She was more at home in them than on Earth, actually—or, rather, was less an exile. Their people, such as these her comrades, sometimes thought and felt much as people used to think and feel. Though that too was changing. On which account you scarcely ever heard talk about terraforming Mars and Venus any longer. Now when it could be done, hardly anybody was interested.
Well, she and her seven kin had always known change. Merchant princes and brawling warriors were strangers to petty bourgeoisie and subservient peasants under the Tsars, who in turn were foreign to twentieth- century engineers and cosmonauts... Yet they had all shared most of what they were with each other, and with her. How many still did?
Tersten brought her from her memories when he gasped, “I’m awake” and struggled to sit up. She knelt, urged caution, helped and supported him. “Water,” he said. The suit swung a tube to his mouth and he drank greedily. “A-a-ah, good.”
Concern furrowed Mswati’s chocolate countenance. “How are you?” he asked. “What happened?”
“How should I know?” Clarity and a little vigor returned to Tersten’s voice as he talked. “Sore in the belly, sharp pains in my lower left chest, especially when I bend or take a deep breath. Earache, also.”
“Sounds like a cracked or broken rib, maybe two,” Svoboda said. Relief overwhelmed her. He could have been killed, suffered such brain damage that revivification would have been pointless. “My guess is that a falling boulder hit you with more force than your suit could withstand. Hm, yes, see.” Her finger traced the semblance of a scar. The fabric had been ripped open, and promptly closed itself again. Within an hour it would be completely healed. “Everything: conspired against us, didn’t it? We’re not going to scale this mountain. No matter. It was hardly more than a whim of ours. Let’s get you back down to camp.”
Tersten insisted he could walk, and managed a gait halfway between a step and a shuffle. “We’ll call for a vehicle to fetch you,” Mswati said. As if to confirm, a relay satellite flitted across the constellations. “The rest of us can finish. It will be easier going from here than it was on farside.”
Tersten bridled. “No, you don’t! I’ll not be cheated out of this.”
Svoboda smiled. “Have no worries,” she reassured. “I’m sure you’ll just need a knitpatch or two injected, and they can return you to us in fifty hours or so. We’ll wait where we are. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind slacking off that long.” An inner glow: My kind of human is not altogether extinct.
Bleakness: How many years can you remain what you are, Tersten? You’ll have no reason to.
Do I keep young in spirit, or merely immature? Has our history damned us, the Survivors, to linger retarded while our descendants evolve beyond our comprehension?
The plateau and camp came in view. Genia ran to meet the party. Someone must stay behind in case of trouble. She had gotten the shelter deployed. More a mothering organism than a tent, it spread beneath the radiation shields that curved like wings from the top of the freight carrier. “Tersten, Tersten!” she called. “I was terrified, listening in. If we’d lost you—“ She reached them. All four embraced. For that moment, at least, under the stars, Svoboda was again among beloved friends.
7
“You see,” Patulcius strove to explain, “what I have done is what the old Americans would have called ‘worked myself out of a job.’ ”
The curator of Oxford, who for reasons unrevealed to him currently used the name Theta-Ennea, lifted her brows. She was comely in a gaunt fashion, but he never doubted that under the plumes growing from her otherwise bare scalp lay a formidable brain. “The record indicates that you served well,” she said—or did she sing? “However, why do you suppose you might find occupation here?”
Patulcius glanced from her, through the glass window of her almost as anachronistic office. Outside, wind chased sunlight and cloud shadows along High Street. Across it dreamed the beautiful buildings of Magdalen College. Three persons wandered by, looking, occasionally touching. He suspected they were young, though of course you couldn’t tell. “This isn’t simply a museum,” he replied after a moment. “People do live in the town. The preservation of things puts them in special relationships among themselves and to you. I imagine that makes a kind of community. My experience— They must have problems, nothing too serious but nevertheless problems, questions of conflicting rights, duties, wants. You must have mediational procedures. Procedures are my strong point.”
“Can you be more specific?” Theta-Ennea asked.
Patulcius turned his gaze back to her. “I would first have to know the situation, the nature of the community, customs and expectations as well as rules and regulations,” he admitted. “I can learn quickly and well.” He smiled. “I did for two thousand years and more.”
“Ah, yes.” Theta-Ennea gave back the smile. “Naturally, when you requested an interview, I tapped the databank about you. Fascinating. From Rome of the Caesars through the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the Turkish Republic, the Dynasts, and— Yes, a story as marvelous as it is long. That is why I invited you to come in person.” Ruefully: “I too have an outmoded preference for concreteness and immediacy. Therefore I hold this position.” She sighed. “It is not a sinecure. I confess I have not had time to assimilate everything about you.”
Patulcius manufactured a chuckle. “Frankly, I’m glad of that. I didn’t enjoy the burst of fame when we Survivors manifested ourselves. Gradually becoming obscure again was ... pleasant.”
Theta-Ennea leaned back behind her desk, which was of plain wood, possibly an antique, and bore nothing except a small omnitenninal. “If I recall rightly, you joined the other seven quite late.”
Patulcius nodded. “After the bureaucratic structure finally and irreversibly collapsed around me. We’d kept in touch, of course, and they made me welcome, but I’ve never been, m-m, intimate with them.”
“Is that why you made more of an effort than they to become integrated with the modern world?”
Patulcius shrugged. “Perhaps. I’m not given to self-analysis. Or perhaps I just happened to have an opportunity none of them did. My talent, such as it is, is for—no, ‘administration’ claims too much. Operations maintenance; the humble but essential chores that keep the social machinery running. Or that used to.”
Theta-Ennea drooped her lids and regarded him closely before she said, “You have done more than that in the past fifty or a hundred years.”
“Conditions were unique. For the first time in a long time, they were such that I was qualified to take a hand in coping. No credit to me. Historical happenstance. I am being honest with you. But I did gain experience.”
Again she pondered. “Would you please explain? Give me your interpretation of those conditions.”
He blinked, surprised, and spoke hesitantly. “I have nothing but banalities... Well, if you insist. The advanced countries—no, I should say the high-technology civilization—had gone so far, so fast. It and the societies that had not assimilated the revolution, they became like different species. It had to absorb them, the alternatives were all horrible, but the gap in ways of living, thinking, understanding, was huge. I was among the few who could ... talk, function ... more or less effectively on both sides of that gap. I gave what assistance I could to those poor people, developing suitable organization to get them through the transition— when your people no longer had an old- fashioned, paper-shuffling, purely human bureaucracy, and were not sure how to build one. That is what I did. I did not do it alone by any means,” he finished. “My apologies for lecturing on the obvious.”
“It is not absolutely obvious,” Theta-Ennea said. “You speak from a viewpoint that has no counterpart anywhere. I would like to hear much more. It should help me come nearer empathizing with those scores of generations who made this place what it was. Because I never quite could, you see. With all the curiosityand, yes, all the love in the world, I have never quite been able to feel what they felt.”
She rested her arms on the desktop and went on compassionately, “But you, Gnaeus Cornelius Patulcius, and the many other names you have borne—in spite of them, in spite of your recent engagements, you also have yet to understand. No, I have no job for you. You should have known as much. Since you did not, how can I explain?
“You assumed this must be a community in some sense, like those where you were, where the dwellers share certain interests and a certain sense of common identity. I have to tell you—this isn’t simple, it isn’t ever spelled out; hardly anybody realizes what is happening, just as hardly anybody in the time of Augustus or of Galileo realized what was happening—but I spend my life trying to fathom the currents of history—“ Her laugh was forlorn. “Pardon me, let me back up and start over.
“Except for a few moribund enclaves, community hi a general sense has dissolved. We still use the word and go through some of the forms, but they are nearly as empty as a fertility rite or an election would be. Today we are
