The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  “Yes—“ And the symbolism of it, uh-huh, shrewd. My God, I’ll be glad to get out from under a system that calculates everything.

  But I should not be ungrateful, should I? “You’re very generous. You always have been, to us. Thank you, thank you.”

  “Thank society. You think in terms of kings, but personal power is obsolete.”

  True, I suppose. As obsolete as the personal soul.

  “Furthermore,” the Administrator continued, “you shall not go to the planet suggested in your report. It does lie less than fifty light-years hence, but distance differences on that order of magnitude are comparatively unimportant when relativistic travel speeds are available. It is the best known of the terrestroid candidates, therefore the most promising for settlement. However, other considerations enter. You spoke of exploration. Very well, you shall explore.

  “The sun and planet chosen” for you lie in Pegasus, near the present limit of our communication sphere. You will recall that in that direction, beyond it, about fifteen hundred light-years hence, is the nearest of those radiation sources that may be high-energy civilizations.

  “We do not know whether it is in fact any such thing; the anomalies are numerous. Nor do we know whether your presence can significantly advance the date at which we make contact. Probably not, since the robots en route to there have reported nothing but natural phenomena as far as they have gone. Going to that planet means you will face more unknowns, therefore more dangers, than otherwise— although we shall be receiving additional information about it while your ship is under construction. But, assigning the most plausible weights to the various uncertainties and imponderables, we have concluded that, on the whole, it is best that your expedition be toward the nearest neighbors comparable to ourselves that we may possibly have.”

  It makes sense. I should have thought of it beforehand. But I’m only one man. We’re only eight, only human, woundable flesh and sheddable blood.

  “Do you and your associates accept these terms?”

  “Yes.” Boundlessly yes.

  11

  Bid Earth farewell.

  Something of her as once she was abides yet, an enclave, a reserve, a restoration, things small and ahVe in crannies, simple folk, archaisms, remembrance. Most people are gracious. They grant permission, they draw aside to create solitude or they come together in fellowship, they give whatever may be in their gift throughout these last few days.

  Ocean roars, rises, rushes downward and up again. The waves are gray-green in a thousand hues and wrinkles along their backs, white-maned above the steep troughs. The boat surges to their swing and tramp, rigging sings, sails strain. Shrill and chill, the wind tastes of salt.

  Wheat goldens toward harvest. It rustles whenever the air stirs, and ripples run across the leagues of it. Bees buzz in a clover meadow, from which the sun bakes sweetness. Some ways off, several cows rest, vividly red, by a chestnut tree whose crown snares light and scatters it back. A clod crumbles warm in the hand.

  Candleglow turns faces as soft as the lilting music. Silver, porcelain, linen sheen with it. In tall goblets, champagne sends jewels aloft. It tickles the palate. Laughter runs around the table with the same lightness. The soup is leek-pungent, cream-rich. Fragrance from courses to come eddies about like a promise of merrymaking afterward until dawn.

  The canyon wall lifts rusty red toward indigo heaven. Eons band it. Crags rear wind-whittled out of the down-slope; but today is so still that a raven’s “Gruk!” explodes through the heat. That blackness wings over pungency of sage and scrub juniper, which clutch at every roothold. The green is less sparse at the bottom, where a streamlet gleams and whispers.

  Though pilgrims come no longer to the shrine, a latter-day kind of piety maintains it, and memories are many. Near its doorway an ancient cypress grips a ledge, limned in gnarled and silvery austerity. Thence vision descends the mountain, past a cliff cloven by a waterfall, over groves and terraces and the curve of a roof, into dawn mists filling the valley and on to blue heights beyond. Breath is cool. Suddenly a cuckoo calls.

  A rainshower has ended. The birch forest sparkles with drops, on the blades that shiver overhead, on fern and moss beneath. Trunks rise girl-slim out of dappled shadows. Ahead, their whitenesses open on reeds, a lake, a deer that looks about startled and soars away. The mould is soft and wet underfoot. The odors are green.

  Things and places may be had again in future, but as illusion, a ghost dance of electrons, photons, neurons. Here is the graspable reality. This picture on the wall came from a riverside stall long ago, that one was taken back when folk employed cameras. The table is nearly as old, its wood scarred by use, twice charred where a lighted cigar fell. The rest of the furniture is as comfortably shabby. The book has weight, its brown-spotted pages crackle between fingers, a name penned on the flyleaf is faded but unforgotten.

  There are no more graveyards. Death is too rare, land too precious. The burial records of the humble seldom endured anyway. It is guesswork what sites to seek—in a city turned alien, in a remnant of countryside where grass and wild-flowers have taken back the plowland—and stand for a while, feeling not altogether alone, before saying very quietly, “Goodbye now, and thank you.”

  12

  Fire raised the wind on which Pytheas fared outward. Sol dwindled aft, slowly at first under the low acceleration, but already, as the ship approached Jupiter, scarcely more than the brightest among the stars.

  They filled the encompassing night with keen and steady radiances, white, silver-blue, amber-yellow, ruby-red. The Milky Way coursed heaven like a river of frost and light. Nebulae glowed in the death and birth of suns. Southward gleamed the Clouds of Magellan. Exquisite at its distance, a spiral, a sister galaxy, beckoned.

  Hanno and Svoboda stood in the command center, looking at the optically enhanced sky. They often did. “What are you thinking about?” he asked at last.

  “Finality,” she answered low.

  “What?”

  “This maneuver ahead of us. Oh, yes, it’s not absolutely irrevocable. We could still turn back—for quite some time to come, can’t we? But what’s soon going to happen, the course change, it’s like—I don’t know. Not birth or marriage or dying. Something as strange.”

  He nodded. “I believe I know what you mean, and I’m the hardheaded pragmatist. Wanderer certainly does. He mentioned to me that he and Corinne are planning a ceremony. Maybe we should all attend.”

  She smiled. “Rite of passage,” she murmured. “I should have realized Wanderer would be the one who understands. I hope he can make a part for me.”

  Hanno gave her a sharp glance. They had all paired off, informally and more or less tacitly, he with her, Wanderer with Macandal, Patulcius with Aliyat, Tu Shan and Yukiko renewing their alliance. Not that each man and each -woman had never shared one another. It had been inevitable that they’d swap around occasionally, during the long time of their masquerade. But since, they had been more apart than together. How much emotional risk dared they take on this voyage? Fifteen years under way, with God knew what at the end—Separations or no, after centuries a couple gained considerable mutual sensitivity. Svoboda’s hand caught Hanno’s. “Not to worry,” she said in the American English that was their favorite dead language. “I only have a, a solemnity in mind. We do need something to lift us out of ourselves. It’s wrong to carry our pettinesses along to the stars.”

  “We will, though,” he said. “We can’t help it. How do you escape being what you are?”

  13

  Screen fields warded particle radiation off as Pytheas slipped close by Jupiter. The planet laid its mighty gravitational hand upon the ship and swung it out of the ecliptic, northerly toward Pegasus. Inboard a drum tbuttered, feet danced, a song called to the spirits.

  When it was safely away, robots went outside. Flitting around the hull, they deployed the latticework of ramscoop and fire chamber. By this time, low boost under torch drive had built up a considerable speed.
Interaction with the interstellar medium was becoming significant. By terrestrial standards it was a hard vacuum, averaging about one atom per cubic centimeter, overwhelmingly hydrogen. Yet a wide funnel traveling fast would gather a great deal. When the robots returned inside, Pytheas resembled a btunt torpedo caught in the net of a giant fisherman.

  Its folk flashed their last laser beam to Earth, made their little speeches, received ceremonial good wishes. The ions and energies that were to surround them would blank out electromagnetic communications. Modulated neutrinos passed easily through, and Pytheas was equipped to receive them, but the beams it could cast dispersed too rapidly. That huge facility which was capable of sending an identifiable message hundreds or thousands of light-years was fixed in place, locked on remote targets that might eventually respond.

  Now, through the net and beyond it, out to thousands of kilometers, the harvester fields came into being. Their forces meshed, intricate, powerful, precise, an ever-changing configuration molded by the controlling computers and what came to them through their sensors. New laser beams sprang from the ship’s bows, swordlike, cleaving electron from nucleus. The fields seized on the plasma and swept it backward, well away from the hull; impact on metal would have released X-rays in swiftly lethal concentration. Aft to the fire chamber, which was itself a magnetohydrodynamic vortex, the gas went.

  Another immaterial engine released a little of the antimatter it held suspended, ionized it, sped it into the maelstrom and the star gas. Particles met, annihilated, became energy, the ultimate conversion, nine tunes ten to the twentieth ergs per gram. That fury lit fusion reactions among other protons, and continued them. Behind the heavily shielded stern of Pytheas, a tiny sun blazed forth.

  Powered by it, the fields hurled most of the plasma aft. Reaction drove the ship forward. Full weight came back to her crew, an Earth gravity of acceleration, nine hundred eighty centimeters per second added every second to velocity.

  At that rising pace, in just less than a year the voyagers would transit half a light-year of distance, and their speed would be close to that of light.

  14

  Nothing natural could have steered the ship. It did itself, a set of systems joined in a unity as complex as a living organism, maintaining its motion and existence outwardly, its livable environment inwardly. Humans became passengers, occupying their tune as best they might.

  Living quarters were bleakly functional, eight individual staterooms, a gymnasium, a workshop, a galley, a dining saloon, a common room, certain auxiliaries such as bathrooms and a dream chamber. Making them pleasanter gave enjoyment to those whose talents lay in that direction. Yukiko urged that they begin with the common room. “It is where we shall most be together,” she said. “Not simply for ease and company. In trouble too, or communion, or awe.”

  Hanno nodded. “Our marketplace,” he agreed. “And markets began with temples.”

  “Well,” cautioned Tu Shan, “we’d better plan things so the decorating doesn’t interfere with the use.”

  The three found themselves alone there one evening. The ship maintained Earth’s immemorial cycle of day and night, the clock to whose beat life had arisen and evolved. It would gradually shift to the different rhythm of the destination world. Dinner was past and others had withdrawn to their rest or their recreations, none of which happened to be here. In the corridor beyond, twilight deepened toward darkness. Soon the widely spaced soft ganglights would turn on.

  Tu Shan fixed a box to wall brackets he had forged in vine shapes. “I thought you were going to carve decorations on that first,” Hanno remarked.

  “I want to put soil in it now and begin raising flowers,” Tu Shan explained. “Later I will make an ornamental railing and attach it.”

  Yukiko gave him a smile. “Yes, you do need flowers,” she agreed. “Living things.” What grew beneath her own hands was a mural painting, a landscape of hills, village, bamboo, in the foreground a blossoming cherry bough.

  “I will carve the railing in animal shapes.” He sighed. “If only we could have animals aboard.” Their DNA patterns reposed in the databank. Someday, if all went well, there would be synthesis, growth tanks, release.

  “Yes, I miss my ship’s cats,” Hanno admitted. “But a sailor got used to doing without most things. It made going ashore that much the happier.” His fingers plied rope, knot-work to hang at certain spots. Its Phoenician pattern would not clash with the Asian motif. He glanced at the mural. “That’s becoming lovely.”

  Yukiko bowed in his direction. “Thank you. A poor copy, I fear, of what I can remember from a building that perished centuries ago.” —before things were recorded, for presentation at will in total-sensory imaging.

  “You should have done it on Earth.”

  “Nobody seemed interested.”

  “Or had you simply lost heart? Never mind. We’ll beam it back from our planet. It’s as special as anything we’re likely to find there.” Its physical self would long since have gone down into the databank, its materials into the nanotech processors, converted to whatever was needed for the next project.

  Aliyat had contended that the whole idea was foolish. No one wanted to spend fifteen years staring at a changeless picture. Why make it, to destroy and replace with something else, when projection panels could instantly create any of thousands of simulacra?

  “I think before then, our friends will accept that this work was worth doing,” Hanno added.

  “They kindly let me indulge in my pastime,” Yukiko said.

  “No, I mean for its own sake. More than a pastime. We could invent plenty of mere amusements. We doubtless will. If necessary, we can just wait. A year goes by fast after you’ve had hundreds or thousands of them.”

  “Unless much happens,” Tu Shan observed.

  Hanno nodded. “True. I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”

  “Perhaps the old man was finding his way toward wisdom,” Yukiko ventured. She lowered her brush. Her tone grew troubled. “For me, that was never possible. My years of quietness always Became, at last, a burden. It is the penalty of never aging. The body does not ease its hold on the spirit.”

  “Nature meant us to die, get out of the way, leave whatever we gahied to the new generations,” Tu Shan said heavily. “Yet nature brought forth our kind. Are we monsters, freaks? Today everybody is like us. Should that be? Will it in the end cost the race its soul?”

  Hanno kept busy with his ropework. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t even know if your questions mean anything. We are unique, we Survivors. We were born into age and death. We grew up expecting them for ourselves. Then we endured them, over and over and over, hi everybody we loved, till we found each other; and that didn’t end the losing. The primitive world shaped us. Look at what we’re making here. Maybe that’s why it’s us going to the stars. We’re the oldest people alive, but maybe we’re also the last of the children.”

  15

  A stateroom had space for little more than a seat, a dresser that doubled as a desk with terminal, and a bunk; but the bunk had width for two. Patulcius had stuck printouts of pictures onto his walls, scenes that existed no longer in their cities. The sonic playout gave a muted background of early twentieth-century jazz. That was the single kind of music on which he and Aliyat could agree. Later styles were too abstract for her, older Near Eastern tunes roused bad memories.

  They lay side by side, sharing warmth and sweat. His passions were always rather quickly slaked, though; he liked to laze for a while afterward, daydreaming or talking, before he either fell asleep or went in search of refreshment.

  Presently she stirred, kicked, sat up, hugged her knees, yawned. “I wonder what’s happening now at home,” she said.

  “As I understand it, ‘now’ means very little to us ... n
ow,” he answered in his plodding fashion. “It will mean less and less, the faster and farther we go.”

  “Never mind. Why can’t they stay in touch?”

  “You know. Our drive screens out their beams.”

  She glanced at him. He lay hands behind head, look upon the ceiling. “Sure, but, uh, neutrinos.”

  “Those facilities are tied up.”

  “Yes,” she said bitterly. “We weren’t worth building new ones for. But aiming at some star a million light-years away—”

  He smiled. “Not that far. Not quite. Although a rather daunting distance, true.”

  “Who cares? I mean, all they ever get is stuff they can’t figure out. They don’t think it’s even meant for us, do they?”

  “Yes and no. It’s a reasonable guess that those are messages addressed ‘to whom it may concern.’ To anyone who may be listening. But why should the senders think enough tike us that we can easily decipher their codes? Besides, they’re almost certainly robots. Very possibly, what we detect are nothing but beacons, meant to attract more robots—like those we have sent toward them.”

  She shivered a bit. “Nothing really alive there?”

  “Doubtful. Have you forgotten? Those are the strange places of the galaxy. Black holes, condensing nebulae, free matrices—is that the term I want? Modern cosmology baffles me too. But they’re bound to be dangerous, generally lethal environments. At the same time, each is unique. Surely all starfaring civilizations will dispatch robots to investigate them. They are where everybody’s machines will eventually meet. Therefore it makes sense that those already there will send messages they—or their builders— hope somebody new will catch. Those always were the likeliest places to find signs of intelligence, the best for us to focus our instruments on.”