The Shoulders of Giants

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Ling and I consulted with facial expressions, then agreed. “Sure,” said Ling. “We'll be waiting.”

  “Not for long,” said Bokket, and the speaker went dead.

  * * * *

  Bokket himself came to collect us. His spherical ship was tiny compared with ours, but it seemed to have about the same amount of habitable interior space; would the ignominies ever cease? Docking adapters had changed a lot in a thousand years, and he wasn't able to get an airtight seal, so we had to transfer over to his ship in space suits. Once aboard, I was pleased to see we were still floating freely; it would have been too much if they'd had artificial gravity.

  Bokket seemed a nice fellow—about my age, early thirties. Of course, maybe people looked youthful forever now; who knew how old he might actually be? I couldn't really identify his ethnicity, either; he seemed to be rather a blend of traits. But he certainly was taken with Ling—his eyes popped out when she took off her helmet, revealing her heart-shaped face and long, black hair.

  “Hello,” he said, smiling broadly.

  Ling smiled back. “Hello. I'm Ling Woo, and this is Toby MacGregor, my co-captain.”

  “Greetings,” I said, sticking out my hand.

  Bokket looked at it, clearly not knowing precisely what to do. He extended his hand in a mirroring of my gesture, but didn't touch me. I closed the gap and clasped his hand. He seemed surprised, but pleased.

  “We'll take you back to the station first,” he said. “Forgive us, but, well—you can't go down to the planet's surface yet; you'll have to be quarantined. We've eliminated a lot of diseases, of course, since your time, and so we don't vaccinate for them anymore. I'm willing to take the risk, but...”

  I nodded. “That's fine.”

  He tipped his head slightly, as if he were preoccupied for a moment, then: “I've told the ship to take us back to Derluntin station. It's in a polar orbit, about 200 kilometers above Soror; you'll get some beautiful views of the planet, anyway.” He was grinning from ear to ear. “It's wonderful to meet you people,” he said. “Like a page out of history.”

  * * * *

  “If you knew about us,” I asked, after we'd settled in for the journey to the station, “why didn't you pick us up earlier?”

  Bokket cleared his throat. “We didn't know about you.”

  “But you called us by name: Pioneer Spirit.”

  “Well, it is painted in letters three meters high across your hull. Our asteroid-watch system detected you. A lot of information from your time has been lost—I guess there was a lot of political upheaval then, no?—but we knew Earth had experimented with sleeper ships in the twenty-first century.”

  We were getting close to the space station; it was a giant ring, spinning to simulate gravity. It might have taken us over a thousand years to do it, but humanity was finally building space stations the way God had always intended them to be.

  And floating next to the space station was a beautiful spaceship, with a spindle-shaped silver hull and two sets of mutually perpendicular emerald-green delta wings. “It's gorgeous,” I said.

  Bokket nodded.

  “How does it land, though? Tail-down?”

  “It doesn't land; it's a starship.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We use shuttles to go between it and the ground.”

  “But if it can't land,” asked Ling, “why is it streamlined? Just for esthetics?”

  Bokket laughed, but it was a polite laugh. “It's streamlined because it needs to be. There's substantial length-contraction when flying at just below the speed of light; that means that the interstellar medium seems much denser. Although there's only one baryon per cubic centimeter, they form what seems to be an appreciable atmosphere if you're going fast enough.”

  “And your ships are that fast?” asked Ling.

  Bokket smiled. “Yes. They're that fast.”

  Ling shook her head. “We were crazy,” she said. “Crazy to undertake our journey.” She looked briefly at Bokket, but couldn't meet his eyes. She turned her gaze down toward the floor. “You must think we're incredibly foolish.”

  Bokket's eyes widened. He seemed at a loss for what to say. He looked at me, spreading his arms, as if appealing to me for support. But I just exhaled, letting air—and disappointment—vent from my body.

  “You're wrong,” said Bokket, at last. “You couldn't be more wrong. We honor you.” He paused, waiting for Ling to look up again. She did, her eyebrows lifted questioningly. “If we have come farther than you,” said Bokket, “or have gone faster than you, it's because we had your work to build on. Humans are here now because it's easy for us to be here, because you and others blazed the trails.” He looked at me, then at Ling. “If we see farther,” he said, “it's because we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

  * * * *

  Later that day, Ling, Bokket, and I were walking along the gently curving floor of Derluntin station. We were confined to a limited part of one section; they'd let us down to the planet's surface in another ten days, Bokket had said.

  “There's nothing for us here,” said Ling, hands in her pockets. “We're freaks, anachronisms. Like somebody from the T'ang Dynasty showing up in our world.”

  “Soror is wealthy,” said Bokket. “We can certainly support you and your passengers.”

  “They are not passengers,” I snapped. “They are colonists. They are explorers.”

  Bokket nodded. “I'm sorry. You're right, of course. But look—we really are delighted that you're here. I've been keeping the media away; the quarantine lets me do that. But they will go absolutely dingo when you come down to the planet. It's like having Neil Armstrong or Tamiko Hiroshige show up at your door.”

  “Tamiko who?” asked Ling.

  “Sorry. After your time. She was the first person to disembark at Alpha Centauri.”

  “The first,” I repeated; I guess I wasn't doing a good job of hiding my bitterness. “That's the honor—that's the achievement. Being the first. Nobody remembers the name of the second person on the moon.”

  “Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.,” said Bokket. “Known as ‘Buzz.'”

  “Fine, okay,” I said. “You remember, but most people don't.”

  “I didn't remember it; I accessed it.” He tapped his temple. “Direct link to the planetary web; everybody has one.”

  Ling exhaled; the gulf was vast. “Regardless,” she said, “we are not pioneers; we're just also-rans. We may have set out before you did, but you got here before us.”

  “Well, my ancestors did,” said Bokket. “I'm sixth-generation Sororian.”

  “Sixth generation?” I said. “How long has the colony been here?”

  “We're not a colony anymore; we're an independent world. But the ship that got here first left Earth in 2107. Of course, my ancestors didn't immigrate until much later.”

  “Twenty-one-oh-seven,” I repeated. That was only fifty-six years after the launch of the Pioneer Spirit. I'd been thirty-one when our ship had started its journey; if I'd stayed behind, I might very well have lived to see the real pioneers depart. What had we been thinking, leaving Earth? Had we been running, escaping, getting out, fleeing before the bombs fell? Were we pioneers, or cowards?

  No. No, those were crazy thoughts. We'd left for the same reason that Homo sapiens had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. It was what we did as a species. It was why we'd triumphed, and the Neandertals had failed. We needed to see what was on the other side, what was over the next hill, what was orbiting other stars. It was what had given us dominion over the home planet; it was what was going to make us kings of infinite space.

  I turned to Ling. “We can't stay here,” I said.

  She seemed to mull this over for a bit, then nodded. She looked at Bokket. “We don't want parades,” she said. “We don't want statues.” She lifted her eyebrows, as if acknowledging the magnitude of what she was asking for. “We want a new ship, a faster ship.” She looked at me, and I bobbed my head in agreement. She pointed
out the window. “A streamlined ship.”

  “What would you do with it?” asked Bokket. “Where would you go?”

  She glanced at me, then looked back at Bokket. “Andromeda.”

  “Andromeda? You mean the Andromeda galaxy? But that's—” a fractional pause, no doubt while his web link provided the data “—2.2 million light-years away.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But ... but it would take over two million years to get there.”

  “Only from Earth's—excuse me, from Soror's—point of view,” said Ling. “We could do it in less subjective time than we've already been traveling, and, of course, we'd spend all that time in cryogenic freeze.”

  “None of our ships have cryogenic chambers,” Bokket said. “There's no need for them.”

  “We could transfer the chambers from the Pioneer Spirit.”

  Bokket shook his head. “It would be a one-way trip; you'd never come back.”

  “That's not true,” I said. “Unlike most galaxies, Andromeda is actually moving toward the Milky Way, not away from it. Eventually, the two galaxies will merge, bringing us home.”

  “That's billions of years in the future.”

  “Thinking small hasn't done us any good so far,” said Ling.

  Bokket frowned. “I said before that we can afford to support you and your shipmates here on Soror, and that's true. But starships are expensive. We can't just give you one.”

  “It's got to be cheaper than supporting all of us.”

  “No, it's not.”

  “You said you honored us. You said you stand on our shoulders. If that's true, then repay the favor. Give us an opportunity to stand on your shoulders. Let us have a new ship.”

  Bokket sighed; it was clear he felt we really didn't understand how difficult Ling's request would be to fulfill. “I'll do what I can,” he said.

  * * * *

  Ling and I spent that evening talking, while blue-and-green Soror spun majestically beneath us. It was our job to jointly make the right decision, not just for ourselves but for the four dozen other members of the Pioneer Spirit's complement that had entrusted their fate to us. Would they have wanted to be revived here?

  No. No, of course not. They'd left Earth to found a colony; there was no reason to think they would have changed their minds, whatever they might be dreaming. Nobody had an emotional attachment to the idea of Tau Ceti; it just had seemed a logical target star.

  “We could ask for passage back to Earth,” I said.

  “You don't want that,” said Ling. “And neither, I'm sure, would any of the others.”

  “No, you're right,” I said. “They'd want us to go on.”

  Ling nodded. “I think so.”

  “Andromeda?” I said, smiling. “Where did that come from?”

  She shrugged. “First thing that popped into my head.”

  “Andromeda,” I repeated, tasting the word some more. I remembered how thrilled I was, at sixteen, out in the California desert, to see that little oval smudge below Cassiopeia for the first time. Another galaxy, another island universe—and half again as big as our own. “Why not?” I fell silent but, after a while, said, “Bokket seems to like you.”

  Ling smiled. “I like him.”

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “What?” She sounded surprised.

  “Go for it, if you like him. I may have to be alone until Helena is revived at our final destination, but you don't have to be. Even if they do give us a new ship, it'll surely be a few weeks before they can transfer the cryochambers.”

  Ling rolled her eyes. "Men," she said, but I knew the idea appealed to her.

  * * * *

  Bokket was right: the Sororian media seemed quite enamored with Ling and me, and not just because of our exotic appearance—my white skin and blue eyes; her dark skin and epicanthic folds; our two strange accents, both so different from the way people of the thirty-third century spoke. They also seemed to be fascinated by, well, by the pioneer spirit.

  When the quarantine was over, we did go down to the planet. The temperature was perhaps a little cooler than I'd have liked, and the air a bit moister—but humans adapt, of course. The architecture in Soror's capital city of Pax was surprisingly ornate, with lots of domed roofs and intricate carvings. The term “capital city” was an anachronism, though; government was completely decentralized, with all major decisions done by plebiscite—including the decision about whether or not to give us another ship.

  Bokket, Ling, and I were in the central square of Pax, along with Kari Deetal, Soror's president, waiting for the results of the vote to be announced. Media representatives from all over the Tau Ceti system were present, as well as one from Earth, whose stories were always read 11.9 years after he filed them. Also on hand were perhaps a thousand spectators.

  “My friends,” said Deetal, to the crowd, spreading her arms, “you have all voted, and now let us share in the results.” She tipped her head slightly, and a moment later people in the crowd started clapping and cheering.

  Ling and I turned to Bokket, who was beaming. “What is it?” said Ling. “What decision did they make?”

  Bokket looked surprised. “Oh, sorry. I forgot you don't have web implants. You're going to get your ship.”

  Ling closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. My heart was pounding.

  President Deetal gestured toward us. “Dr. MacGregor, Dr. Woo—would you say a few words?”

  We glanced at each other then stood up. “Thank you,” I said looking out at everyone.

  Ling nodded in agreement. “Thank you very much.”

  A reporter called out a question. “What are you going to call your new ship?”

  Ling frowned; I pursed my lips. And then I said, “What else? The Pioneer Spirit II.”

  The crowd erupted again.

  * * * *

  Finally, the fateful day came. Our official boarding of our new starship—the one that would be covered by all the media—wouldn't happen for another four hours, but Ling and I were nonetheless heading toward the airlock that joined the ship to the station's outer rim. She wanted to look things over once more, and I wanted to spend a little time just sitting next to Helena's cryochamber, communing with her.

  And, as we walked, Bokket came running along the curving floor toward us.

  “Ling,” he said, catching his breath. “Toby.”

  I nodded a greeting. Ling looked slightly uncomfortable; she and Bokket had grown close during the last few weeks, but they'd also had their time alone last night to say their goodbyes. I don't think she'd expected to see him again before we left.

  “I'm sorry to bother you two,” he said. “I know you're both busy, but...” He seemed quite nervous.

  “Yes?” I said.

  He looked at me, then at Ling. “Do you have room for another passenger?”

  Ling smiled. “We don't have passengers. We're colonists.”

  “Sorry,” said Bokket, smiling back at her. “Do you have room for another colonist?”

  “Well, there are four spare cryochambers, but...” She looked at me.

  “Why not?” I said, shrugging.

  “It's going to be hard work, you know,” said Ling, turning back to Bokket. “Wherever we end up, it's going to be rough.”

  Bokket nodded. “I know. And I want to be part of it.”

  Ling knew she didn't have to be coy around me. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “But—but why?”

  Bokket reached out tentatively, and found Ling's hand. He squeezed it gently, and she squeezed back. “You're one reason,” he said.

  “Got a thing for older women, eh?” said Ling. I smiled at that.

  Bokket laughed. “I guess.”

  “You said I was one reason,” said Ling.

  He nodded. “The other reason is—well, it's this: I don't want to stand on the shoulders of giants.” He paused, then lifted his own shoulders a little, as if acknowledging that he was giving voice to the sort of thought
rarely spoken aloud. “I want to be a giant.”

  They continued to hold hands as we walked down the space station's long corridor, heading toward the sleek and graceful ship that would take us to our new home.

  * * *

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