belong, I wanted to find meaning in this world of yours. I cannot. To me, becoming what I must become would be to destroy all I am, the whole of the centuries and the folk forgotten by everyone else and the comradeship in secret that formed me. I was born too soon for you. It is now too late for me. Can you understand, and forgive?
9
They met in reality. You cannot embrace an image. Fortune favored them. They were able to use a visitor house at Lake Mapourika control reserve, on the South Island of what Hanno to this day thought of as New Zealand.
The weather was as lovely as the setting. They gathered around a picnic table. He remembered another such board beneath another sky, long and long ago. Here a greensward sloped down to still waters in which forest and the white mountains behind stood mirrored. Woodland fragrances arose with the climbing of the sun. From high overhead drifted birdsong.
The eight matched the quietness of the morning. Yesterday passions had stormed and clamored. At the head of the table, Hanno said:
“I probably needn’t speak. We seem to be pretty well agreed. Just the same, it’s wise to talk this over calmly before making any final decision.
“We have no more home, anywhere on Earth. We’ve tried in our different ways to fit in, and people have tried to help us, but we finally face the fact that we can’t and never shall. We’re dinosaurs, left over in the age of the mammals.”
Aliyat shook her head. “No, we’re left-over humans,” she declared bitterly. “The last alive.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Macandal replied. “They are changing, more and faster than we can match, but I wouldn’t take it on myself to define what is human.”
“Ironic,” Svoboda sighed. “Should we have foreseen? A world where we could, at last, come forth would necessarily be a world altogether unlike any that ever was before.”
“Self-satisfied,” Wanderer said. “Turned inward.”
“You’re being unfair too,” Macandal told him. “Tremendous things are going on. They simply aren’t for us. The creativity, the discovery, has moved to—what? Inner space.”
“Perhaps,” Yukiko whispered. “But what does it find there? Emptiness. Meaninglessness.”
”From your viewpoint,” Patulcius replied. “I admit that I too am unhappy, for my own reasons. Still, when the Chinese stopped their seafaring under the Ming, they did not stop being artists.”
“But they sailed no more,” Tu Shan said. “The robots tell us of countless new worlds among the stars; and nobody cares.”
“Earth is pretty special, as we should have expected all along,” Hanno reminded him needlessly. “The nearest planet reported where humans might be able to live in natural surroundings is almost fifty light-years from here. Why mount an enormous effort to send a handful of colonists that far, possibly to their doom, when everybody’s doing well at home?”
“So they truly could live their—our own kind of lives again, on our own land,” Tu Shan said.
“A community,” Patulcius chimed in.
“If we failed, we could seek elsewhere.” Svoboda’s voice rang. “If nothing else, we would be human beings out yonder, doing and daring for ourselves.”
Her look challenged Hanno. The rest likewise turned toward him. Although until now he had barely hinted at his intentions, it was no great surprise when he spoke. Yet somehow the words came before them like a suddenly drawn sword.
“I think I can get us a ship.”
10
The conference was not a meeting of persons, nor even their images. That is, Hanno’s representation went around the globe, and faces appeared shiftingly before his eyes; but this was mere supplement, a minute additional data input. Some of yonder minds were computer-linked, or in direct touch with each other, from time to time or all the time. Others were electronic. He thought of them not by names, though names were known to him, but by function; and the same function often spoke with differing voices. What he confronted, what enveloped him, were the ruling intellects of the world.
We’ve come a long way from you, Richelieu, he thought. I wish we hadn’t.
“Yes, it is possible to build such a spacecraft,” said the Engineer. “Indeed, preliminary designs were drawn up more than a century ago. They showed what the magnitude of the undertaking must be. That is a major reason why it was never done.”
“It can’t be so far beyond the one I was flitting around the Solar System in,” Hanno protested. “And the robotic vessels already push the speed of light.”
“You should have studied the subject more thoroughly before you broached your proposal.”
Hanno bit his lip. “I tried,”
“It is transhumanly complex,” the Psychologist conceded. “We ourselves are employing only a semitechnical summary.”
“The basic principles involved ought to be obvious,” the Engineer said. “Robots have no need of life support, including the comforts necessary for human sanity, and they require minimal protection. For them, an interstellar carrier can be of very low mass, with small payload. Nevertheless, each represents a substantial investment, notably in antimatter.”
“’Investment’ means resources diverted from other uses,” observed the Economist. “Modern society is productive, rich, yes, but not infinitely so. There are projects closer to home, that an increasing body of opinion maintains should be started.”
“The sheer size of the universe defeats us,” sighed the Astronomer. “Consider. We have received the first beam-casts from robots that have gone about a hundred and fifty light-years. It will take longer before we hear from those few we have sent farther. The present sphere of communication contains an estimated forty thousand stars, much too many for us to have dispatched a vessel to each, the more so when the vast majority are dim red dwarfs or cold sub-dwarfs. The suns not too unlike Sol have generally proved disappointing. True, a flood of scientific discoveries already overwhelms the rate at which we can properly assimilate them; but the public finds little of it especially exciting, and nothing that could be considered a revolutionary revelation.”
“I know all that, of course I do—“ Hanno began.
The Engineer interrupted him: “You ask for a manned ship that can reach the same speeds. We grant you, no matter how long-lived you are, anything else makes little sense. Even for a handful of people, especially if they hope to found a colony, the hull must be spacious, correspondingly massive; and the mass of their necessities will exceed that by a large factor. Those necessities include laser and magne-tohydrodynamic systems able to shield against radiation as well as to draw in sufficient interstellar gas for the reaction drive. The drive in turn will consume an amount of antimatter that will deplete our reserves here in the Solar System for years to come. It is not quickly or easily produced, you know.
“Moreover, the robot craft are standardized. A scaleup such as you have in mind demands complete, basic redesign. The preliminary work stored in the database indicates how much computer capability it will take—enough to significantly curtail operations elsewhere. Production, likewise, cannot use existing parts or facilities. Whole new plants, both nanotechnological and mechanical, and a whole new organization, must come into being. The time from startup to departure may well be as long as a decade, during which various elements of society will endure noticeable inconvenience.
“In short, you wish to impose a huge cost on mankind, in order to send a few individuals to a distant planet which, it seems, may be habitable for them.”
