“You know. Our drive screens out their beams.”
She glanced at him. He lay hands behind head, look upon the ceiling. “Sure, but, uh, neutrinos.”
“Those facilities are tied up.”
“Yes,” she said bitterly. “We weren’t worth building new ones for. But aiming at some star a million light- years away—”
He smiled. “Not that far. Not quite. Although a rather daunting distance, true.”
“Who cares? I mean, all they ever get is stuff they can’t figure out. They don’t think it’s even meant for us, do they?”
“Yes and no. It’s a reasonable guess that those are messages addressed ‘to whom it may concern.’ To anyone who may be listening. But why should the senders think enough tike us that we can easily decipher their codes? Besides, they’re almost certainly robots. Very possibly, what we detect are nothing but beacons, meant to attract more robots—like those we have sent toward them.”
She shivered a bit. “Nothing really alive there?”
“Doubtful. Have you forgotten? Those are the strange places of the galaxy. Black holes, condensing nebulae, free matrices—is that the term I want? Modern cosmology baffles me too. But they’re bound to be dangerous, generally lethal environments. At the same time, each is unique. Surely all starfaring civilizations will dispatch robots to investigate them. They are where everybody’s machines will eventually meet. Therefore it makes sense that those already there will send messages they—or their builders— hope somebody new will catch. Those always were the likeliest places to find signs of intelligence, the best for us to focus our instruments on.”
“I know, I do know!” she snapped.
“As for why we have received nothing unambiguous from the mother civilizations—”
“Never mind! I wanted a breath of outside air, not a lecture!”
He did turn his face toward her. The heavy features drooped. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said. “I find the subject fascinating.”
“I might, if I hadn’t heard it all before, again and again. If something new could ever be said about it.”
“And if somebody new said it. Right?” he asked sadly. “I bore you, don’t I?”
She bit her lip. “I’m out of sorts.”
He avoided remarking that she had not answered his question. However, his tone sharpened a bit. “You knew you were leaving the social whirl behind.”
She jerked a nod. “Of course,” she replied curtly. “Do you suppose I didn’t learn how to bide my time, already in Palmyra? But I don’t have to like it.”
She swung her legs around, stood, reached for the robe she had hung on a hook. “I’m not sleepy, either,” she said. “I’m going to a dream box and get relaxed.” Unspoken was that evidently he had not eased her, though she had faked.
He sat up. “You go too often,” he protested without force.
“That’s my business.” She pulled the garment over her head, paused for a moment, met his eyes, glanced away again. “Sorry, Gnaeus. I am being bitchy. Wish me a better mood tomorrow, will you?” She leaned down to ruffle the shag on his chest before she departed, barefoot as she had arrived. The deck surfacing was soft, springy, almost like turf.
The corridor reached empty, dimly lit at this hour. Ventilation gave a breeze and a susurrus. She rounded a corner and stopped. Wanderer did too.
“Why, hello, there,” Aliyat said in American English. “Haven’t seen much of you for a while.” She smiled. “Where are you bound for?”
16
The closer Pytheas flew on-the heels of light, the more alien it and the outside universe became to each other. One did not care to look long into the viewscreens any more, if at all. The interior hull became like a set of caves, warm bright huddling places. Escape from their closeness lay in whatever work could be found or made; in sports, games, skills, reading, music, shows, traditional diversions; in the pseudo-lives of every sort that that computer engendered for those who linked with it.
The circumstances were by no means bad. Most of mankind throughout most of history would have considered them paradise. Still, as Hanno had once implied, it was as well that to immortals, a year could feel like quite a short span. And perhaps that was only true, or only true enough, of the Survivors. Had any modern human lived sufficiently long? Would any ever learn how to tough out hard times, especially the hard times of the spirit? Was a subliminal doubt of it the underlying reason why none had hitherto ventured this faring?
Be that as it may, challenges became welcome.
Phaeacia—Hanno had suggested the name—was not Earth. The robot explorers reported an extraordinary degree of similarity: sun, orbit, mass, composition, spin, tectonics, satellite; countlessly many factors seemed necessary to beget life chemistry closely resembling the terrestrial. Such worlds were few indeed (though “few,” given the size of the galaxy, might add up to hundreds). Yet nothing was identical and much, perhaps most, utterly foreign. The absence of anything sentient was merely the difference plainest to humans, and probably the least important.
Moreover, Phaeacia was less known than the goal Hanno had originally had in mind. It lay almost one hundred fifty light-years from Earth, near the edge of the communication sphere. Thus far a single mission had reached it and, when Pytheas left, a dozen years’ worth of reports had been received. It was a world, as various and mysterious as ever Earth herself in her prehistory.
The robots were still investigating. Pytheas couldn’t catch their messages while en route, but they would download tHeir entire data-hoard when it arrived. Doubtless the astonishments that waited were enormous. The travelers might spend a year or more in orbit, assimilating, before they took their first boat to the surface.
Meanwhile, why not practice? To gain familiarity with the material was elementary prudence, incomplete and often wrong though it must be; hands-on experience was best gotten in advance, illusory though it must be.
The senses no longer knew the gymnasium. Overhead arched sky, virginaUy blue save for clouds that were like breaths off the snowpeaks at the horizon. The countryside round about lay verdant with blades that were not really grass; trees swayed to a lulling wind that smelled of their resin and the sun; wings swept that air, and afar a herd of beasts galloped, swift and graceful. Wanderer remembered Jackson Hole as once it had been. His bean cracked.
Mastering himself, he stooped to pluck a rock out of the spring bubbling at his feet. It glittered quartzlike. The heft of it was cold in his hand. Yes, he thought, I’d better brush up my geology.
“Cut some timber,” Tu Shan ordered the robots. He pointed. “Over there. See if you can make planks.”
“So,” acknowledged the principal, and led its work gang off with their energy projectors, fluid reactants, and solid tools.
Wanderer swung his head toward his companion. The weight of the induction helmet reminded him that he wasn’t in a dream box. He was supposedly training his entire organism; but he stood in a place that surely didn’t exist as it was being presented to him. Well, he could believe that something not too unlike it did, on his new world. “What’re you doing?” he demanded.
“We’ll need wood suitable for construction, wherever we decide to settle,” Tu Shan explained. “We don’t want to depend on the wretched synthesizers, do we? Wasn’t that the point of leaving Earth?” He smiled, narrowed his eyes against the brilliance, dilated his nostrils, breathed deep. “Yes, I like it here.”
“You won’t farm this kind of site!” Wanderer cried.
Tu Shan stared at him. “Why not?”
“There’ll be plenty of others. This, it would be ... wrong.”
Tu Shan scowled. “How much of the planet do you want to keep for your private hunting preserve, forever?”
It shocked Wanderer: Have we carried the enmities of our forefathers through all these centuries and now through these light-years?
