The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  “Rather too clear.”

  “Please, Captain, no offense intended, nothing like that. You must understand what a tremendous business this is. People who, uh, who’re responsible for billions of human lives, they’re bound to be cautious. Including, for a start, me.”

  “Yes, I agree you are doing your duty as you see it, Captain Archer. Besides, you have the power.” Emissary bore a couple of guns, but almost as an afterthought; her fire control officers doubled as pilots of her launch. Though she could build up huge velocities if given time, her top acceleration with payload and reaction mass on hand was under two gravities; and her gyros or lateral jets could turn her about only ponderously. No one had imagined her as a warcraft, a lone vessel setting off into what might be a whole galaxy. Faraday was designed for battle. (The occasion had never arisen, but who knew what might someday emerge from a gate? Besides, her high maneuverability fitted her for rescue work and for conveying exploratory teams.)

  “I’m trying to do our best for our government, sir.”

  “I wish you would tell me who in the government.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m only an astronautical officer. It wouldn’t be proper for me to discuss politics. Uh, you do see, don’t you, you’ve nothing to worry about? This is an extra precaution, no more.”

  “Yes, yes,” Langendijk sighed. “Let us get on with it.” Talk went into technicalities.

  Signoff followed. Langendijk addressed his crew: “You heard, of course. Questions? Comments?”

  A burst of indignation and dismay responded; loudest came Frieda von Moltke’s “Hollenfeuer und Teufelscheiss!” First Engineer Dairoku Mitsukuri was milder: “This is perhaps high-handed, but we ought not to be detained long. The fact of our arrival will generate enormous public pressure for our release.”

  Carlos Francisco Rueda Suárez, the mate, added in his haughtiest tone, “Furthermore, my family will have a good deal to say about the matter.”

  A dread she had hoped was ridiculous lifted in Joelle, chilled her flesh and harshened her contralto. “You’re supposing they will know,” she said.

  “Good Lord, you can’t mean that,” Second Engineer Torsten Sverdrup protested. “The Ruedas kept in ignorance—that’s impossible.”

  “I fear it not,” Joelle answered. “We’re completely at the mercy of yonder watchship, you realize. And her captain isn’t acting like a man who only wants to play safe. Is he? I don’t pretend to be very sensitive where people are concerned, but I have had some exposure to cliques and cabals on high political levels. Also, the last time we talked on Earth, Dan Brodersen warned me we might return not simply to hostility from some factions, but to trouble.”

  “Brodersen?” asked Sam Kalahele, von Moltke’s fellow gunner.

  “The owner of Chehalis Enterprises on Demeter,” said Marie Feuillet, chemist. “You must allow for him exaggerating. He is a free-swinging capitalist, therefore overly suspicious of the government, perhaps of the Union itself.”

  “We have to commence acceleration soon,” Langendijk declared. “All hands to flight posts.”

  “Please!” Joelle cried. “Skipper, listen a minute! I’m not going to debate, I admit I’m hopelessly naive about many things, but Dan—Captain Brodersen did tell me he’d keep a robot near the gate, programmed to look out for us, just in case of trouble. He foresaw the possibility—the likelihood, he called it—that we’d return on a date soon after departure. Well, what else can that second craft be, orbiting far off—we have a radar pickup of it, you remember—what else can it be but his observer?”

  Rueda’s voice rang: “Holy Virgin, Joelle, in all these years, why did you never mention it?”

  “Oh, he felt we shouldn’t be worried about something that might never happen. He told me because, well, we’re friends, knowing I’d shunt the information off in my own mind. I put it on my summary tape, for the rest of you to play back if I should die.”

  “But in that case, there is no problem,” Rueda said happily. “We cannot be held incommunicado, if that’s what you fear. Once the robot reports to him, he’ll tell the world. I might have expected this of him. You may have heard he’s my kinsman by his first marriage.”

  Joelle shook her head. The cables into the bowl-shaped helmet were flexible and allowed that, though the added mass forced a noticeable effort and, in weightlessness, caused her torso to countertwist slightly.

  “No,” she answered. “Notice how distant it is. No optical system man has yet built has the resolution to tell Emissary apart from—seven, is it?—similar ships, at such a remove. She’s simply a modified Reina-class transport, after all.”

  “Then what’s the use of parking an observer out here?” snapped Quartermaster Bruno Benedetti.

  “Isn’t it obvious what’s happened?” retorted planetologist Olga Razumovski. “But tell us, Joelle.”

  The holothete drew breath. “Here’s what Brodersen planned to do,” she said. “He’d dispatch the robot ostensibly to study the T machine over a period of years in hopes of gaining a few clues as to how it works. The watchships don’t really carry on a very satisfactory program, so the project could hardly be forbidden. Besides, he wouldn’t do it in his own name. He’d get the Demetrian Research Foundation to front for him. He’s been generous enough with donations there. Anyway, the craft would be carrying out bona fide observations.

  “Then why is so valuable an instrumentality forced to stay more than a million kilometers from the thing it’s supposed to be investigating? I daresay the authorities made some excuse about safety, possible collision if a ship came through with the wrong vectors. I make the probability of that happening to be on the order of one in ten to the tenth. But they could enforce the regulation if they were determined to.

  “So the fact they would have done it, doesn’t that show their true motive? They don’t want to lose control over news about the gate—another Betan ship appearing, maybe, or us returning, or anything marvelous. They want to exercise censorship.

  “Will they censor us? There is a powerful antistellar element on Earth, in more than one national government. They could have gotten hold of the right levers in the Union hierarchy. They could have plans that they’ve not consulted their colleagues, about.”

  Curses, growls, a couple of objections grated from the intercom. Lonely among them went Fidelio’s fluting sound of bewilderment. What is the trouble? the Betan sang. Why are you no longer glad?

  Langendijk silenced the noise. “As captain of a watchcraft, Archer has authority over me,” he said. “Prepare to obey his instructions.”

  “Willem, listen,” Joelle pleaded. “I can pinpoint a beam to the robot so they’ll not detect a whisper aboard Faraday, and give Brodersen the truth—”

  Langendijk cut her off: “We will follow our orders. That’s a direct command of my own, which I’ll enter in the log.” His tone gentled. “Let’s not quarrel, after we’ve come such a long, hard way together. Calm down. Think how large the chances are that some of you are overwrought, building a haunted house on a grain of sand. Archer communicates secretly, with the secret connivance of the watchship captain in the Solar System—communicates secretly with his secret masters, who tell him to take us to a secret place? Isn’t that a little melodramatic?” Earnestly: “Think, too—the law of space is above politics. It has to be. Without it, man doesn’t go to the stars, he dies. Every one of us has given a solemn oath to uphold it.” After a pause, during which only the ventilator wind had utterance: “Take your flight stations. We will accelerate in ten minutes.”

  Joelle slumped. Hopelessness overwhelmed her. She could in fact have sent the uninterceptible message she spoke of, if her computer linkage were extended to the outercom system; but the switches for that were not in this chamber.

  And Willem does have a point about the law. He could well be right, likewise, about this whole idea of a plot against us being a sick fantasy. Who am I to judge? I’ve been too remote from common humanity for too many years to have
much feel for how it works.

  Ultimate reality is easier to understand, yes, to be a part of, than we are, we flickers across the Noumenon.

  “Are you ready, Joelle?” Langendijk asked mildly, well-nigh contritely.

  “Oh!” She started. “Oh, yes. Any time.”

  “I’ve signalled Faraday our intent to start blasting at one gee at fifteen thirty-five hours, and they concur. They’ll pace us; they are maneuvering for that right now. Interlock of autopilots will be made at one hundred kilometers from Beacon Charlie. Do you have assembled the information you need? … Ach, you’re bound to, I’m a forgetful idiot to ask.”

  Herself wishful of reconciliation, Joelle smiled a smile he couldn’t see and answered, “It’s easy for you to forget, Willem. I’m holding down Christine’s job”—Christine Burns, regular computerman, who died in Joelle’s arms a bare few months before Emissary started home.

  “Navigation is yours, then,” Langendijk said formally. “Proceed upon signal.”

  “Aye.”

  Joelle got busy. Information flooded her, location vectors, velocity vectors, momenta, thrusts, gravitational field strengths, the time and space derivatives of these, continuously changing, smooth and mighty. It came out of instruments, transformed into digital numbers; and meanwhile the memory bank supplied her not only what specific past facts and natural constants she required, but the entire magnificent analytical structure of celestial mechanics and stress tensors. She had at her instant beck the physical knowledge of centuries and of this unique point in space-time where she was.

  The data passed from their sources through a unit that translated them, in nanoseconds, into the proper signals. Thence they went to her brain. The connection was not through wires stuck in her skull or any such crudity; electromagnetic induction sufficed. She, in turn, called on the powerful computer to which she was also linked, as problems arose moment by moment.

  The rapport was total. She had added to her nervous system the immense input, storage capacity, and retrieval speed of the electronic assembly, together with the immense mathematico-logical capacity for volume and speed of operations which belonged to its other half. For her part, she contributed a human ability to perceive the unexpected, to think creatively, to change her mind. She was the software for the whole system; a program which continuously rewrote itself; conductor of a huge mute orchestra which might have to start playing jazz with no warning, or compose an entire new symphony.

  The numbers and manipulations did not stream before her as individual things. (Nor did she plan out the countless kinesthetic decisions her body made whenever it walked.) She felt them, but as a deep obbligato, a sense of ongoing rightness, function. Her awareness went over and beyond mechanical symbol-shuffling; it shaped the ongoing general pattern, as a sculptor shapes clay with hands that know of themselves what to do.

  Artist, scientist, athlete, at the brief pinnacle of achievement… thus had linkage felt to Christine Burns.

  It did not to Joelle. Christine had been an ordinary linker. Joelle was a holothete who had transcended that experience. Perhaps the difference resembled that between a devout Catholic layman at prayer and St. John of the Cross.

  Besides, this present work was routine. Joelle had merely to direct, by her thoughts, equipment which sent the ship along a standard set of curves through a known set of configurations. The unaided computer could have done as well, had it been worth the trouble of readjusting several circuits. Brodersen’s robot performed the same kind of task.

  Christine, the linker, had been signed on because Emissary was heading into the totally unknown, where survival might turn on a flash decision that could never have been foreseen and programmed for. She herself, had she lived, would have found this maneuvering easy.

  Joelle found it soothing. She leaned back in her chair, conscious of regained weight, and enjoyed her oneness with the vessel. She could not hear and feel, but she could sense how the drive whispered. Migma cells were generating gigawatts of fusion power, to split water, ionize its atoms, hurl the plasma out through the jet focuser at a speed close to that of light itself. But the efficiency was superb, a triumph as great as the cathedral at Chartres; nothing appeared but the dimmest glow streaming aft for a few kilometers, and the onward motion of the hull.

  Motion—it would last for several hours, at ever-changing orientations and configurations, as Emissary wove her way through the star gate between Phoebus and Sol. However, at present there was only a straightforward boost toward the first of the beacons. Joelle stirred and scowled. With less than half her attention engaged, she could not for long dismiss her fear of imprisonment ahead.

  But then the viewscreen happened to catch the T machine itself, and she was lifted off into a miracle which never dulled.

  At its distance, the cylinder was a tiny streak among hosts and clouds of stars. She magnified and the shape grew clear, though the dimensions remained an abstraction: length about a thousand kilometers, diameter slightly more than two. It spun around its long axis so fast that a point on the rim traveled at three-fourths the speed of light. Nothing on its silvery-brilliant surface told that to the unaided eye, yet somehow an endless, barely perceptible shimmer of changeable colors conveyed a maelstrom sense of the energy locked within. Humans believed that that gleam came from force-fields which held together matter compressed to ultimate densities. There were moons which had less mass than yonder engine for opening star gates.

  In the background glowed two more of the beacons which surrounded it, a purple and a gold; and through the instruments, Joelle spied a third, whose color was radio.

  This thing the Others had forged and set circling around Phoebus, as they had set one at Sol and one at Centrum and one at… who dared guess how many stars, across how many light-years and years? What number of sentient races had found them in space, gotten the same impersonal leave to use them, and hungered ever afterward to know who the builders truly were?

  Out of those, what portion have crippled themselves the way we’re doing? Joelle questioned in an upsurge of bitterness. O Dan, Dan, it’s gone for nothing, your trying to get the word that could set us free—

  And then, like a sunburst, she saw what must have come to him early on. He was bound to have thought of it; she remembered him drawling, “Every fox has two holes for his burrow.” Hope kindled within her. She didn’t stop to see how feeble it was, how easily blown out again. For now, the spark was enough.

  III

  DANIEL BRODERSEN WAS BORN in what was still called the state of Washington and had, indeed, not broken from the USA during the civil wars, as several regions attempted and the Holy Western Republic succeeded in doing. However, for three generations before him, the family chief had borne the title Captain General of the Olympic Domain and exercised a leadership over that peninsula, including the city of Tacoma, which was real while the claims of the federal government were words.

  Those barons had not considered themselves nobility. Mike was a fisherman with a Quinault Indian wife, who had invested his money in several boats. When the Troubles reached America, he and his men became the nucleus of a group which restored order in the neighborhood, mainly to protect their households. As things worsened, he got appeals to help an ever-growing circle of farms and small towns, until rather to his surprise he was lord of many mountains, forests, vales, and strands, with all the folk therein. Any of them could always bend his ear; he put on no airs.

  He fell in battle against bandits. His eldest son Bob avenged him in terrifying fashion, annexed the lawless territory to prevent a repetition, and set himself to giving defense and rough justice to his land, so that people could get on with their work. Bob felt loyal to the United States and twice raised volunteer regiments to fight for its integrity. He lost two boys of his own that way, and died while defending Seattle against a fleet which the Holies had sent north.

  During his lifetime, similar developments went on in British Columbia. American and Canadian nationalism me
ant much less than the need for local cooperation. Bob married John, his remaining son, to Barbara, daughter of the Captain General of `the Fraser Valley. That alliance ripened into close friendship between the families. After Bob’s death, a special election overwhelmingly gave his office to John. “We’ve done okay with the Brodersens, haven’t we?” went the word from wharfs and docks, huts and houses, orchards, fields, timber camps, workshops, taverns, from Cape Flattery to Puget Sound and from Tatoosh to Hoquiam.

  John’s early years in charge were turbulent, but this was due to events outside the Olympic Peninsula and gradually those too lost their violence. With peace came prosperity and a reheightening of civilization. The barons had always been fairly well educated, but men of raw action. John endowed schools, imported scholars, listened to them, and read books in what spare time he could find.

  Thus he came to understand, better even than native shrewdness allowed, that the feudal period was waning. First the federal military command brought the entire USA under control, as General McDonough had done in Canada. Then piece by piece it established a new civil administration, reached agreement of sorts with the Holy Western Republic and the Mexican Empire, and opened negotiations for amalgamation with its northern neighbor. Meanwhile the World Union created by the Covenant of Lima was spreading. The North American Federation joined within three years of being proclaimed, according to a promise made beforehand. This example brought in the last holdout nations, and limited government over the entire human race was a reality—for a time, at least.

  At the start of these events, John decided that his call was to preserve for his people enough home rule that they could continue to live more or less according to their traditions and desires. Over the years he gave way to centralization, step by step, bargaining for every point, and did achieve his wish. In the end he was nominally a squire, holding considerable property, entitled to various honors and perquisites, but a common citizen. In practice he was among the magnates, drawing strength from the respect and affection of the entire Pacific Northwest.