The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  As my limbs lengthened, everybody marked how I took after my mother in looks, nothing of my father about me. This caused some gossip among the low-minded. It died out, because the People take doings between man and woman as ordinary rather than sacred. (Yet nothing good is not sacred.) My father simply agreed this was a token I should not join his Society when I came of age, but my uncle’s. It would have been the usual outcome anyhow, since we reckon descent and inheritance through the female line.

  No matter what has happened since, I may not and will not tell of my initiation rites, save that they ended down in the kiva when the spirits rose from the sipapu to bless us. There I joined the Herb Society. This caused me to spend years studying which plants can heal, which hurt, which numb pain, which lend flavor, which cause weird dreams and are to be avoided, and how to talk to each kind of plant in respect and love.

  Meanwhile I married, founded a household, carried on the work of a husband. My wife was an upright lass who quickly became more winsome to me than moonrise or yucca blossoms. And when she gave me my first child, to carry forth and show to the sun—!

  We knew more than joy, of course. Some of us got crippled, some took sick and we could not make them well, many died young, and at best we would grow old, teeth worn to the gums, flesh wasted, blindness and deafness closing in, till we were no longer of use. However kindly children and grandchildren cared for the old, reminding them of how they had cared for the newborn, perhaps this hurt worst.

  More and more, we suffered raids from the nomads below the mesa. There lopers in sagebrush, brothers of the coyote, had bows more powerful that ours, and lived for war. In my day they captured a pueblo, tortured to death what men they had not killed, outraged the women before bearing them off, and left the children to wither. This recalled to us ancient means of defense we had been neglecting; after such a punishment, we learned how to stand siege till hunger drove the wild packs off. Nevertheless I remember dreadful battles.

  Their fanged souls alone did not make them assail us. Want likewise did. In my day the drought stuck. We knew of two rainless years in a row, and the legends said they had been plenty bad. Now we counted three, four, five…. Our crops shriveled, our seeds failed in the hard-baked soil, unless we endlessly lugged water…. Six, seven, eight…. Our sun smote us from a sky gone pale; and land shimmered in summer heat. Winters were dry, quiet, gnawingly cold…. Nine, ten, eleven…. We doled out what food we could scrabble together. The aged and the very young were perishing. Four of my children did, two as I watched, two while I was off helping pray….

  The Summoner came to me. I was borne to the world which is not below the world, nor above, nor beyond, but which is the whole world.

  For that which followed, there are no words. Far less than for a night with a dearest woman, or a night in the kiva, or a night when your mother dies in your arms, there are no words. I was every god who had ever been, and understood everything that was. It is beautiful and terrible beyond any dreaming. More I cannot in this body remember.

  At the end, One said that which I can only know as: “You will return to your life. If you wish, you may forget what has been Here. Think well.”

  Afloat in a mighty peace, I thought, until at last I said: “No, take not from me more than must be.” Do I recall a cherishing laughter, which may also have been a weeping?

  I rejoined the People. They did not realize I had been gone. I had no way to tell them. I was still a man, who rejoiced in his wife and living children and friends, who grieved for his hurt and dead. They did find me strange because of the long times I now spent apart from them, under the stars.

  Twelve years, thirteen…. We clung to the ancestral homes, the ancestral graves, as lichen does to a rock. But we are not lichen, it came to me. We are the People. And this is not a world forever fixed in a single harmony, which nothing but black magic can change. We do wrong to hang by the thumbs, for witchcraft, men and women who are merely ill-mannered. I have learned that the world eternally changes, and is more vast and various than we can imagine. That may be good, that may be bad, but that is true.

  If we stay where we are, we die. We must move to better country.

  I talked, I prophesied, I raged, I thrust myself above others, and was scorned for it. I fared off by myself and gathered knowledge of lands where we might go. With this in hand, I could reason among the People. I became a great healer too, which showed I had the favor of the kachinas.

  Finally I led them away.

  Now we are prospering, each year we build further on our new pueblo, in a place where summer is green and a river runs bright between the cottonwoods. I shun honors they would give me, but I do claim the right to walk solitary whenever I wish, which is often, and free my soul to the stars. Yonder lies Oneness. Will the Summoner call me there again before I die, or shall I enter the earth? My strength is gone and my eyes grow dim. Soon I shall be no more what I am, but something else, whatever it may be. Let me thank life for all that it gave. I was Man.

  XXXVII

  JUMP.

  There was a whirling sword of light; there was a T machine, and a wondrous pair of moons for it; there was a stellar background. There was no sun to be seen.

  Slowly—it took whole seconds—Joelle drew her awareness back from the transcendence of a space-time crossing under holothesis. She need not focus vision on the spectacle in the screen; she could perceive directly through any scanner aboard. Her ears brought her Brodersen’s awed, “Jesus Christ, oh, Christ, what is that?” from the intercom. Otherwise the computer room was silent. Weightless in her harness, she might almost have been disembodied. Yet none of the rest could conceive how fully she was in and of the universe. Data overflowed her; a gamma ray photon or a magnetic field was as real, as immediate as any sight or touch. Like a person suddenly put in an unknown setting, she turned manifold senses and magnified intellect on her surroundings and sought comprehension.

  “Joelle,” Brodersen begged, “have you got some idea of where we’re at?”

  “Yes,” replied a minute fraction of her. “A pulsar. I’ll need much more information, of course. Don’t start linear acceleration. It may well be unsafe to leave the neighborhood of the machine. Put us in orbit around it and stand by for further orders.”

  “Aye. You hear, everybody? Keep your stations. Prepare to maneuver.” The captain spoke shakenly.

  They didn’t need her for the simple task. Navigational instruments and a computer in the command center, operated by Susanne, sufficed. Joelle gave herself back to the cosmos.

  Knowledge came slowly, over hours, in that unearthly environment. She made repeated mistakes, analogous to those made by ordinary humans in a room designed to foster optical illusions. Forces, energies, free atoms and ions and subnuclear particles, were bewilderingly different in configuration and behavior from everything she was used to. The very beam of radiance, narrow, sweeping across night and stars in a blink of time, was hypnotic. The challenge made her undertaking thrice marvelous.

  And: in the programs, the data banks, her own memories, was a legacy from Fidelio. Best would have been to have him in linkage with her. But as she began to learn how the information should be employed which he had left for her, she began to feel she would become the equal of the partnership they two had been. In a way, he was still aboard, a ghost within the machine and within her. That gave strength and peace such as nothing and nobody else could have done.

  Concept by concept, Joelle built a recognition of what lay around the ship.

  Chinook had come far through the galaxy, in the same spiral arm but thousands of light-years closer to its cloud-veiled core. She had traveled futureward also by some millions of years; where S Doradus had been, in the larger Magellanic Cloud, there was a glowing nebula. The body here had exploded, itself a supernova, but long before she left home—back when dinosaurs walked on Earth, if that statement had any physical meaning.

  Rather, a giant sun had burst, strewing most of its substance into spac
e for the nourishment of suns and worlds later to be born. The neutron star was a remnant, two-thirds the mass of Sol. Gravity had collapsed it until the diameter was a bare twenty kilometers. Few atoms existed within it. Instead was an ocean of elementary particles, as close together as quantum mechanics allowed, mercurially interchanging natures with each other, at densities which men could measure but never conceive.

  A little of the star’s material, caught up in the monstrous magnetic field which its spin generated, was cast outward through a pair of spirals until the speed approached that of light. Thereupon this matter gave off synchrotron radiation, in thin beams with small dispersion, whose ardor equalled that of an entire Sol. Most was at radio frequencies; the visible light was a tiny fraction of it. Astronomers with suitably tuned and sensitive receivers, on distant planets which happened to lie in the path of the ray, would mark a pulsar blinking.

  The Others had built their engine to orbit in a plane normal to those energy torrents, at a distance of about seventy-five million kilometers. Closer, conditions would have been lethal, where infalling gas from space and the star’s own chained violence created a maelstrom of hard radiation. Joelle wondered why the radius vector was not longer, much longer. As was, throughout its 157-day “year” the construct must repeatedly be smitten by a fury that ought to be ruinous to it, that would surely vaporize any ship which chanced to emerge just then.

  No. A great round thing circled it. Joelle determined the period to be such that the object was always between T machine and star during a transit. This was not a stable situation; but no doubt the device had robotic engines which readjusted its path as necessary. It was a shield.

  Another, bulkier thing likewise played satellite to the machine, in a way which, given occasional compensation, likewise put it behind the shield when protection was needed.

  “And what the hell might that be?” Brodersen asked the heavens.

  He, Dozsa, Weisenberg, and Granville took Williwaw forth on exploration. By telemetry and audiovisual transmission, Joelle followed along. The data flow to her would have been maddeningly slow and incomplete were a holothete not above impatience. (Between inputs she had everything else to consider, to dwell in.) Nonetheless she was with them immensely more than Rueda, Leino, von Moltke, or Mulryan, straining eyes and ears before the screens, could surmise. Understanding better what the investigators found than they did themselves, Joelle was presently telling them what to search for, and how, and what their discoveries meant.

  The shield was a curved shell. Its mean density was about the same as that of the cylinder; no doubt the same kind of force bound it together. It was about five kilometers across, ample to intercept a firebeam a fifth as wide, adamant enough to reflect that energy without being damaged. The shape maximized diffusion of the image, thereby minimizing impact upon the star. Attachments around the circumference, some ponderous, some skeletal, probably generated fields to divert charged particles that might otherwise come storming past it and swing inward. A different apparatus at the center of the concave side was surely the motor that corrected the orbit. Joelle could see all those shapes in a way that nobody else was able to—for they were not readily describable in manspeech—and could appreciate their exquisiteness.

  What Brodersen and company saw was impressive aplenty, the shimmering white shell athwart a black, many-glittered sky, the searing line of brilliance that whirled beyond it. Weightless though they drifted, they seemed to feel enormous powers at work; silent though the gulf about them was, hiss and crackle out of radio receivers brought them the noise of a cosmos in travail.

  Joelle had but the vaguest idea of how the thing was made or how it ran. The Others knew laws of nature man or Betan had not discovered. That was no surprise. Did she ever meet them, she felt confident she, the holothete, could soon learn… converse… oh, maybe enter their fellowship!

  Brodersen conned Williwaw toward the opposite satellite.

  “Please,” Caitlín said, well-nigh timidly. “Eat this sandwich, drink this milk. It’s starving you are.”

  Beneath her helmet, Joelle blinked. She wasn’t hungry. But when had she last eaten? The circuits ought to include physiological monitors of me, flashed through her. Yes, that would be an interesting addition, albeit a minor one. She decided she’d do best to heed the girl’s advice, and reached for the food and squeeze bottle.

  “You should sleep, too,” Caitlín ventured onward. “You look like death’s discarded mistress. Remember how slow and cautious they’re boosting the boat. They won’t reach goal for many hours.” Not getting her head snapped off, she continued: “Frankly, I think it’s a mistake to have a water nipple handy for you and yourself with direct connections to the plumbing. You should need to get out of that hookup several times a day at least.”

  In free fall, unexercised, my heart shrinks, my blood stagnates, my bones atrophy. No part of the admonition felt real. It was certainly not important, unless in symbolizing a kind of apotheosis. The Others aren’t so plagued. They don’t have to cram things down a reluctant gullet and excrete the dirty residue.

  “When you’re done,” Caitlín pleaded, “let me take you to your cabin, give you a little physical therapy, put you to sleep. You’re no use to anyone if you cave in. Your brain won’t function properly if your circulation doesn’t.”

  She’s right, damn her. “Very well.”

  —Loosely harnessed in midair, Joelle felt legs locked around hers, hands kneading her torso or flexing her limbs for her, through the whole of her bare skin. Caitlín was warm and springy. She was having a period, which sharpened the odor of her. A stray lock of hair waved past Joelle’s cheek, tickled, and carried a different scent, clean and bright.

  “I must admit your treatment feels good,” she said. “I hadn’t noticed how stiff I’d gotten.”

  “You’re in better form for your age than you deserve to be,” Caitlín replied, bolder now. “That’ll not last, though, unless you work out regularly.”

  “I did, you’ll recall, till we arrived here. Right now I can’t spare the time.” Can’t amputate myself from the glories around. How feebly alive I am this moment!

  “You should. We’ve not so great a haste. I recommend men, too.”

  Joelle tautened. “I’m sorry,” Caitlín said. “I’d no wish to pry. Still, you and Dan—you do truly understand, do you not, I’ve no jealousy about that?”

  How could you dare be jealous, the way you carry on? Joelle considered throwing back. She decided she didn’t want to. The issue was supremely trivial. Besides, her nerves and glands told her, since I am out of circuit, I would enjoy it if he made love to me—no, fucked me, nothing else, I passive. The palms and fingers along her back raised heat. Or this creature, in this room with me? She’s not equipped, of course, and doubtless not interested, but—no! Christine, Christine! No!

  Caitlín halted. “What’s the matter?” she asked in alarm.

  “Nothing,” Joelle coughed.

  “The hell it’s nothing. You jerked and tightened as though a thousand volts had shocked you.” Caitlín brought herself around face to face, at arm’s length, lightly clinging to the older woman. Distress took hold of her countenance. “If you care to talk about it, I keep secrets well, and I’ve known a diversity of people. This day we share dread of what may happen to Dan. Would you like to share more?”

  Joelle shook her head till she grew dizzy. “No. It’s nothing, I told you. But stop the massage. Give me a knockout pill good for four hours. I must be alert when the boat makes rendezvous.” As Caitlín hesitated, she screamed, “That’s an order, you tramp!” No Christines. No Erics. I can’t afford them. They hurt too much. Why take further pain? It’s the merest epiphenomenon anyway, like its sister phantom, desire, which is also its mother. In the Noumenon is peace. It never betrays. Let it be my lover, my life, while I remain sundered from the Others.

  The second satellite was an argent ellipsoid, approximately nine kilometers by five, its major axis in the
plane of its own orbit and the T machine’s. It circled not far beyond the outermost beacon, well inside the path of the shield. The resemblance of an object at its “after” end to the object within the shell confirmed Joelle’s opinion that these were motors to counteract perturbation effects. Protrusions elsewhere were less identifiable but were doubtless parts of instruments and, perhaps, communications equipment. Most of them made a lacework of metal, with here and there a phosphorescence or an aurora-like weaving of color, the whole sight very lovely against the stars.

  A flange around a segment of the satellite displayed curious scallopings as well as enigmatic apparatuses. “You know,” Brodersen said, “I’ll bet that’s the dock, made to accommodate quite a few sizes and shapes of spacecraft.” He suited up and flew from his vessel on a backjet, to walk about and examine. The metal being nonferrous, magnetic soles didn’t aid him, but he’d slipped on a pair of sticky-coated asteroid miner’s overshoes. Through a camera in his fist Joelle saw the huge curve to his left, the unknown constellations to his right, toppling past the edge of the pier.

  Excitement vibrated in his voice. “It’s our bad luck nobody’s around just now, but they have been and they will be. This place feels used.”

  Nothing was quite fitted to Williwaw. Nevertheless he found a niche into which the boat could ease. Probably one of the machines alongside would secure her, did he only know how to operate it. He settled for leaving Dozsa on unwilling watch, and led the rest off on foot and by personal rocket.

  A cavernous opening in the “bow” was the entrance to a tunnel which ran three-quarters the length of the station (for station of some kind it must be) Lesser passages led off, branching and rebranching. Every wall shone, a soft light that spectrometers declared ranged from the near ultraviolet to the far infrared… for a variety of eyes? Rails gave an opportunity to pull oneself along. At intervals were frameworks which might be rest stops or observation booths or—? Doors of assorted outlines were so smoothly fitted as to be nearly invisible, and no way appeared for opening them. “Each tenant has his key,” Brodersen hazarded.