The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  “Nomhre de Dios,” Kueda whispered and caught his bride to him.

  Before she could lose a tear, Caitlín was holding them both. Across their shaken shoulders, she called to Brodersen, “Dan, we’ve a larger matter to finish, aye, and celebrate, before we think about that unlucky business. Will you begin over?”

  The captain sat alone in his office. Its private line was connected to the holothete. His jaws clamped hard on a pipe, which had turned the air around him acrid and was scorching his tongue. A bottle of whisky stood on his desk beside the printouts of high-speed photographs.

  Those pictured a three-dimensional latticework, its widest dimension perhaps a kilometer, of no simple configuration, though graceful and fragile-seeming as a spiderweb at dawn, it also aglitter with dewdrop light. A pearly luminance cloaked the whole. That, and distance, left barest hints of any further details. The precise track it had taken had likewise escaped identification.

  Joelle said: “I suspect the vessel is almost massless, almost entirely a construct of force-fields. Those could cushionpassengers and cargo against the fantastic accelerations that took her through her guidepath. If there is a cargo; if there are passengers. She may well be robotic–no, doubtless too crude a concept—and she may carry nothing but patterns, imposed on a few molecules, which are information. Why send your body anywhere? Why not a recording of your personality, that can be activated when it arrives-in an identical, manufactured body or in one made for the particular purpose? It can do and experience whatever you want. Then it carl return as a pattern and be… transcribed…into you…. Why, you could live a thousand separate lives, on as many separate worlds, and afterward gather them all together.”

  “Do you know this is true?” Brotiersen asked dully.

  “Of course not. But I do know it’s possible. I even perceive certain details of how it can be clone. If you had such a capability, wouldn’t you take advantage?”

  “Yeah, I s’pose. ‘Then they’ll never detect us’?”

  “I didn’t say that. Perhaps more primitive, material craft go through this point too. Every race in the fellowship may not be on the same technological level, for; I number of reasons. Or perhaps the Others come by once in a while. I don’t think those were Others, Dan. They would not have rnissed our presence.”

  Brodersen took a drink. “What do you guesstimate the chances are of any of your cases being true’? Somebodyhappening past who’s not too advanced to pay attention the way we’re not too advanced to notice a fellow man in the woods. Or else somebody who’s so very far along that his eye is on the sparrow.”

  “I’d call the chances poor.”

  “Yeah, me too. We may both be dead wrong, Joelle deadly wrong, but what’ve we got to go on except our best guesses you from your brain, me from blind instinct’! If we stay here a few more months, pacing back and forth for the sake of weight, we’ll’ve expended our reaction mass and have no choice but to go into spin niode and stay on. I call it better to keep what freedom of action we’re able. I’ll push for weighing anchor, when we discuss ancl vote ton the question.”

  Brodersen’s pipe had gone out. He made fire to rekindle it. “We won’t debate for a couple of weeks, though.” he decreed. “Something could turn up meanwhile, just barely could. And Su and Carlos rate a proper honeymoon.”

  Nothing did appear again.

  XLII

  JUMP.

  In utter blackness, a colossal Catherine’s wheel burned across a quarter of the sky. From where Chinook was it appeared tilted; vision crossed an arm, then the nucleus from which it curved, then an arm beyond that. It shone, it shone: the heart red-gold, the spirals blue-white, clusters scattered throughout like sparks. Elsewhere gleamed a few cloudy forms, attendants upon its majesty, and remotely the light from its kindred.

  “Intergalactic space,” Brodersen whispered.

  “Some fifty thousand light-years out. More than that from where we were,” Joelle said. Her tone held exaltation. “Judging by the colors, the relative brightnesses, of inner and outer portions, there are fewer giant stars than our astronomers estimated, and less dust and gas for new ones to form out of. We must still be in our future, perhaps farther on. A billion years? Let’s stay a while so I can learn!”

  Brodersen regarded the cylinder and its glowing markers. “Another T machine all by itself, and big like the last. A stepping stone to whole other galaxies… and ages—When you reckoned what guidepath would take us the longest ways, you reckoned well.”

  “But still no sign of help for us,” came Leino’s weary voice. “How long can we keep hunting? Into what weird places?”

  Brodersen grimaced. “Yeah,” he said. “I begin to wonder myself. Maybe we’re not wise to plow ahead. Maybe Joelle should lead us in backtracking, if you can figure out how.”

  “I believe I can, in a general way,” the holothete told them. “But that requires more information. Which I ought to gather in any event, to improve my computations, no matter what we decide.”

  “Okay,” Brodersen said, “we’ll hang around a bit. Might as well.” He knuckled his eyes. “A chance to think. Maybe even to get some rest, after this latest blow.”

  Caitlín asked gently, “Are none of you seeing how beautiful this is?”

  She floated alone in the common room and adored. Clocks read twenty-two thirty hours of the day that the crew bore around with them, and what gathering there had been here had broken up early.

  Dozsa came in, pushed toward her, checked himself by grasping a chair beside the one she held. The sole illumination was from outside, argent and rose, moonlight-soft. It tinged her against dappled shadows and darknesses more deep that filled the chamber.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. “Uh, how are you?”

  “Beyond joy,” she answered, not looking away from heaven.

  “Yes, it is a splendid sight. A shame that nobody else seems able to appreciate it. Except Joelle., I suppose, in her cold fashion…. It’s for lovers.”

  “Indeed it is that, Stefan.”

  The mate smiled and laid an arm around her waist. She didn’t noticeably react, for or against. He nuzzled her cheek and inhaled the aromas of flesh and loosely braided hair. “You’re a more gorgeous sight, Caitlín,” he murmured.

  She chuckled. “Thank you, kind sir, for your mendacity.” The humor faded. “If you please, though, no offense intended, but I want to lose me in what we have before us, while we do.”

  “Aw-w-w.” He pulled close. “Caitlín, sweetheart.”

  She tensed and turned to face him squarely. “Stefan, we’ve been good comrades. You’d not be spoiling of that, would you?”

  He kissed her on the mouth. She thrust back from him, not breaking his grip but gaining half a meter between all else of them. “Let me go,” she demanded.

  He tugged at her. “Let me go,” she said, word by word, “or so help me the Mórrigan, I’ll put you in sickbay.”

  Dozsa did. His indignation met her fury. She breathed hard. “If you doubt me,” she warned, “if you rely on your karate, you’ll be minus an eye at least, and quite likely the family jewels. I know how to take people apart as well as sew them together.”

  Wrath came under mastery. “Ah, I got my temper up,” she said with an effort. “You meant no harm, I’m sure. We’ll forget the matter.”

  His anger waxed. “You’re not Dan Brodersen’s woman, pure and simple,” he spat. “You’re Martti Leino’s too. And who else’s?”

  She bridled afresh. “My own and nobody else’s.”

  “You throw your tail around where you feel like it, eh? And I’m not good enough.”

  She attempted mildness. “Stef, dear, Martti needed help. I’m not free to tell why, but he did. He does no more, most of the time. Now Dan’s the one who bleeds. Decision after terrible decision must he make, never knowing if the next will doom us. I ease the bleakness for him a little. And he is my chief person, the man I love and who loves me.”

  “Yah!
Tonight he’s off with Frieda. Don’t think I didn’t see the three of you whispering and the two of them leaving.”

  Caitlín nodded. “Aye. She too has a need, I’ve learned. Did you ever try to know more than that big strong body? She felt so low I decided—Well, never mind.”

  “How about me? Has it occurred to you I might be, be capable of suffering?”

  “Oh, Stefan, ring down the curtain in that theater,” she sighed. “You’ve enjoyed Frieda many a time, and you will again. Here you just thought you saw an opportunity.” She made a fending gesture. “Aye, well I know you miss your darlings at home and dread you’ll nevermore see them. But you’re tough-souled, like me; you don’t bear the final responsibility, like Dan; nor do you—Och, the upshot is, beyond the survival help of a shipmate, we’ve naught to give each other but fun.”

  “And you wouldn’t find me fun,” he said bitterly.

  She laughed. “Why, fellow, I’ve looked forward to you with much interest for weeks. It’s only that conditions were never suitable.”

  He brightened. “Well?”

  She shook her head. “Later, maybe. I told you, Dan needs me. He’s being very kind this night, and nonetheless I had to urge him. There’s no harm in a frolic elsewhere, but I can’t risk another affair as intense as with Martti.”

  Dozsa looked cheerier yet. “I promise you, Caitlín, a frolic is all I have in mind.”

  “But you took for granted you had a right to it.” Her tone was compassionate. “I’m sorry, Stef. I cannot allow that.”

  The mate swallowed, stared at his hands where they clutched the chair, and at last said, “I apologize.”

  “I felt sure you would be big enough to.” She stroked his cheek. “Now let us truly forget. Let us be a pair of friends, met for the admiring of an enormous beauty.”

  XLIII

  JUMP.

  Blackness, nothing, blind and absolute. Folk moaned in a kind of terror.

  The beacons around the T machine were not candles, red, violet, emerald, amber, lit against the accursed dark; they shone lost and tiny, as if at any moment they might gutter out. Then afar, the least of glimmers on the edge of being seeable, vision found a single point of light.

  “Be calm,” ordered a part of Joelle that she detached from herself for this. “We’re in no immediate danger. I will investigate.” She reunited her mind. With the ship’s organs and senses, she reached forth.

  Radar drew the spinning cylinder for her. It was the largest they had yet encountered. Free falling, she nonetheless felt its mass and the power locked within. Optics and radio, vastly amplified, showed her stars scattered thinly and widely, feeble coals smoldering toward oblivion. About the hull was almost a total vacuum. What radiation and material particles she erstwhile knew were almost altogether gone, leaving a hollow that it was meaningless to call empty and cold. She searched and found neighbor galaxies as cindered as this. Their forms were chaotic. She tried to find other whole clusters of them, and should have been able to spy a few of the nearest, such as the Virgo group, by the last photons they would ever breathe out; but she failed. They had receded too far.

  Her awareness came back to immediate surroundings. Instruments had accumulated sufficient data for her to realize that the machine was in orbit around a wholly dead sun. Akin to Sol, it had never exploded, being too small, but passed through its red giant and variable phases, shrank to a planet-sized globe of the maximum density whereunder atoms could still be atoms, and slowly cooled from white heat to a clinker. Some true planets remained, bare rocks or sheathed in their own frozen atmospheres. Save for one—

  Joelle remembered she ought to descend from the heights and tell her people what had been revealed unto her.

  “We’re in the remote future—spatially, back inside the galaxy, but temporally., sometime between seventy and a hundred billion years after we were born. No stars are left alive except the dimmest [the meek shall inherit], and they are now dying, while the galaxy itself is disintegrating. The universe has expanded to four or five times the size it had in our day. If we go much onward, I think we’ll learn whether it really will widen forever, or if the old idea is right after all, that it will collapse inward to a new fireball and a new cosmos.”

  “Us go onward?” a crewman cried. She didn’t identify his distorted voice, nor wanted to. “Oh, no, oh, no.”

  Brodersen’s came in, carefully pragmatic. “What’s that mite of yellow shine we see? Must be nearby.”

  “It is. The black dwarf we’re circling has attendants, and the light source is a satellite of one of those. I have no clear notion of its nature. We ought to take a look. The T machine is in a Trojan position with respect to its primary, and the distance is about one-point-five a.u: not quite four standard days at a full gee.”

  “Yes, I suppose we ought,” Brodersen said.

  Joelle reminded him levelly—the wonder of it stayed singing and thundering within her holothetic self—“It’s doubtless a work of the Others, you know.”

  Chinook flew.

  The viewscreens in the common room were blanked, and nobody was sure who had first proposed that; there had been no slightest argument. Instead, the data retrievals bore images, forlornly brilliant, of manwork—Pericles, Shah Jehan, Hoku-sai, Monet, Phidias, Rodin, on and on in multiple sequences-while music reveled. Few paid much attention.

  Since the vessel was undermanned, a custom had developed that after meals, everyone not on duty helped the quartermaster and her assistant clear things away. Thus Philip Weisenberg found himself walking from the washer beside Caitlín.

  “You’re pretty downcast this evening, aren’t you?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Anything I can help with?”

  “I thank you, but it’s nothing,” she said, sketching a smile. “A mood, a whimsy.”

  “Don’t underrate that, my dear. As isolated as we are—no matter what grandeur is around us, we become more and more defenseless against ourselves.” He brought his lips close to her ear. “You saw me through a bad night. I’ve not forgotten. Call on me whenever you wish.”

  “Well—” Abruptly she seized his arm. “Could we go somewhere and talk?”

  They sought his cabin. He tuned in Swan Lake, a performance recorded on Luna perhaps a hundred million millennia ago, but simply to bring the room alive. No alcohol or marijuana were on hand, and she declined his offer to use the hotplate for making tea. Quietly settling into a chair, he let her pace.

  “Aye, you spoke truth,” she said. “About our being so cut off that our own pettinesses take us over till we become monkeys in a cage. I wasn’t quite realizing of that before, for the splendors we found were always too great. But in this tomb of Creation it comes to me at last—things that have happened—and we, are we really to blame if we go mad? At home, when trouble struck, we had sunsets and sunrises, forests, heaths, loughs, larks, or simply a city, a world of fellow humans, where we could go out and do. Here, in a metal shell, what is left but staring, the while we follow a marshlight to nowhere?… No, worse than that, for a marshlight would at least beguile us through an honest bog, water chill and a-splash, reeds to rustle, frogs to croak, and in the end, when we drowned, peat to receive us and preserve us for our descendants to find and marvel at, in mere thousands of years!”

  “You too, then?” he replied. “You also want to turn back? Nobody imagines any more that we’d find home, but—New Earth? Caitlín, there isn’t a chance.”

  “Och, well I know. Yet we’d have stars to see. Or—Earth and Demeter are not the only living worlds. I could die gladly on Danu, among the singers and dancers.”

  “We can’t return there either. Inbound is not a straightforward reversal of outbound, and Joelle hasn’t the information, let alone the basic knowledge, to compute a path exactly.”

  “That I know too. But we could seek to when the galaxy was alive, could we not?”

  Caitlín prowled back and forth for a time. Bright phantoms leaped where music flowed. At last she halted, stood
before Weisenberg, and demanded, “What do you want for us, Phil?”

  “To go on,” he said. “As long as necessary, or as long as we can.”

  “In the faint hope we may somehow pick up a pilot for Sol?”

  “Yes.” From his self-contained leanness, he beheld her desperate fullness, and said, “Caitlín, I think that underneath your longings, you agree. True, it’s easier for me in a lot of ways. I’m no child of open land and skies, I’m an engineer. A machine is as natural to me as a tree or a rainfall. Space was always my love, the stars, the idea of the Others… next to Sarah and the kids, of course, but damn it, exploring further is the sole way to maybe regain them, and meanwhile, whether we win or lose—Oh, hell, I’m getting maudlin.”

  She stood and looked at him.

  He stirred, shifted his eyes about, and said uncomfortably, “Caitlín, you wouldn’t be this troubled if you weren’t trying to shoulder Dan’s load for him. Would you?”

  “He shoulders the crew’s,” she replied.

  “And still he has no notion how heavily he’s drawing on you?”

  “You exaggerate, Phil. But insofar as I can cheer him who is my life, aye, that’s what I’m for.”

  Nearly appalled: “As independent a person as you would say that?”

  “Why not? Would he not be doing the same for me, did I have need?”

  Weisenberg sat silent, his gaze upon the deck, before he glanced back at her and said, “All right. It’s not so different from what’s—what was—what is between Sarah and me. But Caitlín, if you’d like to let go for a while, just let the control go, remember Ireland aloud or anything else you want, well, here I am too.”

  —Long afterward, she bade him goodnight. They had snuggled somewhat but otherwise talked, only talked, he as much as she, though now and then her words came through tears. “Sleep well, Phil,” she said, “and thank you, thank you.”