The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  “I know, I do know!” she snapped.

  “As for why we have received nothing unambiguous from the mother civilizations—”

  “Never mind! I wanted a breath of outside air, not a lecture!”

  He did turn his face toward her. The heavy features drooped. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said. “I find the subject fascinating.”

  “I might, if I hadn’t heard it all before, again and again. If something new could ever be said about it.”

  “And if somebody new said it. Right?” he asked sadly. “I bore you, don’t I?”

  She bit her lip. “I’m out of sorts.”

  He avoided remarking that she had not answered his question. However, his tone sharpened a bit. “You knew you were leaving the social whirl behind.”

  She jerked a nod. “Of course,” she replied curtly. “Do you suppose I didn’t learn how to bide my time, already in Palmyra? But I don’t have to like it.”

  She swung her legs around, stood, reached for the robe she had hung on a hook. “I’m not sleepy, either,” she said. “I’m going to a dream box and get relaxed.” Unspoken was that evidently he had not eased her, though she had faked.

  He sat up. “You go too often,” he protested without force.

  “That’s my business.” She pulled the garment over her head, paused for a moment, met his eyes, glanced away again. “Sorry, Gnaeus. I am being bitchy. Wish me a better mood tomorrow, will you?” She leaned down to ruffle the shag on his chest before she departed, barefoot as she had arrived. The deck surfacing was soft, springy, almost like turf.

  The corridor reached empty, dimly lit at this hour. Ventilation gave a breeze and a susurrus. She rounded a corner and stopped. Wanderer did too.

  “Why, hello, there,” Aliyat said in American English. “Haven’t seen much of you for a while.” She smiled. “Where are you bound for?”

  16

  The closer Pytheas flew on-the heels of light, the more alien it and the outside universe became to each other. One did not care to look long into the viewscreens any more, if at all. The interior hull became like a set of caves, warm bright huddling places. Escape from their closeness lay in whatever work could be found or made; in sports, games, skills, reading, music, shows, traditional diversions; in the pseudo-lives of every sort that that computer engendered for those who linked with it.

  The circumstances were by no means bad. Most of mankind throughout most of history would have considered them paradise. Still, as Hanno had once implied, it was as well that to immortals, a year could feel like quite a short span. And perhaps that was only true, or only true enough, of the Survivors. Had any modern human lived sufficiently long? Would any ever learn how to tough out hard times, especially the hard times of the spirit? Was a subliminal doubt of it the underlying reason why none had hitherto ventured this faring?

  Be that as it may, challenges became welcome.

  Phaeacia—Hanno had suggested the name—was not Earth. The robot explorers reported an extraordinary degree of similarity: sun, orbit, mass, composition, spin, tectonics, satellite; countlessly many factors seemed necessary to beget life chemistry closely resembling the terrestrial. Such worlds were few indeed (though “few,” given the size of the galaxy, might add up to hundreds). Yet nothing was identical and much, perhaps most, utterly foreign. The absence of anything sentient was merely the difference plainest to humans, and probably the least important.

  Moreover, Phaeacia was less known than the goal Hanno had originally had in mind. It lay almost one hundred fifty light-years from Earth, near the edge of the communication sphere. Thus far a single mission had reached it and, when Pytheas left, a dozen years’ worth of reports had been received. It was a world, as various and mysterious as ever Earth herself in her prehistory.

  The robots were still investigating. Pytheas couldn’t catch their messages while en route, but they would download tHeir entire data-hoard when it arrived. Doubtless the astonishments that waited were enormous. The travelers might spend a year or more in orbit, assimilating, before they took their first boat to the surface.

  Meanwhile, why not practice? To gain familiarity with the material was elementary prudence, incomplete and often wrong though it must be; hands-on experience was best gotten in advance, illusory though it must be.

  The senses no longer knew the gymnasium. Overhead arched sky, virginaUy blue save for clouds that were like breaths off the snowpeaks at the horizon. The countryside round about lay verdant with blades that were not really grass; trees swayed to a lulling wind that smelled of their resin and the sun; wings swept that air, and afar a herd of beasts galloped, swift and graceful. Wanderer remembered Jackson Hole as once it had been. His bean cracked.

  Mastering himself, he stooped to pluck a rock out of the spring bubbling at his feet. It glittered quartzlike. The heft of it was cold in his hand. Yes, he thought, I’d better brush up my geology.

  “Cut some timber,” Tu Shan ordered the robots. He pointed. “Over there. See if you can make planks.”

  “So,” acknowledged the principal, and led its work gang off with their energy projectors, fluid reactants, and solid tools.

  Wanderer swung his head toward his companion. The weight of the induction helmet reminded him that he wasn’t in a dream box. He was supposedly training his entire organism; but he stood in a place that surely didn’t exist as it was being presented to him. Well, he could believe that something not too unlike it did, on his new world. “What’re you doing?” he demanded.

  “We’ll need wood suitable for construction, wherever we decide to settle,” Tu Shan explained. “We don’t want to depend on the wretched synthesizers, do we? Wasn’t that the point of leaving Earth?” He smiled, narrowed his eyes against the brilliance, dilated his nostrils, breathed deep. “Yes, I like it here.”

  “You won’t farm this kind of site!” Wanderer cried.

  Tu Shan stared at him. “Why not?”

  “There’ll be plenty of others. This, it would be ... wrong.”

  Tu Shan scowled. “How much of the planet do you want to keep for your private hunting preserve, forever?”

  It shocked Wanderer: Have we carried the enmities of our forefathers through all these centuries and now through these light-years?

  17

  The nanoprocessors would take any material and transform it, atom by atom, into anything else for which they had a program. Out of their recycling came air, water, food. They could produce a complete, excellent meal, and often did according to individual choice. However, as a rule Mac-andal took just the basic ingredients and, aside from drink, made dinner for everybody. She was a gifted cook, enjoyed the work, and felt it was a service, something that lent her life some meaning. No pretense; machines lacked the personal touch that this archaic crew needed.

  Certainly they did at a time of celebration. The ship’s calendar held many feasts, holy days and national days that Earth had mostly forgotten, private anniversaries, special occasions upon the voyage. Each fulfilled year of it was among them. That was by inboard time, of course. The faster Pytheas flew, the shorter a span became in relation to the galactic wheel.

  “It’s getting kind of drunk out,” she remarked to Yukiko on the third of those evenings.

  Having dined, folk had moved from the saloon to the spacious common room. Simulacrum panels had been raised, hiding the murals. They gave no scenes from home; it had been found that such were too likely to make an alcoholic party go somber. Patterns of light shifted and drifted, glowed and sparkled, through a violet-blue dusk. Nevertheless Hanno and Patulcius sat, goblets in hand, reminiscing about the twentieth century—the two widely sundered twentieth centuries that had been theirs. Wanderer and Svoboda revived the waltz, rotating embraced over the floor, earplugs giving Strauss to them alone; their eyes also excluded the world. Tu Shan and Aliyat danced, whooping and hand-clapping, to some livelier melody.

  Kneeling as of old, Yukiko sipped at the bit of sake she was allowing herself. She sm
iled. “It is good to see cheer-fujness/’ she said.

  “Yes, I’ve felt tension in the air,” Macandal replied. “Not that it’s gone away.”

  “—poor old Sam Giannotti, he tried so hard to get a little modern physics into my head,” Hanno related slurrily. “Hell, I could barely manage a half-notion of what classical physics had been about. Made a song, I did, at last—”

  Sweat darkened Tu Shan’s tunic beneath the arms and sheened on Aliyat’s bare shoulders and back.

  “You should go join the fun,” Macandal said. Sang Hanno off-key:

  “Black bodies give off radiation,

  And ought to continuously.

  Black bodies give off radiation,

  But do it by Planck’s theory.

  “Bring back, bring back,

  Oh, bring back that old continuity!

  Bring back, bring back,

  Oh, bring back Clerk Maxwell to me.”

  Yukiko smiled again. “I am enjoying myself,” she said, “But why don’t you go? You were never a passive person, like me.”

  “Ha, don’t you kid me. In your peculiar ways, you’re as active, as much a doer, as anybody I ever met.”

  “Though now we have Schrödinger functions,

  Dividing up h by 2π

  That damn differential equation

  Still has no solution for Ψ.

  “Bring back, bring back—”

  Aliyat and Tu Shan laughed into each other’s mouths. Wanderer and Svoboda circled as if through a dream.

  “Well, Heisenberg came to the rescue,

  Intending to make alt secure.

  What is the result of his efforts?

  We are absolutely unsure.

  “Bring back, bring back—”

  Aliyat left her partner, approached, beckoned to Yukiko. Macandal stepped aside. The two whispered together.

  “Dirac spoke of energy levels,

  Both minus and plus. Oh, how droll!

  And now, just because of his teaching,

  We don’t know our mass from a hole.

  “Bring back—”

  Aliyat returned to Tu Shan. They left the room arm in arm.

  “She asked if you’d mind, didn’t she?” Macandal inquired.

  Yukiko nodded. “I don’t. I truly don’t. She surely remembered that. But it was good of her to ask.”

  Macandal sighed. “His nature too, isn’t it? I’ve wondered—I’m a trifle in my own cups—don’t be offended, please, but I’ve wondered how much you really love him.”

  “What is love? Among my people, most people, what counted was respect. Affection normally grew out of it.”

  “Yeah.” Macandal’s gaze followed the pair still on the floor.

  Yukiko winced. “Are you in pain, Corinne?”

  “No, no. Nothing’s going to happen with those two. Though, as you say, it shouldn’t matter if anything did, should it?” Macandal made a laugh. “Johnnie’s a gentleman. He’ll ask me for the next dance. I can wait.”

  “Bring back, bring back,

  Oh, bring back that old continuity—”

  18

  Stranger and ever stranger gjew the cosmos that the ship beheld. Aberration of light sent star images crawling aside, while Doppler shift blued those forward and reddened those aft until many no longer shone at any wavelength the eye could perceive. In the ship’s measure, the mass of the atoms that its fields scooped up increased with the rising velocity; distances that it was traversing shrank, as if space were flattening under the impact; time passed more quickly, less of it between one atomic pulsebeat and the next. Pytheas would never reach the haste of light, but the closer it sped, the more foreign to the rest of the universe it became.

  Alone among the eight, Yukiko had taken to seeking communion yonder. She would settle in the navigation chamber, otherwise unused until journey’s end drew nigh, and bid the screens give her the view. It was a huge and eerie grandeur, there around her shell of humming silence— blacknesses, ringfire, streams of radiance. Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.

  She did not let herself go wholly into it. Had she become able to, that would have been a desertion of comrades and dereliction of duty. She hoped she might help Tu Shan, and others if they wished, toward the serenity behind the awe-someness, once she herself had gone deeply enough. Not as a Boddhisatva, no, no, nor a guru, only as a friend who had something wonderful to share. It would help them so much, in the centuries to come.

  They had need of every strength. Hardships and dangers counted for little, would often be gladdening, a gift of that reality which had slipped from their hands on Earth. The loneliness, though. Three hundred years between word and reply. How much more distanced might Earth become in three hundred more years?

  Never before had the eight been this isolated for this long; and it would go on. Oh, it was scarcely worse than isolation had grown at home. (And if shiploads of settlers arrived, once Pha-eacia was proven habitable—if it was; if they did—what would they really have in common with the Survivors?) But it worked on them more than they had foreseen. Forced in upon themselves, they discovered less than they perhaps had looked for.

  Horizons and challenge should open them up again. Yet they might always be haunted by the understanding that they were not actually pioneers, mightily achieving what they had determined they would do. They were ... not quite outcasts ... failures, leftovers from a history that no longer mattered, sent on their way almost casually, as an act of indifferent kindness.

  Their children, however; there was the future that Earth had lost. Yukiko ran a hand down her belly. Mother of nations! This body was not foredoomed in the way that women otherwise were, even today. The technology could keep you youthful, but it could not add one ovum to those with which you were born. (Well, doubtless it could, if people so desired, but of course they didn’t.) Hers made new eggs as it made new teeth, during her entire unbounded life. (Don’t scorn the machines. They’ll save you from ever again having to watch your children grow old. They’ll create the genetic variety that will allow four couples to people a planet.)

  Yes, hope ranged yet. May it never go out of reach.

  “Ship, what of the flight?” she called.

  “Velocity point nine-six-four c,” sang the voice, “mean ambient equivalent matter density one point zero four proton, all mission parameters within zero point three percent, navigating now by the Virgo cluster of galaxies and seven quasars near the limits of the observable universe.”

  Stars across farness,

  Drift of dandelion seeds—

  What, springtime again?

  19

  After seven and a half of its own years, ten times as many celestial, Pytheas reached the halfway point of its journey. There was a brief spell of weightlessness as the vessel went on free trajectory, lasers and force-fields withdrawn except for what was required to shield the life within. Majestically, the hull turned around. Heavily armored, robots went out to reconfigure the generator net. When they were back inside, Pytheas unfurled snare and kindled engine. Fire reawakened. At one gravity of deceleration, the craft backed down toward its goal. Trumpet notes rang through the air.

  Surely the travelers had spesial cause for festival. Macan-dal took three days preparing the banquet. She was in the galley, chopping and mixing, when Patulcius appeared. “Hi,” she greeted him in English, which remained her language of choice. “What can I do for you?”

  He barely smiled. “Or I for you. I think I have remembered what went into that appetizer I mentioned.”

  “Hm?” She laid down her cleaver and brought finger to chin. “Oh ... oh, yes. Tahini something. You made it sound good, but neither of us could recall what tahini was.”

  “How much else has faded out of us?” he mumbled. Squaring his shoulders, he spoke briskly. “
I have brought the memory back, at least in part. It was a paste made from sesame meal. The dish I thought of combined it with garlic, lemon juice, cumin, and parsley.”

  “Splendid. The nano can certainly make sesame, and here’s a grinder, but I’ll have to experiment, and you tell me how wide of the mark I am. It ought to go well with some other hors d’oeuvres I’m planning. We don’t want anything too heavy before the main course.”

  “What will that be, or is it still a secret?”

  Macandal considered Patulcius. “It is, but Til let you in on it if you’ll keep mum. Curried goose. A twenty-one-boy curry.”

  “Delicious, I’m sure,” he said listlessly.

  “Is that all you’ve got to say, you, our champion trencherman?”

  He turned to go. She touched his arm. “Wait,”_she murmured. “You’re feeling absolutely rotten, aren’t you? Can I help?”

  He looked elsewhere. “I doubt it. Unless—“ He swallowed and grimaced. “Never mind.”

  “Come on, Gnaeus. We’ve been friends a long time.”

  “Yes, you and I, we could somehow relax with each other better than— Okay!” he spat. “Can you speak to Aliyat? No, surely not. Or if you do, what use?”

  “I thought that was it,” said Macandal low. “Her sleeping around. Well, I can’t say I’m overjoyed when Johnnie spends a night with her, but it is something she needs. I’ve been thinking Hanno does wrong to ignore her passes at him.”

  “Nymphomania.”

  “No, not really. Grabbing out for love, assurance. And ... something to do. She spends too much time in the dream box as is.”

  He struck fist in palm. “But I am not something for her to do, am I?”

  “Not any more? I suspected that too. Poor Gnaeus.” Macandal took his hand. “Listen. I know her well, better than anybody else. I don’t believe she wants to be unkind. If she avoids you, why, she feels—ashamed? No, more like being afraid of hurting you worse.” She paused. “I’m going to take her aside and talk like a Dutch aunt.”