“Ah, there’s the trouble,” Horad said. “There are so many ambitions we can see no way to fulfil.”
Startled, Lodovico said, “So many? What can they be?”
“Long ago, even as long ago as your original time, men dreamed of visiting other worlds and eventually the stars. Even to have explored the local planets would have been a great consolation. But we are here on Earth, are we not?”
“I had been wondering,” said Lodovico slowly. “There must have been attempts.”
“Indeed there were. People have circled the Sun more closely than Mercury does; they have dipped into the atmosphere of Jupiter, probed the frigid wastes of Pluto. But . . . Well, for every attempt there have been countless failures. Come with us.”
They were at a crumbled mound surrounded by lapping waves.
“From here,” Orlalee told him, “a decadent culture tried to launch a ship directly to the stars. The venture was insane. There was an explosion which sank half a continent.”
They were at a creeper-covered clearing in the midst of a great forest of pines and birches, where a snow-capped mountain loured down on them.
“A long time ago,” Genua said, “people here trapped a bit of sun-stuff in a magnetic holder. It was not strong enough. There was a vast fire which lasted less than an eyeblink, and that too ended.”
They were in a desert where sand-scratched rags of metal whined in a constant wind.
“It is believed,” murmured Horad, “that this is the only spot where men ever held converse with another intelligence. What was said, we shall never know. It was uttered in the form of radiation such as only a star can emit. Perhaps it was a star which answered us, focusing its signal on less space than my arms can span. That was recently. You see the desert; plants have not had time to claim it back.”
The pattern grew in Lodovico’s mind.
A person is fragile. Out where stars send messages to one another it takes a great deal to shield and protect a human body. Moreover the person who makes the voyage must spend so much time thinking about sheer survival, it is nearly a waste of time. So long goes by; so little is discovered!
“And what,” he asked at last, “does this have to do with me?”
“Everything,” they said. It was not Horad who spoke, or Genua, or Orlalee; it was the combination.
“Why?”
“You are immortal.”
“Impossible!”
“Oh, no. On the contrary.” This was definitely Horad. Lodovico had grown to recognise and like his manner: a trifle dry, often witty, always individual. “Perfectly possible. We intended it to happen, and it worked out.”
“How, though? How?”
“Because of the way you have been created. You are a compound percept: we have explained this already. Now, even to us who were present when you first impinged on a present-time consciousness, you are solid. You must eat and drink, or you would die. You are in every respect bar one a person like any other.”
“The difference,” Orlalee said, “is that we cannot conceive of any means whereby you might be destroyed.”
“But you just said I can die—” Lodovico began.
“By your choice. Your own choice. No other way,” said Orlalee.
“Not the brutal gales of a gas-giant planet,” Horad said soberly, “nor the furnace heart of a star can abolish what to us constitutes Lodovico Zaras. For you are not Lodovico Zaras. You are his incorruptible, indissoluble, inerasable image upon the consciousness of all mankind.”
“We can imagine you choosing to starve yourself to death rather than perform the service we hope from you,” said Genua. “But the necessity will not of course arise. Were that to be your decision, even now we could arrange that you cease to exist. But we could not do it against your will.”
“Service?” Lodovico repeated.
“Before we tell you what it is,” Horad said, “we must emphasise that there is a good reason why you should say no. Now that we have made you real, you can feel pain.”
“I was used to that in my original self,” Lodovico said slowly. “Why should it be different, this time?”
“Because we want you to go where no one else can go, and come back and tell us what it’s like.”
He thought that over for a while, and said at last, not looking at them, “And this will hurt.”
“Yes. As nearly as we can calculate, you will be hurt more than any other human being who ever lived. Worst of all, you will never have an escape route into death.”
It was not until a long time afterwards that he said yes.
They had been right about the pain. It was clear, it was a simple fact, that no human being had any right to stand by the bank of a river running liquid helium, on the side of Pluto currently turned away from the sun, and admire the way its flow competed with gravity. Yet . . . he did it.
Perhaps it was that for him pain no longer portended danger, inasmuch as he knew he would not die until humanity became extinct. The agony, at all events, was transformed, and little by little he became able to endure it.
It diminished, indeed, so rapidly, that even at the conclusion of his first expedition it paled into insignificance alongside the frustration he felt when he struggled to fulfil his part of the bargain. How to explain in words the sensation of cold so violent it was like a flame? How to describe the river’s colour, which lacking hue and brilliance and saturation was nonetheless seared into his memory like a scar?
Paradoxically, those who had sent him forth were well pleased. He had imagined failure, rejection; instead, when they had healed him they showered him with compliments and asked how soon he would
