by John Brunner
“Oh, I see it so plainly, and I can’t convey it!… Let me make one last attempt. I’ll ask you all to think about rejection.”
Shaw tensed. He said, “That’s strange! It was a word the others used—all of them—and I just realized I never heard it from you before… or Stacy,” he added, as though embarrassed at the mention of her name.
“You can’t mean ‘all,’” Gene corrected in a glacial tone. “Suleyman and Ingrid were recovered dead.”
Shaw met his gaze. “We had the tapes,” he murmured.
“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry; please go on.”
“About rejection? What rejection is there more complete than being forced outside the very universe?”
“Now finally,” said Gene, “you’ve understood.”
The sun set on the implications of his words. Eventually Yiu stirred and sighed. “You had already been rejected, though—and Stacy too. At last I see the import of your comment about your daughter. It isn’t rational but it’s a fact: the only rejection that’s comparable is when a parent dies before or at your birth.”
“Out there,” said Gene, “that doesn’t matter any longer. But the earth your mother and the sun your father—they are the ones to whom you must return, the prodigal.”
“And beg to be forgiven?” whispered Hoy.
“Yes, indeed. And there remains one question you’ve not asked. I think you know what it is. I think you are afraid to put it to me.”
He waited.
At last Shaw stirred, not looking at him. He said, “It could be this. Who were the people that populated your—your—?”
“Fantasies?” Gene offered wryly.
Shaw shook his head. “I have to accept that travel outside the universe makes nonsense of conventional divisions between what’s real and what is not. It’ll be years before we digest the implications of what you’ve told us. I’m asking about—” He had to swallow hard. “I’m asking about the people who seemed real to you in other ages. How could they correspond so perfectly with a past you never had the chance to research, whose traces since the Flood are so scarce and hard to find that none of our archeologists can contradict your view of it? You even invented sailors from the Venetian period to disguise us when we were right there in front of you!”
“I don’t know how to answer.” Gene frowned, deep furrows developing between his eyes. “I can only”—with a sidelong glance at Yiu—“hazard a guess. This island has been a crossroads of the world. I think they may have been… well, forebears.”
“Literally?” Hoy stabbed. “And physically?”
He didn’t look at her. “Past a certain point there’s no way that can matter. All our predecessors are also our ancestors.”
“Three thousand years is far too short a time for that!”
“Of course it is.” Gene bestowed a skeletal smile on her. “But it’s as near, it seems, as natural law permits.”
“You mean you couldn’t find your way back to a closer time?”
“Ah! You’re finally accepting what I say as true!”
She bit her lip, hands writhing in her lap, and said, “You and Stacy were each outside the universe for the equivalent of—”
“Don’t guess; calculate. Or get your computers to do it for you. Our voyages were carefully controlled: we flew in the same ship for the same time, though not together, and by then the tolerances were down to fractions of a microsecond. Yet because we’ve built so fragile a bridge of intellection between the primal state and ships that can traverse the impossible, it took Stacy and me three thousand years of detour via the past before we could reconnect with the continuum of human experience. Or would have done, had Stacy been allowed to bear our child.”
“Why?” Hoy erupted to her feet. “What’s so marvelous about giving birth? Millions of babies are born every year!”
“Because”—he met her gaze levelly—“it’s a miracle every time it happens. It’s the only way we have to communicate between the past and the future. It lifts us out of time to raise a child that will survive us. And, like it or not, the deepest levels of the subconscious mind accept that as a greater truth than any other.”
“But now we can travel faster than light—”
“Another door has opened to the future: yes! Something in us has overcome the limitations of the physical universe, something you and I and all of us possess. Mind? Reason? Intelligence? We have plenty of words for it, but no faintest notion which is aptest. All we can say is that we can do this thing, and when we do it, whatever makes it possible is forced outside all of space and all of time, and has to find a route back to reality for which there are and very likely can be neither maps nor charts. Explaining why may take a million years.”
He concluded in a slow, grave tone, each word bearing its full burden of unprecedented meaning. Under the impact she sank back in her seat, her face pale.
“In that case is there any hope? Shall we in our time be able to send colonists to other stars?”
“Oh, very possibly. But I doubt whether those who survive the trip will long remain human in any sense you or I would recognize. After all, they’ll have to learn a road back to reality along the worldline of a planet which is not our own. What to do about that, of course, is up to you to figure out, not me. But there’s something comforting about it nonetheless—isn’t there?”
Unexpectedly, Yiu gave a smile. “It matches the traditions of those teachers who have always said: we are not as bounded as the universe.”
“That something in us can exceed it?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I’m a proof of that, I guess. But as to what you or I or any of us can do with the first objective evidence for immortality, I’ve no idea. Right now—” Gene drained his glass and glanced toward the porthole.
“Right now it’s dark. I must bury my dead.”
“What?” Hoy stood before him, rocking back and forth on her heels. “You just said we are immortal after all, and now you’re talking about a burial—!”
“What I went through, Stacy went through too. It hasn’t stopped her body being dead, has it? Nor has it changed our nature!”
Of a sudden, she folded her hands and turned away, sobbing. Retaining his composure, he laid his hand consolingly on her shoulder and spoke to her and Shaw both.
“Take care of the child. I’ll come back at dawn. Find me a spade and carry Stacy to the beach.”
“Oh, Gene, surely—!”
The intervention came from Yiu, whom he silenced with a scowl. “My journey isn’t over! One thing remains. I must accept she’s past recall, and so must you. With luck, tomorrow I’ll be as sane as anyone, more so than most. I’ve been on a longer journey than any other of my kind, and it must end as every lifetime journey ends: with the acceptance of death, and a new birth. Do as I say!”
“But,” protested Yiu, “you just said you’re the proof of our immortality!”
“As usual, you didn’t get my point, but I was thinking of her,” countered Gene in a voice as cold as tombstones. He peeled back the cover of the incubator and touched his daughter’s cheek, feather-lightly. It was too much. She woke up fretting and began to wail. A nurse who had been eavesdropping rushed in and scolded him as she caught the baby up to comfort her.
“Gilgamesh,” murmured Shaw.
“What did you say?” Gene rounded on him. “Was it a name? I seem to remember it, but…”
The other hoisted himself to his feet. “Yes, the Roman that you fantasized about—or maybe met. He mentioned Gilgamesh and his boon companion Enkidu. It’s the oldest story in the world. It tells of the king who lost his best friend when the gods sent a plague against his city, so he set out in search of the herb of immortality. Such was his love for Enkidu that when he found it he would not use it himself. But he fell asleep beside a pool, and it was stolen from him by a water snake. Then, when he came home, he was so changed that at first his own people failed to recognize him.
“But when he died,
they wrote his epitaph, and I recall it word for word.”
Solemnly, in the manner of one performing a ritual, he closed his eyes and recited: “ ‘He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labor, and, returning, engraved on a stone the whole story.’”
There was a pause. Even the baby, as though she understood, fell silent in the nurse’s arms.
“Give him the spade,” said Shaw at last. “It’s time he had the chance to be human again.”
EPILOGUE
Hoy and Shaw laid Stacy on the beach, wrapped in a shroud—of natural fiber, which would rot. Gene had insisted.
He waited in the gathering dark until they went away. Then he whirled his spade at the full stretch of his arm and tossed it up to the headland he had selected for her burial, thinking how much higher would have been his cast before the oceans rose.
Gathering her body to him, he struggled up the steep and rocky path. He was not altogether surprised when near the top he sensed a presence at his back. He laid her down at last beside the spot that he had chosen, and looked around.
There were so many of them that he could not count. All were a little faint, a little indistinct, yet now and then he caught a detail as the clouds above parted and revealed the moon: there the glinting of a watch’s crystal; there a military cap badge; there a rusty iron helm…
Also there were other signs: a waft of incense, the echo of a chant.
But mostly and above all there were silent folk in drab plain clothing, whose very bodies knit the land together into flesh and bone.
Not questioning, he plied his spade and dug a pit. He’d chosen well: this was the deepest patch of earth above the rock. His muscles rejoiced in the resistance of it.
But they wearied, and when it came time to lay the body in its grave he was glad of the help of those who carried it. He recognized them: Milo Hamilton, and Leutnant Kreutzer; Osman Effendi, and the captain of the galley; the honorable knight, and the shipmaster from Africa; the angry officer who hated emperors, even the old woman who had sat day-long in case her skill was needed, who hobbled up and spoke a charm as earth was tossed to cover Stacy.
After that, for a while, he was blinded by tears.
Much later, when dawn was lightening the sky, he found himself among a crowd around a fire, which he had no memory of having lit. They were in solemn mood until the sun pierced the clouds; then they passed wine, making no offer to share it with him. As day broke, they doused and scattered the embers and revealed baked meat—just meat and nothing more. They divided it and gave a piece to all.
To all, save him.
Then, with looks of infinite pity, each provided for a journey into somewhere else, they took their leave.
He sat awhile on a cold flat rock, aching but unable to move, until full daylight overtook him. At last he leveled the earth and made his slow way down the path again, back to the shore.
His long, long trip was over. Now he could make clear to those who planned to follow how best they might prepare themselves to take the road around the universe, yet never lose touch with the continuum which was all the life and all the lives of humankind.
Waiting on the beach, he found he still knew how to smile.