The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  She turned her head more than her body toward Mswati behind her. His beltflash cast a pool of undiffused light at his feet. Through a well-nigh invisible helmet it dazzled her, made him a shadow against the starlit gray of the mountainside. “Come here,” she ordered. “Carefully, carefully. Take hold of my staff.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. Though she hadn’t been leading the climb, she was the team captain. The expedition was her idea. Moreover, she was a Survivor. The others were in their twenties or thirties. Beneath all the informality and fellowship, they bore a certain awe of her.

  “Stand by,” she said when he reached her. “I’m going ahead to look. If more crumbles, I’ll try to spring back, and may well fall off the ledge. Be prepared to brake me and haul me up.”

  “No, I will go,” he protested. She dismissed that with a chopping gesture and set off on hands and knees.

  It was a short crawl, but time stretched while she felt her way forward. On her right a cliff went nearly sheer into a nightful abyss. Flexible as skin, tough as armor, her space-suit wouldn’t protect her against such a fall. Vision searched and probed. Sensors in the gloves told her more through her hands than they could have learned naked. At the back of her mind, it annoyed that she should be aware of sweat-smells and dry mouth. While the suit recycled air and water, at the moment she was overloading its thermostat and capacity for breaking down wastes.

  The suface held. The ledge continued beyond a three-meter gap. She made out pockmarks near the break in it. So, she thought—she must not agonize over Tersten, not yet—once in the past a shotgun meteoroid shower had struck here. Probably radiation spalling then weakened the stone further, turning that section into an unforeseeable trap.

  Well, everybody had said this undertaking was crazy. The first lunar circumambulation? To go clear around the moon on foot? Why? You’ll endure toil and hardship and danger, for what? You won’t carry out any observations a robot can’t do better. You won’t gam anything but a fleeting notoriety, largely for your foolishness. Nobody will ever repeat the stunt. There are gaudier thrills to be had in a sensorium, higher achievements among the computers.

  “Because it is real,” was the best retort she found.

  She came to the edge and put her head over. On the horizon a sliver of rising sun shone above a crater. It turned desolation into a jumble of light and dark. Her helmet saved her eyesight by immediately stopping the glare down to a dull gold. Elsewhere it stayed clear. Her heart thuttered. Tersten dangled beneath her, limp. She loudened radio reception and heard snoring breath.

  “He’s unconscious,” she reported to Mswati. Examining: “I see what the trouble is. His line caught in a crack on this verge. Impact jammed it in tight.” She rose to her knees and tugged. “I can’t free it. Come.”

  The young man joined her. She rose. “We don’t know how he’s injured,” she said. “We must be gentle. Secure the end of my line and lower me over the side. I’ll clasp him and you haul us both in, me on the bottom to absorb any shocks and scrapes.”

  That went well. Both were strong, and, complete with spacesuit and backpack full of intricate chemistries, a person weighed only some twenty kilos. While he was in her arms Tersten opened his eyes and moaned.

  They laid him out on the ledge. Waiting till he could speak, Svoboda gazed west. The heights dropped down toward a level darkness that was Mare Crisium. Earth hung low, daylit part marbled white and blue, unutterably lovely. Memories of what it had once been struck like a knife. Damnation, why did that have to be the one solitary planet fit for humans?

  Oh, the lunar cities and the inhabited satellites were pleasant, and unique diversions were available there. She was more at home in them than on Earth, actually—or, rather, was less an exile. Their people, such as these her comrades, sometimes thought and felt much as people used to think and feel. Though that too was changing. On which account you scarcely ever heard talk about terraforming Mars and Venus any longer. Now when it could be done, hardly anybody was interested.

  Well, she and her seven kin had always known change. Merchant princes and brawling warriors were strangers to petty bourgeoisie and subservient peasants under the Tsars, who in turn were foreign to twentieth-century engineers and cosmonauts... Yet they had all shared most of what they were with each other, and with her. How many still did?

  Tersten brought her from her memories when he gasped, “I’m awake” and struggled to sit up. She knelt, urged caution, helped and supported him. “Water,” he said. The suit swung a tube to his mouth and he drank greedily. “A-a-ah, good.”

  Concern furrowed Mswati’s chocolate countenance. “How are you?” he asked. “What happened?”

  “How should I know?” Clarity and a little vigor returned to Tersten’s voice as he talked. “Sore in the belly, sharp pains in my lower left chest, especially when I bend or take a deep breath. Earache, also.”

  “Sounds like a cracked or broken rib, maybe two,” Svoboda said. Relief overwhelmed her. He could have been killed, suffered such brain damage that revivification would have been pointless. “My guess is that a falling boulder hit you with more force than your suit could withstand. Hm, yes, see.” Her finger traced the semblance of a scar. The fabric had been ripped open, and promptly closed itself again. Within an hour it would be completely healed. “Everything: conspired against us, didn’t it? We’re not going to scale this mountain. No matter. It was hardly more than a whim of ours. Let’s get you back down to camp.”

  Tersten insisted he could walk, and managed a gait halfway between a step and a shuffle. “We’ll call for a vehicle to fetch you,” Mswati said. As if to confirm, a relay satellite flitted across the constellations. “The rest of us can finish. It will be easier going from here than it was on farside.”

  Tersten bridled. “No, you don’t! I’ll not be cheated out of this.”

  Svoboda smiled. “Have no worries,” she reassured. “I’m sure you’ll just need a knitpatch or two injected, and they can return you to us in fifty hours or so. We’ll wait where we are. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind slacking off that long.” An inner glow: My kind of human is not altogether extinct.

  Bleakness: How many years can you remain what you are, Tersten? You’ll have no reason to.

  Do I keep young in spirit, or merely immature? Has our history damned us, the Survivors, to linger retarded while our descendants evolve beyond our comprehension?

  The plateau and camp came in view. Genia ran to meet the party. Someone must stay behind in case of trouble. She had gotten the shelter deployed. More a mothering organism than a tent, it spread beneath the radiation shields that curved like wings from the top of the freight carrier. “Tersten, Tersten!” she called. “I was terrified, listening in. If we’d lost you—“ She reached them. All four embraced. For that moment, at least, under the stars, Svoboda was again among beloved friends.

  7

  “You see,” Patulcius strove to explain, “what I have done is what the old Americans would have called ‘worked myself out of a job.’ ”

  The curator of Oxford, who for reasons unrevealed to him currently used the name Theta-Ennea, lifted her brows. She was comely in a gaunt fashion, but he never doubted that under the plumes growing from her otherwise bare scalp lay a formidable brain. “The record indicates that you served well,” she said—or did she sing? “However, why do you suppose you might find occupation here?”

  Patulcius glanced from her, through the glass window of her almost as anachronistic office. Outside, wind chased sunlight and cloud shadows along High Street. Across it dreamed the beautiful buildings of Magdalen College. Three persons wandered by, looking, occasionally touching. He suspected they were young, though of course you couldn’t tell. “This isn’t simply a museum,” he replied after a moment. “People do live in the town. The preservation of things puts them in special relationships among themselves and to you. I imagine that makes a kind of community. My experience— They must have problems, nothing too serious but nevertheless
problems, questions of conflicting rights, duties, wants. You must have mediational procedures. Procedures are my strong point.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Theta-Ennea asked.

  Patulcius turned his gaze back to her. “I would first have to know the situation, the nature of the community, customs and expectations as well as rules and regulations,” he admitted. “I can learn quickly and well.” He smiled. “I did for two thousand years and more.”

  “Ah, yes.” Theta-Ennea gave back the smile. “Naturally, when you requested an interview, I tapped the databank about you. Fascinating. From Rome of the Caesars through the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the Turkish Republic, the Dynasts, and— Yes, a story as marvelous as it is long. That is why I invited you to come in person.” Ruefully: “I too have an outmoded preference for concreteness and immediacy. Therefore I hold this position.” She sighed. “It is not a sinecure. I confess I have not had time to assimilate everything about you.”

  Patulcius manufactured a chuckle. “Frankly, I’m glad of that. I didn’t enjoy the burst of fame when we Survivors manifested ourselves. Gradually becoming obscure again was ... pleasant.”

  Theta-Ennea leaned back behind her desk, which was of plain wood, possibly an antique, and bore nothing except a small omnitenninal. “If I recall rightly, you joined the other seven quite late.”

  Patulcius nodded. “After the bureaucratic structure finally and irreversibly collapsed around me. We’d kept in touch, of course, and they made me welcome, but I’ve never been, m-m, intimate with them.”

  “Is that why you made more of an effort than they to become integrated with the modern world?”

  Patulcius shrugged. “Perhaps. I’m not given to self-analysis. Or perhaps I just happened to have an opportunity none of them did. My talent, such as it is, is for—no, ‘administration’ claims too much. Operations maintenance; the humble but essential chores that keep the social machinery running. Or that used to.”

  Theta-Ennea drooped her lids and regarded him closely before she said, “You have done more than that in the past fifty or a hundred years.”

  “Conditions were unique. For the first time in a long time, they were such that I was qualified to take a hand in coping. No credit to me. Historical happenstance. I am being honest with you. But I did gain experience.”

  Again she pondered. “Would you please explain? Give me your interpretation of those conditions.”

  He blinked, surprised, and spoke hesitantly. “I have nothing but banalities... Well, if you insist. The advanced countries—no, I should say the high-technology civilization—had gone so far, so fast. It and the societies that had not assimilated the revolution, they became like different species. It had to absorb them, the alternatives were all horrible, but the gap in ways of living, thinking, understanding, was huge. I was among the few who could ... talk, function ... more or less effectively on both sides of that gap. I gave what assistance I could to those poor people, developing suitable organization to get them through the transition— when your people no longer had an old-fashioned, paper-shuffling, purely human bureaucracy, and were not sure how to build one. That is what I did. I did not do it alone by any means,” he finished. “My apologies for lecturing on the obvious.”

  “It is not absolutely obvious,” Theta-Ennea said. “You speak from a viewpoint that has no counterpart anywhere. I would like to hear much more. It should help me come nearer empathizing with those scores of generations who made this place what it was. Because I never quite could, you see. With all the curiosityand, yes, all the love in the world, I have never quite been able to feel what they felt.”

  She rested her arms on the desktop and went on compassionately, “But you, Gnaeus Cornelius Patulcius, and the many other names you have borne—in spite of them, in spite of your recent engagements, you also have yet to understand. No, I have no job for you. You should have known as much. Since you did not, how can I explain?

  “You assumed this must be a community in some sense, like those where you were, where the dwellers share certain interests and a certain sense of common identity. I have to tell you—this isn’t simple, it isn’t ever spelled out; hardly anybody realizes what is happening, just as hardly anybody in the time of Augustus or of Galileo realized what was happening—but I spend my life trying to fathom the currents of history—“ Her laugh was forlorn. “Pardon me, let me back up and start over.

  “Except for a few moribund enclaves, community hi a general sense has dissolved. We still use the word and go through some of the forms, but they are nearly as empty as a fertility rite or an election would be. Today we are purely individuals. Our loyalties, if ‘loyalty’ has any meaning left, are to various and ever-varying configurations of personalities. Has this fact wholly escaped you?”

  “Well, uh, well, no,” Patulcius floundered, “but—”

  “I can offer you nothing in the way of work,” Theta-En-nea finished. “I doubt anyone anywhere can, any longer. However, if you care to stay a while in Oxford, we can talk. I think we might learn something from each other.”

  For whatever help that may be to you afterward, she left unsaid.

  8

  The world abides. I am still I, bone, blood, and flesh, aware of the induction unit that enwraps me but also of walls and their views across the outside, silvery-hued turf, a fountain arcing in fractals, an enormous shell of diamond within which, I have heard, grows a new kind of comet-mining spacecraft, flashes in the sky as a weather control module implants energy, the allness exterior to me. So quiet is this room that I hear my breath go in and out, my pulse, the rustle of hair when my head moves on the couch. What happens to me is a waxing of interior cognizance until soon it is the outside that is the ghost.

  I descend into myself. My whole past opens to my ranging. Again I am a slave, a fugitive, a servant, a leader, a companion; again I love and lose, bear and bury. I lie on a sunlit hillside with my man, the clover smell and buzz of bees are sweet to know, we watch a butterfly pass; it is gone, these five hundred years.

  There are blurs, there are gaps. I am not sure whether lichen grew on yonder stone. Yes, quantum randomness gathers its tax—but slowly, and I can renew what matters, even as my body renews itself. A neuropeptide links to the receptor on a nerve cell...

  Come, The thought is not mine. It becomes mine. I am conducted, I conduct myself, onward and inward.

  Thus far went my training. Today I am ready for oneness.

  I do not go into the network. Nothing moves but those fields, mathematical functions, that the world perceives as forces, particles, light, itself. In a sense the network enters me. Or it unfolds before me, as I before it.

  My guide takes form. No shape walks beside me, no hand holds mine. Nonetheless I am conscious of the body, though it may lie halfway around the planet, hi the way that I am conscious of my own. His person is tall, slender, blue-eyed. His personality is blithe and sensuous. You were once Flora (I learn of you), he thinks to me. Then I will be Faunas. He would like us to meet afterward for purposes of exploration. That is the merest ripple through an intelligence born of a brain made flawless. He has the gift of sympathy too, that he may help a neophyte such as me begin to partake.

  Timidly, then warily, then ardently I mesh the flow of my identity with his. Thereby I more and more know the entire linkage. I have studied an abstraction. Today I am in and of the reality. Currents go like billows, cresting, troughing, weaving new waves. From them spring figures many-patterned and crystalline as snowfiakes, brilliancies that expand outward through multiple dimensions, shift, nicker, dance in eternal change; and this is the language and the music that speak to me. Afar, immanent, core, outermost, the great computer sustains the matrices of our beings, vivifies them, sends them on then- orbits andTsummons them home. Yet it is at our behest. We are what happens, the oneness, the god.

  We. Minds reach forth, touch, join. Here is Phyllis, my human teacher, who first accompanied me along the fringes. I have her self-image, sma
ll, dark, long-haired, though in dim wise because she is not thinking about her body. I recognize the gentleness, patience, toughness. Suddenly I can share her interest in tactile harmonics and microgravity laser polo. Her warmth embraces me.

  And here is Nils. Even without image or name, I would know that laughter. We are good friends, we have sometimes been lovers. Did you truly never want to be more than that, Nils? Do immortality and invulnerability breed fear of permanence?

  You belong to an age that is dead, my dear. You must free yourself of it. We will aid you.

  How is it I feel cold, here where space is a fiction and time an inconstant? No, this is not really you, Nils. I haven’t sensed your thoughts before, but surely they would not float free of all feeling tike these.

  You are right. I am not in the network. This is my double, the downloaded configuration of my mind. Whenever I rejoin it, I grow the richer by what it has known while I was away. (Increasingly I have found you dull and shallow. I had not the heart to tell you so, then, but now there is no more hiding-)

  By his emotion I know that Faunus—glands, nerves, tb’e whole animal heritage—is physically linked like me. Be of good cheer, Flora. You have boundless choices. Evolve with us.

  Another mind comes to the forefront of me. It too is bodiless, but forever. A certain kindliness glows yet (because memories of loss and sorrow do, no longer felt yet still, in shadow fashion, understood?) to make it bid me Behold.

  He was a physicist who dreamed of discoveries. Already the unification had been achieved, the grand equation written. Defiant, he.cherished his hopes. He knew full well how unlikely it was that any law remained unknown, that any experiment would ever again give a result for which the synthesis could not account. Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible, though. And if he never stumbled on some basic new phenomenon, the interplay of the quanta must keep casting forth surprises for him to quest through.