Starfarers (54 page)

He could not stay seated beneath that mood; he rose to meet it. “What does this imply?”

“Don’t you see? That death isn’t the end. That … something lives on afterward.”

“I have always believed that.” Wryness: “I am supposed to.”

“Here, scientific proof—what that could mean to … to everybody!”

He kept himself judicious. “Fascinating. I certainly want to know more. But your inference strikes me as a non sequitur. I think the soul, God, the purpose and meaning of existence, will always be matters of faith.”

“We’ll see,” said defiant enthusiasm.

The crew
sat in their common room, in the half-ring of council. Nansen was at the center. Dayan stood before them. At
her side, Mokoena with a parleur translated for the Tahirians who waited at the edge. Stars gleamed through night in the viewscreens, Milky Way, nebulae, sister galaxies.

“What we are learning—and learning to wonder about—is marvelous and magnificent and overwhelming,” Dayan said into the hush. “A hundred years would not teach us everything. A thousand years might not. But, with all respect for the biology and astrophysics and whatever else, this newest finding is too important to wait for a regular report.

“I want to emphasize that it is a finding, neither a possibility nor a speculation but a fact. The Holont appears to have made a special effort to explain it to us. I have gone through the mathematics repeatedly, with computer aid, and verified the theorem. I have a feeling that this is what the Holont has really been working toward—because it has had word from the future about what this can mean to the future:’

She heard the susurrus of human and nonhuman breath.

“The Tahirian physicists were wrong,” she told them. “I don’t say they lied. Doubtless they were quick to believe what they wanted to believe, a reason to end starfaring. It doesn’t matter. The truth is, a zero-zero transition is no threat.

“It has zero probability of upsetting the cosmic equilibrium. Or less than zero. You see, the energy transfer actually makes a bond, like the transfers of virtual particles that create the forces holding atoms together. Yes, the effect is quantum-small. But it is finite, it is real. Every voyage brings the universe that much further from the metastable state, toward true stability that can last forever.”

Mokoena’s fingers flickered. Tahirian manes trembled. From Emil wafted a scent like wind off the sea.

Nansen stood up. His look passed over each of them before he said, quite calmly, “Now we must go home.”

No trace
remained of Terralina. After Tahirians demolished the buildings, fourteen hundred Tahirian years of weather and growth erased whatever was left. They worked likewise on the site itself. Where a stream had run through a meadow surrounded by forest, a river flowed brown and Sluggish across turfland. Trees had become sparse. Their kinds were different, too, low, gnarly, their foliage in darker browns and reds; nor was wildlife the same. Weather hung warm and damp, with frequent wild rainshowers. The planet’s axis was shifting, the polar zones shrinking. Someday they would again march forward.

The humans had scant reason to care. They would only be here a terrestrial month, the span grudgingly granted them—a month of spaciousness, sunlight, wind, romp, rest, not virtual but real, before they embarked for unknown Earth. They erected their temporary shelters and settled in.

It was doubtless as well, though, that the place was altered in all except its isolation. Too many memories could have awakened.

The sky was cloudless when Sundaram and Dayan went for a walk. They moved rather carefully, not entirely reaccustomed to the weight. Heat drew vapor from wet soil, a fog that eddied upward a few centimeters, white above umber, and baked pungencies out of it. Tiny wings glittered by; larger ones cruised overhead. From the river, half a kilometer off, hidden behind reedlike thickets, boomed the call of some animal, over and over.

“Yes,” Sundaram said, “it was enlightening to speak with those linguists.” Segregated though the crew was, occasional scholars visited. Conversation almost had to be in person if
it was to deal with anything but trivia. He smiled rather wistfully. “And good to see dear old Simon again, one last time. Our talk clarified certain points for me. I will have much to think about on the way home.”

“Might you come nearer to an idea of the Holont’s Semantics?” Dayan asked.

“That is beyond me. But our contacts with it and the Tahirians have been richly suggestive as to the basics of our own minds. In the end, this may prove to be the true revolution we bring, insight into ourselves.” He quelled the note of enthusiasm. “Daydreaming. First we must give form to our thoughts so that we can test them.”

“Well, we all have a lot to think about.”

He glanced at her. The clear profile was somber against heaven. “You don’t complain,” he said gently, “but I imagine you feel a dreadful frustration. A glimpse of fundamental new knowledge, and then we left.”

“Why, no,” she replied. “I’ve been sincere. None of us were really sorry to go. What we did learn will keep us busy for the rest of our lives, won’t it? In fact, Wenji and I expect to be working the whole way back.”

“How, if I may ask?”

“We hardly know where to begin, there’s so much. For instance, preliminary designs of field-drive spacecraft suitable for humans. And besides the acceleration compensator, what other applications of the principle are there that the Tahirians never thought of? And newer to us, maybe even more important—I think I’m starting to see how that electron manipulation from a distance that the Holont can do works. Quantum entanglement. … The uses in communication and nucleonics, energy sources. … Transmissions across time. … And more and more, including what you’ve found out about the mind and Mam’s found out about life, possibly life after death. Oh, people will be engaged for centuries to come with what we bring them.”

“To the extent they can be,” Sundaram felt obliged to say. “That may be limited. They will have no black hole to study, no Holont to converse with.”

He was not a physical scientist or technician. Preoccupied with his special explorations, he had not chanced to be present when this subject came up on shipboard, or else had paid no attention. She corrected him. “They will know the phenomena exist, that such things can be made. That should be enough for them to go on.”

“If they care to.”

“Yes. If. We don’t know what their civilization will be like.”

They walked on awhile. The noise of the water beast receded.

“All right,” she said abruptly. “Time I told you why I asked if we could have a private talk.”

“I did not wish to press you.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Kind, tactful—and, mainly, you understand the human soul.”

“Oh, please.”

“I mean in different ways from how Mam does as a physician and psychologist, or any of us do from everyday experience. Your, well, probably yoga is the wrong word, but your spiritual guidance. I remember how you helped Lajos, calmed him down, eased his pain, that nightwatch when we were sealed into the wardroom. I suspect you’ve quietly helped others along the way.”

Sundaram shook his head. “I have no secret Eastern spiritual technology. In fact, it’s a myth.”

“Self-command, perception—there are right ways and wrong ways to try for them, aren’t there? The same as with anything else. You know at least some of the right ways. Now everybody needs your counsel.”

“Why do you say that?”

She fell silent once more. Mists thinned as temperature climbed. The turf squelped less and felt springier.

“We’re a crew, we surviving half dozen,” Dayan answered at length. “Our relations were never easy. They finally got murderous. And that was when we only had to cope with strangeness, loss, exile in space and time. We’re better knit together now. But what when we meet our far-future
kin, when they come at us in ways no nonhuman ever could? How can we keep this hard-won … crewdom of ours? I think we have to, because it’ll be all we really have. But can we?”

Sundaram’s smile was more compassionate than amused. “I cannot very well offer a seminar in brotherhood, can I?”

“No, but you can … lend strength to … individuals as they need it. Just be willing to. They’ll soon know.”

“You have Ricardo Nansen especially in mind, don’t you?” Sundaram prompted softly.

Dayan swallowed. “I don’t believe we can stay together without him.”

“He will not desert us. That isn’t in him.”

“No, but—He’s been so remote,” she quavered. “Polite, dutiful, firm but considerate—and nothing else. Nothing behind his eyes.”

“Oh, there is. He simply does not show it.”

They stopped, as if they had read an agreement in one another’s bodies, and stood face-to-face. “Why not?” she pleaded. “I thought … here, resting wounds healing, he’d come back to us—his spirit would—but as soon as we were established, he went away.
Why?
”

“He told us he wanted a change of scene.”

“It doesn’t make sense. Unless he’s broken inside.”

“You care very much, do you not?”

Dayan stood mute.

Sundaram smiled now as a man would smile at his troubled young daughter. “Put your fears aside, Hanny. He has taken the deepest hurt of any of us. He—” After a few seconds: “He did speak several times with me. I may not reveal what he said, of course. But I can point out the obvious, which you in your own pain seem to have let pass by. Ricardo Nansen is an aristocrat. He does not readily bare his feelings. To come to terms with his grief, he wants a surcease, a time alone. The captain is never alone, always on call. I helped him arrange it with the Tahirians. I may have given him a thought or two to consider. He will return to us, also in spirit.”

Dayan laid fist in hand and looked past her companion, hopeward. Finally she turned her gaze to him and said, “Thank you. I wish I knew better words, but thank you.”

Sundaram bowed. “
Shalom
, Hanny.”

The island
lay solitary, the top of a midoceanic volcano. From its crater the slopes fell rough and bestrewn, hundreds of meters down to surf. Woods blanketed the lower reaches in bronze and amber. Flocks crowded the skies, swimming creatures lanced the waves. Winds blew mild, full of salt and fragrances. Nevertheless the island was uninhabited. A population kept well under the carrying capacity of the planet had no land hunger. Besides, the benign climate would not last, and meanwhile geologists foresaw eruptions. An aircar was a rare sight on these shores.

One rested, a bright bubble, above the black sands of a beach, near a shelter. Nansen and a Tahirian stood outside.

“(I am glad it was you who came to take me off,)” said the man on his parleur.

“(Would you not rather it were Simon or, better, Emil?)” inquired Ivan.

“(We bade our good-byes when we landed from the ship. They were—)” Nansen paused. The breeze ruffled his hair. Beyond the little quadruped who confronted him, sea tumbled blue, indigo, and white. Surf whooshed low, crumbling rather than breaking, with none of the violence he had seen along coasts of Earth.

“(They are friends,)” he said. “(I always wished you, too, could be my friend.)”

Stance, gesture, and sharp, gingery odor did not altogether reject him. “(That is difficult, after what you have done to my people.)”

“(Those others do not see it as harm.)”

“(No, many have not. But the lifetimes since you first arrived here, during which we were away at the black hole, have been less than serene.)”

“(Everything seems peaceful.)”

“(Yes, seemingly. Yet our society is trembling, old customs abandoned, restlessness rife. The very purpose of maintaining stability is in question. This latest flood of new information, new concepts that your return has brought, it will have consequences still less foreseeable, perhaps uncontrollable.)”

“(Is it bad that possibilities open up?)” Nansen argued. “(I envy your race its nearness to the black hole. You can discover more than we today can imagine, thousands of years before we will be able to.)”

“(What cost does progress bear?)” Ivan retorted. “(I have studied what you related of your human history. I witnessed the slaughter, aboard ship.)”

“(Need it happen to you? Cannot you make choices as free as ours?)”

“(I hope so. I realize you did not intend to disturb us. You could not know. It chanced, as the collision of a stray planet with Tahir might chance. The cosmos goes deeper than our minds ever will.)”

Ivan was still for a span. “(I do not hate you,)” en admitted. “(I would even like to be your friend.)”

Hand clasped hand.

They let go. “(But you must not disturb us more,)” Ivan begged. “(Leave us to cope with what you have left us. Depart before you raise more discontent, more questions.)”

“(I suppose we always will, wherever we are,)” Nansen wrote on his parleur as stoically as he would have uttered it.

“(Yes, because your race is mad.)”

“(Maybe. And maybe that is why we voyage.)”

The wind blew, the waves ran.

The Thyrian
nation was loyal to Jensu and indeed provided the Governance with many of its best constables, but clan ties still counted. Thus it came about that soon after he received his commission, Panthos was posted halfway around Earth to North Meric, where he reported directly to the Executive of that continent, his great-uncle. Given the growing unrest there, opportunities for conspicuously useful service and consequent rapid advancement in rank should be frequent.

“If you survive them,” cautioned the old man. “Rats’ nests of tribes, peoples, classes, religions, godknowswhats, scourings of wars, migrations, revolutions, conversions, history—much too much history, much too little of it ours.”

Straight and trim in his new gray uniform, optionary’s bars newly gleaming on his shoulders, Panthos replied, “They won’t dare rebel, any of them, will they, sir?”

“Not yet. Not in my lifetime, maybe not in yours. They hate each other worse than they hate the Coordinator. But they do riot. If we can’t keep that within bounds, it will stir up notions, and
that
will not be unwelcome to certain Jensui magnates— Never mind.”