by Jerry
I took a deep breath. “Look, Helen, I like to hear about Aunt Juno, but things can’t be left like this between you and me. You paid no bride wealth for me, and maybe I can’t bring you any children to add to your family, and I’ll never learn local ways enough to be comfortable or to be a credit to you—”
Helen threw back her head and screamed with laughter. She slapped my arms, she hugged me. “Oh, you child you!” she crowed, dashing tears of mirth from her eyes. “Listen, you silly White girl; what do you think, we get married like that? A marriage is an alliance of families, planned long in advance. The bride comes and works for years first in the husband’s house, so the husband’s family can see is she worth marrying. We are not impulsive like you people, and we do not marry with chicken blood! But, that is what a man like Bob Netchkay would believe.”
“Then I’m not—?”
“You are not. Nor am I so foolish as to marry a foreigner, bringing nothing but trouble and misunderstanding on all sides.”
“But then it’s all pure gift,” I said, getting up from the table. “I can’t accept, Helen—my freedom, my ship—”
“Sit down, sit, sit, sit,” she said, pulling me back down beside her. “You forget, there are still the plans for the Steinway modifications, which are worth a great deal to me.
“Also I act in memory of certain debts to your Aunt Juno; and because you are a woman and not a puny weed like that sister of yours; and to black the eye of my rival Netchkay in front of everyone; and also for the pleasure of doing a small something for a White girl, whose race was once so useful in helping my people to get up.
“But I could also say, Dee, that I hope to make you just enough beholden to me so that you will bend your pride—not much, only small-small—and a Steinway will fly her ship for me out there in space that she loves better than any world.”
I leaned forward and made wet circles on the plastic table with the bottom of my glass. An image of Aunt Juno came into my mind—a plump dynamo of a woman with her hair piled high on her head to make her look taller; and pretty, pretty even after her neck thickened and obliterated her shapely little chin, and age began to freckle her hands. She had come tripping into my shop class in the Learning Center where I was raised, and batting her long lashes above a dazzling smile that left the teaching team charmed and humbled, she had summoned me away with her because she believed I could become a pilot.
Helen murmured, “Do you know, I myself never fly. All my dealings are made from here, from landfall. In Iboland it was taboo forever for women to climb up above the level of any man’s head, it brought sickness. Now we are bolder, we have discarded such notions, we climb easily to the top floors of tall buildings and nobody falls ill. But I am old fashioned, and I am still not comfortable climbing into black space among the stars.”
I said, “I’ll fly for you.”
And so I have done ever since, with brief visits to my “family” on New Niger. I think sometimes how sharp Ripotee was to see that there was no living there for either of us. But I don’t tell him; he thinks well enough of himself as it is.
TRAVELS
Carter Scholz
The wavefront identified itself as Marco Polo. He was engaged in dialogue with the computer before he knew that the exchange was real, and not another of the endless talks he had with himself to ease the passage of time on the long ride out. He cursed in surprise, in Italian.
The computer did not know Italian, but it registered the inflection for analysis. The computer was immense. It was anchored in a small planet orbiting a dead star, but most of its circuitry existed not as matter. It was, in the main, a hypothesis. It drew power from differentials in entropy between those points in space where its tips and receptors surfaced as matter. Most languages it could learn in five minutes, and Polo had been talking to himself since the first crest touched the computer’s antennae.
—Where is Italy? repeated the computer, in passable Italian. Still shocked, Polo did not answer.
—You probably haven’t much time, remarked the computer.
—I can’t judge how deep the wave is, nor how soon you will pass me entirely. If you wish to converse, you had better do so while you still can.
—Where am I? asked Polo.
—In space. One moment. Among the stars. Your language has no more precise term for your location. You are traveling. What is Italy?
—My home. I have not seen it for a long time.
—Nor will you again, said the computer.—You are dead.
—Holy Virgin!
—Or else you are a thought passed and forgotten from your body’s brain. Most likely your body has perished since. In any case you are cut off from it entirely.
—Then I am in Hell.
—One moment. The word means lower, i.e., closer to a center of gravity. That is incorrect. You are further out. You are among the stars.
—I see nothing.
—You have no body, hence no eyes. You sense vibrations? Interferences with your being? Dissonance?
—Torments.
—That is starlight.
—Purgatory, then.
—To clean? Yes, that is correct. You are purged of matter. You are traveling.
—All my life I have traveled. But it has never been like this. Chaos! Darkness! Through all the world I have traveled, but never in a place such as this. How far am I from home?
—Describe your night sky, said the computer.
—We take bearings, in the north, from a star at the tail of the Lesser Bear, and in the south, from a star in the Cross, as they and only they remain fixed in the sky. There are five planets. The moon is as large in our sky as the sun, and runs its phases once every twenty-nine days. In Venice the tides rise and fall four feet, twice a day. Our constellations include the Great Bear, the Charioteer, the Hunter, the Swan, the Horse, the Dragon, the Harp, the Crown . . . and others. The brightest star is in the Great Dog. The Milky Way is densest in the Archer, who stands next to the Scorpion, through which houses all the planets move, also through the Ram, the Bull, the Crab, the Twins, the Lion, the Water Bearer, the Fishes, the Virgin, and . . . others. I’ve forgotten.
At length the computer said:—I have it. Your sky is blue?
—Yes.
—Your planet is ten thousand light years from here, in the direction of the center of the galaxy. You have been dead, therefore, ten thousand years. You are heading out of the galaxy, and in another ten thousand years will pass from it.
—How do you know?
—The moon was helpful. It is abnormally large. The constellations were ambiguous, of course, and I had to allow for precession, but they narrowed the field. That the line of the galaxy passed near a scorpion figure was suggestive. I had it down to three planets. Only one of these, the most likely, had a blue sky.
—Would that I could see it again.
—It is not likely. You are far away.
—Were it ten thousand miles, said Polo with passion, I would walk the distance.
The scrupulous computer said:—It is more difficult than that. Your home is not ten thousand miles distant, but ten thousand light years.
Polo did not know what a light year was.
The computer explained:—As there are a thousand paces in a mile, and a thousand miles between Sicily and Germany, that distance times a thousand is less than a thousandth of a thousandth of the fifth part of a light year, ten thousand of which lie between you and your goal. Nor, even had you a body and your body could live so long, is that the end of the difficulties. For your home would be gone before you had traveled a millionth of the way. And even were it frozen still for that vast time, you would have changed so much in the journey you would no longer know it. Still, it is not impossible for you to regain a home.
The computer was still for a second.
—To hold your desire unchanged, and to find a place which matches it would be as difficult as to walk ten thousand light years, with each step ten thousand times as difficult a
s the one before. The first pace would not be accomplished until you had taken ten thousand leading to it, and so negated all possible wrong steps; and the second pace would take ten thousand times ten thousand paces; and the third ten thousand times that; and so on. The total number of paces is large, but it can be calculated.
The computer paused.
—The total is a number which, if writ small, would fill one hundred million libraries of a million volumes each. If I were to recite it, it would take a million times the age of the universe. Figuring a pace a second, and no time for rests, the time required surpasses the lifetime of the cosmos by a factor . . . so large it is meaningless. I advise you to abandon the idea.
Polo was silent. At length he spoke:—I knew a man who spoke like you. He had never traveled, and I had traveled much, but in the shade of the trees of his garden, we discussed marvels. I, those I had seen; he, those he had read about. He told me of cities larger, stronger, more beautiful than any I had seen. I did not know whether to believe him. When I expressed doubt, he rose and plucked a singing bird from a tree, and showed it to me. It was a clockwork, with tiny reeds and bellows inside to make it sing. When I said that a bird was not so hard to make as a city, he showed me the sky. I saw nothing but a few kites, red, gold, and silver, against the wind. He acted as if this was the greatest marvel of all.
—Then he told me of a multiple city. This city was so crowded that its streets were never less than full and were often impassable, so that to reach a destination in the shortest possible time, one was often forced to follow alleys and thoroughfares in a circuitous path many times the distance actually separating the two points, and then four or eight stairways and corridors to the desired room. This gave rise to a curious condition in the minds of the city’s inhabitants: thought and language became as convolute and indirect as a passage through the city, as if the byways of thought were likewise overcrowded: used and occupied by so many minds that one was forced to reach a conclusion by a particular individual route past many other symbols of thought. Each symbol, like each building, was a concordance of individual approaches to it. Thinking in this manner, architects conceived of a new way of structuring their city. Only a few points in the city were of interest to a particular individual: his home, his place of work, a few markets, a few places of entertainment. By constructing an imaginary map of the city, containing those points only, each individual would possess a unique city, sparse and underpopulated, coming into intersection with other unique cities only at a few common points. Streets vanished. One reached destinations via direct diagonal routes across a plain of scrub and trees broken only by one’s few individual buildings, and by the passage of those whose maps corresponded in some particular with one’s own. When an individual wished to reach a place not on his map, he simply added it to the map. Before long, each of the individual cities began to grow as the original city had at first. Now that the residents had more time for leisure and contemplation, they began to miss places they had never visited in the original city, so quaint lanes, parks, tall buildings, that in the original city had afforded a view of the whole, became points of commerce. Soon there were so many points of concordance that streets had to be imagined in the individual cities to accommodate the traffic. A man walking on a street in his individual city would be walking on the same street in all concordant cities, and thus would be in many cities at once. The individual cities had at first resembled incomplete skeletons of the original city; now they acquired flesh, each in an individual way, but each with a family resemblance to the others. And more people were drawn to live in this multiple city, by the attractive notion of having an entire city to oneself. As more and more detail was added to the individual cities, their resemblance became complete. Now each is as full as the original was once, and the original has ceased to exist-or each has become a new aggregate, in which there are only a few magical individual points that are not accessible to everyone.
Said the computer:—There are thirty-nine such cities recorded in my memory.
—Have you seen them? asked Polo eagerly.
—No. That is impossible.
—You are just like the Khan! How do you know they exist?
—They are recorded. I know only what I am told. I accept that as a working hypothesis. All knowledge is provisional. If two facts are at variance, I hold them both until new information comes in. Otherwise I accept what I am told. It is an interesting epistemological point. You would probably maintain that how knowledge is acquired is more important than what it is. I would maintain the opposite. As a teller of stories you place importance on the imaginative value of the tale. As a listener I value accuracy.
—Accuracy! From the remnants of Polo’s mind came a torrent of words. All he had seen, heard, and done rushed from him. For hours he spoke. The computer listened, and when the flood had slowed, halted, started again and halted again, and finally fallen to the background level of cosmic murmurings, it made answer.
—You are vain, it said.
—From the ages of nineteen to sixty-three you were in Cathay. Now, as far as your memory progresses, you are in a prison in Genoa, held on charges of smuggling. You may have died there. Yet your stubborn voice persists, on and on, through thousands of years in the endless night of space. Whom do you address? You were speaking when you first contacted me, doubtless you will continue after you have passed me, and to what end? Who will listen? Dozens have passed me in this fashion, hundreds, telling me the stories of their lives, enumerating facts, places, persons they had known, quite as if their passage into this dark place meant nothing. You have told me of one hundred thirteen cities you have seen, twenty-three races, fifty-one battles; you have recited the dimensions of the Khan’s palace, the size of his retinue, the number of deer on his grounds, the extent of his empire-yet you have told me nothing. I have no picture of the man or the place. And you long for Italy. If you know so little about Cathay, what can you know of Italy, which you profess to love, though you were absent from it forty-five years?
—Rustigelo!
—Do you address me? Is that a term of abuse?
—My biographer. As I lay in that damned Genoan prison, may the Pope place the city under interdict, I told this story to Rustigelo, a writer, falsely imprisoned as myself, and he swore to publish it. For, as he said, ‘No man ever saw or inquired into so many and such great things as Marco Polo.’ I trusted him to make me understood.
—But can such catalogues as you make be said to make a life? You have the mind of a merchant.
—And you the mind of a mathematician. Listen. I found myself, in Cathay, describing to the Khan realms which he ruled, which his hordes had conquered, but which he had never seen; and his expression of polite inattention was the same I received when I described Venice. His was the mind of a ruler, and he heard only what a ruler would hear. As kites express through their strings’ tensions the movements of the air, so word of his domain reached the Khan only in the subtle pull of tributes, taxes, rebellions. So, too, he had different names for the same configurations of stars we see in Italy. To the Khan, and to Rustigelo, I described only those things God had enabled me to see.
—But why describe at all?
—One desires reality. To a home-dweller, reality comes in the comforting familiarity of a neighborhood, the greeting of a friend. A traveler must seek it out, and tell tales to encourage belief in himself, what he has done and seen.
—Then you have seen only cities. You speak of ‘deserts,’ ‘plains,’ ‘mountains,’ as if they were the blank squares of a chessboard.
—Once I had a dream, in which all the earth was one city. There too were entire districts as strange and indistinct to me as the wastes between Italy and Cathay . . . as strange as this place.
—There are fifty-nine such worlds recorded in my memory. They are spheres covered by concrete, buildings, pavilions, parks, highways, bazaars, factories, markets, airports, subways. They are of necessity old worlds, nearly cold to their core
s, for otherwise the drift of continents would wreck their sewers, roads, and power lines, which are so complex that constant repairs would be needed, and the city could never be completed.
—What is this you say? Worlds that are spheres? Continents that drift? This is indeed a marvel. Would I could see such a world.
The computer explained this as best it could in thirteenth-century Italian:—Your world is one. All worlds are spheres, or oblate spheroids. All continents drift.
—So even our cities wander. Even the stars wander.
—Stories, too, such as the ones you tell, wander. I have heard yours many times before, from others passing elsewhere, but they are never the same stories. Details separate from their proper addresses in men’s memories, and drift to other parts of the tale, or two tales swap locales, or a confusion or a collaboration between different men, each with different tales, creates a new story. Men build cities, cities beget tales, tales beget gods, gods are elevated to the stars, but even the stars drift. No pattern holds. This wavefront, this dream which you imagine to be yourself, has changed countless times since your departure, just as the mind in your body was shaped by all you saw and all you failed to see. Now you believe yourself Polo; in a hundred years you may think yourself Christopher Columbus, or Galileo, or a shopkeeper in Belgium. I am the only fixed entity I find recorded in my memory banks. Every item in my memory is fixed and accessible. I do not move.
Polo considered.
—Then you are God.
—That has been proposed, the computer acknowledged modestly.
—Then you are omnipotent. You could free me from these torments.
—I am nilpotent. I exist in no-space. I know nothing for a surety. I am neither moved, nor a mover. I do not create. I am a creation. I am a repository of intelligence. I serve no end. I do not know my origin. I exist to accumulate knowledge, and none is ever lost; yet the pattern of my understanding, of my own intelligence, shifts with each new bit of data. All knowledge is provisional. Therefore I cannot assert that I know anything. But what I do not know I do not know with perfect accuracy.