I am lost, Mahala thought as she surrendered to Ragnar’s vision, a creation that he had kept from her until he was prepared to show it to all of their comrades. The universe she had known would be gone, no more than a bright beacon of light; in the time that it took her to raise her hand, months would pass outside the Seeker. The emotional impact of that realization filled her with awe and with terror.
We had suspected that Ragnar’s starscape might have an adverse effect on some members of the Seeker’s human community. Several thousand potential voyagers were so deeply moved, and so emotionally wrought after their experience, that they were impelled to return to Earth or to their former Habitats. Reports of increasing social disruption on Earth and of the greater involvement of the Habitat-dwellers in events on Venus, with the Cytherians potentially endangered by Earth’s political and social instability, did not deter these comrades from leaving the Seeker. Linking themselves to Earth’s net of cyberminds or to the Habber cyberminds who were now more closely tied to their Earthly cybernetic brethren, and doing what they could to ward off widespread disorder, seemed preferable to enduring the extreme displacements of interstellar travel.
Ragnar, inspired by his recently acquired knowledge, had sought only to share his vision of what he might see outside the Seeker as it raced through the universe toward the alien calling to us—the blue-shifted giant stars, the visible blue of ultraviolet radiation distorting the positions and shapes and brightness of other stars, the red of the stars receding from us, the black cone forming at the back of the Seeker as its rel-ativistic speed increased. That his starscape had impelled some of his fellows to abandon the Seeker was, he admitted to Mahala later, somewhat gratifying to him; he could bear almost any reaction to his creations except indifference.
That his starscape also served to weed out more people who might prove unsuited for our voyage also served our purposes.
The Seeker, powered by our matter-antimatter drive, left its orbit around the sun to embark on the first stage of our journey in the year 672 of the Nomarchies of Earth. Our community of spacefarers was composed by then of nearly five hundred thousand human beings, with as many Links to the voyaging Habitat’s net of cyberminds.
“There should have been more people aboard,” Benzi often said. He spent much of his time on the bridge, the vast open space of consoles and platforms that housed our navigational systems, surrounded on all sides by walls of holo screens for sensor displays of what lay outside the Seeker. “I knew that many would turn back, that most people wouldn’t want even to consider joining us, but I thought there would be more.”
Mahala understood what he meant. The dream of deep space exploration had lived inside Benzi for so long that he still found it hard to believe that so few members of his species shared its realization with him.
Mahala was approaching the fortieth year of her existence, a fact that struck her as having little relevance to her present life. Her emotional ties to Ragnar were still strong, even though they shared fewer moments with each other in such pursuits as talking and lovemaking and exploring yet another part of the landscape in the Seeker’s Heart. They had moved to shared quarters in the level nearest the Heart; they were now over the novelty of being able to furnish their rooms with almost any objects our synthesizers could fashion for them. The clutter of their previous rooms had been replaced by cushions, a bed, a low table holding a few of Rag-nar’s carvings, and a wall screen that usually displayed either a landscape of a section of the Seeker’s Heart or one of Ragnar’s sketches.
Occasionally, Mahala called up a scene from one of the Seeker’s sensors for her wall screen. She did not care to gaze at the red pinprick that was Mars as the Seeker passed that planet’s orbit, or at giant Jupiter, or at cold bluish Neptune; that was looking back. Her screen held images of a field of stars slowly being compressed into a large cluster, of stars changing color as the Seeker’s velocity increased.
We came to the Oort Cloud, that halo of thinly scattered comets and small bodies that surrounded the solar system. We left that last region of familiar space behind as our vacuum drive cut in, gradually increasing our velocity to ninety-eight percent of light speed. Ninety years would pass for us in relativistic, subjective time aboard the Seeker by the time we reached our destination, but six hundred years would have passed by then for those left behind in the solar system. This fact, well known to all aboard, was beginning to impress itself upon the emotions of our human companions.
Mahala was often on the bridge with Benzi and Suleiman Khan to observe the familiar visual universe vanish around us, to be displaced by the ever-increasing deep black cone astern and the Doppler-shifted stars, altering in size and color, toward which the Seeker was rushing. The bridge, large enough to hold over a thousand people, was often empty except for a few pilots, five trained astrophysicists and a few others who had made themselves into students of that discipline, and a small group of the curious. I knew through the net that even though any of our human comrades could have been watching on wall screens elsewhere or could have called up a holo display, few of them were actually doing so.
They did not want to view those distortions of space. Perhaps many of them were like Ragnar in preferring to undergo this passage in solitude while musing on their memories of a past that was retreating ever more rapidly from them.
Mahala had decided to view the passage, to come to the bridge to watch, but during one visit, as the forward field of stars grew more compressed on the screen, she turned away and left the bridge without speaking. The time and space that she had known now existed for her only here, in this place, as the rest of the universe fled from the Seeker.
She felt a hand on her arm; Suleiman had caught up with her. “I thought I had prepared myself for this,” the older man told her as he slipped his arm through hers.
She probed the channels; his Link was closed. “Are you sorry that you stayed aboard?” she asked.
“No. I wouldn’t have left. It’s not that I have any regrets. It’s just that I am now realizing how irrevocable my decision is and exactly what I’ve lost.”
Suleiman, with almost seven decades of life behind him, must have said many farewells before leaving Venus. He would have even more memories to haunt him than she did. She wondered whether he would choose to give some of them up to be kept by the Seeker’s cyberminds, or if he would begin to live inside them, as others were already beginning to do.
Mahala had taken to sharing her meals often with Akilah Ching and Kyril Anders. Sometimes they came to the rooms she shared with Ragnar; at other times, she and Ragnar met them in one of the gardens in the Seeker’s Heart.
On one occasion, as the Heart’s bands of light were fading into an soft evening glow, the four of them met in a small three-sided dwelling surrounded by trees. As Mahala and Ragnar laid out food and drink they had brought there from a dispensary on the low table they had found in the dwelling, Mahala was suddenly struck by memories of dinners in her grandmother’s house. The presence of Akilah and Kyril, who had grown up in Risa’s household, made the memories sting even more.
She kept her Link closed, not wanting to know from us exactly how much time had passed outside the Seeker, how much our subjective time was slowing in relation to the rest of the universe.
“What is it, Mahala?” Akilah asked as she leaned forward.
Mahala shook her head.
“You’re remembering,” Ragnar said.
“I’ve been remembering, too,” Kyril said. “It comes upon me suddenly. I’ve had moments when everything around me vanishes and I find myself back in Oberg, at some place or in some situation from my past, and it all seems as real as if I were there. I don’t need my Link to make it seem entirely authentic, either.” His brown eyes were solemn as he gazed across the table at Mahala. “In fact, I often have to use my Link to bring me back to the present.”
“The present.” Akilah shook her head, as if finding something absurd in those words.
The Se
eker had by then reached a point where we could no longer accurately measure our distance from Earth or from our destination, where the light-years seemed to be shrinking around us, the universe seemingly growing smaller than it had. been.
A numbness had been creeping into Mahala for some time now, as her mind resisted a complete understanding of what she had done. The Seeker had become familiar; she clung to that familiarity.
In that, she was like the vast majority of the human beings aboard the Seeker. They had come here to be explorers, to voyage into the unknown. Now they were looking into their own thoughts as their minds fell in on themselves and grew as compressed as the field of stars on the bridge screens.
The time had come for our human voyagers to sleep, to retreat to the chambers where they would be suspended, yet many resisted that sleep. Mahala was one of those who clung to consciousness. She told herself that as a physician, she was needed to counsel others who held back from suspended animation, in order to reassure them and to see that they were properly prepared for their decades-long sleep. But there were other reasons guiding her actions, reasons she only intermittently acknowledged consciously, reasons which haunted the minds of many of the spacefarers.
She would awake from her sleep when we were still five years from our destination, when our human community would come to life again, reestablishing their connections to one another and to us, assimilating whatever data we had gathered and preparing themselves for contact with the alien. And she would know, when she awoke, that well over five hundred years had passed in the solar system, that everyone she had known was irretrievably lost to her.
Five years after our departure from the solar system, Mahala went with Ragnar to one of the chambers that held our sleepers. Only a few thousand of our people were still awake by then; the rest lay in rows on sleeper platforms, visible through the transparent carapaces that enclosed them. Mahala glanced at their unmoving faces, closed eyes, the arms folded over their chests or resting at their sides, and thought of death.
“I’ll be in the sleeper next to yours,” Ragnar said. “When you wake, I’ll be the first person you see.”
She held on to him for a moment, then forced herself to lift the carapace of the empty sleeper. She stretched out quickly and closed her eyes as the carapace closed over her.
This was how she recalled the experience later, when the sleeper opened and she was able to turn her head and see Ragnar on the platform next to hers, stretching his arms as he struggled into wakefulness: She remembered only closing her eyes and then waking to find herself stiff and disoriented and breathing air that seemed much too cold and dry until she remembered where she was. Yet she also had memories of being on the bridge, of gazing into a bright cluster of stars that was all she could see of the heavens, of feeling herself growing larger and more vast as the universe contracted around her.
Perhaps, she told herself later, after Ragnar had kissed her awake and she had helped to rouse others from their rest, it was only a phantom memory. But when she was with other people once more, listening to their recollections of their time in suspended animation, she began to see that specific memory as part of a dream all of them had shared.
It was also our dream, for we thought of our passage at relativistic speed as a dream, and perhaps some of that dream had filtered through their Links to the sleepers. Our space-time, the only reality that existed for us, insisted on confirming that the remaining distance to our destination had shrunk from four hundred to sixty light-years, that time was shortening beyond our comprehension. We could no longer measure the universe outside the Seeker. Our net of mentalities had devised a defense to protect our intellectual functions, one gained from the workings of human minds; we perceived our voyage as a dream.
Our people had been revived, but many could not bring themselves to awaken fully to the reality around them. We felt many of them retreating again, withdrawing from us and from the harder edges of our thoughts.
Mahala had always considered herself an empiricist. In this she knew, from the records and stories of her predecessors, that she resembled her great-grandfather, Liang Chen, who had concerned himself with what he could see and know. What others thought of as the spiritual realm had been of no interest to Chen. That the world had become what the Muslims around him called the Dar al-Islam, the Abode of Islam, that Islam had prevailed on Earth and had, as a result, later shown an increased tolerance for those who had not yet submitted to that faith, was a fact that he accepted without much thought. Whether or not the laws he lived under were derived from Islam or some other legal code was a matter of indifference to him, as long as such laws were applied fairly to all.
That was one part of Mahala’s heritage, but there was also the example of her great-grandmother, Iris Angharads. Iris’s public record noted that she had been brought up in Lincoln as a Marian Catholic and that her memorial service on Island Two had been conducted by a priest, but Mahala knew little about Iris’s inner state of mind. From what she had seen of Iris’s private records, she suspected that her great-grandmother had harbored much skepticism, but there was nothing that hinted at what she might have believed toward the end of her life.
There was also her grandfather Malik, who might have questioned some tenets of his Islamic faith, but whose scholarly writings bore the stamp of his culture and its religious beliefs. And then there were her parents, who had given themselves over to the destructive cultish fanaticism of Ishtar.
Mahala had never thought much about such matters. A worthwhile human life, she had always felt, had to be lived within the confines of what was known and what was theoretically probable, with doubt being one of a thinking person’s most important intellectual tools. But it was becoming increasingly obvious that some of the others who lived in the Seeker were turning to older certainties.
Mahala was in the Seeker’s Heart, following a stone path near a riverbank, when she heard the sound of the call to afternoon prayer. She halted, listened for a while, then moved toward the sound. In the levels of rooms and corridors that surrounded the Heart, people had occasionally gathered in groups to practice whatever rites had become habitual to them, but Mahala had believed such practices had been growing less common even before the period of suspended animation. Now she felt that there were aspects of life among her fellow spacefarers that had been invisible to her, perhaps because she assigned so little importance to them herself and had chosen to ignore them.
The voice of the muezzin fell silent. She rounded a bend in the river and came to a clearing. A slender spire made of ivory-colored stone stood at the corner of a small roofless structure of four walls. The spire, she realized, was meant to be a minaret; she had come to a mosque.
Three pairs of slippers sat outside the wall facing her. She sat down under the nearest trees and waited. At last the door to the tiny mosque opened; two men in headdresses and long robes came outside, followed by Suleiman Khan in a tunic and loose trousers. His two companions put on their slippers and left the clearing without acknowledging Mahala’s presence. Suleiman donned his shoes, sat down, then beckoned to her.
She came toward him and seated herself. He said, “I have been praying.”
“So I noticed.”
“The last time that I prayed with any sincerity, may God forgive me, was as a very young man, before I went to live in Turing, before—” He was silent for a while. “I have been praying that those I once knew are at peace, that God now cradles them.”
He had reminded her of the probability, the certainty, that everyone they had once known on Venus was dead. Mahala had kept that thought submerged, refusing to allow it to swim up into her conscious mind. She had seized on other possibilities: that human life spans had become so indefinitely prolonged that they amounted to a kind of physical immortality; that human mental patterns might live on in cybernetic intelligences that were far more subtle and developed than those who made up the network of the Seeker; that individual selves that she would recognize as Risa, Sef,
Dyami, Chike, and Solveig were still somehow alive. To some, her hope would seem as irrational—or as much of a leap of faith—as Suleiman’s hope that those he had cared for lived on in the paradise God had promised to all believers and good people.
“I do not know what I have been for much of my life,” Suleiman continued. “Many, I am sure, would have called me an infidel, or a backslider at best, but God—may his name be praised—is all-forgiving. I’ve committed my share of sins. Men died at my hands during the Cytherian Revolt, when those of us imprisoned in Turing finally had our revenge on our tormentors, but I did not believe that any just God would punish me for that. And then for a long while it seemed that I had lost what little faith I had possessed in
God and his truth, but maybe that was only a loss of faith in men.” He gazed at her steadily with his dark eyes. “The believers, and those who emigrate and struggle in God’s way— those have hopes of God’s compassion, and God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”
He had said that last phrase in Arabic, but Mahala understood enough Arabic to grasp the words, while I informed her through her Link that they were from a sura of the Koran.
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