Even if you emerged at a machine, you would never find your way back. Consider. Ten globes, taken in their various orders, define 3,628,800 paths. In truth the combinations are many more, since not every path requires passing by every beacon; if you ignore the markers altogether, the number becomes virtually infinite. You would blunder blind until you died, or more probably until you emerged someplace where no machine was.
You must have noted that the configuration of the spheres is not constant, but gradually changes. Doubtless you have guessed that that is to compensate for the changing positions of the stars. Do not worry about it. Simply follow the same order of close passage by each, as you have been instructed. Likewise, the correct order at the far end of this trip of yours will always bring you back from there to here. You will note that it is entirely unlike the course which took you from here to there.
Beware, repeat, beware of deviating from either of those patterns. Send unmanned probes on random paths if you like, but never a live crew, for it could never return.
(The study of a famous philosopher)
SAMUELSON
—I don’t believe any human is equipped to understand the Others. They must have what is infinitely more important than a science and technology superior to ours by perhaps millions of years. I feel convinced that they have superior minds… and, yes, I suppose, superior, nobler souls. I cannot believe they’d exist for such reaches of time, with such powers as are theirs, and not evolve.
Nevertheless, in the case of the T machines, I’ll risk a guess about their motives. Why hasn’t their Voice described any paths to us except the ones between Sol and this single distant star? Why hasn’t it even hinted at what the mathematical relation is between a given path and two given points in space-time, so we can work out how to get from A where we’re at to a B which we’d like to visit? Why, indeed, has the Voice been silent since that first advent of humans?
I think this is part and parcel of their doctrine of non-interference.
Think. They put the Solar System machine opposite Earth, and we didn’t dream it existed till we had developed a substantial capability in space. But the machine in the other system orbits much more handily, in a stable path, sixty degrees ahead of the planet we’ll probably be colonizing, clearly visible to any astronomers there. However, apparently no astronomers, no truly thinking creatures, are native to it: nobody that might be lured by the sight into feverish, unbalanced efforts or a deadly struggle for control.
The Voice said the Others love us. They must; they have given us a whole new world. But they must love all sentient races. I suspect a breed like ours, with its history of war, oppression, rapine, and exploitation, would bring disaster if it burst overnight into the galaxy. I suspect also that we are not unusually bad or short-sighted, that many a species would become an equal menace if it got the chance.
At the same time, the Others seemingly refuse to take us, or anybody, under tutelage. I am sure that, from their viewpoint, they have far better things to do. And from the viewpoint of our well-being, they may feel it would be wrong to domesticate us.
So they leave us our free will, they permit us to use their star gates, but they make no further gifts. We must endure the frustration of seeing Alpha Centauri and Sirius shining still unattainable in our skies, until we have groped our own way out into the cosmos. I hope that they hope the long, cooperative effort that this requires will mature us a little….
(View of a spacecraft completing her path. Suddenly she vanishes. View of the T machine in the Phoebean System. Suddenly the spacecraft appears, about half a million kilometers from the cylinder.
(Shots taken on the original faring. Fernández-Dávila, Tonari, and Napier stare from their cramped cabin. They babble. Two of them offer prayers. Presently they master themselves and look outward with trained eyes. A groundling cannot see constellations in space; the visible stars are too many. An astronaut can. Here, none are familiar. After a while, the men think they can puzzle out a few, changed though the shapes are; and extragalactic objects do not appear different. They reckon roughly that they have gone more than one hundred and less than five hundred light-years northwest of Sol.)
VOICE
—The planet that will interest you most is in the sky hard by the Crab Nebula….
(The view settles on a point of sapphire, infinitely lovely.)
NARRATOR
The world we have since named Demeter—
(Stopped-down view of Phoebus. View of Discoverer’s cabin and three men stunned with glory.)
VOICE
Your ship has not the reserves to go there. You had best return to the Solar System at once. Surely more vessels, outfitted to explore, will come after. You yourselves may be aboard….
(Scenes of the path back through the gate being traced out, not the least like the earlier pattern. Scenes of emergence at the other end, of jubilation, of solemnity, of the long haul home. Scenes of tumult, parades, ceremonies, parties, extravagant predictions, and in between an occasional word of foreboding.)
NARRATOR
—we are at last ready to send our first colonists. Beforehand, we had to spend years of research, learning the most elementary things about Demeter. The Others promised it would be worth our trouble, but not that it would be Eden….
(The home of a famous spaceman)
FERNÁNDEZ-DÁVILA
—The price is high per person we send, and we cannot tell what they might send back that would repay it. On this account, we hear protests, we hear demands that the whole program be dropped. Well, I maintain that the stimulus to space technology it has given, the order-of-magnitude improvement in ships and instruments, has already recouped the entire cost plus a high profit. Then there’s the scientific revolution, especially in biology, that we’ve gotten out of Demeter. An entire independent set of life forms! We need decades, maybe centuries, to examine them further, with their implications for medicine, genetics, agriculture, mariculture, and who can foresee what else? That requires a permanent settlement.
Beyond this, in the crassest economic terms, I claim that within a generation, humans on Demeter will be returning Earth’s investment to Earth a thousand times over. Remember what America meant to Europe. Remember what Luna and the satellites mean to us today.
Far beyond this, think of the imponderables and unpredictables: challenge, opportunity, enlightenment, freedom….
The beginning of our growth toward the Others….
Joelle found that a sequel had been added. She thought it was equally honest, but the honesty was that of a later generation.
It went into Demetrian history. No more than a few thousand individuals per year could be boosted to the gate and landed on the planet. Conveyance capacity did expand as the colony started to yield dividends—but slowly, because of conflicting claims on that wealth. Emigrants went under national auspices, according to an elaborate quota setup. However, through bribery or lawful agreement, many traveled under flags different from their own.
The reasons for going were as various as the people who went. Ambition, adventure, Utopian visions were among them. But certain governments subsidized the departure of dissident citizens, and pressured them to accept; certain ones aimed to found outposts of power for themselves; certain more had crazier motives, as did assorted unofficial organizations and individuals.
Initially, everybody must live in or near Eopolis, and close cooperation was a requirement of survival. A notion that the Others might be somewhere around, watching, reinforced solidarity. This faded with time, and meanwhile population and the economy grew. Likewise did knowledge. People learned how to live independently of the city. The countryside became a patchwork of ethnic clusters and social contracts.
At last a Demetrian legislature was a perceived necessity. It remained subordinate to the Union, represented by the governor general, and its authority was further limited by the fact that most communities ran most of their affairs without reference to it.
El
sewhere, time had also been riding. What precarious order had prevailed on Earth had broken down, and the Troubles begun. No few rhetoricians claimed that the fact of the Others brought this on; it was too disturbing, too provocative of heresy; there were things man was never meant to know. In Joelle’s opinion—derived in large part from conversations with Dan Brodersen, who was thoroughly opinionated—that was nonsense. If anything, the miracle was that the equilibrium had lasted, seesawing, until then; and the fact of the Others gave enough pause for reflection that lunacy did not lay waste the entire globe. Be this as it may, indisputable was that, though millions died and whole nations went under, the world survived. Civilization survived, in more areas than not. Space endeavors survived; no important hiatus occurred beyond Earth, whether in industry, exploration, or the settlement of Demeter.
One ongoing effort was reckoned more important than even the dispatching of unmanned probes toward neighbor stars. It was the sending of such craft through the gates, along arbitrary paths, programmed to return from wherever they went by taking equally arbitrary paths. None did.
Slowly, mankind appeared to settle down. In Lima they signed the Covenant.
(The office of a famous astrophysicist, still alive.)
ROSSET
—the theory we’ve been developing says that a T machine has a finite range. We estimate it as five hundred light-years in space, perhaps more, perhaps less. The point is that if you want to go across a greater span than that, you must go through an intermediate machine, which acts as a relay.
Now we’ve had no luck thus far with our probes. But let us keep it up long enough, and sheer statistics guarantees that eventually one will find its way back to us, with a record of the routes that it took. Let this happen a number of times, and we’ll at least have the information we need to reach that many stars. We may also begin to get a glimmering of the basic principles, of how to plot a course for ourselves.
This will be especially true if we encounter another race that is likewise probing. We can compare notes….
The presentation ended at that point, twenty-odd years in the past. Joelle wondered how the tape had gotten here. Maybe a fussy curator decreed that, if the San Geronimo Wheel was to be a monument, historical references in its data bank should be kept current.
For a minute she imagined another update, starting four years back in the time of Sol or Phoebus, twelve years back in her own life.
(View from the watchship at the Phoebean machine, of an unknown craft suddenly arriving. Long, blunt-nosed, serrated, surrounded by a blue haze, she is obviously not human-built. She makes no response to signals, but at high accelerations traces out a path among the markers which officers aboard the watchship closely note, until she disappears.
(Scenes of public furor and of secret debate after the news has broken. Officialdom has come to despair of the cost effectiveness of robot probes and sent none for quite some time. The decision is reached not to send any now, but, instead, a manned vessel, along that path. Volunteers for the crew will not be lacking.
(Emissary goes through the unknown gate and vanishes.
(Astoundingly soon. Emissary returns.
(Interview with a famous holothete, who explains what she has learned from the Betans. They have been using this transport engine, which they discovered by sheer cut-and-try, for the past three centuries—but infrequently, as a relay to or from a part of the galaxy which they seldom have occasion to visit. No planet in the system attracts them as a colony site, and as for scientific research, they already have more going than they can handle. Hastily homebound, accustomed to employing neutrinos rather than radio or lasers for communication in space, the crew of this particular craft did not notice that newcomers were present.
(This sequence differs from previous ones in that the famous holothete is not addressing the whole human world, but those few men who hold her captive.)
“Well,” Joelle asked, “do you understand better?”
“No,” Fidelio confessed.
“Nor I,” Joelle said.
IX
THE WORDS Lis spoke made Brodersen glance around him. The sole public phone in Novy Mir was on a wall of its tavern. However, nobody appeared interested. Sunlight entered through the windows and an open door, along with odors of soil and growth, to set an ikon aglow and brighten the whole dim little room. A pair of oldsters sipped tea and played chess. A younger man sat near the samovar, though he drank vodka, and talked idly with the landlord. Their eyes did keep drifting elsewhere—but toward Caitlín, who occupied a table by herself and scowled at a glass of what these Russians imagined to be beer. Anyhow, few people hereabouts know English, Brodersen recalled. Maybe none.
“Okay.” He turned back to the screen. “How’s that again, sweetheart?”
For an instant, seeing the image of her face and the signs of sleeplessness on it, he felt how sundered they were. The physical distance was trivial. But he dared not come to her, nor she to him, that they might touch. They could not even call other directly. From here his voice went to the cabin on Lake Artemis, where it was scrambled and passed on to their house, where Lis’ instrument strained out the pre-recorded conversation between “Abner Croft” and her husband—which ought to help convince Hancock’s linetappers that he was home—and reconstructed his message. Her answer must retrace the same long route.
“I said, only five of the crew agreed to go.” Lis named them. “The rest promised to keep silence, and I believe they will, but, well, the way Ram Das Gupta put it was, he has a family to think about, and this venture isn’t just desperate, it could become lawless.”
“Damn and double damn!” Brodersen snarled. “They were all ready enough to go through the gate, to wherever Emissary did, if we could get clearance and the guidepath data with God knows what at the far side, and He not telling.”
“That’s not the same. I, I can’t help sympathizing. The Union does mean so much. Defying it is a kind of blasphemy.”
“The cabal are who’re defying it, subverting it.”
“You may be wrong, darling. You may be. And whether or not you are, if you try this thing and fail—” She strove to hold pain out of her speech and features. “I’ll always be proud, you know that, but maybe I won’t be able to convince Barbara and Mike that their dad did not die a criminal.”
Brodersen’s fist slammed the wall. Those in the room gave him a startled glance. He took a deep breath and felt his throat loosen a bit.
“We went through this before, the other night,” he said. “I tell you again, I do not aim to get reckless.” He constructed a grin. “Would I have lasted to date if I were a bold type?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She blinked hard. “I can’t help being afraid for you. If I could come along, oh, for that I’d give whatever years of my life I may have to live without you.”
Overwhelmed, he could mumble nothing but, “Aw, shucks, honey.”
Showing merely her head, the screen nonetheless told him how she straightened. “If I back you up from here, that is my way of going along,” she said. “Do your job, Elisabet Leino, and do it right!”
“Say, look, I never meant—”
“Let’s stick to business.” She spoke briskly. “Can you get by with those five crewmen?”
He wrestled himself down into her kind of calm. “As far as conning Chinook or Williwaw, sure, no problem. Besides, remember, the first thing I figure to do is contact the Señor. He may well be able to take over completely from there. Everything may turn out downright disappointingly safe and easy.”
“In which case, after you come back, we’ll raise some private hell.”
“Sure.” The smile flew between them, and away. “All right, we’ve got a skeleton crew standing by. What about leave to go?”
“I’m working on that.”
Brodersen frowned. “Um-m-m. How long d’you reckon it’ll take? Hancock’s pretty soon bound to suspect I’ve furloughed myself.”
“I’m doing not
hing to remind her of us. Instead, I’ve gotten hold of Barry Two Eagles.” As the Astronautical Control Board’s commissioner for the Phoebean System, he held authority over space traffic. “Confidential-like, you understand. We had dinner yesterday evening, tête-á-tête, at the Apollo House. He’s got hot pants for me, you know You didn’t?” Lis laughed. “You’re nowhere near as depraved as you claim to be, Dan, dearest.”
“Um, yeah, he’s a good fellow,” Brodersen said with a reluctance that surprised him.
“True. I like him, and do not like using him, because he’ll get no satisfaction, though he doesn’t know that yet. Anyhow, he’ll do nothing illegal, of course, but he’ll be within his rights to clear Chinook for Sol without telling the governor. Especially since he doesn’t know you’re supposed to be under arrest. I explained you’re busy, but you’ve heard how Aventureros badly wants to charter your ship and asked me to handle the matter. To him it looks like a typical Brodersen-Leino snap decision.
“I explained furthermore that Aurie Hancock would veto it if she knew beforehand, because she and her husband have stock in a rival corporation—oh, you’d have enjoyed the yarn I spun. He was shocked, denied she’d be that venal, but I prattled him into agreeing to keep silence, and then offered him a bribe. He’s thinking it over.”
“Huh? Barry don’t bribe.”
“Not exactly. But when I remarked that if this deal went through, we’d be in a position to make a substantial donation to research on brain tissue cloning—” She saw the man wince, and did herself. Two Eagles had ordered a doctor to switch off the machine that maintained what was left of his son after a skull-shattering accident. “Dan, we will. Regardless.”
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