by Ben Bova
“But…”
Rising to his feet like a dark thundercloud, Mandabe said, “The machines’ reasoning is correct. If we could return to Earth, four thousand years will have elapsed. We’ll be strangers on our own homeworld.”
“But it would be Earth,” Fogel said wistfully.
“It will be an alien world to us,” Mandabe insisted. “We might as well stay here.”
“What choice do we have?” Ignatiev asked.
Focusing his intense gaze on Ignatiev, Mandabe said, “I say we should make a virtue of necessity. We’re here, we’re going to stay here. Let’s stop whining and start behaving like scientists.” Spreading his thickset arms, he continued, “We have an entire world to study. An alien civilization. A new biosphere. A species of protohuman creatures. Enough work to fill our lifetimes. What are you complaining about?”
Ignatiev remained silent, but he remembered Faraday’s ancient dictum: Science is to make experiments, and to publish them. What good is studying this new world if we’ll never be able to show our work to our colleagues back on Earth? Our studies will be mere busywork. They won’t add to the human race’s store of knowledge. They’ll be destroyed by the death wave, when it arrives.
Still, he said nothing. Mandabe is right, as far as he goes. Give us something to do, some tasks that make us feel as if we’re accomplishing something. Something to keep us busy and take our minds off the death wave.
Mandabe sat down in his chair, satisfied that he’d made his point.
Time for me to make mine, Ignatiev thought.
Slowly, he pushed himself to his feet once more. Every eye in the conference room turned to him.
Ignatiev cleared his throat noisily, then said, “I hereby resign as chairman of this committee. And I nominate as my replacement Dr. Okpara Mandabe.”
The department leaders arrayed around the long table gasped with surprise, turned to glance at one another, and finally rose as a single person and applauded Dr. Mandabe, who sat there unable to suppress a smile that Ignatiev thought was only a hair less than gloating.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Ignatiev returned from the meeting to find their quarters empty. Gita is still working in the exobio lab, he guessed. He prowled about the sitting room, too perturbed to relax. Almost, he felt glad to be rid of the responsibilities of heading the executive committee. Almost. He knew Mandabe was delighted to take on the job. Well, let him have it. He can be the top alpha male now.
Still, Ignatiev felt a tendril of doubt, a nagging worry about this new situation.
Gita arrived home at last, and he quickly grasped her by the wrist and led her to the couch.
Without any preliminaries he blurted, “I’ve quit the committee chairmanship.”
Gita’s face went wide-eyed with shock. “You resigned?”
“I did,” said Ignatiev. “And I nominated Mandabe to replace me.”
“Mandabe?”
“The department heads elected him by acclamation.”
Sitting beside her, he saw that she was just as troubled about his decision as he was.
“Why did you resign?” she asked. “Everyone respects you. Mandabe … he’s not as capable as you.”
“He made sense at the meeting. He calmed everyone’s fears, everyone’s doubts. He’ll be a good leader.”
“Not as good as you.”
“Better. He wants the job. I never did.”
“What made you do it?” she wondered.
“The machines have sent Intrepid away. We’re stuck here.”
“We can’t leave this planet?”
“That’s what they told us.”
He could see the realization of it on her face. “We’re marooned here.”
With a bitter smile, Ignatiev said, “We’ll spend the rest of our lives here.”
“Whether we want to or not.”
“Whether we want to or not,” Ignatiev echoed. “We’d better get accustomed to that.”
Gita smiled too. “I don’t mind being marooned with you, Alex.”
He grinned back at her. “Things could be worse, I suppose.”
Her smile fading, Gita admitted, “I don’t see how.”
“We could have never met each other,” Ignatiev said softly.
Gita flung her arms around his neck. They kissed ardently.
“I love you, Gita,” he whispered.
“And I love you,” she replied. “Wherever in the universe we are, as long as we’re together it’s not so bad.”
Ignatiev laughed. “Faint praise,” he said, then quickly added, “But I love it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The next morning, Ignatiev woke abruptly. Blinking his eyes, he turned and saw Gita beside him, curled in a fetal crouch, sleeping peacefully. For many silent moments he stared at her, watched the soft movement of her breathing, gazed at her beautifully tumbled dark hair. Slowly, quietly, he slipped out of bed and padded to the bathroom.
When he returned he dressed swiftly, silently. He sat as softly as he could on his edge of the bed to pull on his socks. Still, it woke her.
She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and mumbled, “You’re up early.”
Ignatiev smiled at her.
“Gita, dearest, we should get married.”
Her eyes went wide. “Married?”
“Yes. It’s what a man and a woman do when they love each other. When they want to spend the rest of their lives together.”
“We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together, Alex.”
“Then we should get married.”
She sat there on the bed, the bedsheets tangled about her legs, and said nothing.
“You do want to marry me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. But he heard a hesitancy in her voice.
Feeling a pang of alarm, he asked, “There’s a problem?”
“I’m a Moslem.”
“I thought you were from Sri Lanka.”
“I am,” Gita said. “But my family has been Moslem for a dozen generations. More.”
“What of it?” he said.
“We faced discrimination. Subtle, but hurtful. I was the only Moslem in my classes at school.”
Ignatiev smiled at her. “We’re not in Sri Lanka now. You’re among educated people. Two thousand light-years from discrimination.”
She smiled back at him, and the whole room lit up. “I know. You’re right. Still…”
“Still?”
“I always thought that when I married, it would be a Moslem ceremony.”
Without an instant’s hesitation, Ignatiev said, “I’ll see what we can do about that.”
* * *
It wasn’t easy. There were seventy-three Moslems among the crew’s scientists and engineers, but none of them knew anything about Islamic wedding ceremonies. Ignatiev appealed to the machines’ avatar, which had absorbed all of Aida’s memory files, but the humanlike persona found nothing dealing with wedding ceremonies of any religion, merely a standard civil ritual.
After two days of prodding the avatar and every Moslem among them, Ignatiev admitted defeat to Gita.
Sitting together on the couch in their quarters, he confessed, “I’m sorry, dearest, no one seems to know what a Moslem wedding ceremony should be like.”
“Feasting,” Gita said. “Lots of food.”
“That we can do.”
“And a henna party,” she remembered. “The women decorate themselves.”
“But the religious aspect,” Ignatiev said.
Gita replied, “I remember from my childhood that there was always a declaration of faith.”
“A declaration of faith?”
“In Allah.” She hesitated, then added, “You would have to recite it.”
Ignatiev started to say that had no religious faith, he was an atheist. But he looked into Gita’s soulful dark eyes and realized he wanted to please her. Besides, he said to himself, you have a faith. Not a religious one, but a faith in the constancy and beauty of th
e universe. A faith in human ability to grasp it all, sooner or later. A faith in the order and understandability of the cosmos.
He said to Gita, “If you can find the words of the declaration, I will speak them.”
“But I don’t remember it,” she moaned. “Not every word of it. It was all so long ago…”
Ignatiev took her hands in his. Smiling gently, he said, “Then we’ll have to dig the words out of your memory.”
* * *
Karl Zeeman was the only psychiatrist among Intrepid’s medical staff. As he sat with Gita in Zeeman’s small, snug office, Ignatiev thought he didn’t look much like a psychiatrist. Too young. Too athletic-looking. Zeeman was tall, his dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, his face roundish and cheerful.
“Repressed memory, huh?” he asked, from behind his compact little desk.
“Not repressed,” Gita said. “It’s just that it’s an old memory. I was barely a teenager.”
Nodding vigorously, Zeeman said, “All right, all right. We can deal with that. It’s always better if the patient cooperates.”
“I want to remember,” Gita said.
Zeeman got to his feet, but as Gita and Ignatiev started to get up from their chairs, he motioned for them to remain sitting. “Relax; I’m merely going to the cabinet to haul out some equipment.”
He stepped across the tiny room, opened a drawer in the cabinet standing against the wall, and returned to his desk with both hands holding what looked to Ignatiev like children’s gadgetry.
Lowering himself into his swivel chair once more, Zeeman held a pair of earphones in one hand. “Cerebral wave blockers,” he said. “Puts you to sleep.” He held out his other hand, showing a trio of minuscule studs. “Microencephalograph scanners. Pick up deep memories.”
“It’s that simple?” Ignatiev asked.
Zeeman grinned at him. “When it works. If there’s no blockage.”
“I want to remember,” Gita said, sounding almost like a child trying to please her father.
“Very well,” Zeeman said, getting up from his chair again. “Let’s see what we can accomplish.”
He came around the desk and slipped the earphones onto Gita’s head, then stuck the studs across her forehead. “We used to have the devil’s own time trying to get the scanners to make good contact on people with thick heads of hair, like yours,” he muttered. “These forehead attachments work much better.”
Ignatiev nodded. Zeeman returned to his chair and slid open a desk drawer.
“Are you ready?” he asked Gita.
She said, “Ready,” in a near-whisper. Ignatiev felt his pulse thumping in his ears. Gita looked just the tiniest bit tense, but she turned to Ignatiev and smiled at him.
Zeeman said softly, “You’re falling asleep. Deeply asleep.”
Gita’s eyes closed and her head slumped to her chest.
Zeeman looked down at his open drawer. Checking readouts, Ignatiev assumed.
“Very good,” the psychiatrist murmured. Gradually he took Gita back to her teen years, slowly zeroing in on a wedding ceremony she had attended.
After several minutes, he asked Gita, “And what did the bridegroom answer?”
Gita replied hesitantly, “La … illaha illaha Mohamedur … rasulilah…”
Zeeman broke into a broad grin. “That’s it!” he said, rubbing his hands together briskly. “You can wake up now.”
Gita stirred and opened her eyes.
Zeeman played back the recording of her voice. “Is that what you wanted?”
Her face tense with strain, she replied, “I don’t know. I think so. It’s close, but I’m not sure it’s the entire declaration.”
“It will have to do,” said Ignatiev.
“Yes,” said Gita, smiling at him. “It’s the intent that counts. Allah doesn’t expect us to do more than we can.”
* * *
“La illaha illaha Mohamedur rasulilah,” said Ignatiev as he stared into Gita’s warm, dark eyes. The two of them were in the auditorium that the machines had added to their village, standing before a makeshift altar, holding hands.
Mandabe—who had insisted on performing the marriage ceremony—smiled broadly as he went through the remaining few moments of the ritual. Finally he said, “I pronounce you husband and wife.” To Ignatiev he added, “You may kiss the bride.”
Practically every man and woman of the Intrepid’s complement was crowded around Mandabe and the newlywed couple. They all applauded lustily.
The celebration roared on through the night. Feasting and toasts and laughter. Gita kissed almost every man there, and embraced the women.
At last she and Ignatiev got to their quarters, slightly drunk and giggling.
But when they slipped into bed Ignatiev wrapped his arms around her and whispered, “You’re the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen.”
In the darkness Gita replied, “And you are the handsomest of husbands.”
He sighed happily.
Gita asked, “Alex, does it really make a difference to you?”
“Yes,” he answered firmly.
“Why?”
“Because we have declared that we are united, now and forever. Declared it for everyone to know.”
“Until we are parted by death.”
“Maybe beyond that,” Ignatiev said, surprising himself. “Maybe for eternity, beyond death itself.”
He could sense her smile. “Beyond eternity.”
Ignatiev remembered a line from an old novel, “Yes, wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
With a strange sense of contentment, Ignatiev returned to his life’s work, astronomy. Let Mandabe be the alpha male, he told himself—more than once—I’m free now to study the stars.
But he quickly found that without the artificial intelligence system he was reduced to a nearly blind beggar groping his way through the star-flecked darkness of space. Aida, he mourned. Aida is housed aboard Intrepid, and Intrepid is gone.
He could ask the avatar for the machines’ astronomical records, which included Aida’s files, but for some reason he hesitated to do so. Pride? he asked himself. Yes. He hated the thought of being a beggar to these machines. Hated the idea that they were so far ahead of him. Pride. So be it.
He was sitting in his tiny, windowless study next to the bedroom, surrounded by wall screens that showed glowing clouds of stars. They beckoned to him, but he was unable to do more than gape helplessly at them. All his records, his observations, all the discoveries made by generations of astronomers were locked away in Aida’s memory. All gone now.
Sternly, he told himself that this was all that Galileo saw. Newton, Shapley, Leavitt, even Hawking and Ikamura had little more than this to work with.
But it did no good. More than three centuries of astronomical observations, hundreds of years of spectroscopic studies, all the spaceborne telescopes and instruments that had probed to the limits of the expanding galaxies—all were irretrievably lost to him. He sank his head in his arms, despairing. I might as well be a Stone Age savage; everything we’ve learned over the generations is lost.
“Not lost,” said the serene voice of the avatar.
Ignatiev looked up, and there was the machines’ envoy, untroubled as usual. Instead of the military-style uniform that Ignatiev had grown accustomed to, however, it was wearing a softly flowing floor-length robe, midnight blue.
Trying to keep the anguish out of his voice, Ignatiev asked, “What do you mean?”
“We have absorbed the complete memory of your artificial intelligence system,” said the avatar. “It is rather primitive, of course, but all the information it holds is now safely stored in our memory.”
“I know,” Ignatiev replied. “You have all of Aida’s files.”
“So why haven’t you asked us to show them to you?” the avatar asked, almost accusingly.
Ignatiev hesitated. At last he admitted, “I didn’t want to become dependent on you.
I didn’t want to be beholden to you.”
“Human emotions,” chided the avatar. “The sin of pride, as you say in your ancient texts.”
Ignatiev nodded gloomily.
“Alexander Alexandrovich,” the avatar said sternly, “are you going to allow pride to destroy your astronomical research?”
“That would be foolish, wouldn’t it?” Ignatiev admitted.
“So?”
Gritting his teeth, Ignatiev asked, “Can I … may I access your files?”
“Certainly,” the avatar repeated, with a faint smile. “You can link to the system just as you did earlier. Dr. Mandabe and the others of your staff have been using the system for several days now.”
“And none of them mentioned it to me,” Ignatiev complained.
The avatar said, “You have made yourself something of a recluse. They did not want to disturb you.”
Ignatiev nodded, thinking, They respect me too much. He almost smiled at the double meaning of too much.
Instead, he called out, “Aida!”
And the familiar voice of the AI system responded, “How may I help you, Professor?”
A profound wave of relief swept through Ignatiev. Looking back at the avatar, he said, “Thank you! Thank you so much. You’ll never know how lost—”
But he stopped himself. Of course it knows. If it had any emotions at all it would be smirking at me now.
Instead, the avatar asked, “Your AI system’s memory now includes the results of our own studies.” It paused a heartbeat, then asked, “Is there anything else you require?”
Bring back our starship, Ignatiev immediately thought. But he kept the desire unspoken. Doesn’t matter, he told himself. The machines know what I’m thinking.
As coolly as ever, the avatar said, “Very well. We will leave you to your studies.”
And it disappeared, like a light snapped off.
* * *
The machines’ understanding of the heavens was more than a little humbling, Ignatiev saw. He had spent decades studying the pulsars, those collapsed ultradense cores of exploded stars. The machines had solved all the riddles that Ignatiev had tried so hard to unravel. They make my work look like the scribblings of an idiot child, he grumbled inwardly.