Journey Between Worlds

by Sylvia Engdahl

  But the envelope didn’t contain a letter, other than a brief handwritten note. Its bulk came from something wrapped in white tissue and sealed with gilt-edged tape. It was the locket! My ancestor Melinda Stillwell’s gold locket, that had traveled the long, hard ox trail across terrestrial plains and mountains, all those many years ago.

  I could imagine Gran standing by the window as she wrapped it, looking out at the shimmering blue ocean that I shall never see again. Holding the locket up and swinging it by its chain as I used to do when I was little, I thought of how I’d once wished that I’d been a pioneer woman in an unsettled land. Never make a wish unless you’re prepared to see it come true in some astonishing way that you’d never even dream of! Because that may be how it turns out, though if you’re lucky, like me, you’ll also get some things that you didn’t have the sense to wish for.

  Now, strange as it still seems to me, I’m truly beginning to think of myself as a Martian! Is there anything more to it than love? Do I believe in the big dream myself, at all?

  Well, I’ve pondered it a lot, and this is what I think: It’s the future. Because if you don’t believe that human beings will keep growing and changing and moving on, you don’t believe in the future at all. If Alex and I weren’t here, there’d be others; that’s how it’s always been, all the way from ancient times through the New World colonies, the western pioneers, the colonization of this solar system—and someday on to the stars. It may be Manifest Destiny as Alex says, or it may simply be that people, individual people, always want to see what’s over the hill. It may be something else. But I do believe that if this thing wasn’t being done by somebody, Earth would be in real trouble someday. I know enough now to say that you can’t put permanent bounds on your horizons.

  Things never stay the same, and that goes for worlds, too. You can’t impose stability on the human race any more than on your own life. A civilization that can’t expand will turn to violence, I’m told. Or at least decay. How paradoxical that the only way to assure the future for Earth is to leave it!

  Maybe it’s not what I’d have chosen to do alone. In fact I’m fairly sure it’s not, but Alex wants it, and I love him. After all, that first Melinda wouldn’t have chosen the covered wagon journey, either, if not for love of her husband, Jess. Maybe she lay in the bare, drafty log cabin night after night dreaming of the old Massachusetts seaport town, the way I dream of Maple Beach. The way the pilgrims who built that town must have dreamed of England. . . .

  If the baby’s a boy, we’re going to name him after Dad. If it’s a girl, I think we’ll name her Susan—maybe even Susan Constance—because, while not all our memories of Susie are happy ones, it was in those days that we began to fall in love. And the very name Susan Constant was always something of a symbol for us.

  Perhaps when little Susan gets old enough, she’ll enjoy playing with Gran’s locket, the way I used to do, and perhaps someday she’ll have a daughter of her own to pass it on to. I wonder how many times it will be handed down before it comes to the girl who’ll look wistfully back at a faint star, growing still dimmer in the center of a viewport, and say: “That’s the sun.” Not Earth, or Mars, but the sun! There will always be new worlds, I guess, as long as there are new generations.

  Afterword to the 2006 Edition

  This story, first published in 1970, was written several years earlier—before the Apollo flights to the moon, before anyone had gone to another world in a spaceship and looked back at Earth from a distance. It was based on the ideas I had about space when I myself was growing up. Yet when I came to revise it for republication, I found that the only facts to be updated, apart from the details of references to computer technology, were those related to the discoveries made in 1976 by the Viking landings on Mars.

  In most ways, the story’s initial edition was more relevant to today’s world than to the era during which I wrote it—and there are more young people today who share my interest in the future. But I have made some minor changes that reflect modern women’s outlook toward marriage and toward careers. My views of these things have changed more than my views of space have. I believe more than ever in all that I originally said about the significance of space colonization.

  The settlement of new worlds may not proceed just as I’ve described it. Like many space advocates, I now think that the problems of Earth such as overpopulation and pollution can best be solved by building human habitats not on distant planets, but in space itself. It’s possible that orbiting colonies will become a reality before Martian colonies do, although this book does not mention them. That makes no real difference to the story. Society a century from now will not be just as it’s imagined today in any case; still people’s dreams and people’s feelings will remain the same.

  Readers who would like to talk about the story are invited to write to me at sle@sylviaengdahl.com, and to visit my Web site at http://www.sylviaengdahl.com. I’m looking forward to meeting you there.