Delta Pavonis (26 page)

"Why?" Dierdre asked. "Are you all so scientifically-minded? We find you unbelievably beautiful, but I'm sure you can't think the same of us."

Al'assa stroked her fingertips down Dierdre's cheek. "We know of your concepts of beauty—of symmetry of face and body, grace of movement and melodiousness of voice. We prized these things ourselves once, and built them into our genes. Now we scarcely notice them. But to us, you shine like stars in the void."

"But—"

"I will let M'ats explain some of this to you. He is more your—age, although that is not quite accurate. It is an affinity."

Sieglinde looked up at Al'assa. "You are our creators, aren't you?"

Al'assa blinked, her first sign of surprise. "M'ats told us you were swift, that we would need a speeding-up treatment just to converse with you comfortably, but this-—"

"She isn't just fast," Dierdre said, "she's intuitive. You can't match that with any treatment."

"Intuitive," Al'assa said. "Yes, that is something you have. We, too, once, long ago. Come with me."

They left the dock, entered a corridor walled with what looked like flowers, then a ballroom-sized chamber with walls and floor and ceiling textured subtly in ripples and waves so that the eye was drawn along to differing arrangements in much the way that the ear was beguiled by music. Dierdre was astonished at the degree of sophistication required to come up with something like this and she asked about it.

"An art form we practiced once," Al'assa said. "Now we sometimes use it for decoration. You see it static now. When it moves it is far more amusing."

"Where is the control room?" Sieglinde asked.

"There is none," Al'assa said. "The ship is voice-controlled by specialists in its language."

"You don't use your matter transporters for long-distance travel?" Sieglinde pressed.

"I've said that we will not reveal everything. Many things you must discover for yourselves. We would not cripple you by giving you everything we know."

"I was afraid of that," Sieglinde said. They came to a room shaped like a bubble on the side of the ship. It was transparent and faced the planet beneath.

"We're not rotating," Dierdre observed. "But we're standing on this floor at what I judge to be about point-seven-five gee. How's that?"

"I fear we cannot—" Al'assa started.

"Reveal everything at once, or ever," Dierdre finished. "I think I know the spiel by now."

Al'assa chuckled richly. "So impatient. Suffice it to say that you still have much to learn about the nature of gravity and how it may be manipulated."

"Poor Rostov," Sieglinde said. "He'll be going crazy about now. Back to my question. Don't worry that you'll upset us with this one, because it's been upsetting us for centuries. Long ago, most of us outgrew the religio-mythological explanations of our origin. The scientists have been arguing about it ever since, mainly because of an extremely spotty fossil record. That we were part of Earth's natural environment we no longer question. How we fit into it is a matter of some dispute. When we landed on that planet"—she jabbed a finger downward—"the debate blew up again. It's been raging ever since, gaining fuel each time the other expeditions came across hominids or humans on other planets. Different races, but all seemingly of the same species, or at least a subspecies of the same. Why?"

Al'assa hesitated for a while, then, "I will give you some of the explanation. You may decide how much to inform the others. Yes, we—made you. I will not say 'created'; we are not gods to make something from nothing." She leaned a hand on the sill below the great bubble window and seemed to organize her thoughts.

"We are the
Arumwoi
. It is a very ancient word, not even of the language we speak now. It means 'the First.' We are not from this arm of the galaxy. We originated in another arm, closer to the center. It was an area of stars far more ancient than these near your home star. Our homeworld had been reabsorbed into its parent star long before there was life on your planet. We have been star-rovers for a long, long time, and much of our earliest history has been lost. We do know that we were the first humans.

"In our explorations of this galaxy—and there is much of it, the great bulk, that we never reached—we found life in many places, and all organic life is very similar, easy for us to manipulate. Our history was very slow compared to yours. We must have had many millennia of the Stone Ages, many more of metal ages and mechanical centuries before we developed space flight. We never had your urgency.

"And sheer time wore us down. We grew weary, we lost our creativity, our ambition. But we felt that we should not be the end of human evolution. We did not deceive ourselves that we could create a higher form, but we thought that, by developing variants of ourselves, starting far back in our phylogeny, we might bring about humans more versatile, more capable and imaginative. With you, we succeeded better than we could have hoped. I suppose it was inevitable that you would be other than predicted. We wanted something different, after all."

"It didn't work as well with all your experiments," Dierdre commented, remembering the bombed-out cities of the sterilized planets.

"You developed so fast!" Al'assa said. "We made this great laboratory to experiment with the organic life of the planets we had found suitable for human life. We kept specimens of the various stages of evolution, natural and forced, as controls in case something should fail and we would have to go back to an earlier phase to begin again."

"As you said," Sieglinde commented, "you're used to dealing with time."

"In the end, it was all we could deal with. When we had definite hominids, ones that we could be sure would develop into something resembling us, we seeded the worlds with them. In small numbers, of course, in keeping with the natural workings of evolution."

"And you used your own genes for these experiments?" Sieglinde said.

"Yes, you are our close relatives, despite a period of retroevolution. But we never thought you would develop so fast! When we last looked, you were fully human, but had only recently developed language. You were not living in villages. We had thought that by now, at most you would have rudimentary agriculture. We never expected spacegoing technology while you were still children, socially speaking."

"So," Sieglinde said, "you didn't foresee that we would have the means of planetary suicide while we were still mentally at the level of feuding tribes. It must be a disappointment."

"Oh, no. We wanted something different. We were not trying to recreate ourselves. Your history is violent and tragic, but I think it is wonderful that you have arrived among the stars while you still have this ferocious vitality."

"Already," M'ats added, "you have delved into areas where we never went. We have never developed artificial intelligence as you have, for instance."

"This is going to come as a shock to our more insistent guilt-mongers," Sieglinde said.

"Thus, you can imagine the shock that went through our race when you arrived here. We were prepared to wait another hundred millennia for definite results from our experiments. We were quiescent in—another place when the alarm woke Junior Technician M'ats and he saw this radiant child in our transporter."

To Dierdre, who remembered well how she had looked that day, the description was more than flattering. But by now she knew that
Arumwoi
aesthetics were different from her own.

"We activated this ancient vessel and made our way here. We had means of reaching
Shining In The Void
with little delay, and once activated it was but a short flight here at near-light speed."

"We wouldn't consider that a short flight," Sieglinde said, "but a few years means little to you. I gather there was some reason why you didn't want to arrive by your current means of travel?"

"It would be rather more—spectacular than would be truly suitable for a first contact with you."

"Don't dazzle the natives, eh?" Sieglinde said. "Well, you've done some dazzling already. Could I see the drive units on this vessel?"

"Certainly. They will mean little to you, but I will explain what I may."

"I guess that's as much as I can ask for. Please, lead on." She turned to Dierdre. "Dee, you and Mats get better acquainted for a while."

When they were gone, she was alone in the bubble room with M'ats. He was still holding her close, but she broke away, gently but firmly, and turned to face him.

I still don't get it," she said. "I've never been strong on glamour, even among my own people. With you
Arumwoi
, I feel like an ugly, primitive, filthy, lice-infested ape! You look the way the ancient Greeks pictured their gods, the way Renaissance artists pictured angels. You even sound that way. But you can't keep your hands off me. None of you can keep from touching us. Why?" She was almost in tears, although she couldn't have said why.

"Dierdre, we are old.
Old
! We are so tired and discouraged, and for hundreds of thousands of years you have been our only hope! You are human beings as we once were, only better! You will accomplish a thousand times what we did in a tenth of the time."

He came close to her again and took her by the arms, and she did not draw back. "Can you have any idea how it feels to one of us to stand close to someone like you? You are the embodiment of youth and strength, enthusiasm and joy. Even your terrors and your sorrows seem joyful to us! You are the youth of worlds and being so near you is to bathe in that force. It is too late for us to rejuvenate, but we can enjoy this sensation for a little while. It is as—Al'assa said, to us you are as stars in the void; the great, beautiful stars that for a million years have been the objects of our adoration."

She put her hands against his chest, but not to push him away. It was more to brace herself. "This is all a little much."

He laughed and the sound sent a shiver through her. How, she thought, are we ever going to be content with each other after seeing and hearing these people? She answered herself: We never liked each other all that much anyway.

"A little much! I wish there were some way I could describe how I felt when I saw you in the transporter! Not just your beauty, but the courage it took to do what you did! You and your companions afterward; the unbelievable courage and determination to risk your terribly short lives just to do something no one had ever done before, to learn things unknown, and to do it in defiance of authority."

"But," she protested, "most people thought it was idiotic!"

"Yes, isn't it wonderful? We love even your contradictions and confusions! I had to find you, to make contact. Like you, to be
first
! I flouted thousands of years of accepted custom to do it. I waited until we were within safe transporter range, then when I knew you were alone in the main chamber, I came to meet you."

"Well," she almost whispered, "maybe it isn't too late for you to rejuvenate." She looked at the entrance to the room. "Does that door close? You came across space to find me. By now you know I don't do things halfway." She couldn't tell how he did it, but the door closed like a descending eyelid.

Later, she stood with Sieglinde at one of the broad windows in Avalon's old museum. From here they could see the way the umbilicus connecting the two ships rotated with Avalon's spin, turning at some mysterious, unexplained joint at the
Arumwoi
ship end. With artificial gravity, the
Arumwoi
ship needed no spin. All around them hulked the old asteroid-ship, once the most advanced work of mankind. Now it seemed a clumsy hunk of artificial buildings and drive units. It was entirely appropriate, Dierdre thought, to a race of star-traveling cavemen.

"Where will they go?" she asked.

"Al'assa says they may migrate to another galaxy. Long ago they sent out expeditions to other galaxies and never heard from them again. They feel they can leave the galaxy now that we've turned out successfully. Not any time soon, though. They want to teach us a few things, although they're being cagey about it. Hell, they just want to hang around us. They can't get enough of us."

Dierdre laughed. "You don't know half of it!"

"Don't be vulgar. You know, they just got too old, they lost their enthusiasm and curiosity. In that short tour she gave me she didn't think she was revealing much, but I saw a half-dozen areas in matter transmission alone where they never developed promising technologies. They just let time and momentum take care of most of their studies."

"So, they're just a bunch of old travelers, looking for the fountain of youth?"

"They're beginning to think they've found it. They certainly make me feel young!" She almost sounded girlish.

"Getting the old enthusiasm back, Doc?"

"I told her, when they get to that galaxy they're planning to try for, they'll find we got there ahead of them."

"That's the way I like to hear you talk." She looked at the alien vessel, so incredibly old, so beautiful inside, but so unchanging. "You know, Doc, they're our parents in a way, and I love them, but being beautiful and benevolent isn't enough, to my taste. We may not live as long, but we're going to do lots better than they did."