The races had evolved separately, they experienced the world differently, and thus their minds were unlike. The most fundamental thing they had to work out was a mutual semantics.
A parleur screen displayed three-dimensional hypertext. Changes in any part of it, especially cyclic or to-and-fro changes, added a fourth dimension. Learning to write this would have imposed an intolerable strain on memory, but the nanocomputer rendered what a party entered, within the logico-grammatical rules, into agreed-on symbols. With diligence and patience, one could master these.
From either viewpoint, Cambiante was a restricted language, functioning best when it dealt with scientific and technological matters, poorly or not at all in poetics, faith, or philosophy. However, by now it could generally convey practical statements or questions reasonably well. As users discovered some of the cues in tones, attitudes, movements, even odors, they added to the vocabulary, both written and connotative.
Whatever one person understood another to be saying would scarcely ever be quite identical with the intent. But they improved.
The site was an upland, wind-swept and stony, where turf clung in crannies and the few trees were gnarled dwarfs. Seen from above, the country showed signs of former habitation: roads, levelings, excavation where communities had been, occasional rubble heaps. Yu shivered. “Bleak,” she said.
“I suppose, as the axis of rotation shifted, it got too uncomfortable here to be worth bothering with,” Nansen suggested prosaically.
“Abandonment. A millennial necessity. What do they do when the obliquity becomes extreme?”
“Well, they seem to keep the population at half a billion or less. It will never overcrowd whatever lands are suitable. They can move gradually. We know they plan ahead much further than that.”
“Humans would never be able to. We aren’t … sane enough. Is it really easy for Tahirians?”
The laboratory where the aircar set down was isolated, small, with sparse facilities. Although it and associated buildings were well maintained by robots, everything stood long unused. Such amenities as heat and running water must be restarted. The guests had been told to bring their own sanitary unit and whatever else they would need.
Two who were strangers to them waited outside. With Emil, they hustled the newcomers along, barely letting them unload their baggage in a house before conducting them to the laboratory. “No time for a cup of tea?” asked Yu, only partly in jest.
“Plain to see, they’re in a hurry.” Nansen frowned. “Do they want to make sure they accomplish what they have in mind before anyone else finds out?”
Once inside, the two other Tahirians were straightaway busy at control boards. Emil faced the humans. “(We wish to convey certain information,)” en spelled out. “(At the present stage of communication, it is best done through graphics, using a larger screen than a parleur’s.)”
“But why just here?” Nansen muttered in Spanish. Yu trembled, mainly with eagerness.
Imagery appeared, drawings and numbers, symbolizations meaningful to the watchers.
A sun that exploded, blown-off gas ramming outward to shock against englobing nebulosity—
The remnant dwindling and dwindling, as if downward into nothingness—
Against the background of the stars, a sphere absolutely dark, save for a fiery ring of matter whirling inward—
Close-up of the rim, and the sky behind it eerily distorted—
“A black hole,” Yu breathed. “A supernova greater than the one that made the pulsar. Collapse beyond the neutron stage, in past an event horizon, falling forever.”
The image receded in sight. A map of local star distributions replaced it. A marker ran from a dot marked with the sign for Tahir’s sun, unrolling a distance scale behind it. When it stopped, Nansen read, “About five hundred light-years away. That’s as of today. Obviously it was farther when the eruption happened, or this planet would have suffered badly. But what has it to do with us?”
“Hush,” Yu murmured. “There’s more.”
They peered and puzzled. The characters were mostly unknown to them. “I think that’s the ‘organism’ radical,” Yu said, pointing. “But why are those quantum physics symbols attached?”
Emil trod back in front of them and fingered ens parleur. “(Life)” en declared. “(Intelligence.)”
“¿Qué es?” ripped from Nansen. “No!”
“How?” Yu whispered. “It … seems … impossible. But—look, the big display—something about quantum states … I can’t quite understand it. I don’t think Hanny could, either. Not yet.”
Emil whistled what they had come to recognize as a note of warning. “(Do not reveal this until further notice,)” en said.
Nansen steadied the parleur in his grasp. “(Not to our shipmates? Why?)”
“(It is dangerous.)” Emil paused. “(If you must tell any, be sure they will let it go no further.)”
“Someone doesn’t want us to know,” Nansen said.
Dismay shook Yu’s voice. “Factions, among these people?”
“I’ve been getting strong hints of it. We shall have to be careful,” when we cannot now escape to the stars.
“I can’t believe they would be violent. I won’t believe it.”
“I would rather not, myself. But sometimes there are worse things than violence.”
Emil observed them. “(You are weary and perplexed,)” en said. “(The sun is low. Best you take refreshment, rest, and thought. We will resume tomorrow morning early.)”
“That means a short night’s rest.” Nansen chuckled a bit. “Well, I don’t expect I’d sleep much in any case.”
“Nor I,” Yu agreed. “Not when this is waiting.”
The walk across to their quarters was through a chill wind. They didn’t feel it. Emil left them at the entrance. The dilation closed behind them. They were in a curve-walled, rosy-tinted room, bare except for his outfit, their food and drink, and a glower to warm the rations. She had taken the adjoining chamber. Eyes looked into eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Nansen said. “Our friends must know what they’re doing—whatever it is.”
Yu shook her head. The bobbed blue-black hair swished past the high cheekbones. “No fear. The wonder of it! Something utterly strange, I don’t know what, but something we could never have foreseen if we’d stayed home—Oh, Rico, we haven’t come this whole long way for nothing!”
“Ay, sí.” Upborne together, they embraced. It became a kiss.
He let go and stepped back. “Forgive me,” he said unevenly. “That won’t happen again.”
“I helped it happen.” Her laughter drained away into sobriety. “You are right, it had better not again. We must be careful about more than secrets.”
He smiled. “Agreed. Permit me only to envy Ajit Sundaram a little in my heart, as well as respect him and you.”
“You have a hard time ahead,” she answered. “May it end happily.” She hunkered down at the supply pile. “Come, let’s put this in order and have that cup of tea before we eat.”
The island was beautiful.
There could be no real knowledge of the life on a planet unless that knowledge included the life in its seas. Once this desire had been expressed to them, some Tahirians brought Mokoena and Zeyd there. Robotic boats came and went from a dockside building full of investigative equipment. It was probably a monitoring station rather than a research laboratory. The civilization must have catalogued every species but be concerned with maintaining a healthy ecology.
At the end of a hard day’s study the humans felt ready for some recreation. Walking across a wooded corner of the island, they emerged on a strip of turf, beyond which a beach lay dazzling white under a clear sky and long sunbeams from the west. The air was warm but laden with fresh sea smells. The ocean rolled deeply blue. Although tides were less than Earth’s, at this point the conformation of the bottom made breakers high and thunderous.
Mokoena clapped her hands together. “What a surf!” she
whooped. “I’m going in.”
“Not alone, please,” Zeyd cautioned. “The undertow may be bad.”
“Well, I appoint you my lifeguard,” she laughed.
Her mood captured him. “Why not your partner?”
“Why not indeed?”
For an instant they hesitated, but only an instant. After all, they had stripped before. Clothes fell off. They ran over the sand and into the waves.
The water brawled and surged. When they plunged, it slid sensuously around them, a pulsing whole-body caress. They frisked and frolicked like seals.
Still, they remembered not to get beyond their depth. A comber broke over their heads. They collided, caught at one another, found footing, and sank their toes into shifting grit. The wave rushed on past. Chest deep, Zeyd gazed down into Mokoena’s face. Her lips were parted, her breasts thrust against him as she snatched for breath. He kissed her. She responded.
Letting go, they saw the next breaker coming at them, taller yet, a glassy cliff maned with foam. They turned about, jumped clear of the bottom, swam, caught the onslaught, and rode it in.
As it receded they scrambled to their feet and waded ashore. “Hoo,” Mokoena panted, “that beast tumbled me!”
He looked her over. “It had the right idea,” he said.
She stopped. He moved closer. She lifted her hands and pushed at him, not very hard. “No.” Her tone wavered. “Hanny—”
“She’s away. For two years and more.”
“I won’t go behind her back.”
“We won’t. Mam, Hanny and I were—are—friends. We never owned each other. If we did, she would not have left. She told me again and again, as the time approached—the last night, too—she told me she won’t be jealous and you are her shipsister.”
“I don’t know—when she returns—”
“That will depend on you, Mam. You and no one else.”
She quivered. “Selim, if you mean that—”
He pulled her to him. “A lovely setting, this, for a lovely woman.”
“And a—lovely man …”
They hurried to the soft sward and sank down upon it.
Afterward, happily, she murmured, “I wonder if our friends have us under observation.”
He grinned. “Then they got their demonstration. Do you mind?”
“Not too much, now.”
Before Dayan left, Yu had traded cabins with her so that she might be next to Sundaram’s. He and she no longer slept apart.
They sat in the unit that had been his, among relics and keepsakes they had mingled, sipped wine, and gravely talked about their research. It was among their highest pleasures.
“No,” he said, “I do not think we can properly call this a conservative society, like old China or old India. That is too weak a word. I think it is posthistoric. It has renounced change in favor of a stable order that apparently provides universal peace, plenty, and justice.”
“Or so they tell us, if we understand them rightly,” she replied. “A majestic vision in its way. Like a saint reaching Nirvana, or a stately hymn at the end of a Catholic mass.”
“But how can we explain it to our shipmates? I fear several of them will find it ghastly.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because it may forecast what will happen to our own race.”
She considered. “Would it be tragic, actually? Not an eternity of boredom or anything like that. The riches and beauty of the world, the treasures of the past, aren’t they new to every newborn? A lifetime isn’t long enough to know and savor them all. And there can still be new creations. Ancient, fixed modes, I suppose, but new poems, pictures, stories, music.”
Sundaram smiled ruefully. “I doubt that the likes of Ricardo Nansen or Jean Kilbirnie will agree. For that matter, I doubt that every individual Tahirian is content with things as they are. I have an impression, almost a conviction, that some of them look at the stars with longing.”
She nodded. “That may be one reason the race ended its starfaring. Deliberately, as a policy decision. It carried the danger of bringing in something new and troublesome” She winced. “What effect are we having? Is it for good or ill?”
His smile warmed. “You have an overactive conscience, my dear.”
She smiled back and teased, “Have you none?”
He went serious again. “Oh, I feel my occasional qualms. But I don’t have your—tenderness, beneath the tough competence. I am too detached.”
“Nonsense. You are the kindest man I have ever known”
“And you—” He leaned forward in his chair. They clasped hands.
Less than two shipboard hours after she had gone zero-zero, Envoy arrived at the pulsar.
28.
Year Four.
Nine-tenths of a light-year distant, the sun of Tahir stood lord among the stars. But it was another point of light that vision sought, nearly as bright as Sinus in the skies of Earth. Enhancing every other stellar image, the screen mildened this one, for it would have burned a hole in the retina of a naked eye.
“One millionth Solar luminosity,” Dayan said like a prayer to a pitiless god, “shining from a body ten kilometers in diameter. Therefore nineteen thousand times the intensity; and that’s just in the visible spectrum?”
Her companions could well-nigh hear the thoughts prowling through her. The core of an exploded giant sun, a mass almost half again Sol’s, jammed down by its own gravity till it’s that small, that dense, no longer atoms but sheer neutrons, except that at the center the density may go so high that neutrons themselves fuse into something else, hyperons, about which we know little and I lust to know more. An atmosphere a few centimeters deep—incandescent gaseous iron? What storms go rampant through it, what quakes rack the ultimate hardness beneath, and why, why, why? A spin of hundreds per second, a magnetic field that seizes the inter-stellar matter and whips it outward till it nears the speed of light, kindles a radio beacon with it that detectors can find across the breadth of the galaxy. O might and mystery! Out of the whirlwind, God speaks to Job.
Cleland’s voice trembled. “How close dare we come?”
“The ship will decide,” Dayan answered, her tone flat, her mind still at the star. “Not very, I think. It’s blazing X rays, spitting plasma and neutrinos—lethal.”
“Besides,” Brent put in dryly, “we’re at about two hundred AU now. Another jump in that direction, and we’d certainly fry.”
“But we’re no so far frae the planet we ken, are we?” Kilbirnie cried. “We’ll tak’ our station ’round it, no?” And explore it, said the glance she exchanged with Cleland.
Of the three Tahirians, Colin and Fernando stared as raptly at the object of the quest—and beyond it, into the cold cataract of the Milky Way? Leo stood aside, ens mane held stiff. The powers on Tahir, whoever they were and whatever their power meant, had required that a person whom they would pick come along to observe.
The spaceboat was not intended for humans. There was no way Envoy could have carried it or any of its kind on her expedition. Not only the hull docks but the entire control system would have had to be rebuilt, which would have caused dangerous instabilities elsewhere in the robotic complex that she was. Improvised facilities—for security, sanitation, nourishment, sleep—enabled humans to go as passengers in the boat. Lately. Yu and the Tahirian physicist Esther had jerry-rigged circuits that allowed a skillful human to act as pilot—temporarily, under free-space conditions with plenty of safety margin.
“Hoo-ah!”
Ruszek tickled the board before him. The craft leaped. Nonetheless, weight inside held steady. The moon loomed enormous in sight, a sweep of smooth-fused stone studded with structures, curving sharply to a near horizon. Ruszek cut the drive. Zero gravity felt like an abrupt fall off a cliff. The three aboard had learned to take it as a bird does. The boat swung low around the globe on a hyperbolic hairpin and lined out for the great blue crescent of Tahir.
“That will do,” said Yu from aft. “Let us r
eturn.”
“Járvány,” grumbled Ruszek. “I hoped for more of this.” His tone was genial, though, and a smile bent his mustache toward his brows.
Harnessed beside Yu, Esther asked, “(Did you record the data you need?)” En quivered and fluted; sweet odors wafted from the skin.
Yu nodded. “(I believe so.)”
“What’s the result?” called Ruszek, whose back was to them.
“Excellent,” Yu replied. “I think once I have analyzed these readings, with Esther’s help, I will know how the field drive operates.”
“You don’t? I mean, uh, you told me before, you’re sure it’s a push against the vacuum.”
Yu sighed. “An interaction with the virtual particles of the vacuum,” she corrected. “Energy and momentum are conserved, but, loosely speaking, the reaction is against the mass of the entire universe, and approximately uniform. What I referred to was understanding the exact, not the general, principle.”
“Uniform? Don’t they adjust the field inside a hull? Weight’s the same during any boost.”
“In quantum increments, obviously.” Yu paused. “Compared to this drive, jets are as wasteful as … as burning petroleum, chemical feedstock, for fuel once was on Earth.”
“What I like is the handling qualities. How soon can you and your computer design a motor for us, Wenji?”
“Not at all, I fear, until we’re home. Besides, we couldn’t possibly do so radical a retrofit on Envoy, or even her boats.” Yu’s voice lilted. “However, I think, with Hanny’s help when she gets back, we can devise a unit that will compensate for linear acceleration and keep the vector in the wheels constant.”
“Do you mean, when the ship’s under boost, we won’t have to cram like swine onto those manhater-designed gimbal decks?” Ruszek waved clasped hands above his shining pate. “Huzzah!” he bellowed.
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