The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  “The star has a smaller companion; have you seen? It will be affected. What we’ll get, if humans and Betans know any astrophysics, is a recurring nova, nothing like the supernova but casting elements into the universe also.

  “I daresay a situation similar to this has already occurred elsewhere, freakishly early in cosmic history, perhaps inside a nebula. There came to be enough local concentration of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the necessary materials, that planets could coalesce on which life could arise, even then, before there was even this hint at a galaxy to come. Perhaps one or more of those life forms evolved into the Others.

  “Possibly,” Joelle finished, “a small part of what makes you and me up is being made there, in those stars, right now.”

  Caitlín smote her hands together and said, “No wonder the Others would make a gate to come see!”

  “Doubtless.” Joelle sighed. “I’d hoped they might have a scientific station. That’s why we continue moving slantwise to the T machine, instead of heading straight back. But I don’t believe any longer that they have. It would be somewhere nearby if it existed, would it not? After all, everything, including materials for the T machine itself, would have to be sent through from the past. That’s a huge enough undertaking for anybody, demigods or no. Surely they have competing claims on their attention. And when the giant blows up, it’ll wipe out whatever is in orbit around it, unless maybe the T machine itself can survive. No, I daresay the Others just come through occasionally in ships, or whatever they use, to take observations. The interval could be thousands of years.”

  After a minute she added, “If they do have an installation, in spite of my guess, it’s elsewhere. We haven’t a prayer of finding it, in a system laid out on this vast a scale. No, we’ll hang around for a day or two, probing, peering, broadcasting a forlorn hope if ever there was one—and finally try another jump.”

  Because of how she stared at the star, Caitlín asked her, “You’d be happy here yourself, learning, is that not so?”

  “Not feasible.” Joelle smiled lopsidedly. “We’d run out of mass and have to change over to spin mode, which would terribly hamper any studies. Worse, we’d always wonder what opportunities we’d missed. We must go on.” Again she hesitated. “That’s frightening.” As if to get it out before she could strangle the impulse: “Hearten us, Caitlín, will you?”

  The quartermaster flushed, her lashes fluttered, her voice lost steadiness; never before had the holothete seen her that shy. “Can I? Me, I, I’m nothing but a bard of sorts. You’re a doer—Dr. Ky—an understander, a Druid. Our lives rest on you.”

  “No. On Fidelio, the way things are… at present. And you understand what I cannot—Excuse me.” Joelle swung about. “I remember something I’d better do.” She left with hasty strides. Seen from behind, her shoulders trembled.

  XXXIII

  JUMP.

  Again heaven was full of stars. For a heart-stopping instant Brodersen could find no T machine among them. After he did spy it, made tiny by distance, he became able to look around him and wonder.

  A sun disc hung out there. About the same size as that which Earth saw, it was distinctly greenish—an oath of amazement exploded from him—and heavily spotted. According to a meter, the luminosity per unit area exceeded Sol’s by some thirty percent. The corona was immense around it, and ruddy; without magnification, he saw flares and prominences like fire geysers; but no zodiacal light appeared, though he spotted down brightness and amplified weak sources to the limit of his screens.

  Having taken reports, he ordered Chinook to accelerate in the orbital plane of the transport engine and research to commence. Then he scratched his head and plaintively addressed the intercom: “Hey, what’s going on? I didn’t know the main sequence included green stars.”

  The holothetes didn’t reply. They were too immersed. After a minute, Su Granville’s diffident tones reached him: “I t’ink I can guess. Green is not an impossible color, but the range of surface temperature for it is so narrow that we seldom ’ave observed it.”

  “Is that why the Others are interested in this one?”

  “No, I suspect it is simply leaving the main sequence and ’appens to be going through a brief green phase.”

  Hydrogen burned away at the core, the nuclear reactions moving outward—“Wait. Doesn’t it become a red giant?”

  “Yes, in due course. But at first it shrinks and grows very much ’otter. That shortens the peak wavelength. Expansion ’as now begun, but needs time yet for to cool the surface, redden the light, while the total output increases more—” She went into dismay. “Oh, you know the elementary astronomy! I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be, Su. I should’ve figured this out for myself.”

  Once assured that nobody had detected anything dangerous, Brodersen left the command center. He couldn’t resist peeking in at the various investigators and asking questions, but left before he turned into a nuisance and sought Caitlín. She stood in the common room, surrounded by the views it offered, marveling. As he entered, she sped to him, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him with cyclone force.

  He responded. When they came up for air, she crooned, “Oh, Dan, Dan, what we’re seeing! What we’ll learn, aye, and do!”

  “I sure would like to do something,” he grumbled. “This being useless gets on my nerves.”

  She cocked her head. Her grin grew mischievous. “Well, Captain, you could be dealing justice to a poor deprived quartermaster. Yonder sight makes me horny.”

  “Good Lord! Does any sight not do that, ever?”

  She disengaged herself and took him by the elbow. “Later, you can help me cook.”

  Reports came in through the hours.

  The ship was thousands of light-years from Earth, to gauge by the altered outlines of the Milky Way and bearings of neighbor galaxies. Identifiable astronomical objects were not noticeably changed, including monstrous S Doradus. Hence the date, reckoned from the hypothetical beginning of the universe, was the same as at home, give or take a few million years. Chinook had returned from the distant past.

  Doppler readings on the T machine, combined with radar ranging of the sun, gave the latter a mass above Sol’s. On that basis, theory gave it an age on the order of ten billion years. More precise measurements would be needed to refine that figure. Clearly, however, it must belong to an early generation. This was confirmed by a paucity of dust around it and by the weak metallic lines in its spectrum. However, it contained more heavy elements than might have been expected. Perhaps it had formed in the vicinity of a recent supernova burst. (Could that have been the detonation of the blue giant the humans lately beheld? They speculated mightily and futilely.)

  It had planets. One moved at more or less the same distance as the T machine, a little over an a.u., a little less than ninety degrees ahead. The globe was Earth size and bore oxygen in the atmosphere.

  There was no telling where the Others had originally placed their device, except that presumably it was not in a sixty-degree position. Maybe it had once been straight across from the living world, like the ones at Sol and Centrum and stars elsewhere known to the Betans. If so, it must have exhausted its station-keeping capability at last: for now it orbited as subject to perturbation as any natural heavenly body.

  Brodersen shook his head and clicked his tongue. Anything he could utter was inadequate anyway. “Well,” he said, “I guess whatever interest the Others had here died out long ago. Unless they care to watch the system itself die.”

  Soon Dozsa’s receivers cast a dazzling doubt on his conclusion. A source at the terrestroid planet was emitting a radio pattern which, though simple and repetitive, must be of artificial origin. A beacon, a message? For Chinook, absolutely a summons.

  It was a three-day flight.

  Those who could do astronomy were kept busy supplying Fidelio with data which he integrated into an ever more complete picture. They were much too slow for him. He spent most of his hours in holothesis n
evertheless, probing his stellar environment through direct instrumental input, considering it, or perhaps oftenest contemplating the Ultimate in that way of his which gave him a sense of those he loved being real within a space-time which unified him with them.

  Meanwhile the engineers checked Williwaw out after the stresses of the Danu trip, treated her to a thorough overhaul, adjusted her as best they could for predicted conditions, and replenished her mass tanks from the ship’s supply. Brodersen lent a hand whenever he was able. They had no room for a larger work party.

  Rueda and Su were left with more leisure than they wanted. Joelle was almost completely at loose ends.

  Waking very early in the second mornwatch, unable to get back to sleep, finding no solace in books or music, she rose, threw on a coverall, and left the barrenness of her cabin. She’d go borrow the galley to brew herself some tea, which she had neglected to draw as private rations, and thereafter, while the Betan rested, get into her own linkage. It was awkward to do unassisted, but she’d be damned if she asked for help. That would be downright humiliating when she was unprepared to accomplish anything of value and merely intended to submerge her being for a while in the hearts of atoms and stars—in what was well-known about them, nothing else. It wasn’t even as if that state were an addiction which must be satisfied. After all, she’d experienced it in fullness quite recently.

  Fullness…. Everything has gone empty.

  The corridor underscored her feeling when she emerged into it, a hollow length of metal curving away on either side, lined with shut doors, air chill and rustling. When one of the doors, Frieda von Moltke’s, slid back, Joelle started, nearly frightened.

  Martti Leino stepped out, waved before he closed it, and as he turned around saw the holothete. Likewise surprised, he blurted, “Good morning, Dr. Ky. How are you?” His hair was tangled and his clothes carelessly redonned.

  “Insomniac,” Joelle said, because it must be obvious. “And you?”

  Leino looked smug. “Well, I haven’t slept much either. Was going for coffee in the galley, I’ve run out in my quarters. Would you care to join me?”

  Joelle changed her mind about tea. Why should her face grow hot? “No, thanks, I want to walk about.” She left him.

  Is that floozy servicing every man aboard? she thought. If so, why should I gave a damn? What’s it to me? At least she seems to have wiped the hangdog misery out of Leino he’s been carrying around these past days.

  What caused it? I had the impression he paired off with Mulryan the night watch after the party, but no, he seems to have been avoiding her since. Did he think he was going to get laid, and instead get refused? A quarrel—But she’s been speaking kindly to him at mealtimes, though she rarely hears better than monosyllables in reply.

  I don’t know. Nobody tells me anything. Perhaps because I never ask. I don’t know how to. Or much of anything that involves people.

  Eric made me wholly human for a short while—made me, wholly human—but then I went too far beyond him into a Reality too enthralling. I became Cartesian. A few subsequent lovers who were holothetes had bodies attached to their minds, but merely attached, as far as I was concerned. The rest were hardly more than bodies, conveniences, pets at best.

  Did that leave me vulnerable to Chris, beautiful sweet Chris? To love is to be vulnerable, I suppose. Argh! Nothing could have come of it. True?

  As for Dan—

  Her feet took her up a companionway toward the scientific level, where the computer room was. Metal enclosed her in narrowness. A phrase came back from her Tennessee girlhood. Though she might be part of Project Ithaca, at the frontiers of human knowledge, her foster parents had sent her to Sunday school. There the Protestant chaplain of the military reservation used to read from the Book of Common Prayer as well as the Bible. The whole scene came back, whitewashed walls, banal picture of Jesus blessing the children, windows open to clover smell and hum of bees, her class sitting, primly clad on straight wooden chairs while the big man’s bass rolled over them, “—fast bound in misery and iron—”

  You know, he looked and sounded a lot like Dan. He impressed me tremendously, at my small age. I wonder, in spite of his being pious, I wonder if he may have been as good in bed.

  Stop that!

  Joelle achieved a smile at her own expense. Why? Is it blasphemous?

  No, she realized. It’s dangerous. I dare not get obsessed with Dan, as I fear I am tending. That would be Chris all over again. He’s Mulryan’s. Oh, she’ll let me borrow him once in a while if I wish, and he’ll be considerate, but I know he’ll begrudge the time he could have been with her, out of these few years we have left. And that will feel so lonely, so lonely.

  I dare not admit Descartes (as a maker of symbols which have no more scientific meaning left in them than does the Last Judgment) was wrong.

  Reaching the passage she wanted, she took a route which brought her by the astrolab. Its door stood retracted on a darkened interior and she heard speech. Surprised anew, she halted.

  Carlos Rueda Suárez: “—Yes, I grant you the government of Demeter needs sweeping reform, and probably the planet as a whole needs more say in policies that affect it. But autonomy? Independence? Why, it isn’t the germ of a nation.”

  Haven’t I had vague designs on him? Joelle stood where she was.

  Susanne Granville: “What do you mean by ‘nation’? Is Peru homogeneous? The Andean Confederacy? Why cannot our separate colonies make a little World Union of their own?” Almost accent-free in Spanish, she did not speak timidly but with spirit and, it seemed, a certain relish.

  Rueda: “You sound like Daniel Brodersen.”

  Granville: “I have listened to him and learned.”

  Rueda: “And thought for yourself as well, I notice.” A sad laugh. “Why are we arguing? What can politics matter to us? We’re adrift in space-time. Quite conceivably Earth and Demeter and the whole human race don’t exist any more, if that isn’t a nonsense phrase. We’ll never be sure.”

  Granville: “Maybe we will be.” In English: “We ain’t licked yet, my friend.”

  Rueda: “Daniel again, I hear. Ah, well, Su, we’ve talked about a great deal in these past hours, haven’t we? Life and fate and God and little things that are big to us—why not Demeter? But when we’re less tired.”

  Granville, softly: “You have reason, Carlos. Also, the view is too lovely for disputations. Look.”

  Dan would rack me back for eavesdropping, Joelle knew. I could go around in the reverse direction, but he might want them warned I’ve noticed them. It was an effort to louden her footfalls, halt in the doorway, and call, “Hello, there.”

  The room was full of shadowed bulks. Light from the hall picked Rueda and Granville out dimly, where they sat at the farther bulkhead, facing each other at knee-touch distance. A single viewscreen behind them brimmed with clear darkness, stars, Milky Way, the planet a yellow-green brilliance and near it a golden point that was its moon. Caitlín had proposed naming it Pandora, since no one knew what it might hold for them, trouble or hope or both.

  Rueda sprang up to deliver a courtly bow. “Ah, Dr. Ky. What brings you here?” Neither he nor the linker seemed flustered, though Joelle suspected the interruption annoyed them.

  “I… I wanted to inspect some readouts,” the holothete said. Why the devil do I feel embarrassed? “You two?” Wait, I didn’t need to bark that question at them.

  “No secret. I thought everybody knew. Su and I have become deadwood, or at most very marginal assistants. We’ve decided to learn specialties the ship needs, but we’ve scarcely begun to explore what we might be best at. So we came here to play with the apparatus when it wasn’t in demand.”

  And fell into conversation which went on the whole nightwatch. How warm your voices sounded. Joelle shivered a bit in the cold of a clockwork dawn. “I see. Well, good luck.” She walked stiffly from them, toward her computers.

  Orbiting Pandora at twenty-five thousand kilometers, the traveler
s of Chinook saw it big in a screen in their common room. Under the glare of the dying sun, which burned opposite, the shrunken oceans were aquamarine and continents stood forth as brownish blots, sharply defined. A few water clouds were tinted pale olive; larger were the buff-colored dust storms. There was no sign anywhere of ice or snow, but vast salt beds gleamed livid. Beyond one limb was the moon, scarred crescent, half the apparent size of Luna seen from lost Earth or Persephone from lost Demeter. Elsewhere shone the universe.

  Floating in front of his crew, Brodersen growled, “Blast it, we’ve got to send a party down, or admit we’re not serious about wanting help to get home. It may not look promising, but how can we tell? Beta wouldn’t look promising either if we didn’t know better. Right, Fidelio?”

  The alien made a noise of concurrence. His eyes caught luminance from a world as foreign to him as it was to the humans.

  Once Pandora had been of the proper mass at the proper distance from the proper kind of star to bring forth life. Plants freed oxygen into its air, conquered the land, drew a rich diversity of animals after them; the yeast of evolution worked through hundreds of millions of years until a creature existed that thought and wrought.

  But now the globe was raddled with age. Wearied by tides, it turned on its axis in almost a month. Its nearer moon had drifted far off. Another, a small body on its own path, appeared to have been stolen away. Long since spent, radioactives in the core gave no more heat to drive crustal plates about and raise new mountains; erosion had worn the last ranges down to hills. Nevertheless huge drops occurred, where continental shelves tumbled down to the bottoms of dead seas, to crusted wastes and brine marshes.