To Outlive Eternity

by Poul Anderson

  "We killed its brain, then," Alexandra Vukovic said. "As I hoped. I know we did not simply kill its engines. I took care not to strike that far aft. So the warhead is now disarmed. Well and good, we can approach."

  She spoke the French that was the common language of the expedition with a strong Serbian accent, but fluently. Her wiry frame relaxed easy as a cat in the chair, and no further expression showed on her scarred face. She's tough, Sigird thought, not for the first time. Had to be, I suppose, to fight the Russians in the "Balkan incident" of 1980 as she did. But when the whole Earth has died . . . no, it isn't human to stay that cool!

  Then she noticed how raggedly Alexandra inhaled her cigaret, and how fingernails had drawn blood from the gunner's palm.

  Captain Edith Poussin's voice rapped over the intercom: "Oh, no, you don't, my dears. We aren't coming near that thing. It may be booby trapped."

  "But Madame!" Sigrid Holmen sat straight in astonishment. "You agreed—when we decided there was a chance to capture it for examination—I mean, what's the use, if now we won't take a look?"

  "We will," said Captain Poussin. "Yes, indeed. And perhaps find out whose it is, no?" Sigrid envisaged her in the central control chamber, plump, gray, reminding one more of some Dordogne housewife than an anthropologist and xenologist with an astronautical degree from the University of Oao on Unya. But her tone was like winter, and suddenly the pilot remembered those grandmothers who had sat knitting beneath the guillotine.

  "Let us not be fools," Edith Poussin continued. "Two missiles we destroyed, one we have disabled; but does that not argue they orbit in trios? I think we can expect more to come along at any moment, as they happen within detection range of us. Fortunately, we have not such a great heavy ship as the Americans or Russians do. However, speed and maneuverability will not save us from a mass onslaught. No, our first duty is to escape." Clipped: "I want three volunteers to make us fast to that missile and examine it while we proceed toward the nearest interference fringe. Respectively a navigation officer, weapons expert, and electronician."

  Sigrid rose. She was a tall young Swede, eyes blue and Italian-cut hair yellow, her features regular without being exceptional but her form handsomer than most. On that account she chose to wear less clothing than most of the Europa's hundred women. But vanity had departed with Earth and hope. She was only conscious of an adrenalin tingle as she said, "That's us right here."

  "Aye," said Alexandra. Katrina Tenbroek shook her head. "No," she stammered. "Please."

  "Are you afraid?" scoffed the Yugoslav.

  "None of that, Vukovic," the captain's voice interjected. "Apologize at once."

  "Afraid?" Katrina shook her head. "What is there to be afraid of, after today? B—b—but I have to cry . . . for a while. . . . I'm sorry."

  Alexandra stared at the deck. The scar on her cheek stood lividly forth. "I'm sorry too," she mumbled. "It is only that I don't dare cry." She turned on her heel.

  "Wait!" Sigrid was surprised to hear herself call. "Wait till we're relieved."

  Alexandra stopped. "Of course. Stupid of me. I—oh—" She smashed the butt of her cigaret and took another. Sigrid almost reminded her that there would be no more tobacco when the ship's supply was gone, not ever again, but checked the words in time.

  Father, she thought. Mother. Nils. Olaf. Stockholm Castle, and sailboats among the islands, and that funny friendly little man in Lapland the year we took our vacation there. The whole Earth—I should not have studied space piloting. I should not have gone on practice cruises. That was time I could have spent with them. I should not have taken this berth. I sold my right to die with them. Oh, no, no, no, I am having a nightmare, I am insane, this cannot be. Or else God himself has gone senile and crazy. Why is the sun still shining? How does it dare?

  Her relief, Herta Eisner, entered with Yael Blum and Marina Alberghetti. All three looked unnaturally relaxed. Sigrid knew why when the German girl extended a box of pills.

  "No," Sigrid said. "I don't want to hide behind any damned chemistry."

  "Take that tranquilizer," Captain Poussin called. "Everyone. That's an order. We can't afford emotions yet."

  Sigrid gulped and obeyed. As she and Alexandra proceeded down the starboard corridor, she felt the drug take hold: an inward numbness, but a tautening and swiftening of the logical mind, so that ideas fairly flew across the surface. Red-haired Engineer Gertrud Hedtke of Switzerland met them at the suit locker. She pushed a paragrav barrow loaded with the tools and coiled cable they would need. Wordless, they helped each other into their spacesuits and went out the airlock.

  Space gloomed and glittered around them. The sun was a fire too fierce to look at, the Milky Way an infinitely cold cataract, stars and stars filled the sky—through which, in free fall, they went endlessly tumbling. Away from the ship's background sounds, silence pressed inward till one's own breath became a noise like an elemental force. The noise of the quern Grotte, Sigrid thought remotely, which the giantesses Fenja and Menja turn beneath the sea, which grinds forth salt and cattle and treasure, broad lands and rich harvests and springtime dawns; which grinds forth war, bloody spears, death and burning and Fimbul Winter.

  She turned her back on Grotte, scornfully, and gave her attention to the job.

  The Europa, a slim tapered cylinder, as beautiful to see as she was to handle, had matched velocities with the missile at some four kilometers' remove. That should be safe, even if the hydrogen warhead did go off; empty space won't transmit concussion, and at that distance the screens could ward off radiant energy sufficiently well. Flitting about on paragrav units, the girls attached twin cables to the king-brace amidships and paid them out on their way to the prize. Modern galactic technology was marvelous, thought Sigrid; these metal cords which could withstand fifty thousand tons of pull were no thicker than her little finger and massed no more than a hundred kilos per kilometer. But I'd rather weave a bast rope with bleeding hands, to use on a green Earth, it cried within her.

  The drug suppressed the wish. She approached the missile with no fear of an explosion. Her death would be meaningless, even welcome, when Earth's children and men were dead. Quickly she helped patch the cables on, then she and Alexandra left Gertrud to make a proper weld while they both ducked into a hole burned through the shell.

  Darkness inside was total. As Sigrid groped for the flash button on her wrist, Captain Poussin's voice sounded in her helmet receiver: "Other objects detected approaching. We can outrun them at one-point-five gravities, I think. Stand by." She braced herself against the surge of weight.

  Undiffused, the flashbeams were puddles of illumination which picked crowded enigmatic machinery out of night. Sigrid squirmed after Alexandra until they reached a central passageway big enough to stand in. The missile was being towed with its main axis transverse to the acceleration, so that they could walk down its length.

  Gauges and switches threw back the light from a tangle of wires. A faceless troll shape in her armor, Alexandra asked low, "Do you recognize any of this?"

  "Kandemirian?" Sigrid hesitated. "I think so. I don't know their languages or . . . or anything . . . but once I saw their principal alphabet in a dictionary. I believe the letters and numbers looked like this." One clumsy gauntlet pointed to a meter dial.

  "Give me some light and I'll photograph a sample. The Old Lady will know." Alexandra unslung the camera from her waist. "But I can tell you for certain, this missile is Kandemirian built. They taught us what little was known about outworld military equipment, at the officers' academy in Belgrade. I've seen pictures of just this type. The corridor we're in is for workmen to move around, making repairs, and for technicians to go to program the brain. Those vermin," she added colorlessly.

  "Kandemir. The nomad planet. But why would they—"

  "Imperialists. They've already overrun a dozen worlds."

  "But that's hundreds of light-years from here!"

  "We've been gone for more than two years, Sigrid. Much could have
happened." Alexandra laughed; the sound echoed in her helmet. "Much did happen. Come, let's look at the brain. That'll be toward the bow."

  At the end of the passage they found the controls, what the thermite shells had left of them. Sigrid swung her light around, searching for any trace of—of what? A scrawl on the bulkhead caught her eye.

  She leaned closer. "What's this?" she asked. "See here. Something scribbled in some kind of grease pencil."

  "Notes to refer to, as the writer worked at programming the brain," Alexandra guessed. "Ummm . . . sacre bleu, I swear there are two distinct symbologies. Perhaps one is a non-Kandemirian alphabet? I'll photograph them for Madame." She busied herself. Sigrid gazed into blackness.

  Gertrud came fumbling and clumping along. "Finish quickly, please," she said. "I just got a message from the ship. Still more missiles are on their way. We shall have to cast loose the tow and go at high acceleration to escape them."

  "Well, I think we've gotten everything from this beast we need," Alexandra said.

  Sigrid followed the others numbly. She did not begin to come to herself until they were back in the Europa.

  The ship throbbed with gathering speed, outward bound, soon to go superlight and return to the stars. Earth's corpse and the hounds that guarded it receded sternward. As their tranquilizers wore off, most of the crew wept. Hysterics had been forestalled; they simply wept in quiet hopelessness.

  After some hours, Captain Poussin summoned the missile party to her cabin. Walking down the corridor, Sigrid felt her eyes hot and puffed. But I am over the worst, she decided. I will mourn you forever, Earth, Father and Mother, but I am no longer willing to die. For while we live, there is the hope of revenge; and infinitely more, the hope of homes and children on some new Earth where you shall never be forgotten.

  The captain's cabin was a small, comfortable, book-lined room. She sat beneath pictures of her husband, many years dead, and her sons and grandsons who must now also be dead. Her face showed little sign of tears and she had set forth a bottle of good wine. "Come in, do," she said. "Be seated. Let's discuss our situation." But when she poured the wine, she spilled some on the tablecloth.

  "Has the captain examined the pictures we took?" Alexandra began.

  Edith Poussin nodded. Her mouth grew tight. "Unquestionably that was a Kandemirian missile," she stated. "But one thing puzzles me. Those symbols written on the bulkhead near the pilot computer." As if to keep from looking at the pictures above her, she grabbed a sheet of paper. "Here, let me reproduce the lines. I won't copy them exactly. You'd have too much trouble distinguishing signs all of which are new to you. I'll substitute letters of our own alphabet. For this wiggly thing in the middle of most of the lines, I'll use a colon. Now see—" She wrote rapidly.

  A B C D E F G H I J K AL

  M N O P Q MR

  BA : NQ

  ABIJ : MOQMP

  JEHC : NMQPPO

  She continued similarly until everything had been transferred, then threw her penstyl down. "There! Can you make anything of that?"

  "No," said Alexandra. "But weren't some of those symbols actually Kandemirian numbers?"

  "Yes. I've represented those by the letters A through L. The others I've rendered as M through R. I don't know what signs they are, what language or—Anyhow, you'll notice that they are always separated from the Kandemirian numerals."

  "I think," Sigrid ventured, "this must be a conversion table."

  "That's obvious, I would say," the captain agreed. "But conversion into what? And why?" She paused. "And who?"

  Alexandra struck a fist on her knee. "Let us not play games, Madame. The Kandemirian imperialists have subjugated many different language groups on a dozen or more planets. This must have been a notation made by some workman belonging to an enslaved race."

  "May have been," Edith Poussin corrected. "We don't know. We dare not leap to conclusions. Especially when we have been out of touch with local events for more than two years."

  Two years, Sigrid thought. Two magnificent years. Not just the glory of the galaxy, new suns, new folk, new knowledge as the Europa circumnavigated the great Catherine's wheel of stars, though that was enough splendor for a lifetime. But the final proof to a continent still skeptical of international cooperation and complete sexual equality, that many nations together could do this thing and that it could be done by women.

  The years were bitter in her mouth.

  She squared her shoulders. "What does Madame plan to do?" she asked.

  The captain sipped for a while without answer. "I am holding private conferences like this with the most sensible officers," she admitted. "I am open to suggestions."

  "Let me, then, propose we go to . . . Monwaing, or one of its colonies," Alexandra said. "We can find out there what happened. And they will help us."

  Gertrud shuddered. "If they don't cut our throats," she said. "Are you so sure they did not do this? Yes, yes, those traders and teachers who lived on Earth for years at a time, they were polite and gentle, yes. But they were not human!"

  "In any event," Edith Poussin said bleakly, "no planet acts as a whole. The kindliest ordinary citizens might have fiends for leaders." She frowned at her wine. "I wish we had followed the American and British example, and taken a nonhuman pilot along, even though we were bound for regions equally strange to everyone in this cluster. We might have gotten a little insight—No, I feel myself it is too risky to seek out anyone who might have had any interest, one way or another, in Earth's fate."

  "What do we risk?" Alexandra murmured.

  Sigrid raised her head. "There were other ships from Earth. They may still be out there."

  "If the missiles haven't gotten them," Gertrud said. She snatched her glass and drank deeply.

  "The all-male European expedition can't have gotten home," Sigrid declared. "They planned on at least three years in the Magellanic Clouds. No one knows where the Russians went, or the Chinese. And the Chinese crew included both sexes. And the Russians might have completed their own female ship and gotten her into space before—Maybe several other countries launched ships too. They were talking of it when we left. They were going to purchase ships, at least, now that they had the financial means." She clenched her jaw. "We'll meet someone again, someday."

  "How?" Captain Poussin raised her brows. "The difficulties . . . well, I've threshed those out with the first and second mates already. There is no interstellar radio. If we go outside the local civilization-cluster, there is hardly any interstellar travel. How can two or three or a dozen dustmotes of ships, blundering blind in the galaxy, come upon each other before we die of old age?"

  Sigrid stared at the deck, crossed and uncrossed her long legs, sent a warmth of wine down her throat and listened to silence. There must be an answer, she told herself desperately. Her father, the shrewd and gentle ship's chandler who became a rich man by his own efforts, had taught her to believe there was little men couldn't do if they really wanted to. And women, he had added with his big laugh which she would not hear again. When a woman set out to be an irresistible force, he said, any immovable objects in the neighborhood had better get out of the way.

  "We don't want to cower on some empty planet where no one will ever come," Alexandra declared. "We should go to a civilization. Our skills will be useful; we can earn our keep."

  Sigrid nodded, recalling cities and ships where folk had been mightily impressed. Not that humans were so outstanding in themselves, but they carried the arts of their own cluster, which were not identical with those of other places. A blue-faced reptile had given her an energy gun in exchange for one of her paintings; she had delighted a six-limbed shipyard master by explaining to him certain refinements in the pilot board which a British engineer had added to the Monwaingi design. And this was in spite of their having picked up only a few words of each other's languages, in the brief time the Europa stayed. Surely a hundred highly skilled Terrestrials could make themselves valuable somewhere.

  "To another
civilization-cluster, then," Gertrud said, almost eagerly. "That will be safest. No one there will have any interest in . . . in hurting us. We will come as total strangers."

  "I believe so," the captain said. "You echo my own thoughts. However, the problem remains, if we go that far afield, how shall we inform any other surviving humans of our whereabouts? Of our existence, even?"

  It was as if her father's laugh sounded in Sigrid's head. She sprang to her feet. Her glass tipped and crashed to the deck. No one noticed. "I have an idea, Madame!"

  V

  In this world a man must be either anvil or hammer.

  —Longfellow

  The hall was built with massive dark timbers, the beam ends chiseled into the gaping heads of sea monsters. Exquisitely carved screens from a former era emphasized rather than hid that brutal vigor which the single long room embodied. Fluorescent globes threw their light off polished cups, shields, crowns, guns, booty from a dozen planets, and off the bronze wall plaques that displayed the emblems of Vorlak's warlords. At one end of the hall, flames roared and whirled up the chimney. The statue of the Overmaster at the other end was in shadow.