experience yonder world-ocean, he would watch reconstructions and replays of what the robot had known through robotic senses, unless he ordered the data downloaded into his brain; and that would not be the exploration, but merely the borrowed memory of a machine.
People on Earth had wondered why he went to so much trouble and, yes, risk, for so small and scientifically valueless an accomplishment. He had refrained from arguing, simply replied that he wanted to do this. Having arranged suitable precautions, for a torchcraft mishandled could work more havoc than most ancient wars, the authorities let him. After all, he was the oldest man in existence. One must expect him to keep archaic urges.
They never heard him say, “Trial run.”
The robot closed in. Hanno broke contact and uncoupled from the neuroinduction unit. Docking maneuvers would be both tedious and confusing to a human intellect. Masses moved readily enough, but the right phase-in was essential, lest the dance of electromagnetic fields around the ship be perturbed. Let it falter for one second, and the ambient radiation would end a life that began in the early Iron Age.
As always, for a span he felt stunned. The robot’s input had been so much greater than anything unaided flesh and blood could ever perceive. Still more had been his partnership, slight though it was, with the computer. Bereft of it, he seemed witless.
The longing receded. He was again Hanno, a man with a man’s unique part to play. Few on Earth understood that any longer. They thought they did, and in a way they were right, but they did not think like him.
He made his preparations. When the ship told him, “All clear” he was ready. Obedient to his orders, it calculated the vectors of an optimum course for his next goal. Well aft of him, matter met antimatter and energy flamed. Weight came back. Jupiter drifted across the viewfield until the forward screen held only stars.
Under a one-gee boost, the time between planets was measured in days. He did not have the total freedom of them. Certain regions were lethal, even within his land of shielding, such as the neighborhood of the sun. Certain were forbidden him, and rightly so. While he could pass near enough to the Web to admire its spidery vastness through his optical systems, a close approach could trouble some part of its functioning, garble the information it drank in from the universe. Subtlest, most enigmatic, was the scent of beings somewhere yonder in the galaxy.
Never mind. He was no passive passenger. Within the broad limits of law and its capability, the ship would do whatever he wanted. Recycling molecules in patterns tried and true or ingeniously new, it provided every necessity, roost comforts, many luxuries. Almost the entire culture of the human race was in its databank, immediately available for his use or pleasure. That included minds for him to summon up when he desired to converse.
Living bodies, besides his own, he forewent. This was a trial run, the ship well-nigh minimal. He expected his tour of the Solar System would take a year or two, maybe three if he got really fascinated. That was hardly a blink of time.
Nevertheless, already impatience quivered in him.
2
From the height where it nestled, the shop overlooked the Great Valley of the Appalachians. Forest covered the land below, multitudinously green, a-ripple with wind. Slender spearshafts rose from among the trees, hundreds of meters tall, hundreds in number, each bearing a crown. Far down and across, made hazy by remoteness, the woods gave way to an immensity of lawns. There towers and lower buildings stood widely spaced. Iridescence played over their fantastical shapes.
Tu Shan knew the elven country for an illusion. He had seen the various, always precise forms of those trees close up. They lived not to leaf, flower, and fruit, but to grow materials that no natural plant ever made. The park held— not factories—a technocomplex where another kind of growth went on, atom by atom under the control of giant molecules, tended by machines and overseen by computer, wombs of engines and vessels and other things once made by hands wielding tools. The shafts were rectennas, receiving solar energy beamed as microwaves from collector stations on the moon. He spied it overhead, a wan crescent nearly lost in the blue, and remembered that “overhead” was also an illusion.
Once men sought enlightenment, escape from the mirage that is the world. Today they held that the phantasm was all there was.
Tu Shan trudged down the knob of rock where the aircab had found a spot to let him out. The shop was a pleasant sight before him, a house in antique style, timber walls and shake roof. Several pines reared behind it. The wind brought their sun-warmed fragrance to him.
He knew it wasn’t actually a shop. Bardon usually prepared his electronic displays here because this was where he lived more than anywhere else. However, Express Service took them to his customers, who were scattered across the globe.
He had seen the cab descend and waited on his porch. “Well, howdy,” he called. “Haven’t heard from you in quite a spell.” After a pause, “Goldurn, five years, I bet. Maybe more. Time sure flies, don’t it?”
Tu Shan kept still until he reached the other man. He wanted to study him. Bardon had changed. He remained tall and lanky, but he had discarded shirt and trousers hi favor of a fashionable scintillant gown; his hair was dressed into ram’s-horn curves; when he smiled, his mouth glittered. Yes, he too had decided it was unattractive to regrow outworn teeth every century or so, and gotten the celis in his jaws modified to produce diamond.
His handshake was the same as before. “What’ve you been up to, friend?” A trace of mountaineer drawl lingered. Perhaps he cultivated it. The past kept some small glamour.
Not respect. How could anyone revere old age when everyone was perpetually young?
“I tried farming,” Tu Shan said.
“What? ... Hey, come in, come in, and we’ll have a drink. Man, it is good to see you again.”
Tu Shan noticed how Bardon avoided noticing the box he carried.
Most furniture he recognized, but otherwise the interior of the house had become rather stark. It held no trace of wares, nor of a woman. That made for a sense of emptiness, when Anse and June Bardon had been together for as long as he had known them, but Tu Shan felt shy of inquiring.
He took a chair. His host splashed whiskey into glasses— .that, at least, was a constant—and settled down facing him.
“You farmed, you say?” Bardon asked. “What do you mean?”
“I sought... independence.” Tu Shan groped for words. He despised self-pity. “This modern world, I am not at home here. I spent all the basic share I had, together with my savings, and pledged the rest, to buy some hectares in Yunnan that nobody else wanted very much. And animals, and—”
Bardon stared. “You went clear back to subsistence farmin’?”
Tu Shan smiled lopsidedly. “Not quite. I knew that was impossible. I meant to trade what I did not eat for things I Deeded and could not make myself. I thought home-grown produce would have a novelty value. But no. It became a hard and bitter existence. And the world crowded in anyhow. At last they wanted my land for a recreation lodge. I did not ask what kind. I was glad, then, to sell for a tiny profit.”
Bardon shook his head. “You were lucky. You should have talked with me first. I would’ve warned you. If your food fad caught on, nanotech jvould duplicate it exactly and undersell you. But chances were, it couldn’t succeed in the first place. The computers dream up novelties of every kind raster than people can consume them, or even hear about them.”
“Well, I spent most of my life in a simpler world than yours,” Tu Shan sighed. “I made my mistake, I have learned my lesson. Now I have made more things for you.” He gestured at the box, which rested on his lap. “An elephant, a lotus pattern, and the Eight Immortals, carved in ivory.” Tank-grown ivory, but formed by hand, using traditional tools.
Bardon winced, tossed off a mouthful of whiskey, braced himself. “I’m sorry. You should have stayed in touch. I dosed down that business three years ago.”
Tu Shan sat mute.
“I don’t think anybody else is handUn’ stuff like this any more, either,” Bardon slogged ahead. “The value is
