The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  “But this isn’t that kind of thing!”

  “No, not exactly. Still— Listen. What happened today pros that I got so furious that if I couldn’t go conjure a private world, I’d’ve had to scream and smash things and generally throw a fit. What would that have done for crew morale?”

  “What was the matter?”

  “Hanno. What else? We met by chance and he buttonholed me and, oh, you can imagine. He repeated the same tired noises you just did, about me and the dream box. He tried to say, very roundabout— Never mind.”

  Svoboda bared a brief smile. “Let me guess. He implied you are a menace to relationships aboard ship.”

  “Yeah. He’d like to pair off with me. Of course he would. Hasn’t gotten laid for months now, has he? I suggested what he could do instead, and walked off. But I was volcano angry.”

  “You were overreacting; you, of all people. Stress—”

  “I s’pose.” Faintly surprised at how rage and loss alike had eased within her, Aliyat said, “Look, I’m not addicted to dreams. Really I’m not. Everybody uses them once in a while. Why don’t you share with me sometime? I’d like that. An interactive dream has more possibilities than letting the computer put into your head what it thinks you’ve demanded.”

  Svoboda nodded. “True. But—“ She stopped.

  “But you’re afraid I might learn things about you you’d rather I didn’t. That’s it, nght?” Aliyat shrugged. “I’m not offended. Only, don’t preach at me, okay?”

  “Why did you resent Hanno’s attempt?” Svoboda asked quickly. “It was quite natural. You need not have cursed him for it.”

  “After what he’s done to us?” Counterattack: “Do you still have a soft spot for him?”

  Svoboda looked elsewhere. “I shouldn’t, I know. On se veut—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing. A stray memory.”

  “About him.”

  Svoboda met the challenge. Probably, Aliyat thought, she wants to be friendly toward me; feels she has to. “Yes. Of no importance. Some lines we saw once. It was ... the late twentieth century, a few years after we—we seven had gone under cover, while Patulcius was still keeping his own camouflage. Hanno and I were traveling about incognito in France. We stayed one night at an old inn, yes, old already then, and in the guest book we found what somebody had written, long before. I was reminded now, that’s all.”

  “What was it?” Aliyat asked.

  Again Svoboda looked past her. The wry words whis-jjjered forth as if of themselves.

  “On se veut On s’enlace Ons’enlasse On s’en veut.”

  Before Aliyat could respond, she nodded adieu and hurried on down the corridor.

  23

  Once more Yukiko was redecorating her room. Until she finished, it would be an uninhabitable clutter. Thus she spent most of her private hours in Tu Shan’s, as well as deeping there. In due course they would share hers while Idle worked on his. It was her proposal. He had assented without seeming to care. The brushstroke landscape and calligraphy she earlier put on his walls had over the years been ween until they were all but invisible. However, she had a feeling that he would never especially have noticed their disappearance.

  Entering, she found him cross-legged on the bed, left hand supporting a picture screen, right hand busy with a light pencil. He drew something, considered it, made an aikation, studied it further. His big body seemed relaxed and the features bore no mark of a scowl.

  “Why, what are you doing?” she asked.

  He glanced up. “I have an idea,” he said almost eagerly. “It isn’t clear to me yet, but sketching helps me think.”

  She went around behind him and leaned over to see. His drawings were always delicate, a contrast to much of his work in stone or wood. This showed a man in traditional peasant garb, holding a spade. On a large rock beside him jiquatted a-monkey, while a tiger stood below. Through the foreground flowed a stream wherein swam a carp.

  “So you are finally going to try pictures?” she guessed.

  He shook his head. “No, no. You are far better at them than I will ever be. These are just thoughts about figures I mean to sculpture.” He gazed up at her. “I think pictures may not help us much when we get to Tritos. Even on Earth, in old days, you remember how differently people in different times and countries would draw the same things. To the Alloi, any style of line, shade, color we might use may not make sense. Photographs may not. But a three-dimensional shape—no ghost in a computer; a solid thing they can handle—that should speak to them.”

  Tritos, Alloi, he pronounced the names awkwardly; but one needed better words than “Star Three” and “Others,” and when Patulcius suggested these, the crew soon went along. Greek still bore its aura of science, learning, civilization. To three of those in the ship, it had been common speech for centuries. “Metroaster” for “Mother Star” had, though, been voted down, and “Pegasi” was back in use. After all, nobody could say whether the Alloi at Tritos had come from there, or even whether it was sun to a sentient race.

  Hanno sat mute through the discussion and merely nodded his acceptance. He spoke little these days, and others no more to him than was necessary.

  “Yes, an excellent thought,” Yukiko said. “What do you mean to show?”

  “I am groping my way toward that,” Tu Shan replied. “Your ideas will be welcome. Here, I think, might be a group—more creatures than these—arranged according to our degrees of kinship with the animals. That may lead the Alloi to show us something about their evolution, which ought to tell us things about them.”

  “Excellent.” Yukiko trilled laughter. “But how can you, now, keep up your pretense of being a simple-minded fanner and blacksmith?” She bent low, hugged him, laid her cheek on his. “This makes me so happy. You were sullen and silent and, and I truly feared you were going back to that miserable, beastly way of living I found you in—how long ago!”

  He stiffened. Harshness came into his voice. “Why not? What else had our dear captain left us, before this came to me out of the dark? It will help fill a little of the emptiness ahead.”

  She let go and slipped about to sit down on the bed in front of him. “I wish you could be less bitter toward “Hanno,” she said, troubled. “You and the rest of them.”

  “Have we no reason to?”

  “Oh, he was high-handed, true. But has he not been punished enough for that? How dare we take for granted that what he’s done is not for the best? It may prove to be what saves us.”

  “Easy for you. You want to seek the Alloi.”

  “But I don’t want this hateful division between us. I dare BOt give him a friendly word myself, I’m afraid of making matters worse. It makes me wish we’d never received the message. Can’t you see, dear, he is—like a righteous emperor of ancient times—taking on himself the heavy burden Of leadership?”

  Again Tu Shan shook his head, but violently. “Nonsense. You are drawn to him—don’t deny—“ , Her tone went calm. “To his spirit, yes. It isn’t tike mine, but it also seeks. And to his person, no doubt, but I’ve honestly not dwelt on that in my mind.” She closed hands upon his knee. “You are the one I am with.”

  It mildened him to a degree. Sternness remained. “Well, stop imagining he’s some kind of saint or sage. He’s a scheming, knavish old sailor, who naturally wants to sail. This is his selfishness. He happens to have the power to force it on us.” He slapped the screen down onto the blanket, as if striking with a weapon. “I am only trying to help us outlive the evil.”

  She leaned close. Her smile trembled. “That is enough to start.”

  24

  Yet another Christmas drew nigh, in the ship’s chronology. It was meaningless to ask whether it did on Earth just then—doubly meaningless, given the physics here and the forgottenness yonder. Hanno came upon Svoboda hang-ing ornaments in the common room. Evergreen boughs from the nanoprocessors were fresh and fragrant, bejeweled with berries of hotly. They seemed as forlorn as the
Danish carols from the speakers. She saw him and tautened. He halted, not too close to her. “Hello,” he proffered.

  “How do you do,” she said.

  He smiled. Her face stayed locked. “What sort of party are you planning this year?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “No motif.”

  “Oh, I’ll keep out of the way, never fear.” Quickly: “But we can’t go on much longer like this. Well lose skills, including the skills of teamwork. We must start having simulations and practicing in them again.”

  “As the captain directs. I suppose, though, you’re aware that Wanderer and I, at least, are doing so. We’ll bring others in presently.”

  Hanno made himself meet the blue gaze, and made it stay upon his. “Yes, naturally I know. Good. For you two above aU. A phantom wilderness is better than none, right?”

  Svoboda bit her lip. “We could have had the real thing.”

  “You will, after we’re through at Tritos. You wanted to go there first yourself. Why don’t you look forward to it?”

  “You know why. The cost to my comrades.” She closed a fist and clipped: “Not that we can’t cope. I outlived many bad husbands, dreary decades, tyrants, wars, everything men could wreak. I will outlive this too. We will.”

  “Myself among you,” he said, and continued on his way.

  It was to no particular goal. He often prowled, mostly at shipnight or through sections where nobody else had occasion to be. An immortal body needed little exercise to keep fit, but he worked regularly at his capabilities and developed new ones. He screened books and shows, listened to music, played with problems on the computers. Frequently, as in the past, when stimuli palled and thought flagged he disengaged his mind and let hours or days flow by, scarcely registering on him. That, however, was in its way as seductive, easily overdone as the dream chamber which he shunned. He could but hope that his crew rationed themselves on illusions.

  Today impulse returned him to his stateroom. He sealed himself in, not that anyone would come calling, and settled down before his terminal. “Activate—“ The command fell so flat across silence that he chopped it short. For a while he stared at the ceiling. His fingers drummed the desktop. “Historical persons,” he said.

  “Whom do you wish?” inquired the instrumentality.

  Hanno’s mouth writhed upward. “You mean, what do I wish?”

  What three-dimensional, full-color, changeably expressive, freely moving and speaking wraith? Siddhartha, Socrates, Hillel, Christ — Aeschylus, Vergil, Tu Fu, Firdousi, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mark Twain — Lucretius, Avicenna, Maim on ides, Descartes, Pascal, Hume — Pericles, Alfred, Jefferson — Hatshepsut, Sappho, Murasaki, Rabi’a, Mar-grete I, Jeanne d’Arc, Elizabeth I, Sacajawea, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Isak Dineseri — yes, or if you liked, the great monsters and she-devils — Have your machine take everything history, archaeology, psychology knew of a person and that person’s world, down to the last least scrap, with probabilities assigned to each uncertainty and conjecture; let it model, with subtle and powerful abstract manipulations, the individual whom this matrix could have produced and who would have changed it in precisely those ways that were known; make it write the program, activate; and meet that human creature. The image of the dy was a mere construct, as easily generated as any other; but while the program ran, the mind existed, sensed, thought, reacted, conscious of what it was but seldom troubled thereby, usually enthusiastic, interested, anxious to disOld myths and nightmares have become real,” Svoboda said once, “while old reality slips away from us. On Earth they now raise the dead, but are themselves only half alive.”

  “That isn’t strictly true, either side of it,” Hanno had replied. “Take my advice from experience and don’t caU up ‘anybody you ever actually knew. They’re never quite right. Often they’re grotesquely wrong.”

  Unless memory failed after centuries. Or unless the past was as uncertain, as flickeringly quantum-variable, as everything else in the universe of physics.

  Seated alone, Hanno winced, partly at recollection of a ;time when he sought advice from the electronic revenant of Cardinal Richelieu, partly at recalling how he and Svoboda ; had been together, then. “I don’t want any single companion,” he said to the machine. “Nor a synthetic personality. Give me ... several ancient explorers. A meeting, a coun-can you do that?”

  “Certainly. It is a nonstandard interaction, requiring creative preparation. One minute, please.” Sixty billion nanoseconds.

  The first of the faces looking out was strong and serene, “I don’t quite know what to say,” Hanno began hesitantly, well-nigh timidly. “You’ve been ... told about the situation here? Well, what do I need? What do you think I should do?”

  “You should have taken more thought for your folk,” answered Fridtjof Nansen. The computer translated between them. “But I understand it is too late to change course again. Be patient.”

  “Endure,” said Ernest Shackleton. Ice gleamed in his beard. “Never surrender.”

  “Think of the others,” Nansen urged. “Yes, you lead, and so you must; but think about how it feels to them.”

  “Share your vision,” said Marc Aurel Stein. “I died gladly because it was where I had wanted to go for sixty years. Help them want.”

  “Ha, why are they sniveling?” roared Peter Preuchen. “My God, what an adventure! Bring me back to see when you get there, lad!”

  “Give me your guidance,” Hanno entreated. “I’ve discovered I’m no Boethius, to console myself with philosophy. Maybe I have made a terrible mistake. Lend me your strength.”

  “You’ll only find strength in yourself, sir,” declared Henry Stanley. “Not in spooks like us.”

  “But you aren’t! You’re made out of what was real—”

  “If something of what we did and were survives to this day, we should be proud, my friends,” said Nansen. “Come, let us put it back into service. Let us try to find good counsel.”

  Willem Barents shivered. “For so strange a voyage, most likely to a lonely death? Commend your soul to God, Hanno. There is nothing else.”

  “No, we owe them more than that,” said Nansen. “They are human. As long as men and women fare outward, they will be human.”

  25

  Macandal sent her glance slowly from one to the next of the six who sat around the table in the saloon with her. “I suppose you’ve guessed why I’ve asked you to come,” she said at length.

  Most of them stayed unstirring. Svoboda grimaced. Wanderer, beside her, laid a hand on her thigh.

  Macandal took a bottle and poured into a glass. The claret gurgled dusky rose; its pungency sweetened the air. She passed the bottle on. Glasses had been set out for everyone. “Let’s have a drink first,” she proposed.

  Patulcius attempted a jest. “Are you taking a leaf from the early Persians? Remember? When they had an important decision to make, they discussed it once while sober and once while drunk.”

  “Not the worst idea ever,” Macandal said. “Better than these modern drugs and neurostims.”

  “If only because wine has tradition behind it,” Yukiko murmured. “It means, it is more than its mere self.”

  “How much tradition is left in the world?” Aliyat asked bitterly.

  “We carry it,” Wanderer said. “We are it.”

  The bottle circulated. Macandal raised her goblet. ‘To the voyage,” she toasted.

  After a moment: “Yes, drink, all of you. What this meeting is about is restoring something good.”

  “If it has not been wholly destroyed,” Tu Shan grated, but he joined the rest in the small, pregnant ceremony.

  “Okay,” Macandal said. “Now listen. Each of you knows I’ve been after him or her, arguing, wheedling, scolding, trying to wear down those walls of anger you’ve built around yourselves. Maybe some haven’t noticed it was in fact each of you. Tonight’s when we bring it out hi the open.”

  Svoboda spoke stiffly. “What is there to talk about? Reconcil
iation with Hanno? We have no breach. Nobody has dreamed of mutiny. It’s impossible. A change of course back to Phaeacia is impossible too; we haven’t the antimatter. We’re making the best of things.”

  “Honey, you know damn well we are not.” Steel toned beneath Macandal’s mildness. “Cold courtesy and mechanical obedience won’t get us through whatever waits ahead. We need our fellowship back.”

  “So you’ve told me, us, over and over.” Wanderer’s voice was raw. “You’re right, of course. But we didn’t break it. He did.”

  Macandal regarded him for a quiet spell. “You’re really hurting, aren’t you?”

  “He was my best friend,” Wanderer said from behind his mask.

  “He still is, Johnnie. It’s you who’ve shut him out.”

  “Well, he—“ Speech trailed off.

  Yukiko nodded. “He has made approaches to you also, then,” she deduced. “To everyone, I’m sure. Tactful, admitting he could be wrong—”

  “He has not groveled,” Tu Shan conceded, “but he has put down his pride.”

  “Not insisting we are the ones mistaken,” Svoboda added, as if unwillingly.

  “We may be, you know,” Yukiko argued- “The choice had to be made, and only he could make it. At first you wanted this way yourself. Are you certain it was not just your own pride that turned you against him?”

  “Why did you change your mind and join us?”

  “For your sakes.”

  Tu Shan sighed. “Yukiko has worked on me,” he told the others. “And Hanno, well, I have not forgotten what he did for us two in the past.”

  “Ah, he has begun to make himself clear to you,” Pa-tulcius observed. “Me too, me too. I still don’t agree with him, but the worst rancor has bled off. Who advised him how to speak with us?”

  “He’s had a long time alone for thinking,” Macandal said.

  Aliyat shuddered. “Too long. It’s been too long.”