The Boat of a Million Years

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 fullness: 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.

2

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.

3

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?

4

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

“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?

9

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.”

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:

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.”

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

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

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.”

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.”

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.

“Humankind has waited a long time for contact, and on the whole has not actually shown much interest,” Patulcius said. “It can wait a while longer. Our first duty is to the children we shall have, and can have only on Phaeacia.”

“They can better wait than this can,” Svoboda argued. “What we learn from the aliens, the help they give us, should make us the more secure when we do take our new home.”

“The opportunity may well be unique,” Hanno joined in. “I repeat, the aliens at Three are likely few, and pretty newly arrived. Else the Web at Sol would have picked up trace of them, or spacecraft of theirs would have arrived there. Unless— But we simply don’t know. Are they necessarily settled at Three? If we don’t accept their invitation— and they have no way of telling whether we’ve gotten it— will they stay, or will they move on? And will they necessarily move on toward Sol?”

“Will they necessarily still be at Three when we come?” countered Macandal. “If they are, will they necessarily be anything we can communicate with? No, it’s a long, dangerous detour for the sake of something that may be grand but may just as well prove futile. Let’s get on with our real business first.”

“As the computers and overlords on Earth planned for us,” Hanno gibed. He turned toward Wanderer. “Wouldn’t you, Peregrine, like for once to do something that wasn’t planned, that broke through the whole damned scheme of the world today?”

The other man sighed. “A tough call. Yes, I want to go to Three so bad I can taste it. And someday I hope to. But first and foremost, free life in a free nature—“ Pleadingly: “And I couldn’t do it to Corinne and Aliyat. I just can’t.”

“You’re a knight,” Aliyat breathed.

Yukiko smiled sadly. “Well, Hanno, Svoboda, we three are no worse off than we were yesterday, are we? Better, in fact, with a new dream before us.”

“For someday,” Svoboda mumbled. She lifted her head. “I am not angry with you, my friends. I too am weary of machines and hungry for land. So be it.”

The tension began to ease. Smiles flickered.

“No,” said Hanno.

Attention stabbed at him. He rose. “I am more sorry than you’ll ever guess,” he stated. “But I believe our need and our duty have changed. They are to go to Three. Till now, this venture was desperate. We pretended otherwise, but it was. Our chances looked about equal for perishing as miserably as the Norse did in Greenland, or settling into a sameness like the Polynesians in the Pacific.”

“You promoted it,” Patulcius virtually accused.

“Because I was desperate too. We all were. At least we’d be trying. We might, againsUthe odds, eventually fill our planet with people who kept on looking and searching outward. What had we to lose? Well, this day we’ve discovered what. The universe.

“I am the captain. I am taking us to the Others.”

Tu Shan was first onto his own feet. “You can’t!” he bellowed.

“I can,” Hanno said. “Pytheas obeys me. I will order the course change at once. The sooner it’s made, the sooner—”

“No, not against our will,” Wanderer interrupted.

“It would be wrong,” Yukiko pleaded.

Svoboda regarded Hanno with something akin to horror. “You, you don’t mean what you said,” she stammered.

“Don’t you want me to do this?” he cast back.

Her jaw clenched. “Not like that.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Still, I am going to issue the order. You’ll thank me afterward.”

“Bozhe moi—“ She raised her voice. “Pytheas, you won’t .heed a single man, will you?”

“He is captain,” replied the ship. “I must.”

“No matter what?” Patulcius shouted. “Impossible!”

“Such is the programming.”

“You never told us,” Macandal whispered.

‘T didn’t expect the occasion would ever arise,” Hanno said, not quite firmly. “I arranged it as a provision in case of emergency, best kept secret till then.”

“Jesus Christ!” Aliyat yelled. “This is the emergency! You’re making it yourself!”

“Yes,” Wanderer said. Sweat studded his skin. “We didn’t bargain for a dictator, and we’re not going to knuckle under to any. We can’t.” He looked upward, as if to find another face in the air. “Pytheas, it’s become seven against one.”

“That is not a consideration,” the ship answered.

“It never was, at sea or anywhere men voyaged,” Hanno said. “It couldn’t be, if they were to make shore alive.”

“What if the captain is—is incapacitated?” Wanderer called. “Insane?”

Did the ship take a few extra microseconds to scan its bio-psychologieal database and draw its conclusion? “Derangement is impossible for any of you without the severest trauma,” it declared. “That has not occurred.”

Tu Shan snarled. He started around the table. “It can. A dead captain doesn’t give orders.”

Svoboda moved to block him. “Now you’re the crazy one,” she groaned. He sought to push her aside. She resisted. “Help me! A fight, no, we can’t!”

Wanderer joined her. They gripped Tu Shan by the arms. He halted. The wind sobbed hi and out of him.

“See what you nearly caused, Hanno.” Macandal spoke softly, though tears coursed down her cheeks. “Your command would destroy us. You can’t issue it.”

“Can and will.” The Phoenician stepped to the doorway, turned back toward them, stood alert but unmoving. His tone mildened. “Once the decision’s made, you won’t go tq pieces. I know you too well to believe you would. Nor will you try violence against me. You realize you can’t spare one-eighth of our strength, one-fourth of the forefathers to come. And I am the one of us who’s held command, not simply leadership but command, hi ships and wars, trades and ventures beyond what was known, over and over for thousands of years. Without me, your survival on Phaeacia or anywhere else is more than doubtful.”

Gentler still: “Oh, I’m no superman. All of you have your own special gifts, and we need them all. I’m as open as ever >.’ to your thoughts, advice—yes, your wishes. But someone has to take the final responsibility. Someone always had to. The captain.

“We’ve another dozen years ahead of us, with God knows what at the end. Don’t make them any harder on yourselves if than they must be.”

He left. The seven stood mute, half stupefied. At last § Wanderer released Tu Shan, as Svoboda did, and said dully, “He’s right about that. We have no choice.” I’ “The course change process will commence in an hour,” i Pytheas announced. “In order to conserve fuel and minimize the undesired vector, it begins at that time with going free. Please make ready for a weightless period of approximately six hours.”

“That ... is ... it,” Aliyat choked. Hanno returned. They knew he had sought the control room partly to look at its displays, as if that mattered, but mainly as a sign unto them. “We’d better get busy,” he said. “Here, I have printout copies of a checklist. Done is done. We’re on our p way.” He half smiled. “Not everybody hates this.”

“Perhaps not,” Svoboda replied. Sobaka. You dog. You total son of a bitch.” She took Wanderer by the hand.

22

And Christ appeared before Aliyat where she knelt. His aadiance was not what she had imagined, brilliant as desert noonday; it filled the darkened hollowness of the church With a blue dusk and the last sunset gold. Almost, she Brought she heard bells from a caravan returning home. Warmth glowed into the stones beneath and around her. JNor was his visage gaunt and stern. In the West (she had Heard?) they showed him like this, a man who had tramped loads, shared wine and honeycomb, taken small children jjoto his lap. He smiled when he bent over her and with his shirt sleeve dried the tears off her face.

Straightening again, he said—oh, tenderly, “Because you have kept your vigil, though the smoke of Hell blew about you, I have heard the prayer you dared not utter. For a time and a time, that which was lost shall be restored to you, and the latter end blessed more than the beginning.” He lifted both scarred hands on high. “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

He was gone. Young Barikai sprang down from the beraa and raised her into his arms. “Beloved!” he jubilated before she stopped his mouth with hers.

Together they went out. Tadmor slumbered beneath a full moon, which frosted spires and dappled paving stones. A horse waited. Mane and tail were streams of moon-silver. Barikai swung into the saddle. He reached down. She answered his clasp by soaring up to settle against him.

Briefly, hoofs rang, then the horse leaped aloft and galloped the ways of air. Wind lulled. Stars gleamed soft, everywhere around, in violet heaven. Aliyat’s loosened hair blew backward to make a tent for her and Barikai. She was drunk with the odor of him, the strength that held her, the seeking lips. “Where are we bound?” she asked.

“Home.” His laugh pealed. “But not at once!”

They hastened onward, around the curve of the world into morning. His castle gleamed on its mountaintop. The horse came to rest in a courtyard of mosaics and flowers where a fountain danced. Aliyat gave them scant heed. Later she noticed that she had been unaware whether the servants who met their lord and lady had bodies.

They did provide feast, music, spectacle, when such was wanted. Otherwise Aliyat and Barikai kept to themselves, tireless until they fell embraced into a half-sleep from which they roused joyous.

That happiness grew calmer, love lingered more and more, so that at last it was a new bliss when he said, “Now let us go home.”

Their horse brought them there at dawn. The household was just coming awake and nobody saw the arrival. Indeed, it was as if nothing had happened and they had never been away. Manu received her hug with some surprise, then much boyish dignity. Little Hairan took it for granted.

She savored ordinariness for the rest of the day and evening, minute by minute, each presence and place, task and talk, question and decision, everything that she owned and that owned her. When the final lamp guided her and Barikai to bed, she was ready for his words: “I think best you sleep, truly sleep, this night and beyond.”

“Hold me until I do,” she asked of him. He did, with kisses. “Come not back too soon,” he said once, against her cheek. “That would be unwise.”

“I know—“ She drifted from him. j Opening her eyes after a time outside of time, she found she was crying. Maybe this had been a bad idea. Maybe she should not go back ever. Come on, old girl, she thought. Stop this. You promised Corinne you’d help her with that tapestry she wants to make. Uncoupling, she left the booth where she had lain but stood for a space more in the dream chamber, busy. Good habit, carrying a makeup kit in a purse. Sessions here did sometimes touch pretty near the bone. Well, she learned long ago how to cover the traces.

Svoboda was passing by in the corridor. “Hello,” said Aliyat. She was about to move on when the other woman plucked her sleeve.

“A moment, if you please,” Svoboda requested.

“Uh, sure.” Aliyat glanced away.

Svoboda didn’t take the hint. “Don’t resent this. I must try it. You should go in there less often.”

Anger quivered. “Everybody else says it. Why not you? I know what I’m doing.”

“Well, I can’t prescribe for you, but—”

“But you’re afraid I’m curling up in a ball and someday I won’t be able to uncurl.” Aliyat inhaled. Suddenly she felt like speaking. “Listen, dear. You’ve been in situations in the past where you had to go away from yourself.”

Svoboda paled a bit. “Yes.”

“I have a lot more than you. I know them pretty thoroughly, believe me. The dream box is a better escape than booze or dope or—“ Aliyat grinned—“closing my eyes and flunking of England.”

“But this isn’t that kind of thing!”

“No, not exactly. Still— Listen. What happened today pros that I got so furious that if I couldn’t go conjure a private world, I’d’ve had to scream and smash things and generally throw a fit. What would that have done for crew morale?”

“What was the matter?”

“Hanno. What else? We met by chance and he buttonholed me and, oh, you can imagine. He repeated the same tired noises you just did, about me and the dream box. He tried to say, very roundabout— Never mind.”

Svoboda bared a brief smile. “Let me guess. He implied you are a menace to relationships aboard ship.”

“Yeah. He’d like to pair off with me. Of course he would. Hasn’t gotten laid for months now, has he? I suggested what he could do instead, and walked off. But I was volcano angry.”

“You were overreacting; you, of all people. Stress—”

“I s’pose.” Faintly surprised at how rage and loss alike had eased within her, Aliyat said, “Look, I’m not addicted to dreams. Really I’m not. Everybody uses them once in a while. Why don’t you share with me sometime? I’d like that. An interactive dream has more possibilities than letting the computer put into your head what it thinks you’ve demanded.”

Svoboda nodded. “True. But—“ She stopped.

“But you’re afraid I might learn things about you you’d rather I didn’t. That’s it, nght?” Aliyat shrugged. “I’m not offended. Only, don’t preach at me, okay?”

“Why did you resent Hanno’s attempt?” Svoboda asked quickly. “It was quite natural. You need not have cursed him for it.”

“After what he’s done to us?” Counterattack: “Do you still have a soft spot for him?”

Svoboda looked elsewhere. “I shouldn’t, I know. On se veut—”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing. A stray memory.”

“About him.”

Svoboda met the challenge. Probably, Aliyat thought, she wants to be friendly toward me; feels she has to. “Yes. Of no importance. Some lines we saw once. It was ... the late twentieth century, a few years after we—we seven had gone under cover, while Patulcius was still keeping his own camouflage. Hanno and I were traveling about incognito in France. We stayed one night at an old inn, yes, old already then, and in the guest book we found what somebody had written, long before. I was reminded now, that’s all.”

“What was it?” Aliyat asked.

Again Svoboda looked past her. The wry words whis-jjjered forth as if of themselves.

“On se veut On s’enlace Ons’enlasse On s’en veut.”

Before Aliyat could respond, she nodded adieu and hurried on down the corridor.

23

Once more Yukiko was redecorating her room. Until she finished, it would be an uninhabitable clutter. Thus she spent most of her private hours in Tu Shan’s, as well as deeping there. In due course they would share hers while Idle worked on his. It was her proposal. He had assented without seeming to care. The brushstroke landscape and calligraphy she earlier put on his walls had over the years been ween until they were all but invisible. However, she had a feeling that he would never especially have noticed their disappearance.

Entering, she found him cross-legged on the bed, left hand supporting a picture screen, right hand busy with a light pencil. He drew something, considered it, made an aikation, studied it further. His big body seemed relaxed and the features bore no mark of a scowl.

“Why, what are you doing?” she asked.

He glanced up. “I have an idea,” he said almost eagerly. “It isn’t clear to me yet, but sketching helps me think.”

She went around behind him and leaned over to see. His drawings were always delicate, a contrast to much of his work in stone or wood. This showed a man in traditional peasant garb, holding a spade. On a large rock beside him jiquatted a-monkey, while a tiger stood below. Through the foreground flowed a stream wherein swam a carp.

“So you are finally going to try pictures?” she guessed.

He shook his head. “No, no. You are far better at them than I will ever be. These are just thoughts about figures I mean to sculpture.” He gazed up at her. “I think pictures may not help us much when we get to Tritos. Even on Earth, in old days, you remember how differently people in different times and countries would draw the same things. To the Alloi, any style of line, shade, color we might use may not make sense. Photographs may not. But a three-dimensional shape—no ghost in a computer; a solid thing they can handle—that should speak to them.”

Tritos, Alloi, he pronounced the names awkwardly; but one needed better words than “Star Three” and “Others,” and when Patulcius suggested these, the crew soon went along. Greek still bore its aura of science, learning, civilization. To three of those in the ship, it had been common speech for centuries. “Metroaster” for “Mother Star” had, though, been voted down, and “Pegasi” was back in use. After all, nobody could say whether the Alloi at Tritos had come from there, or even whether it was sun to a sentient race.

Hanno sat mute through the discussion and merely nodded his acceptance. He spoke little these days, and others no more to him than was necessary.

“Yes, an excellent thought,” Yukiko said. “What do you mean to show?”

“I am groping my way toward that,” Tu Shan replied. “Your ideas will be welcome. Here, I think, might be a group—more creatures than these—arranged according to our degrees of kinship with the animals. That may lead the Alloi to show us something about their evolution, which ought to tell us things about them.”

“Excellent.” Yukiko trilled laughter. “But how can you, now, keep up your pretense of being a simple-minded fanner and blacksmith?” She bent low, hugged him, laid her cheek on his. “This makes me so happy. You were sullen and silent and, and I truly feared you were going back to that miserable, beastly way of living I found you in—how long ago!”

He stiffened. Harshness came into his voice. “Why not? What else had our dear captain left us, before this came to me out of the dark? It will help fill a little of the emptiness ahead.”

She let go and slipped about to sit down on the bed in front of him. “I wish you could be less bitter toward “Hanno,” she said, troubled. “You and the rest of them.”

“Have we no reason to?”

“Oh, he was high-handed, true. But has he not been punished enough for that? How dare we take for granted that what he’s done is not for the best? It may prove to be what saves us.”

“Easy for you. You want to seek the Alloi.”

“But I don’t want this hateful division between us. I dare BOt give him a friendly word myself, I’m afraid of making matters worse. It makes me wish we’d never received the message. Can’t you see, dear, he is—like a righteous emperor of ancient times—taking on himself the heavy burden Of leadership?”

Again Tu Shan shook his head, but violently. “Nonsense. You are drawn to him—don’t deny—“ , Her tone went calm. “To his spirit, yes. It isn’t tike mine, but it also seeks. And to his person, no doubt, but I’ve honestly not dwelt on that in my mind.” She closed hands upon his knee. “You are the one I am with.”

It mildened him to a degree. Sternness remained. “Well, stop imagining he’s some kind of saint or sage. He’s a scheming, knavish old sailor, who naturally wants to sail. This is his selfishness. He happens to have the power to force it on us.” He slapped the screen down onto the blanket, as if striking with a weapon. “I am only trying to help us outlive the evil.”

She leaned close. Her smile trembled. “That is enough to start.”

24

Yet another Christmas drew nigh, in the ship’s chronology. It was meaningless to ask whether it did on Earth just then—doubly meaningless, given the physics here and the forgottenness yonder. Hanno came upon Svoboda hang-ing ornaments in the common room. Evergreen boughs from the nanoprocessors were fresh and fragrant, bejeweled with berries of hotly. They seemed as forlorn as the Danish carols from the speakers. She saw him and tautened. He halted, not too close to her. “Hello,” he proffered.

“How do you do,” she said.

He smiled. Her face stayed locked. “What sort of party are you planning this year?” he asked.

She shrugged. “No motif.”

“Oh, I’ll keep out of the way, never fear.” Quickly: “But we can’t go on much longer like this. Well lose skills, including the skills of teamwork. We must start having simulations and practicing in them again.”

“As the captain directs. I suppose, though, you’re aware that Wanderer and I, at least, are doing so. We’ll bring others in presently.”

Hanno made himself meet the blue gaze, and made it stay upon his. “Yes, naturally I know. Good. For you two above aU. A phantom wilderness is better than none, right?”

Svoboda bit her lip. “We could have had the real thing.”

“You will, after we’re through at Tritos. You wanted to go there first yourself. Why don’t you look forward to it?”

“You know why. The cost to my comrades.” She closed a fist and clipped: “Not that we can’t cope. I outlived many bad husbands, dreary decades, tyrants, wars, everything men could wreak. I will outlive this too. We will.”

“Myself among you,” he said, and continued on his way.

It was to no particular goal. He often prowled, mostly at shipnight or through sections where nobody else had occasion to be. An immortal body needed little exercise to keep fit, but he worked regularly at his capabilities and developed new ones. He screened books and shows, listened to music, played with problems on the computers. Frequently, as in the past, when stimuli palled and thought flagged he disengaged his mind and let hours or days flow by, scarcely registering on him. That, however, was in its way as seductive, easily overdone as the dream chamber which he shunned. He could but hope that his crew rationed themselves on illusions.

Today impulse returned him to his stateroom. He sealed himself in, not that anyone would come calling, and settled down before his terminal. “Activate—“ The command fell so flat across silence that he chopped it short. For a while he stared at the ceiling. His fingers drummed the desktop. “Historical persons,” he said.

“Whom do you wish?” inquired the instrumentality.

Hanno’s mouth writhed upward. “You mean, what do I wish?”

What three-dimensional, full-color, changeably expressive, freely moving and speaking wraith? Siddhartha, Socrates, Hillel, Christ — Aeschylus, Vergil, Tu Fu, Firdousi, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mark Twain — Lucretius, Avicenna, Maim on ides, Descartes, Pascal, Hume — Pericles, Alfred, Jefferson — Hatshepsut, Sappho, Murasaki, Rabi’a, Mar-grete I, Jeanne d’Arc, Elizabeth I, Sacajawea, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Isak Dineseri — yes, or if you liked, the great monsters and she-devils — Have your machine take everything history, archaeology, psychology knew of a person and that person’s world, down to the last least scrap, with probabilities assigned to each uncertainty and conjecture; let it model, with subtle and powerful abstract manipulations, the individual whom this matrix could have produced and who would have changed it in precisely those ways that were known; make it write the program, activate; and meet that human creature. The image of the dy was a mere construct, as easily generated as any other; but while the program ran, the mind existed, sensed, thought, reacted, conscious of what it was but seldom troubled thereby, usually enthusiastic, interested, anxious to disOld myths and nightmares have become real,” Svoboda said once, “while old reality slips away from us. On Earth they now raise the dead, but are themselves only half alive.”

“That isn’t strictly true, either side of it,” Hanno had replied. “Take my advice from experience and don’t caU up ‘anybody you ever actually knew. They’re never quite right. Often they’re grotesquely wrong.”

Unless memory failed after centuries. Or unless the past was as uncertain, as flickeringly quantum-variable, as everything else in the universe of physics.

Seated alone, Hanno winced, partly at recollection of a ;time when he sought advice from the electronic revenant of Cardinal Richelieu, partly at recalling how he and Svoboda ; had been together, then. “I don’t want any single companion,” he said to the machine. “Nor a synthetic personality. Give me ... several ancient explorers. A meeting, a coun-can you do that?”

“Certainly. It is a nonstandard interaction, requiring creative preparation. One minute, please.” Sixty billion nanoseconds.

The first of the faces looking out was strong and serene, “I don’t quite know what to say,” Hanno began hesitantly, well-nigh timidly. “You’ve been ... told about the situation here? Well, what do I need? What do you think I should do?”

“You should have taken more thought for your folk,” answered Fridtjof Nansen. The computer translated between them. “But I understand it is too late to change course again. Be patient.”

“Endure,” said Ernest Shackleton. Ice gleamed in his beard. “Never surrender.”

“Think of the others,” Nansen urged. “Yes, you lead, and so you must; but think about how it feels to them.”

“Share your vision,” said Marc Aurel Stein. “I died gladly because it was where I had wanted to go for sixty years. Help them want.”

“Ha, why are they sniveling?” roared Peter Preuchen. “My God, what an adventure! Bring me back to see when you get there, lad!”

“Give me your guidance,” Hanno entreated. “I’ve discovered I’m no Boethius, to console myself with philosophy. Maybe I have made a terrible mistake. Lend me your strength.”

“You’ll only find strength in yourself, sir,” declared Henry Stanley. “Not in spooks like us.”

“But you aren’t! You’re made out of what was real—”

“If something of what we did and were survives to this day, we should be proud, my friends,” said Nansen. “Come, let us put it back into service. Let us try to find good counsel.”

Willem Barents shivered. “For so strange a voyage, most likely to a lonely death? Commend your soul to God, Hanno. There is nothing else.”

“No, we owe them more than that,” said Nansen. “They are human. As long as men and women fare outward, they will be human.”

25

Macandal sent her glance slowly from one to the next of the six who sat around the table in the saloon with her. “I suppose you’ve guessed why I’ve asked you to come,” she said at length.

Most of them stayed unstirring. Svoboda grimaced. Wanderer, beside her, laid a hand on her thigh.

Macandal took a bottle and poured into a glass. The claret gurgled dusky rose; its pungency sweetened the air. She passed the bottle on. Glasses had been set out for everyone. “Let’s have a drink first,” she proposed.

Patulcius attempted a jest. “Are you taking a leaf from the early Persians? Remember? When they had an important decision to make, they discussed it once while sober and once while drunk.”

“Not the worst idea ever,” Macandal said. “Better than these modern drugs and neurostims.”

“If only because wine has tradition behind it,” Yukiko murmured. “It means, it is more than its mere self.”

“How much tradition is left in the world?” Aliyat asked bitterly.

“We carry it,” Wanderer said. “We are it.”

The bottle circulated. Macandal raised her goblet. ‘To the voyage,” she toasted.

After a moment: “Yes, drink, all of you. What this meeting is about is restoring something good.”

“If it has not been wholly destroyed,” Tu Shan grated, but he joined the rest in the small, pregnant ceremony.

“Okay,” Macandal said. “Now listen. Each of you knows I’ve been after him or her, arguing, wheedling, scolding, trying to wear down those walls of anger you’ve built around yourselves. Maybe some haven’t noticed it was in fact each of you. Tonight’s when we bring it out hi the open.”

Svoboda spoke stiffly. “What is there to talk about? Reconciliation with Hanno? We have no breach. Nobody has dreamed of mutiny. It’s impossible. A change of course back to Phaeacia is impossible too; we haven’t the antimatter. We’re making the best of things.”

“Honey, you know damn well we are not.” Steel toned beneath Macandal’s mildness. “Cold courtesy and mechanical obedience won’t get us through whatever waits ahead. We need our fellowship back.”

“So you’ve told me, us, over and over.” Wanderer’s voice was raw. “You’re right, of course. But we didn’t break it. He did.”

Macandal regarded him for a quiet spell. “You’re really hurting, aren’t you?”

“He was my best friend,” Wanderer said from behind his mask.

“He still is, Johnnie. It’s you who’ve shut him out.”

“Well, he—“ Speech trailed off.

Yukiko nodded. “He has made approaches to you also, then,” she deduced. “To everyone, I’m sure. Tactful, admitting he could be wrong—”

“He has not groveled,” Tu Shan conceded, “but he has put down his pride.”

“Not insisting we are the ones mistaken,” Svoboda added, as if unwillingly.

“We may be, you know,” Yukiko argued- “The choice had to be made, and only he could make it. At first you wanted this way yourself. Are you certain it was not just your own pride that turned you against him?”

“Why did you change your mind and join us?”

“For your sakes.”

Tu Shan sighed. “Yukiko has worked on me,” he told the others. “And Hanno, well, I have not forgotten what he did for us two in the past.”

“Ah, he has begun to make himself clear to you,” Pa-tulcius observed. “Me too, me too. I still don’t agree with him, but the worst rancor has bled off. Who advised him how to speak with us?”

“He’s had a long time alone for thinking,” Macandal said.

Aliyat shuddered. “Too long. It’s been too long.”

Svoboda’s words fell sharp. “I don’t see how we can ever again be whole-hearted about him. But you are right, Cor-inne, we must rebuild ... as much faith as we can.”

Heads nodded. It was no climax, it was the recognition of something foreseen, so slow and grudging in its growth that the completion of it came as a kind of surprise.

Macandal need merely say, “Grand. Oh, grand. Let’s drink to that, and then relax and talk about old times. Tomorrow I’ll cook a feast, and we’ll throw a party and invite him and get drunk with him—“ her laugh rang—“in the finest Persian style!”

Hours afterward, when she and Patulcius were in her room making ready for bed, he said, “That was superbly handled, my dear. You should have gone into politics.”

“I did, once, sort of, you recall,” she answered with a slight smile.

“Hanno put you up to this, from the beginning, didn’t he?”

“You’re pretty shrewd yourself, Gnaeus.”

“And you coached him in how to behave—carefully, patiently, month after month—with each of us.”

“Well, I made suggestions. And he had help from ... the ship. Advice. He never told me much about that. I think it was an experience too close to his heart.” She paused. “He’s always guarded his heart—too carefully; I guess because of the losses he suffered in all those thousands of years. But he’s no fool either, where it comes to dealing with people.”

Patulcius looked at her a while. She had slipped off her gown and stood dark, supple before him. Her face1 against the wall, which was muraled with lilies, made him remember Egypt. “You’re a great woman,” he said low.

“You’re not a bad guy.”

“Great for ... accepting me,” he slogged on. “I know it pained you when Wanderer went to Svoboda. I think it still pains you.”

“It’s good for them. Maybe not ideal, but good; and we do need stable relationships.” Macandal flung her head back and laughed afresh. “Hey, listen to me, talking like a twentieth-century social worker!” She swung her hips. “C’mon over here, big boy.”

26

Clouds massed huge, blue-black over the high place. Lightning flared, thunder crashed. The fire before the altar leaped and cast sparks like stars down the wind. The acolytes led the sacrifice to the waiting priest. His knife glimmered. In the grove below, worshippers howled. Afar, the sea ran white and monsters rose from its depths. “No!” Aliyat wailed. “Stop! That’s a child!”

“It is a beast, a lamb,” Wanderer called back against the noise; but he kept his glance elsewhere. “It is both,” Hanno said to them. “Be still.” Knife flashed, limbs threshed, blood spurted and flowed dark over stone. The priest cast the body into the flames.

Flesh sizzled on coals, fell away from bones, went up in fat smoke. Through the storm, terrible in their splendor, came the gods.

Pillar-tall, bull-broad, beard spilling down over the lion skin that clad him, eyes capturing the fire-gleam, Melqart snuffed deep. He licked his lips. “It is done, it is well, it is life,” he boomed.

Wind tossed the hair of Ashtoreth, rain jeweled it, lightning-light sheened on breasts and belly. Her own nostrils drank. She clasped his gigantic organ as if it were a staff and raised her left hand into heaven. “Bring forth the Resurrected!” she cried.

Baal-Adon leaned heavily on Adat, his beloved, his mourner, his avenger. He stumbled, still half blind after the murk of the underworld; he trembled, still half frozen from the grave. She guided him to the smoke of the offering. She took the bowl filled with its blood and gave him to drink. Warmth returned, beauty, wakefulness. He saw, he heard how men and women coupled in the grove and across the land in honor of his arising; and he turned to his consort.

More gods crowded about, Chushor out of the waves, Dagon out of the plowlands, Aliaan out of the springs and underground waters, Resheph out of the storm, and more and more. Clouds began to part. Distantly gleamed the twin pillars and pure lake before the home of El.

A sunbeam smote the eight who stood on the topheth near the beryl, invisible to priest and acolytes. The gods stared and stiffened. Melqart raised bis club that had smitten the Sea, primordial Chaos, in the dawn of the world. “Who dares betread the holy of holies?” he bellowed.

Hanno trod forward. “Dread ones,” he said calmly, with respect but not abasing himself, looking straight into those eyes, “we are eight from afar in space, time, and strangeness. We too command the powers of heaven, earth, and hell. But fain would we guest you a while and learn the wonders of your reigning. Behold, we bear gifts.” He signalled, and there appeared a treasure of golden ware, gems, precious woods, incense.

Melqart lowered his weapon and stared with a greed that awoke also in the features of Ashtoreth; but her regard was on the men.

27

One by one, they disengaged. That was a simple matter of removing induction helmets and feedback suits. The web of union between them and the guiding, creating computer had already vanished; the pseudo-experience was at an end. Nonetheless, after they had emerged from their booths into the commonplaceness of the dream chamber, it took them silent minutes to return altogether to themselves. Meanwhile they stood side by side, hand in hand, groping for comfort.

Eventually Patulcius mumbled, “I thought I knew something about the ancient Near East. But that was the most damnable—”

“Horror and wonder,” Macandal said unevenly. “Lust and love. Death and life. Was it really like that, Hanno?”

“I can’t be sure,” the captain answered. “The historical Tyre we visited seemed about right to me.” —in a full-sensory hallucination, where the computer drew on his memories and then let the seekers act and be acted on as they would have in a material world. “Hard to tell, after so long. Besides, you know I’d tried to put it behind me, tried to grow away from what was bad in it. This, though, the Phoenician conceptual universe— No, I don’t believe I ever thought in just that way, even when I was young and supposed I was mortal.”

“No matter authenticity,” Yukiko said. “We want practice in dealing with aliens; and this was amply alien.”

“Too much.” Tu Shan’s burly frame shivered. “Come, dear. I want a time gentle and human, don’t you?” She accompanied him out.

“What society shall we draw on next?” asked Svoboda. Her attention sought Wanderer. “Those you knew must have been at least as foreign to the rest of us.”

“No doubt,” he replied rather grimly. “In due course, yes, we will. But first a setting more ... rational. China, Russia?”

“We have plenty of tune,” Patulcius said. “Better we digest this before we think about anything else. Kyrie eleison, to have witnessed the gods at work!” He tugged at Macandal, “I’m exhausted. A stiff drink, a long sleep, and several days’ idleness.”

“Right.” Her smile was fainter than usual. They left.

Wanderer and Svoboda seemed aroused. Their gazes came aglow. She reddened. His breast rose and fell. They also departed.

Hanno took care not to watch. Aliyat had clasped his hand. Now she let go. He spoke dully. “Well, how was it for you?”

“Terror and ecstasy and—a kind of homecomjng,” she said, barely audible.

He nodded. “Yes, even though you started life as a Christian, it wouldn’t be totally foreign to you. In fact, I suspect the program used some memories of yours as input where mine weren’t sufficient.”

“Weird enough, though.”

He stared beyond her. “A dream within a dream,” he murmured, as if to himself.

“What do you mean?”

“Svoboda would understand. Once she and I imagined what kind of future it might be where we dared reveal what we were.” Hanno shook himself. “Never mind. Goodnight.”

She caught his arm. “No, wait.”

He stopped, lifted his brows, stood alert in a fashion weary and wary. Aliyat grasped his hand again. ‘Take me along,” she said.

“Eh?”

“You’re too lonely. And I am. Let’s come back together, and stay.”

Deliberately, he said, “Are you tired of subsisting on Svoboda’s and Corinne’s leavings?”

For a moment she lost color. She released him. Then she reddened and admitted, “Yes. You and me, we’re neither of us the other’s first pick, are we? And you’ve never forgiven me for Constantinople, not really.”

“Why,” he said, taken aback, “I’ve told you I have. Over and over I’ve told you. I hoped my actions proved—”

“Well, just don’t let it make any difference that counts. What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little? Hanno, I’m offering you what nobody else in this ship will, yet. Maybe they never will. But we are getting back something of what we had. Between us, you and I could help that healing along.” She tossed her head. “If you aren’t game to try, to give in your turn, okay, goodnight and to hell with you.”

“No!” He seized her by the waist. “Aliyat, of course I— I’m overwhelmed—”

“You’re nothing of the sort, you calculating old scoundrel, and well I know it.” She came to him. The embrace went on.

Finally, flushed, disheveled, she said against his shoulder, “Sure, I’m a rogue myself. Always will be, I guess. But—I learned more about you than I’d known, Hanno. It wasn’t a dream while we were there, it was as real to us as—no, more real than these damned crowding walls. You stood up to the gods, outsmarted them, made them take us in, like nobody else alive could have. You are the skipper.”

She raised her face. Tears were on it, but a grin flashed malapert. “They didn’t wear me out. That’s your job. And if we can’t entirely trust each other, if the thing between us won’t quite die away, why, doesn’t that add a pinch of spice?”

28

Throughout the final months, as Pytheas backed ever more slowly down to destination, the universe again appeared familiar. Strange that a night crowded with unwinking brilliant stars, girded by the frost-road of the galaxy, where nebulae querned forth new suns and worlds while energies raged monstrous around those that had died and light that came from neighbor fire-wheels had left them before humanity was—should feel homelike. Waxing ahead, Tritos had barely more than half the brightness of Sol, a yellow hue that stirred memories of autumns on Earth. Yet it too was a hearth.

Instruments peered across narrowing distance. Ten planets orbited, five of them gas giants. The second inmost swung at somewhat less than one astronomical unit’s radius. It possessed a satellite whose eccentric path indicated the primary mass was slightly over two and a third the terrestrial. Nevertheless that globe, though warmer on the average, was at reasonable temperatures, and its atmospheric spectrum revealed chemical disequilibria such as must be due to life.

Week by week, then day by day, excitement burned higher within the ship. There was no quenching it, and presently even Tu Shan and Patulcius stopped trying. They were committed; magnificent things might wait; and here was, for a while at least, an end of wayfaring.

Hie peace with Hanno that each had made on his or her own terms did not strengthen into the former fellowship. If anything, it thinned, stretched by a new guardedness. What might be want next, and how might someone else react? He had promised that eventually they would go on to Phaeacia; but when would that be, would it ever, could he then betray it? Nobody made accusations, or indeed brooded much on the matter. Conversation was generally free and easy, if not intimate, and he joined again in some recreations—but no more in shared dreams, once their training purpose had been served. He remained half the outsider, in whom none but Aliyat confided, and she little except for her body.

He did not attempt to change their attitudes. He knew better; and he knew, as well, how to pass lifetime after mortal lifetime among strangers to his spirit.

Tritos grew in sight.

Pytheas cast signals ahead, radio, laser, neutrino. Surely the Allot had detected the ship from afar, roiling the dust and gas of space, braking with a flame out of the furnace engine. Receivers caught no flicker of response. “Have they gone?” Macandal fretted. “Have we come this whole way for nothing?”

“We’re still many light-hours off,” Wanderer reminded her. Hie hunter’s patience was upon him. “Can’t talk very readily. Not at all by electromagnetic waves, while our drive blazes in front of us. And ... I would scan a newcomer first, before leaving my cover.”

She shook her head, half angrily. “Forget the Stone Age, John. Anything like war or piracy between the stars isn’t just obscene, it’s absurd.”

“Can you be absolutely certain? Besides, we could be dangerous to them, or they to us, in ways neither party has managed to imagine.”

Tritos brightened. Without magnification, simply with the fight stopped down, eyes beheld the disc, spots upon it, flares leaping aloft. Offside stood a bluish-white steady spark that was the second planet. Now spectroscopy gave details of land and water surfaces, air mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The travelers changed course to intercept. The name they bestowed was Xenogaia.

The hour came when Pytheas called, “Attention! Attention! Coded signals detected.”

The eight crowded into the command room. That wasn’t physically necessary. They could quite well have perceived and partaken from their separate quarters. It was merely impossible for them not to be side by side, breath mingling with breath.

The message employed the same basic system as had the robots—a dozen years ago ship’s time, three and a half cosmic centuries—minus relativistic adjustments no longer required. It arrived by UHF radio, from somewhat aft, to avoid ionization that was no longer enormously strong but could still interfere. “The source is a comparatively small object about a million kilometers distant,” Pytheas reported. “It has presumably lain in orbit until we came this near. At present it is accelerating to match our vectors. Radiation is weak, indicating high efficiency.”

“A boat?” Hanno wondered. “Has it a mother ship?”

Pytheas assembled the images transmitted. They sprang into vivid existence. First appeared a starscape, then an unmistakable Tritos (you could compare what was in a view-screen), then a dizzying zoom in on ... forms, colors, a thing that swept lopsidedly around a larger. “That must be Xenogaia,” Patulcius said into a thick silence. “It must be where they stay.”

“I think they are preparing us for what comes next,” Yukiko said.

The representation vanished. A new form was there.

They could not, at once, properly see it. The contours, the mathematical dimensionality were too exotic, too far beyond any expectation. Thus had it been for Svoboda and Wanderer when first they glimpsed high mountains—snow-clouds, heaven gone wrinkled, or what? “More art?” Tu Shan puzzled. “They do not make pictures like any that humans ever did. I think they do not sense like us.”

“No,” Hanno said, “this is likelier a straightforward hologram.” The hair stood up on his arms. “Maybe they don’t know how we see, either, but die reality is die same for all of us ... I hope.”

The image moved, a stow and careful pirouette revealing it from every angle. It reached out of the scene and brought back a lump of something soft, which it proceeded to mold into a series of geometrical solids, sphere, cube, cone, pyramid, interlinked rings. “It’s telling us it’s intelligent,” Aliyat whispered. Blindly, she crossed herself.

Vision began to understand. If the image was tire-size, the original stood about one hundred forty centimeters tall. Central was a stalk, a green that glittered and shimmered, supported on two thin limbs mat were flexible or multiply jointed, ending in several bifurcated digits. At the top sprouted two similar arms. These forked, subdivided, sub-subdivided, dendriticaUy, till the watchers were unable to count the last, spidery-delicate “fingers.” From the sides spread a pair of—wings? membranes?—to a span that equaled the height. They looked as if made of nacre and diamond dust, but rippled tike silk.

After a long time, Tu Shan muttered, “If this is what they are, how shall we ever know them?”

‘The way we knew the spirits, maybe,” Wanderer answered as softly. “I remember kachina dances.”

“For God’s sake,” Svoboda cried, “what are we waiting for? Let’s show them us!”

Hanno nodded. “Of course.”

The spacecraft moved on together toward the living world.

29

So Pytheas came to harbor, took orbit about Xenogaia.

That required special care. There were other bodies to give a wide berth. Foremost was the moon. Scarred and ashen as Earth’s, it had only a tenth the mass, but its path brought it inward to about a third the Lunar distance from its primary, then out again to three-fifths. Some cosmic accident must have caused that, more recent than the impacts that formed the planet.

A number of artificial satellites wheeled in their own courses. None resembled any in the Solar System. Boats, as Hanno dubbed them, came and went. His folk were unsure how many, for no two seemed alike; only slowly did they realize that form changed according to mission, .and force-fields had more to do with it than crystal or fiber.

The Allosan mother ship (another human phrasing) orbited well beyond the moon. It appeared to be of fixed shape, a cylindroid almost ten kilometers in length and two in diameter, majestically rotating on its long axis, mother-of-pearl iridescent. Aft (?) was a complex of slender, curved members which might be the drive generator; it put Hanno in mind of interwoven vine patterns he had seen on Nordic mnestones and in Irish Gospels. Forward (?) the hull flared and then came to a point, making Patulcius and Svoboda recall a minaret or a church spire. Yukiko wondered about its age. A million years did not seem unthinkable.

“They probably live aboard,” Wanderer opined. “Uh, what weight does that spin provide?”

“Sixty-seven percent of standard terrestrial gravity,” the ship responded.

“Yeah, they look as if they come from that kind of environment. It means—let’s see, you told us Xenogaian pull equals one point four times Earth’s, so for them—no, no, let me show off,” Wanderer laughed. “It’s twice what they’re used to. Can they take it?”

“We could, if we had to,” Macandal said. “But the Al-k)i do seem fragile.” She hesitated. “Like crystal, or a bare tree iced over on a clear winter day. They are quite beautiful, once you learn how to look at them.”

“I think we shall have to,” declared Tu Shan harshly. “I mean, bear an added forty kilos on each hundred.” Their gazes followed his to that viewscreen in the common room which held an image of Xenogaia. They were passing the day side, the planet nearly full. It was brighter than Earth, for it was more clouded. Whiteness swirled and billowed, thinly marbled with the blue of oceans, spotted with greenish-brown glimpses of land. Though the axis tilted a full thirty-one degrees, neither pole bore a cap; snow gleamed rarely on the tallest mountains.

Aliyat shivered. The motion loosened her hold on a table edge and sent her slowly off through the air. Hanno caught her. She clung to his hand. “Go down there?” she asked. “Must we?”

“You know we can’t stay healthy in weightlessness,” he reminded her. “We can for longer than mortals born, and we’ve got medications that help, but finally our muscles and bones will shrink too, and our immune systems fail.”

“Yes, yes, yes. But yondert”

“We need a minimum weight. This ship isn’t big enough to spin for that by itself. Too much radial variation, too much Coriolis force.”

She glared through tears. “I am not an idiot. I have not forgotten. Nor have I f-f-forgotten the robots can fix that.”

“Yes, separate the payload and engine sections, hitch a long cable between, then spin them. The trouble is, that immobilizes Pytheas till it’s reassembled. I think you’ll all agree we’d better hang on to its capabilities, as well as the boats’, at least till we know a lot more.”

“Shall we shelter on the first planet?” Tu Shan.asked. “A seared hell. The third isn’t this large either, but a frozen, barren waste; and likewise every outer moon or asteroid.”

Svoboda looked still toward Xenogaia. “Here is life,” she said. “Forty percent additional weight won’t harm us,” given our innate hardiness. “We will grow used to it.”

“We grew used to heavier burdens in the past,” Macandal observed quietly.

“But what I’m trying to say, if you’ll let me,” Aliyat yelled, “is, can’t the Alloi do something for us?”

By this time considerable information exchange had taken place, diagrams, interior views of vessels, whatever the non-humans chose to offer and the humans thought to. It included sounds. From the Alloi, those were notes high and coldly sweet that might be speech or might be music or might be something incomprehensible. It seemed likely that they were going about establishing communication in systematic wise; but the naive newcomers had not yet fathomed the system. They dared hope that the first, most basic message had gotten through on both sides and was mutually honest: “Our will is good, we want to be your friends.”

Hanno frowned. “Do you imagine they can control gravitation? What about that, Pytheas?”

“They give no indication of any such technology,” answered the ship, “and it is incompatible with known physics.”

“Uh-huh. If it did exist, if they could do it, I expect they’d have so many other powers they wouldn’t bother with the kind of stuff we’ve met.” Hanno rubbed his chin. “But they could build a spinnable orbital station to our specs.”

“A nice little artificial environment, for us to sit in and turn to lard, the way we were doing here?” exploded from Wanderer. “No, by God! Not when we’ve got a world to walk on!”

Svoboda uttered a cheer. Tu Shan beamed. Patulcius nodded vigorously. “Right,” said Macandal after a moment.

“That is provided we can survive there,” Yukiko pointed out. “Chemistry, biology—it may be lethal to us.”

“Or maybe not,” Wanderer said. “Let’s get busy and find out.”

The ship and its robots commenced that task. In the beginning humans were hardly more than eager spectators. Instruments searched, sampled, analyzed; computers pondered. Boats entered atmosphere. After several sorties had provided knowledge of surface conditions, they landed. The mtelligent machines that debarked transmitted back their findings. Then as the humans gained familiarity, they became increasingly a part of the team, first suggesting, later directing and deciding. They were not scientific specialists, nor need they be. The ship had ample information and logic power, the robots abundant skills. The travelers were the embodied curiosity, desire, will of the whole.

Hanno was barely peripheral. His concern was with the Alloi. Likewise did Yukiko’s become. He longed most for what they might tell him about themselves and their tarings among the stars; she thought of arts, philosophies, transcendence. Both had a gift for dealing with the foreign, an intuition that often overleaped jumbled, fragmentary data to reach a scheme that gave meaning. Thus had Newton, Planck, Einstein gone straight to insights that, inexplicably, proved to explain and predict. So had Darwin, de Vries, Oparin. And so, perhaps, had Gautama Buddha.

When explorers on Earth encountered peoples totally foreign to them—Europeans in America, for instance—the parties soon groped their way to understanding each other’s languages. Nothing like that happened at Tritos. Here the sundering was not of culture and history, nor of species, phylum, kingdom. Two entire evolutions stood confronted. The beings not only did not think alike, they could not.

Compare just the human hand and its Allosan equivalent. The latter had less strength, although the grip was not negligible when all digits laid hold on something. It had vastly more sensitivity, especially in the fine outer branchlets: a lower threshold of perception and a wider, better coordinated field of it. The hairlike ultimate ends clung by molecular wringing, and the organism felt how they did. Thus the subjective world was tactilely richer than ours by orders of magnitude.

Was it optically poorer? Impossible to say, quite likely meaningless to ask. The Allosan “wings” were partly regulators of body temperature, partly excretors of vaporous waste, mainly networks (?) of sensors. These included organs responsive to light, simpler than eyes but, in their numbers and diversity, perhaps capable of equal precision. Whether this was so or not depended on how the brain processed their input; and there did not seem to be any single structure corresponding to a brain.

Enough. It would probably take Hanno and Yukiko years to learn the anatomy; it would certainly take them longer to interpret it. For the moment, they understood—borrowing terrestrial concepts, grotesquely inappropriate—they were dealing not only with software unlike their own, but hardware. It was not to be expected that they would readily master its kind of language. Perhaps, beyond some kind of rudiments, they never would.

Presumably the Alloi had had earlier practice among aliens, and had developed various paradigms. The pair found themselves acquiring facility as they worked, not simply struggling to comprehend but making contributions to the effort. More and more, intent clarified. A primitive code took shape. Material contacts began, cautious to start with, bolder as confidence grew.

The fear was not of violence, or, for that matter— “under these circumstances,” said Hanno, grinning—chicanery. It was of surprises that might lurk in a universe where life seemed to be incidental and intelligence accidental. What condition taken for granted by one race might harm the other? What innocuous or necessary microbes might elsewhere brew death?

Robots met in space. They traded samples that they took to shielded laboratories for study. (At any rate, it happened aboard Pytheas.) Nanotech and biotech gave quick responses. While the chemistries were similar, even to most arnino acids, the deviations were such as to bar cross-infection. Yes, the specimens sent by the Alloi had things in them that probably corresponded somewhat to viruses; but the fundamental life-stuff resembled DNA no more than a file does a saw.

After repeated experiments of that general sort, robots paid visits to ships. The Allosan machines were graceful, multi-tentacular, a pleasure to watch swooping about. Within the Allosan vessel, the air was thin, dry, but humanly breathable. Temperatures went through cycles, as they did in Pytheas, the range being from cool to chilly. Light was tinged like that from Tritos, less bright than outside but adequate. Centrifugal weight was as predicted, two-thirds of a gee, also sufficient.

As for what else the great hull bore—

Work on Xenogaia proceeded more straightforwardly. Planetology was a mature discipline, a set of techniques, formulas, and computer models. This globe fitted the pattern. Meteorology and climatology were less exact; some predictions could never be made with certainty, for chaos inhered in the equations. However, the overall picture soon emerged.

A strong greenhouse effect overcompensated a high albedo; other things being equal, every clime was hotter than at the same latitude on Earth. Of course, things seldom were equal. Thus the tropics had their pleasant islands as well as their steaming continental swamps or blistering deserts. Axial tilt and rotation rate, once around in slightly more than twenty-one hours, made for powerful cyclonic wind patterns, but the heavy atmosphere and warm polar regions moderated weather almost everywhere. Though conditions were unstable compared to the terrestrial, subject to swifter and often unforeseeable change, dangerous storms were no commoner than on Earth before control. In composition the air was familiar: higher humidity, rather more carbon dioxide, several percent less oxygen. For humans, the latter was more than made up by the sea-level pressure, twice their standard. It was air they could safely inhale, and uncorrupted.

Life covered, filled, drenched the planet. Its chemistry was akin to the terrestrial and Allosan, with its own uniquenesses. Given considerations of energy, followed by the scores of cases robots had reported to Earth, that was expected. As always, the astonishments sprang from the details, the infinite versatility of protein and inventiveness of nature.

On the prosaic side, humans could eat most things, though probably few would taste very good, some would be poisonous, and none would provide complete nutrition. Probably they would be safe from every predator microbe and virus; mutation might eventually change that, but modern biomedicine should handily cope. For the Survivors, with their peculiar immune and regenerative systems, the hazard would almost be nonexistent. They couki grow terrestrial crops if they chose, and then animals to feed on the grass and grain.

This was not virgin Earth given back to them. It was not Phaeacia of their dreams. Yet here they could make a home.

Here they would have neighbors.

“—and he’s been so lonely,” Macandal said to Patulcius. “She and Hanno—no, no monkey business between them. Might be better if there were. It’s just that they’re both wrapped up in their research till it’s as if nothing and nobody else quite exists for them. Aliyat’s complained to me. I can’t do much for her, but I’ve gotten an idea about Tu Shan.”

She singled out others and gave them the same thought, privately, in words she deemed suited to each. Nobody objected. On the chosen evening, after she had done the poor best that could be done to produce a feast in weightlessness, she called for a vote, and Tu Shan received his surprise.

A spaceboat descended. Assisted by two robots, because initial problems with gravity were unavoidable after this long in orbit, he stepped forth, the first human being on Xenogaia. He had left off his shoes. The soil lay warm and moist. Its odors enriched his breath. He wept.

Shortly afterward, Hanno and Yukiko returned from the Allosan ship. The visit had been their first. The six aboard Pytheas gathered around them in the common room. All floated watchful as pikes in a hike. A mural, enlarged from “Falaise d Varengeville”—sea, sky, cliff, its shadow on the water, brush golden with sunlight—seemed more remote in time and space than Monet himself.

“No, I cannot tell you what we saw,” Yukiko said, almost like one who speaks in sleep. “We haven’t the words, not even for the images they’ve sent here. But ... somehow, that interior is alive.”

“Not just dead metal and electronic trickery,” Hanno added. He was altogether awake, ablaze. “Oh, they’ve £ much to teach us! And I do believe we’ll have news for them, once we’ve found how to tell it. But it seems they can’t come to us in person. We don’t know why, what’s wrong with our environment, but I think that if they were able to, they would.”

“Then they doubtless have the same handicap on the planet,” Wanderer said slowly. “We can do what their machines never can. They must be glad we came.”

“They are, they are,” Yukiko exulted. “They sang to to us—”

“They want us to come live with them!” Hanno cried.

A kind of gasp went around1 the room. “Are you sure?” Svoboda’s question was half demand.

“Yes, I am. We’ve achieved some communication, and it’s a simple message, after all.” The words tumbled from Hanno. “How better can we get to really know each other and work together? They showed us the section we can have. It’s plenty big and we’re free to bring over whatever we want, make whatever we like. The weight’s enough to keep us fit. The air, the general conditions are no worse than in mountains we remember. We’ll get used to that; and we can set up cozy retreats. Besides, we’ll spend a lot of time in space, exploring, discovering, maybe building—”

“No,” said Wanderer.

The single sound was a hammerfall. Silence echoed behind it. Eyes sought eyes. One by one, faces stiffened.

“I’m sorry,” Wanderer went on. “This is marvelous. I’m tempted. But we’ve sailed too many years with the Flying Dutchman. Now there’s a world for us, and we’re going to take it.”

“Wait, wait,” Yukiko protested. “Of course we mean to study Xenogaia. Mainly it, in fact. It, the sapients, they must be why the Alloi have lingered. We’ll establish bases, work out of them—”

Tu Shan shook his heavy head. “We will build homes,” he answered.

“It is decided,” Patulcius said. “We will cooperate with the Alloi when we have seen to our needs. I daresay we can investigate the planet better, living on it, than in a series of ... of junkets. Be that as it may—“ he smiled coldly—“je suis, je reste.”

“Hold on,” Hanno argued. “You talk as though you mean to stay on permanently. You know that was never the idea. Xenogaia may be habitable, but it’s far from what we had in mind. Eventually we’ll take on fresh antimatter. I think the Alloi have a production facility near the sun, but in any case, they’ll help us. We’ll go to Phaeacia as we intended.”

“When?” challenged Macandal.

“When we’re finished here.”

“How long will that take? Decades, at least. Centuries, possibly. You two will enjoy them. And the rest of us, sure, we’ll be fascinated, we’ll help whenever we can. But meanwhile and mainly, we have our own lives and rights. And our children’s.”

“If in the end we leave,” Svoboda said low, “it will not be the first home any of us forsook; and first we will have had a home.”

Hanno captured her gaze. “You wanted to explore,” he recalled.

“And I shall, in a living land. Also ... we need every pair of hands. I cannot desert my comrades.”

“You’re outvoted,” Aliyat said, “and this time you can’t do anything about it.” She reached to stroke fingers over Hanno’s cheek. Her smile quivered. “There are seas down there for you to sail on.”

“Since when were you a bold pioneer?” he taunted.

She flushed. “Yes, I’m a city girl, but I can learn. Do you suppose I liked lolling useless? I thought better of you. Well, in the past I crossed deserts, mountains, oceans, I survived in alleys, through wars and plagues and famines. Go to hell.”

“No, please, we must not quarrel,” Yukiko pleaded.

“Right,” Wanderer agreed. “We’ll take our time, think, talk this over like friends.”

Hanno straightened, so that he floated upright before the cliff and the sky. “If you want,” he said bleakly. “But I can tell you now, in the teeth of your old tribal hope for a consensus, we won’t reach any. You’re bound and determined to strike roots on the planet. And I, I will not throw away this opportunity the AUoi have offered. I cannot. Instead of fighting, let’s plan how we can make the best of what’s to be.”

Tu Shan’s countenance twisted. “Yukiko?” he croaked.

She flew to his arms. He held her close. What she gulped forth was, “Forgive me.”

30

“I think you should go,” Macandal said. “It seems to be something you’d understand best among us.”

“No, really,” Aliyat began, “you’ve always—”

Macandal smiled. “You’ve gotten too shy, honey. Think back. Way back, like to New York.”

Still Aliyat hesitated. She wasn’t simply unsure whether she could deal with the Ithagene in. what was clearly a critical situation. As a matter of fact, she had gotten more grasp of their language and ways—in some aspects, at least—than anybody else. (Had her earlier life made her quick to catch nuances?) But Tu Shan could ill spare her help, nursing the fields through this season of a drought year; and in spare moments, she was collating the mass of data and writing up the significant experiences that Wanderer and Svoboda sent back from their exploration of the northern woodlands. “I’d have to stay in touch with you anyway,” she said.

“Well, that’s wise,” the other woman replied, “but you’ll be on the spot and the only one really qualified to make decisions. I’ll support you. We all will.”

She was not the boss at Hestia, nobody was, yet it had tacitly come to pass that her word carried the most weight in the councils of the six. More lay behind that than finding the advice was sound. Wanderer had remarked once, “I think we, with our science and high technology, four and a third light-centuries from Earth, are discovering old truths again: spirit, mana, call it what you will. Maybe, even, God.”

“Besides,” Macandal continued, “I’ve got my hands full,” She always did, her own work, what she shared with Pa-tulcius, what belonged to the community; and at three years, Joseph was several handsful by himself. Her laugh rolled. “Also my belly.” Their second. Pregnancy was not disabling, bodies had hardened to Xenogaian weight, but you had better be careful. “Don’t worry, we’ll pitch in to see your man through; and maybe you won’t be gone long.” Soberly: “Take what time you need, though. This means a great deal to them. It might mean everything to us.”

Therefore Aliyat packed her gear and rations, and departed.

Coming out of her house in the morning, she stopped for a minute and looked. Not yet was the scene too familiar to see. The sky reached milky, an overcast riven in places to reveal the wan blue beyond. Nowhere beneath were the clouds that should have brought rain. Air hung still and hot, full of sulfjury smells. The stream that ran from the eastern hills through the settlement had become little more than a trickle; she barely heard it fall over the verge nearby and tumble to the river. Down in the estuary, banks and bars shone wider than erstwhile at low tide.

Regardless, Hestia abided. The three homes and several auxiliary buildings stood foursquare, -solidly timbered. Russet native turf between them had withered, but watering preserved the shade trees and the beds of roses, hollyhocks, violets along walls. A kilometer northward, robots were busy around the farmstead and in the fields; the meadow and its cows made a fantastic vividness of green and red. Farther off, the spaceboat reared above the aircraft hangar, into heaven, like a watchtower over the whole small realm. From this height Aliyat spied a brighter gleam on the eastern horizon, the Amethyst Sea.

We’ll survive, she knew. At worst, the synthesizers will have to feed us and our livestock till the drought breaks, and next year we’ll have to start over. Oh, I hope not. We’ve worked so hard—machines too few—and hoped so much. An enlarged base, surplus, the future, the children— All right, I have been selfish, not wanting to be bothered with any of my own, but isn’t Hestia glad that I’m free today?

Elsewhere Minoa reached as of old. South, across the river, forest crowns bore a thousand hues, ocher, brown, greenish bronze, dulled by dryness. The same growth bordered the cleared land on the north; then, westerly on this side, hills climbed. Above their ridges lifted a white blur, Mount Pytheas wrapped in its mists.

Human names. Throat and tongue could form the language of the dwellers after a fashion, understandably if they paid close attention, but soon grew hoarse. The concepts behind that speech were more difficult.

Aliyat turned to kiss Tu Shan goodbye. His body was hard, his arms strong. Already at this hour he smelled of sweat, soil, maleness. “Be careful,” he said anxiously.

“You be,” she retorted. Xenogaia surely harbored more surprises and treacheries than had struck thus far. He’d been injured oftenest. He was a darling, but drove himself overly hard.

He shook his head. “I fear for you. From what I have heard, this is a sacred matter. Can we tell how they will act?”

“They’re not stupid. They won’t expect me to know their mysteries. Remember, they asked if somebody would come and—“ And what? It wasn’t clear. Help, counsel, judge? “They haven’t lost their awe of us.”

Had they not? What did a creature not of Earth, no kin whatsoever, feel? The natives had certainly been hospitable. They readily gave this piece of ground, had indeed offered a site closer to their city; but the humans feared possible ecological problems. There had been abundant exchange of objects as wejl as ideas, useful as well as interesting or beautiful. But did this prove more than that the Ithagene— another Greek word—had their share of common sense and, one supposed, curiosity?

“I’ve got to go. Keep well.” Aliyat walked off, as fast as was safe under a backpack. She’d developed muscles like a judo black belter’s, which gave a terrifically sexy figure and gait, but bones remained all too breakable.

Someday we’ll leave. Phaeacia waits, promising us to be like Earth. Does she lie? How much will we miss this world of toils and triumphs?

Four Ithagene waited at the head of the path. They wore mesh mail and their hook-halberds gleamed sharp. They were an honor guard; or so she thought of them. Deferential, they divided to precede and follow her down the switchbacks across the fjord wall to the river. At the floating dock, the envoy was already in the vessel that brought them. Long, gracefully curved at prow and stern, it little resembled the two human-made boats tied nearby. No more did it have rowers, though, and the yards were bare of sails. A motor, such as the fabricator robots had lately, accumulated the resources to make, was an imperial gift. Supplies of fuel renewed it ongoingly.

The humans often wondered what they were doing to this civilization, for good or ill—ultimately, to this world.

Aliyat recognized S’saa. That was as closely as she could render the name. She did her best with a phrase that they guessed, in Hestia, was half formal greeting, half prayer. Lo responded in kind. (“Lo, le, la.” What else could you say when sexes were three, none corresponding quite to male or female or neuter, and the language lacked genders?) She and her escort boarded, a crew member cast off, another took the rudder, the motor purred, they bore upstream.

“May you now tell me what you want?” Aliyat asked.

“The matter is too grave for uttering elsewhere than in the Halidom,” S’saa answered. “We shall sing of it.”

The notes keened forth to set an emotional tone, prepare both body and mind. Aliyat heard distress, anger, fear, bewilderment, resolution. Surely much escaped her, but in the past year or two she had finally begun to comprehend, yes, feel such music, as she had failed to do with many kinds on Earth. Wanderer and Macandal were experimenting with adaptations of it, composing songs of quiet, eerie power.

You wouldn’t have thought of these beings as artists. Barrel torsos, some one hundred fifty centimeters tall on four stumpy limbs, covered with big scales or flaps, brown and leathery, that could individually lift to show a soft pink un-dersurface for fluid intake, excretion, sensing; no head to speak of, a bulge on top where a mouth underlay one scale and four retractable eyestalks protruded; four tentacles below, each terminating in four digits, that could be stiffened at will by turgor. But how repulsive did a body look that was scaleless as a flayed corpse? The humans took care always to be fully clothed among Xenogaians.

Rapidly driven, the boat passed several galleys bound the same way, then numbers of lesser craft “fishing” or freighting. None were going downstream; the tide had begun to flow, and although the moon was fairly distant today, the bore up the river would be considerable. At ebb the argosies would set forth. This was a seafaring nation (?) whose folk hunted great aquatic beasts and harvested great weed fields, traded around the coasts and among the islands, occasionally fought pirates or barbarians or whatever their enemies were. As tactfully as possible, the six at Hestia refused to give any military aid. They didn’t know the rights or wrongs, they only knew that this appeared to be the most advanced civilization on the planet but someday they’d want to start getting acquainted with more. Of course, doubtless .their local friends had found uses both warlike and peaceful for what they acquired from them.

A pair of hours slipped by. On the south side, forest gave way to orchards and croplands. Foliage drooped sere. On die north, while hills heightened in the background, bluffs declined to gentle slopes. Towers came into hazy view, grew clearer, loomed sheer above masts crowded along the wharfs; and Aliyat went ashore into Xenoknossos.

Warded by stream and fleet, the city had no need of outer walls. Along wide, clean streets, colonnades and facades rose intricately sculptured. Glass flashed in color patterns of contrasting simplicity. The effect was not busy but harmonious, airy, like trees and vines in wind or kelp in currents, undersea, strange to behold on a world that dragged so heavily. The raucous turbulence of human crowds was absent. Dwellers moved deliberately; even the looks and remarks that followed Aliyat were decorous. It was their voices that danced, twittered, strove, joined together—their voices and the sounds of instruments from places where they took their pleasure.

Not all was thus. Climbing a hill, she saw down to a camp outside the city, a wretched huddle of makeshift shelters. The beings within stood ominously bunched. Armed guards were posted about. Chill touched her. This must, somehow, be the reason she was called.

On the hilltop fountained the building she knew as the Halidom. Its stone had weathered pale amber. Nothing like its interwoven, many-branched vaults and arches, spiral wm-dows and calyx eaves, was ever on Earth. Imagination yonder had never ranged in those directions. When the images arrived, architecture, together with musk and poesy and much else, might well have a rebirth, if anybody still cared about such things.

S’saa accompanied her inside. A chamber vast and dim opened before them. The mighty of Xenoknossos had gathered, expectant, in a half circle before a dais. Thereon were those three, one of each sex, who reigned or presided or led. Hearing tell of them, Hanno had from space proposed dubbing them the Triad, but later those at Hestia thought a better word might be the Triune.

She approached.

That night she radioed back from the apartment lent her. She camped in it, really, as ill suited as the furnishings were; but it served. A window was unshuttered to warm darkness, the booming of a breeze. The small horned moon tinted clouds and cast ghostly shimmers on the river. Fires burned sullen among the squatters in the field.

Exhaustion flattened her voice, though her mind had seldom felt more awake. “We’ve been at it all day,” she said. “Not that the trouble is complicated in itself, but it involves beliefs, traditions, prejudices, everything that’s so knitted into a person— Think of a pagan Celt and a pious Muslim trying to explain, to justify, the status and rights of women to each other.”

“The Ithagene did have the wisdom to ask for an outside opinion,” Patulcius remarked. “How many human societies ever did?”

“Well, this is unprecedented,” Wanderer answered from the outback. “We never had any real aliens among us on Earth. Maybe in future we’ll benefit— Go on, Aliyat.”

“It’s how they breed,” copulating in fresh water, which must be still if conception was to result; a certain concentration of certain dissolved organic materials was essential. That set no more of a handicap, on a world where most regions were normally wet, than loss of the ability to synthesize vitamin C in the body had done for her species. “You remember, the city people use that lake in the hills behind town.” Holy Lake became the human name, for it seemed lovemaking was a religious rite in this society. “Well, throughout the hinterlands, most others have dried up to the point where they’re useless. The habitants have gotten together and demand access to Holy Lake till the drought’s over. It’s badly shrunken too, but enough is left for everybody if triples ration their turns.” Aliyat’s laugh clanked. “How that would go over with our race! But of course the Ithagene don’t think of it the way we do. What has the Xenoknossians up in arms is the thought of ... outsiders profaning their particular mystery, the presence of their, their tutelary spirit or god or whatever it is. The Triune told the countryfolk to go home and wait out the bad times. They shouldn’t breed anyway till the rains come again. But you know about the sacred Year-Births—”

“Yes,” Tu Shan said. “Besides, they live primitively, infant mortality is always high, they feel they must be fecund whatever happens.”

“The realm, this whole section of Minoa, is close to civil war,” Aliyat told them. “There’ve been killings. Now the, uh, tribes have jointly sent two or three thousand here, who insist that soon, come what may, they’ll go to the lake. Nothing can stop them, short of a massacre. Nobody wants that, but to give in could tear things apart almost as terribly.”

Macandal whistled low. “And we had no idea. If only they’d come to us sooner.”

“I don’t suppose it occurred to them before they got desperate,” Patulcius guessed. “If we don’t find a solution fast, I suspect it will be too late.”

“That’s why you went, Aliyat.” Macandal’s tone wavered. “I gathered, from S’saa’s hints, that it concerned this kind of thing, and you, with your experience— Don’t misunderstand!”

“No offense,” Aliyat said. “I did, I hope, slowly get a feel for what’s going on, and a notion. It may be worthless.”

“Tell us,” Svoboda begged.

If you could use human words for Ithagenean emotions and make sense, Aliyat thought, then the assembly next morning was appalled. “No!” exclaimed the le of the Triune. “This is impossible!”

“Not so, Foreseers,” she maintained. “It can be quickly and easily done. Behold.” She unfolded a sheet of paper. Copied thereon, a transmission from Hestia to a machine she had earned along, was an enlarged aerial photograph of Holy Lake and its vicinity. The Ithagene didn’t object to overflights, though none had ever accepted an invitation to ride. (Did some instinct forbid, was it a prohibition, or what?) She pointed. “The lake lies as hi a bowl, fed by rain and runoff. Here, a short way below, is a hollow. Let us clear it of trees and brush, then dig a channel through the hill above. Some of the life-giving water will drain out to fill it, while enough will remain for yon after the channel is closed again. There, out of sight of your people, the countryfolk can engender according to their own customs. For you this would be a huge undertaking, but you know of our machines and explosives. We will do it for you.” Hissings and rustlings filled the, gloom. S’saa must explain to Aliyat, patching out the native language with what human speech lo commanded: “Although they are reluctant, they would agree, lest worse befall. However, they fear the habitants will refuse, will take the proposal as a deadly threat. Knowing Kth and Hru’ngg, the leaders, I think this is true. For a life-site is not any pond; it is hallowed by ancient use, by the life it has given in the past. To triple elsewhere would be to set the work) awry. The rains might never return, or the violators might never have another birth.” Dismay struck whetted. “You don’t believe that!”

“Not we who are here, no. But those are simple upcoun-try folk. And it is true that not all bodies of water grant the blessing. Many do not, though surely they were tried at some time.”

“That is because—oh—oh, Christ, what’s the use?”

“Water flows from your eyes. Do you invoke?”

“No, I— You have no word. Yes, I invoke the dead, and the loss, and— Wait! Wait!”

“You leap, you raise your arms, you utter noises.”

“I, I have a new thought. Maybe this will serve. I must ask the council. Then I must... must doubtless go to the habitants and ... learn if it feels right to them.” Aliyat turned around to face the Triune.

For days heaven had been almost dear, an iron-hard blue, clouds nowhere but in the west. Heat lightning sometimes nickered yonder, and thunder muttered into windlessness. Now sunset reddened those reaches. Its beams struck through gaps and down valleys until they splashed the new tarn as if with human blood. Trees bulked black against h. More and more, the Ithagene gathered in their hundreds became masses of shadow, a wall around the water. Their singing beat like a heart.

Out of them trod the Eldritch Ones, three couples, for it was known that that was their nature. On their right walked the Foreseers of the City, lanterns aloft on poles to cast many-patterned light; on their left, torches flared and smoked among the Sower Chieftains. These halted at the marge. The six went onward.

Aliyat felt drowned turf crisp beneath her feet. The water lapped around her ankles, knees, loins. Warmth from the day remained in it, but a coolness was rising from below, a pledge to years unborn. “Here’s where we stop,” she said. “The bottom slopes fast. Farther on, we’d soon be over our heads.” She couldn’t fight back a giggle. “That’d make it bard to go about this dignified, wouldn’t it?”

“I am not sure what we should do,” Tu Shan confessed.

“Nothing much. We have our clothes on, after all. They don’t know how we make babies anyway. But we must take our time and—“ A sudden odd shyness: “And get them to see we love each other.”

His arms enfolded her. She pressed herself close. Their mouths met. Vague in the twilight, she glimpsed Patulcius and Macandal, Wanderer and Svoboda. The hymn from the shore reached into her.

A necking party in a pool, she thought craztty. Ridiculous. Absurd as real lovemaking, as everything human, everything alive. We’ve sailed from those stars blinking forth overhead, to stage a Stone Age fertility rite.

But it was working. It consecrated the mere, it kindled the magic. In peace would Minoa await the resurrection of the land.

“Tu Shan,” she whispered, straining against him, “when we get home, I want your child.”

31

“Joyful is the word that has come to us,” related the Allos whom the humans thought of as Lightfall. “Share it. From rendezvous has it fared, the closest rendezvous, 147 light-years yonder.” Many-branched fingers marked off a part of the sky, then closed on a point within. Made by a shape that looked so frail, limned against naked space as revealed in a transparency of the ship, the gesture became doubly strong.

The direction was well away from Sol, but not toward Pegasi. The Alloi had roved widely from the world that mothered their race.

“Rendezvous,” said Yukiko, perforce aloud and in a language of Earth. She was understood, as she understood what was communicated to her. However, difficulties and failures of comprehension were still many. That was inevitable, when minds could not translate directly what senses perceived, but must pass it through a metalanguage worked out in the course of years. “I do not quite identify your reference.”

“Starfarers have established stations, orbital about chosen suns, to which they report their discoveries and experiences,” Quicksilver explained. “These pass the information on to the rest. So do nodes of knowledge grow, and the beams between them form nets that piece by piece knit together.”

Hanno nodded. He had been aware of this; his explorations with Alloi companions had taken him near the vast gossamer web they had made to circle Tritos, while Yukiko was searching into their arts, philosophies, dreams. “There’s a primitive version in the Solar System,” he reminded her. “Or was, when we left. After they start receiving our ‘casts, they can upgrade it and join the community.”

“If they care to.” She looked out to where stars drowned in the icy cataract of their own numbers, and away again, with a slight shudder. What she and he had learned here gave scant hope of that.

Hanno was less daunted. “What is this news?” he asked avidly.

“A ship came to the rendezvous,” Lightfall told. “All do thus from time to time, that they may take in the fresh data; for the stations cannot well broadcast continuously to those who may be anywhere, at any velocity. Such of. our report on this system as had arrived by then determined the crew on proceeding next to Tritos. We have encountered them before; it is clear to us that the Xenogaians hold special interest and promise for them. May we have an image?”

“Provided,” agreed Star Wing, and activated a projector.

A hulking form sprang forth. Hanno’s immediate thought was of a rhinoceros. Granted, the resemblance was faint and fanciful, like comparing a man to a caterpillar. The body was of minor interest in any case, except insofar as it was the matrix of mind, of spirit.

“Y-yes,” he ventured, “they’re from a big planet too, aren’t they? I daresay they see just enough cultural similarity here to themselves that they may reap a harvest of ideas from the differences.”

Yukiko’s eyes shone. “When will they come?”

“Their message is that they wished to spend a few years at the rendezvous first, studying and thinking about the data,” Lightfall imparted. “That is usual, to take advantage of facilities that no vessel can accommodate. Doubtless they are on their way at this moment. Since they are accustomed to high accelerations, they should arrive just a few months later than their announcement that they have set forth.”

“Several years yet, then.” Yukiko smiled. “Time to prepare a festive reception.”

“Do they travel by the same doctrine as you?” Hanno Inquired.

“Yes,” Lightfall answered, “which we recommend you also adopt.”

“I’m thinking about it. We’d need some basic modifications hi our ship, you know.”

“More in your thoughts.”

“Touche!” Hanno laughed. “Conceded, we are impatient parvenus.”

The Alloi did not boost continuously between stars. They got close to tight speed, then went on free trajectory, using centrifugal weight. The saving in antimatter allowed huge hulls, with everything that that implied. The price was that time dilation became less. A journey that might have been accomplished in ten shipboard years would take perhaps twice as long; and the farther you went, the larger the factor grew. All voyagers were ageless, but none escaped from time.

The practice accounted for observers at Sol never having picked up sign of starcraft. Enormous though the energies were, radiation was only at beginning and end of a passage, a candle-flicker; and starcraft were very few.

“Perhaps you do yourself an injustice,” suggested Volant.

“Perhaps your hastiness will fill a need we older spacegoing races did not know we had. You may go beyond this tiny segment of the galaxy that we have reached, from end to end of it, in less than a million cosmic years. You may be those who weave it together.”

Yukiko’s hands fluttered. “No, no. You honor us far beyond what we deserve,”

“Let us abide the future,” flowed from Star Wing: the patience of ancientness. These beings had left Pegasi fifteen thousand years ago; no individual lifetime of theirs was shorter than half of that. They knew of explorations that had been going on, in other directions, a hundred times as long.

“Well, this is ... wonderful,” Hanno said. Glancing at Yukiko: “Maybe you can find words, dear. I’m dumbstruck.”

She caught his hand. “You brought us here. You.”

They had become able to sense when AHoi turned grave. “Friends,” Lightfall told them, “you must make certain decisions among yourselves. Soon after the—(?)—arrive, we will leave.” Through shock and suddenly racketing pulse, they gathered: “You may remain if you desire. They will be rapturous at meeting new members of the fellowship. You can help them, and they help you, to know Xenogaia and its awarenesses, quite likely even more than you and we have helped each other. Everything that we have built in this system shall stay for your use.”

“But, but you go away?” Yukiko stammered. “Why?”

Stalky limbs traced symbols. Membranes quivered; opalescences ran over them. The declaration was calm, inexorable, and maybe, maybe regretful. “We have spent more than four centuries at Tritos. I believe you realize that was partly because of what we had detected from Sol: our hope, which was fulfilled, that we could call travelers from there to us. Meanwhile we explored these planets and above all the diverse Me-ways, histories, achievements, horrors, glories of the sentients on Xenogaia. It was effort richly rewarded, as we foreknew it would be. Another whole concept of the universe opened for us. Something of what we learned has entered our inwardness.

“And yet you humans, in your decade and a half, have gathered more than we imagined was there. It happens your home world, your evolution, more closely resembles theirs. Nature has better prepared you to comprehend them.

“For our part, we found ourselves drawn to you as never to them. You too are the kind of beings who reach for the stars.

“We could stay here till this sun begins to die, and not discover all that there is to discover; for it is so much, and always changing. Life is a rare thing, sapience more seldom yet. Why, then, will we not linger?

“It is that we hope for more than we have gained here; and we know that if we seek long enough, we shall find it.”

Hanno had nothing but merchant words. “I see. You’ve gone past the point of diminishing returns. Your best strategy is to start fresh.”

As it seemed mother civilizations did not, could not.

“Will you go on to Sol?” Yukiko asked unsteadily.

“Someday, perhaps,” Star Wing conveyed.

“Likelier not,” Quicksilver asserted. “I think that what you have revealed to us will suffice—for they have been evolving onward.”

“Let Sol and Pegasi communicate,” Volant scoffed.

“No, you are too impetuous, and too thoughtless of our friends,” Lightfall admonished. “We have years ahead of us in which to consider.” To the mimans: “You too, with your kindred down on the planet, you must take thought. Do you wish to commence at once?”

Hanno and Yukiko traded a look. Mutely, she nodded. After a moment, he did likewise. They bowed, one of many motions that had gradually acquired eloquence, and went from the coralline room.

A passageway took them along the great curve of the ship. Past the part of it that was alive stretched, today, a simulated vista of ruddy hills, lean crags, fronds rippling around a frozen pool, beneath a violet-blue sky where rings arched tike undying rainbows—a world the AJloi had once come upon and found beautiful, for it was much as their mother world was before the machines. They had left colonists.

Beyond lay a room of exercise equipment made for the humans. It could be spun through a hollow ring around the hull to provide higher weight. Thus did they maintain a physical condition that allowed them to visit the planet without being too badly handicapped in relation to those who lived there.

Farther on was their home section, Yukiko’s little garden, a post upholding the model of a caravel that Hanno had once constructed, the compartment that housed them. Air inside it remained thin and dry, but it was warm and to their eyes the lighting was pure white.

The three rooms held their possessions, a few carried from Earth, more that were remembrances of their years here, but there was no clutter. He kept his sailor’s tidiness, she her basic austerity. Opposite the electronic complex a calligraphic scroll hung above a low table where a bowl of water contained a single shapely stone.

They removed their outer garments. “Shall I make tea?” she proposed.

“Do, if you like.” His face drew taut. “I want to call plan-etside now.”

“Well, it is tremendous news, but we shall have to talk about it over and over—”

“In person. We’re going down and stay a while, you and I.”

“That will be very welcome,” she sighed. “Yes, I admit I’ll enjoy some unfaked shirtsleeve outdoors, a sea, a salt wind.”

“And our comrades, not images but real flesh again. How the children must have grown.”

He missed the wistfulness, and not until later did he recall how ardently she entered into the life around her when they touched down. The occasions had been infrequent and brief. You must live with the Alloi, work side by side with them, share hardships and dangers as well as victories and celebrations, if you would reach an understanding of them and of what they had won on their endless voyage. To him the sacrifices were small.

“Never mind how many years we may have to make ready,” he said. “We’d better begin straightaway.”

She smiled. “You mean that you cannot sit still for a cup of tea.”

Ignoring the gentle gibe, he settled before the complex and ordered a beam to Hestia. The ship was at present above the opposite hemisphere, but the Alloi had long since orbited relay satellites. The screen came alight. “Summoning,” said the artificial voice. A minute passed, and another. “Summoning.”

Yukiko brought up an outside view. The planet shone blue-veined white. Lightnings threaded the darkened edge. She smote hands together. “We forgot!” she cried. “It’s night where they are.”

“Damn,” said Hanno without remorse.

Svoboda’s likeness entered the screen, three-dimensional, as if she herself stood behind a shut window. Her hair was tousled. A robe hastily thrown on gaped over milk-heavy breasts. “What’s wrong?” she exclaimed.

“No emergency,” Hanno replied. “News. I’ll tell you, you tell whoever else got roused, and then go back to sleep if you can.”

She bridled. “It couldn’t wait?”

“Listen.” He made his announcement in short, clanging words. “We need to begin studying what information the Alloi can give us about these other beings, as soon as they’ve assembled it. Before then we need to confer. Yukiko and I— Expect our boat, m-m, shortly after sunrise... What’s the matter?”

“What is the hurry?” Svoboda’s response crackled. “Aren’t you aware this is harvest season? We’ll be working ourselves sweatless, people an8 robots both, for the next several days. We already are. I heard the summons only because I’d just fallen asleep after the baby kept me awake for hours. Now you want us to sweep and garnish quarters for you and meet in instant council.”

“Don’t you core? Why in hell’s name did you sign on?”

“We’re sorry,” Yukiko interjected. “We were so excited, everything else dropped from our minds. Pardon us.”

The other woman fleered. “Is he sorry?”

“Hold on,” Hanno said. “I made a mistake. But this that’s happening—”

Svoboda cut him off. “Yes, it’s important. But so is your arrogance. The main thing you’re forgetting is that you, sit-ttag up there in the sky, are not God Almighty.”

“Please,” Yukiko begged.

Hanno spoke coldly. “I am the captain. I’ll have respect ,ftom you.”

Svoboda shook her head. A blond lock tossed on her temple. “That has changed. Nobody is indispensable any longer. We’ll accept whatever leader we may need, if we judge that person will serve us well.” She paused. “Somebody will call tomorrow, when we’ve conferred, and make proper arrangements.” With a smile: “Yukiko, this isn’t your fault. Everybody knows that. Goodnight.” The screen blanked.

Hanno sat staring into it.

Yukiko went to stand behind him, a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t take this hard,” she said. “She was simply short on sleep, therefore short on temper. After she has rested, she will shrug it off.”

He shook his head. “No, it goes deeper than that. I hadn’t realized—we’ve been away too much—down underneath, they carry their resentment yet.”

“No. I swear not. No more. You did bring them, us to something far more wonderful and meaningful than we had dared hope for. It is true, you are not vitally necessary now. Your captaincy is not unquestioned. And you did act thoughtlessly. But the wound is nothing, it will heal by morning.”

“Some things never heal.” He rose. “Well, no use brooding.” A crooked grin. “What about that cup of tea?”

She regarded him in silence before she said, most quietly, “You two can still hurt one another, can you not?”

His voice went brusque. “How often do you miss Tu Shan?” He drew her to him. “Regardless, these have been good years for me. Thank you.”

She laid her cheek against his breast. “And for me.”

He forced a chuckle. “I repeat, what became of the tea?”

32

First light grayed the east, made dull silver of the stream. Heights westward hulked black and haze dimmed a sinking huge moon. The waterfall rushed loud down its cuff into the river, which clucked and purled. Coolness blew, laden with silty odors.

Hanno and Wanderer stood on the dock. Then- tongues felt awkward. “Well,” said Wanderer, “have fun.”

“You too,” Hanno replied. “Uh, how long did you say you’d be gone?”

“Don’t know for sure. Three, four days. But you come home this evening, hear me?”

“Of course. We Phoenicians never spent a night at sea if we could help it.”

Wanderer’s shadowed countenance darkened further. “I wish you wouldn’t go at all. Especially alone.”

“I heard you before. You’re going alone yourself, and not even taking a communicator along.”

“That’s different. I know those woods. But none of us really know the waters. We’ve just puttered around a little in our boats or taken passage with natives, and that was to study the crew, not the seamanship.”

“Look, Peregrino, I know perfectly well the conditions aren’t identical with Earth. I’ve tried them out, remember? Please remember, too, that I was sailing, in flimsier vessels than I like thinking about, two thousand years before you were born. Always the second law of the sea is ‘Take care.’ ”

“What’s the first?”

“ ‘It’s in the bilge!’ ”

They laughed together a bit. “Okay, okay,” Wanderer said. “So we both need to go walkabout, in our different ways. I suspect the same’s true for Corinne. She didn’t really have to confer with the Triune at this exact time.” He left unspoken: Escape, relief, slack off the tension that has built up in us through these past days of wrangling. Shall we abide here, shall we accompany the Ailoi when they leave, or what? Seek within ourselves for our true desires. We have years yet in which to decide, but the divisions between us have festered longer than that, ranker than we knew.

“Thanks for your help,” said Hanno.

“De nada, amigo.” They shook hands. It was the heartiest clasp Hanno had ever felt, or given, in Hestia. He couldn’t ask outright, but he believed Wanderer had altogether forgiven him. Well, whatever rift had occurred was not over something fundamental to the man’s life, as for some others; and from Wanderer’s viewpoint, events had fairly well vindicated his old friend. At these latest con-daves of the eight, they had argued side by side.

It wasn’t the same with Macandal, Patulcius, Aliyat, Tu Sfaan, Svoboda—Svoboda— Oh, she was perfectly gracious; after all, in principle she too favored exploring. But by tacit agreement, she and Yukiko stayed abed when their men got up to carry the gear down to the boat.

Wanderer turned. His stride whispered over the dock, bis tall form strode up the path and disappeared hi remnant darknesses. Hanno boarded. Quickly he uncovered and unfurled the mainsail, took the jib from its bag, raised them, cleated the sheets, cast off. Hie fabric stood ghost-white athwart strengthening dawn, slatted, caught wind and filled. Ariadne listed over and slipped downstream.

She was a sweet little craft, a six-meter sloop that on Earth would once have been an ocean racer (who there went sailing any more?), built at odd moments by Tu Shan with robot help according to plans in the database. Mainly, he had wanted to make something beautiful as well as purposeful. It turned out that nobody found time to use her much, finally not at all. The Ithagene were intrigued, but the layout was wrong for them. Hanno patted the deck beside the cockpit. “Poor girl,” he said. “Did you cry sometimes at night, lying always alone? We’ll take a real run today, we will.” Surprised, he noticed he had spoken hi Punic. When had he last?

The estuary broadened. Unhindered, the land breeze blew harder. He had it, the current, and the tide to bear him. Ebb should end just about when he reached the sea; stack water for the transition was desirable. Waves, rips, every kind of turbulence went faster, more forcefully, less foreseeably on Xenogaia, under its gravity, than on Earth. The sun rose ahead, blurred and reddened by overcast, not so far to starboard as it would have been on Earth at this latitude and time of year. Though the planet rotated somewhat faster, the axial tilt promised him a long, long summer day. Cloud banks towered murky in the south. He hoped they wouldn’t move northward and rain on him. The wettest season had passed, but you never knew. Xenogaian meteorology was still largely guesswork. The parameters were unfamiliar; the humans and their computers had too much else, too much more interesting, to consider. Also, it seemed the weather was highly unstable. Chaos, in the physics sense of the word, took over early in any sequence. Well, this was a sturdy, forgiving boat; he and Wanderer had carried down an outboard for her; if he got in bad trou- ble, he could call, and an aircraft would come take him off. He scowled at the thought.

Think about pleasanter things, then. Faring out again among the stars— No, that cut too near. That was what divided the house of the Survivors against itself.

You couldn’t blame those who wanted to stay. They’d toiled, suffered, wrought mightily; this had become home for them, it was the cosmos for their children. As for those who wanted to quest, why, Minoa with its multitudinous realms was only one continent on an entire world. For those who would liefest dwell near nonhumans, a whole new race of them was coming. What more dared you wish?

Dismiss it for now. Lose yourself in this day.

The sea opened before Ariadne, eunmetal whitecaps, surge and brawl, wind abruptly southeast and stiff. She leaped, leaned, ran happily lee rail under. It throbbed in deck and tiller. The wind sang. Spindrift blew salt kisses. Hanno closed his jacket and drew up its hood against the chill. Fingers brushed the gas cartridge that would at need inflate it. Tricky sailing, and nis muscles not yet fully retrained to bear his weight. He couldn’t have singlehanded -were it not for the servos and computer. At that, he must pay constant heed. Good. So did be wish it to be.

A native ship was inbound, beating across the wind, a bravery of sails. She must have lain out, waiting for the tide to turn. Now she would ride the flow upstream, doubtless to Xenoknossos. Probably she would have to take shelter in one of the bays .the Ithagene had dug along the banks, while the bore went rumbling by. It would be especially dangerous today; the moon was both full and close.

Northward, some five kilometers off the mainland, water churned and jumped white, black forms reared up—the Forbidden Ground, a nasty patch of rocks and shoals. A current from the south swept strongly around it. Hanno trimmed his sails. He wanted to be well clear before the incoming tide reinforced that rush.

Tacking, he made for the nearest of three islands that lay dim in the eastern distance. He would scarcely get that far before midafteraoon, when prudence dictated he turn back, but it was something to steer by.

A goal, he thought. A harbor I won’t make. Odysseus, setting forth from ashy Troy for Ithaca, lured by the Lotus Eaters, bereaved by the Cyclops, at strife with winds and wild men, seduced by an enchantress who took away humanity, descending to the dead, raiding the fields of the sun, passing through the gate of destruction, made captive by her who loved him, cast ashore at Phaeacia—but Odysseus came home at last.

How many ports had he, Hanno, foiled to make in his millennia? All?

Tritos climbed to a breach hi the overcast. Light flamed. He sailed on the Amethyst Sea, and it was strewn with diamond dust and the manes of the waves blew white. It was as lovely and wild as a woman.

Tanithel, her black hair garlanded with anemones, who whispered her wish that she had not had to sacrifice her virginity in the temple before she came to him; Adoniah, who read the stars from her tower above Tyre—twice he cast anchor, the lights of home glimmered through dusk, and then ebb tide bore that country off and he lay again on empty waters. Afterward—Merab, Althea, Nirouphar, Cordelia, Brangwyn, Thorgerd, Maria, Jehanne, Margaret, Natalia, O Ashtoreth, the dear ghosts were beyond counting or remembering, but had they ever been much more than ghosts, belonging as they did to death? To men he felt closer, they could not bear the same thing off with them— Baalram, Thuti, Umlele, Pytheas, Ezra, rough old Rufus, yes, that hurt, somewhere inside himself Hanno had forever mourned Rufus. Stop sniveling!

The wind skirled louder. Ariadne heeled sharply. The sun disappeared behind gray, beneath which wrack began to fly. CLoud masses bulked mountainous, drawing closer. Lightning sprang about in their blue-black caverns. The islands were lost in scud-haze, the mainland aft lay low and vague. “What time is it?” Hanno asked. He whistled when the computer told him. His body had sailed for him while his mind drifted awash hi the past, longer than he knew.

He’d grown hungry too without noticing, but would be rash to trust the helm to the machinery even to duck below and fix a sandwich. “Give me Hestia,” he ordered the communicator. “Summoning.”

“Hello, hello, is anybody there? Hanno calling.”

Wind tore Yukiko’s voice from the speaker, seas trampled its tatters underfoot. He barely heard: “—frightened for you ... satellite report ... weather moving faster and faster ... please—”

“Yes, certainly, I’ll return. Don’t worry. This boat can take a knockdown and right herself. I’ll be back for supper.” If I catch the tide right. Got to keep well offshore till I can run straight down the slot- Well, the motor has plenty of kilowatts. Better that to claw off with than men rowing till their hearts burst.

He didn’t want to use it unless and until he must. He needed a fight, wits and nerve as well as sinews against the wolf-gods. Coming around was a long and tough maneuver. Once a wave smashed clear across the deck. Ariadne shuddered, but still her mast swayed on high, an uplifted lance. Gallant girl. Like Svoboda—like all of them, Yukiko, Cor-inne, Aliyat, all of them Survivors in ways their men had never had to be.

He did let the servos keep the tiller while he shortened sail. A sheet escaped his grasp and slashed his wrist before he captured and cleated it. Spume washed the blood off. The world had gone dark, driving gray, save for the lightning flashes southward. Water swung to and fro in the cockpit till the pump flung it overside. He remembered bailing Pytheas’ ship during a Baltic storm. As he took the helm back, a song abruptly lilted through his head. “Oh, hand me down my walking cane—“ Where had it come from? English language, old, old, nineteenth or early twentieth century, impudent, a pulsing, railroad kind of tune.

“—Oh, Mama, come go my bail, Get me out of this God damn jail. All my sins are taken away.”

Railroad, the West, a world that had seemed boundless but lost its horizons and itself in a blink of centuries and was one with Troy. Then some looked starward and dreamed of New America. The upshot ... machines, eight human beings, immensities as impassable and unanswering as death.

“Oh, hett is deep and hell is wide, Oh, hell is deep and hell is wide, Oh, hell is deep and hell is wide, Ain’t got no bottom, ain’t got no side. All my sins are taken away.”

Hanno showed the wind his teeth. Odysseus went there and won back. If the stars held no New America, they offered what was infinitely more.

The noise rammed him. It was a monstrous rush and boom, pierced by a risen screech. To port the cloud wall had vanished behind a whiteness that overran waves and kilometers.

“Strike sail!” he bawled. That was not merely a gale, that was a line squall come from behind sight and bound for him. Weather on Xenogaia heeded no law of Grecian Aeolus. Wind speeds were commonly low, but when they did go high, they bore twice the weight of violent air. His left hand took the switch that lowered the outboard. Point bows into seas and hold them fast!

Trie fist smote. Rain flayed and blinded. Waves topped the rails. Ariadne climbed, swayed amidst cataracting foam, plunged into troughs. Hanno clung.

Something snatched him.

He was down in roaring black. He whirled and tumbled. At the middle of it rested a cold steadiness, his mind. I’m overboard, he knew. Inflate the jacket. Don’t breathe water or you’re done.

He broke surface, gasped air full of rain and salt foam, threshed limbs against heaviness that tore. The hood swelled into a pillowlike collar, upbearing his head as the rest of the garment floated his body. He squinted about. Where was the boat? No sign of her. He didn’t think she’d gone under, not that staunch little lady, but wind and waves must have borne her from him, maybe not very far as yet— far enough, though, when he could see only the billows savaging him.

What had happened? His brain cleared, shook off shock, became a computer programmed to calculate survival. Wind might have caught the unfurled loose mainsail, swung the hull around, shoved it so low that a broaching sea swept him out. Well, if he kept alert, he’d drift free till rescue came.

That should be soon after this flaw of weather had passed. Yukiko was probably trying right now to call him. An aircraft— Those carried aboard Pytheas were designed for Phaeacia. They flew on Xenogaia, but it was rather precarious; given conditions at all unusual, you needed a human pilot as well as the machine. Maybe the Hestia folk should have ordered modifications, but the job was big, they had so much else on hand, they could stay aground when in doubt.

Pilots. Wanderer’s the best, I think that’s generally agreed. He’s out of touch today. Otherwise Svoboda; and she’s got her kid to think about. The colony is tiny, a beachhead on a shore not made for our kind. She has no right to risk herself needlessly. Of course, she will take off the moment it looks practical, which should be when this gust is over. High winds aren’t an unacceptable hazard in themselves, if they’re reasonably steady.

The trick will be to stay alive till then. Exposure is the enemy. This water isn’t too cold, it’s a warm current from the south. However, a few degrees below skin temperature will suck the heat out in time. I remember— But that was on another voyage, and besides, the men are dead. I also know some ancient Asian ways of controlling blood flow; at dire need, I can call up my ultimate reserves, while they last.

Swim. Save your strength, but do not let yourself be rolled about and smothered. Find the rhythms. Who was it, what goddess, who lived at the bottom of the sea and spread her nets for sailormen? Oh, yes, Ran of the Norse. Shall we dance, my lady Ran?

Wind screamed, seas crashed. How long had this gone on? No telling. A minute could amount to an hour, reverse time dilation, the cosmos flying away from a man. He’d been mistaken about the blow. It wasn’t any quick squall. Though rain had thinned, the wind raved wilder. Unforeseen, unforeseeable, as ignorant as men and, yes, their smug machines still were. The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you.

Thunder ahead. Hanno rose onto a crest. He saw black teeth, the rocks and skerries, the Forbidden Ground. Water seethed, geysered, exploded. The current had swept him to this. Flashingly, he hoped Ariadne remained free, for her people to recover. He readied himself.

It was hard to do. A sense of warmth hi hands and feet crept treacherously toward his breast. He knew that consciousness was dimming; he couldn’t tell which lights had by now gone out.

A comber took him along.

He smashed into the white.

White. ... He lay on stone. Weed wrapped him, yellow-brown ropes. Waves roiled and roared under a low, flying sky. Oftener and oftener, water rushed over the roughness beneath him. He would inhale it, choke, cough, reach for air.

He scarcely noticed. Cold, pain, struggle were of the world, the storm. Impersonal, he watched them, like a man drowsy at his hearthside watching flames. The rising tide would claim him, but he would not be here. He would be— where? What? He didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

So this is how it ends. Not too bad a way for an old sailor-man. I do wish I could lie remembering. But memory slips from me, wishing does, being does. Farewell, farewell, you ghosts. Fare always well.

A whickering whine through wind and surf, a shadow, a shape, a jolt that awakens awareness.

You fool! he raged dimly. Go back! You could lose your life!

The aircraft bucked and rocked, fell, climbed, did battle. From its teardrop snaked a tine. The cord passed half a meter above Hanno. His hand tried to reach and grab it, but couldn’t. It whirled on past. Again. Again.

It withdrew. The engine overhead snarled louder. The line descended afresh. A loop was at the end, for the feet of a clinging man.

Tu Shan hit the reef. He took the impact in his muscles, got his foothold, stood while a surge ran ankle-deep around him. With his left hand he kept hold of the tine; and he advanced step by gripping step.

The strongest among us, thought Hanno bewilderedly. But I’ve been all this time with his woman.

Tu Shan’s right arm wept under his shoulders, raised him, held him fast. The aircraft winched the line in. They swung like a bell clapper. “Proclaim Liberty throughout the world—”

They were aboard. Svoboda gained altitude and made for snore. Tu Shan laid Hanno out in the aisle, which shivered and banged. He examined him with rough skill. “Slight concussion, I think,” he growled. “Maybe a broken rib or two. Mainly a bad chill, uh, hypothermia. He’ll live.”

He administered initial treatment. Blood quickened. Svoboda brought the aircraft slanting down. “How did you know?” Hanno mumbled.

“Yukiko called the Alloi,” Svoboda said from the controls. Rain dashed across the viewscreen before her. “They couldn’t enter atmosphere themselves. Even their robots have trouble in bad weather. But they sent a spaceboat on low trajectory. Its detectors registered an infrared anomaly in the rocks. That was where you might well be.”

“You shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t—”

She made a near-vertical descent. Contact jarred the machine. She snapped off her harness and came to kneel beside him. “Did you think we’d want to be without you?” she asked. “Did we ever?”

33

Seldom was a day this brilliant. Sunlight spilled from a sky in which clouds were blue-shadowed white, tike enormous snowbanks. It gleamed off wings cruising aloft; glimpses of river and sea shone molten. The eight seated around a plank table were thinly clad. From the top of their knoll vision ranged between Hestia, at its distance a toy box, westward to where Mount Pytheas rose pure beyond the hills.

Twice before have we met this way, in open air, remembered Hanno. Do we have some unknown need? Yes, the reasons are practical, be undistracted, leave the children in care of the robots for these few hours, and hope that fresh surroundings will freshen our thinking. But do our souls be-tieve that when we most want wisdom, we must seek it from earth and heaven?

They are not ours, even now. This close-knit turf that is not grass, yonder squat trees and serpentine bushes, somber lues of everything that grows, sharp fragrances, the very taste of spring water, none came from the womb of Gaia. Nor can any of it ever truly become hers, nor should it.

The looks upon him were expectant. He cleared his throat and sat straighten The motion hurt, his injuries were not yet entirely healed, but he ignored that. “I won’t ask for a vote today,” he said. “We have years ahead before we must commit ourselves. But my news may change some minds,”

Unless that had already happened. Certainly it had done so as regarded him. He didn’t know whether his near death had been necessary to snuff out the last rancor. Maybe that would have faded away in time; but maybe it would have smoldered on and on, eating hearts hollow. No matter. The fellowship was whole again. Little had been spoken outright; everything had been felt. He had an intuition, moreover, that in typical irrational human fashion, this was in turn catalyzing another oneness.

We’ll see, he thought. All of us.

“As you know,” he went on, “Yukiko and I have been communicating a lot with the AUoi these past few days. They’ve reached a decision of their own.”

He raised a hand against anxiety. “Nothing radical, except in what it can mean for the long haul. They will stay on till the new ship arrives, and for several years afterward. There’ll be an unforeknowably great deal of information to exchange and, well, rapport to build and enjoy. In due course, though, the Alloi are going elsewhere.

“What’s new is—if we, at that time, leave for Phaeacia, they will come with us.”

He and his partner smiled into the amazement, savored it. “In God’s name, why?” exclaimed Patulcius. “What have they to gam there?”

“Knowledge, to start with,” Hanno answered. “A whole different set of planets.”

“But planetary systems are common enough,” Wanderer said. “I thought that what interests them most is intelligent life.”

“True,” Yukiko told them. “At Phaeacia, that will be us; and for us, they will be.”

“They want to know us better,” Hanno said. “They see tremendous potential in our race. Far more than in the Ithagene, much though they’ve gotten from them in the way of scientific discovery and artistic inspiration. We are spacefarers too. The odds are, the Ithagene never will be, none of diem; at best, in the remote future.”

“But the Alloi need only stay here, and they can observe both races, and interact with that other set of travelers to boot,” Patulcius argued.

Yukiko shook her head. “They do not expect we can or win remain. Certainly our numbers could only grow slowly, and never become large, on Xenogaia; and therefore what we, humans in space, were able to do, or at last cared to do, would be hopelessly limited.”

“You six—no, we eight have been like the English Puritans on Earth,” Hanno said. “Looking for a home, they meant to settle in Virginia, but weather drove them north and they ended in New England. It wasn’t what they’d hoped for, but they made the best of it, and that’s how the Yankees came to be. Suppose New England had been all there ever was for them. Think of such a country, stagnant, poor, narrow and narrow-minded. Do you want that for yourselves and your children?”

“The Yankees put down strong roots,” Tu Shan responded. “They did have America beyond.”

“We have nothing like that,” Macandal said. “Xenogaia belongs to its people. We have no right to anything but this Ktde patch they gave us. If we took more, God ought to strike us down.”

Wanderer nodded.

“So you have often said, dear,” Patulcius demurred, “and I have tried to point out that as a practical matter—”

“Yes, we have our investment here,” Svoboda interrupted, “sweat and tears and dreams. It will hurt to scrap that. But I always believed, myself, that someday we must.” Her voice clanged. “And now we’ve been given this opportunity!”

“That’s it,” Hanno chimed in. “Phaeacia has no natives for us to harm. It seems to be almost a reborn Earth. Seems. Maybe it’s a death trap. We can’t know till we’ve tried. We understood the risk of failure, extinction. Well, with the Altoi at our backs, that won’t happen. United, we can over-pHtpo anything. You see, they want us to live, to Sourish. They want humans among the stars.”

“Why us?” asked Macandal. “I realize—our psyches, our special talents, we and they doing more, becoming more, than either could alone, like a good marriage—but if they’d like human company, why not go on to Earth?”

“Have you forgotten why?” retorted Hanno grimly.

Her eyes widened. Fingers touched lips. “How can they be sure?”

“They aren’t, not absolutely; but from what we’ve described, they can guess with pretty high probability. Earth is going the selfeame way Pegasi did, and the rest that they know about. Ob, we’ll swap messages with it, no doubt. But it’s too far off”—a galactically minuscule four and a third light-centuries—“to make the voyage appear worthwhile. The Alloi would rather help us get established, come really to know us, and finally plan ventures together.”

Tu Shan gazed upward. “Phaeacia,” he breathed. “Like Earth. Not truly, but ... green leaves, rich soil, clear skies.” He closed his eyes against the sun and let its warmth lave his face. “Most nights we will see stars.”

Patulcius shifted about on the bench. “This does put quite a different complexion on matters,” he admitted. As much eagerness as his heavy features ever showed danced across them. “The survival of more than simpty us. Of humanity, true humanity.”

It blazed from Wanderer: “Not just a settlement or nation. A base, a frontier camp. We can be patient, we and the Alloi. We can make the planet ours, raise generations of young, till we’re many and strong. But then we’ll go to space again.”

“Those of you who wish,” said Tu Shan.

Macandal’s tone shook. “To learn and grow. To keep life alive.”

Aliyat spoke through sudden, brief tears. “Yes, take the universe back from the damned machines.”

“Where are they?”

The story is that Enrico Fermi first raised the question in the twentieth century, when scientists first dared wonder publicly about such things. If other thinking beings than us existed—how strange and sad if none did, in the entire vast-ness and diversity of creation—why had we on Earth found no trace or track of them? There we were, on the verge of making our own starward leap. Had nobody gone before us?

Perhaps it was impractical or impossible for flesh and Mood. It certainly was not for machines we knew in principle how to make. They could be our explorers, sending home their findings. Reaching far planets, they could build more like themselves, instilling the same imperative: Discover. (No menace to Me in their proliferation; at any given sun, a few tons of raw material from some barren asteroid or moon would suffice.) Under conservative assumptions, calculation showed that such robots would spread from end to end of the galaxy in about a million years. That was the merest eyeblink of cosmic time. Why, a million years ago our ancestors were approaching full humanness. Had no race anywhere even that much of a head start? All it would take was one.

Still easier to send were signals. We tried. We listened. Silence, until we thought to try in certain new directions; then, enigma.

Guesses teemed. The Others were transmitting, but not by means that we yet knew. They had come here, but in the prehistoric past. They were here, but concealed. They destroyed themselves, as we feared we might, before they could send or go. They had no high-technological civilizations among them; ours was unique. They did not exist; we were indeed alone. ...

Fermi went to his grave, time blew onward through its night, humankind entered upon a new path of evolution. The answer to his question was less found than it was created, by what the children of Earth themselves did; and it proved to be twofold.

Dispatch your robots. They go forth to marvels and magnificences. Every star is a sun, every planet a world, multifarious, astounding, its secrets not exhaustible in less than many decades. When it bears life, they are inexhaustible forever, because life is not only infinite in its variousness, it never remains the same, it is forever changing. When it is intelligent, this rises to a whole new dimensionality, a different order of being.

The farther your emissaries range, the faster grows the realm of the unknown. Double the radius, and you roughly octuple the number of stars to ransack. You also double the time of faring and the time for a signal to cross between ship and home.

Ten or twelve years from departure to arrival, ten years more to receive the first recounting, are reasonable. Fifty years are not unreasonable. But a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years either way? Suns and planets have fallen into classes; they no longer hold revelations. If you know the basic parameters, you can compute their properties. It is pointless to lengthen your list of them.

Life forms are something else. Yet if you desire to study these, you have a sufficiency on worlds already attained. Indeed, you have overwhelmingly much. Your information-processing capabilities, that part of them devoted to this endeavor, grow saturated.

The data include data on sapient beings. Those are rare, but they do occur and are fascinating beyond measure. Nevertheless, when the time lag grows much greater than lifetimes of theirs, and moreover your field scientists are machines, how can you truly come to know them? (Those that have been found are primitive and mortal. Science and high technology result from chains of unlikely historical accidents.) Wiser to hold your attention on those near enough that you can to some limited extent follow what the robots do and observe.

There is no precise limit. There is simply a radius, on the order of a light-century or two, beyond which it is unprofitable to search farther. Having foreseen this, you have never built self-multiplying von Neumann machines.

Exceptions exist. When your instruments detect the radiations that suggest a civilization at some star, you will send your beams and perhaps your robots; but the span until anything can come of that, if anything does, is multimillennial. At the end, will your race still care?

Other exceptions are cosmic, astrophysical—extraordinary stars, clouds where stars are coming to birth, recent supernovae, black holes in peculiar circumstances, the monstrosities at the core of the galaxy, and comparable rarities. You will dispatch your observers that far (thirty thousand light-years from Sol to galactic center) and wait.

All of the few starfaring civilizations will do likewise. Therefore all that have reached these goals will beamcast from them, in hopes of making contact. They will wait.

All have become entities that can wait.

Here is the second half of the solution to the riddle.

It is not sentient organic life that the robots seek to summon. It is other robots.

Machines do not conquer their mother worlds. They gently, gradually absorb their creators into their systems, at the wish of those beings, whose overmatching physical and intellectual superiors they have become. Then in the course of time, more and more they direct their attention from mere life, toward problems and undertakings they find wormy of themselves.

When the original thinking animals five on, as happens occasionally, it is because they too have turned their concerns elsewhere, inward, searching for joys and fulfillments or possibly imaginary enlightenments toward which no machine can aid them, realms quite outside the universe of the stars.

“No,” said Svoboda, “we do wrong if we feel hostile. Postbiotic evolution is nevertheless evolution, reality finding newness in itself.” She colored and laughed. “Oh, but thai sounds pretentious! I only meant that the advanced, independent robots are no threat to us. We’ll continue keeping robots of our own, we have to, but for purposes of our own. Well do what the postbiotics not only don’t care to do any more, they never really could. That’s to deal with life of our kind, the old kind, not by peering and listening, centuries between question and answer, but by being there ourselves, sharing, yes, loving. And so we’ll come to understand what we can’t now imagine.”

“Those of you who choose to be seekers.” Patulcius’ remark fell doubly dry after her torrenting enthusiasm. “Like Tu Shan, I shall cultivate my garden. I daresay most of our descendants will so prefer.”

“No doubt,” Hanno said. “That’s fine. They’ll be our reserve. Peregrine’s right; some will always want more than

“The Phaeacians won’t settle down into rustic innocence” Macandal predicted. “They can’t. If they aren’t to the way of Earth—and that would make their whole meaningless, wouldn’t it?—they’ll have to find some path for themselves. They’ll have to evolve too.”

“And those of us in space will, along our own lines,” Wanderer added. “Not in body, in genes; I aim to be around for a mighty long spell. In our minds, our spirits.”

Yukiko smiled. “The stars and their worlds for our teachers.” Earnestly: “But let us remember what a hard school that will be. Today we count for nothing. Every crew of starfarers the Alloi have any knowledge of—and they are less than a dozen—are like us, leftovers, malcontents, atavisms, outcasts.”

“I know. I don’t admit we count for nothing, though. We are.”

“Yes. And if we are wise, if we can humble ourselves enough to hear what the lowliest of living beings have to tell us, at last we will meet the postbiotics as equals. In a million years? I don’t know. But when we are ready, it will be as you said, we will have become something other than what we are now.”

Hanno nodded. “I wonder if, at the end, we and our allies won’t be more than the equals of the machines.”

His comrades regarded him, a little puzzled. “I’ve been playing with an, idea,” he explained. “It seems to have worked this way on Earth, and what we’ve seen here and heard from the Alloi suggests it may be a general principle. Most steps in evolution haven’t been triumphal advances. No, the failures of the earlier stages made them, the desperate ones—in Yukiko’s words, the atavisms and outcasts.

“Why should a fish doing well in the water struggle onto the land? It was those that couldn’t compete that did it, because they had to go somewhere else or die. And the ancestors of title reptiles were forced out of the amphibians’ swamps, the birds forced into the air, and mammals forced to find niches where the dinosaurs weren’t, and certain apes forced out of the trees, and—and we Phoenicians held only a thin strip of territory, so we took to the sea, and hardly anybody went to America or Australia who was comfortable at home in Europe—

“Well, we’ll see. We’ll see. A million years, you guessed, Yukiko.” He laughed. “Shall we make a date? One million years from this day, we’ll all meet again and remember.”

“First we must survive,” said Patulcius.

“Surviving is what we’re good at,” replied Wanderer.

Macandal sighed. “So far. Let’s not wax overconfident. No guarantees. Never were, never will be. A million years are a lot of days and nights to get through. Can we?”

“We shall try,” said Tu Shan.

“Together,” vowed Svoboda.

“Then we’d better learn,” said Aliyat, “better than before, how to share.”

34

The ships departed, Pytheas and friend. For a while, some months, until speeds grew too high, word went between them, imagery, love; rites celebrated the mysteries of community and communion; for everywhere around them thronged suns.

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

Hanno and Svoboda stood in the darkened command center, looking out. Through clasped hands they felt each other’s nearness and warmth. “Is this why we were born?” she whispered.

“We’ll make it be,” he promised.