or Protestants or anybody who happened to be a little different from the people around him. We don’t discriminate that way any more, mainly because races and religions and customs on Earth have become so tangled and mixed up that you’d need a computer to tell you who to be prejudiced against. Now we have androids. It’s the same thing all over. You androids live longer than we do, you have better-looking bodies, you have all sorts of superiorities, but we made you, and so even though we’re jealous of you we can take some pleasure out of telling android jokes and keeping androids out of our fraternities and that sort of stuff. Part of the prejudice thing is that the victim has to be somebody weaker than you in numbers, but somebody you secretly admire or fear. So people used to think that Jews were smarter than ordinary people, or that Negroes were more graceful and agile than ordinary people, or that Chinese were able to work harder than ordinary people; and so Jews and Negroes and Chinese were envied and despised all at once. Until it got so that everybody had a little of everybody else’s genes, and so you couldn’t think that way any more.”

“Perhaps,” Kelly said, smiling coolly, “the solution to the android-discrimination problem would be to create some sickly, ugly androids!”

“They’d just be the exception that proves the rule, Kelly. The only real solution would be to make androids capable of reproduction, and then intermarrying all over the place. But they say that the development of the fertile android is at least five hundred years away.”

“Two hundred,” said Kelly quietly. “Or less. Android biologists are studying the problem. Now that we are emancipated, now that we no longer have to be the slaves and beasts of burden you created us to be, we have begun to examine some of our own needs.”

I found those words mightily unsettling.

“Well, perhaps eventually we’ll outgrow some of our sillier attitudes toward androids,” I said half-heartedly.

Kelly laughed. “And when will that be? You spoke the truth: prejudice is part of your nature. You naturals are so foolish! You run all over the universe looking for people to despise. You sneer at the slow-wittedness of Calamorians, you make jokes about the size and smell of Dinamonians, you laugh at the habits of Shilamakka and Thhhians and every other alien race. You admire their unusual gifts and skills, but privately you look down on them because they have too many eyes or heads or arms. Am I right?”

I felt as if I had lost control of the conversation. I had simply wanted to know what it felt like to be android, to hold such a complex place in modern society — but here I was on the defensive, trying to account for the idiot prejudices that H. sapiens holds so dear.

What got me off the hook was the arrival of Jan. She drifted into the cabin wearing the pale, ghostly look that people sometimes get after a few hours in the nothing chamber; her eyes were dreamy, her facial muscles so relaxed that she looked like a sleepwalker. Lying in a warm bath of chemicals like that, with your ears plugged and eyes capped, will do that to you. Jan floated in like one of the headless wives of Henry VIII, looked at me, looked at Kelly, smiled strangely, said, “Excuse me,” in a silvery, trilling voice, and floated out again. Weird.

Somehow that punctured the discussion of racial prejudice. We didn’t start it again. Kelly began talking about inscription nodes instead, and after a while I said good night and went to sleep. Since then we’ve spent several evenings together, sitting up late and talking. I think Kelly is using me as a way of avoiding the sticky attentions of Leroy Chang, but I don’t mind. With Jan so conspicuously ignoring me, it’s pleasant to have Kelly to talk to. And rewarding to discover that an android can be a real person in so many ways. There’s an underlying core of calmness in Kelly that nothing can penetrate, and which to me betrays her artificial origin; but above that she’s got moods, strong feelings, a sense of fun, sophistication, and a lot more. She tends to be a little defensive about being an android, in an if-you-prick-us-do-we-not-bleed? kind of way, but that’s not surprising. I won’t pretend that I’ve shaken off my prejudices. I keep thinking that Kelly is very human, but… and it’s that damned but that won’t go away. Still, I’m making progress.

It scares me a little to think that in a couple of centuries there may be intermarriage between androids and humans, with children produced. I wonder why that thought frightens me so much. Because an injection of android blood into our genetic pool may change us, maybe? Improve us? The thought hits me where my prejudices live.

But I won’t be there to see it happen. That’s comforting. Or is it?

On that ambiguous note I stopped dictating, ten days ago. It is now close to the end of November, and I pick up this cube again just to add the P.S. that we will be reaching GGC 1145591 in five more days. I doubt that anything significant will happen between now and then, and so I’m going to seal the cube.

Status remains quo in all ways. Whenever I see Jan, she’s with Saul and they’re deep in a discussion of the self-cancelling French stamps of 2115, or whatever. Kelly suggests I take up coin collecting in self defense. The idea doesn’t seem practical. What the zog, I suppose Saul is just the better man. I wish I knew why, though.

Away with such trivia. The dark star awaits us.