The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  Svoboda’s words fell sharp. “I don’t see how we can ever again be whole-hearted about him. But you are right, Cor-inne, we must rebuild ... as much faith as we can.”

  Heads nodded. It was no climax, it was the recognition of something foreseen, so slow and grudging in its growth that the completion of it came as a kind of surprise.

  Macandal need merely say, “Grand. Oh, grand. Let’s drink to that, and then relax and talk about old times. Tomorrow I’ll cook a feast, and we’ll throw a party and invite him and get drunk with him—“ her laugh rang—“in the finest Persian style!”

  Hours afterward, when she and Patulcius were in her room making ready for bed, he said, “That was superbly handled, my dear. You should have gone into politics.”

  “I did, once, sort of, you recall,” she answered with a slight smile.

  “Hanno put you up to this, from the beginning, didn’t he?”

  “You’re pretty shrewd yourself, Gnaeus.”

  “And you coached him in how to behave—carefully, patiently, month after month—with each of us.”

  “Well, I made suggestions. And he had help from ... the ship. Advice. He never told me much about that. I think it was an experience too close to his heart.” She paused. “He’s always guarded his heart—too carefully; I guess because of the losses he suffered in all those thousands of years. But he’s no fool either, where it comes to dealing with people.”

  Patulcius looked at her a while. She had slipped off her gown and stood dark, supple before him. Her face1 against the wall, which was muraled with lilies, made him remember Egypt. “You’re a great woman,” he said low.

  “You’re not a bad guy.”

  “Great for ... accepting me,” he slogged on. “I know it pained you when Wanderer went to Svoboda. I think it still pains you.”

  “It’s good for them. Maybe not ideal, but good; and we do need stable relationships.” Macandal flung her head back and laughed afresh. “Hey, listen to me, talking like a twentieth-century social worker!” She swung her hips. “C’mon over here, big boy.”

  26

  Clouds massed huge, blue-black over the high place. Lightning flared, thunder crashed. The fire before the altar leaped and cast sparks like stars down the wind. The acolytes led the sacrifice to the waiting priest. His knife glimmered. In the grove below, worshippers howled. Afar, the sea ran white and monsters rose from its depths. “No!” Aliyat wailed. “Stop! That’s a child!”

  “It is a beast, a lamb,” Wanderer called back against the noise; but he kept his glance elsewhere. “It is both,” Hanno said to them. “Be still.” Knife flashed, limbs threshed, blood spurted and flowed dark over stone. The priest cast the body into the flames.

  Flesh sizzled on coals, fell away from bones, went up in fat smoke. Through the storm, terrible in their splendor, came the gods.

  Pillar-tall, bull-broad, beard spilling down over the lion skin that clad him, eyes capturing the fire-gleam, Melqart snuffed deep. He licked his lips. “It is done, it is well, it is life,” he boomed.

  Wind tossed the hair of Ashtoreth, rain jeweled it, lightning-light sheened on breasts and belly. Her own nostrils drank. She clasped his gigantic organ as if it were a staff and raised her left hand into heaven. “Bring forth the Resurrected!” she cried.

  Baal-Adon leaned heavily on Adat, his beloved, his mourner, his avenger. He stumbled, still half blind after the murk of the underworld; he trembled, still half frozen from the grave. She guided him to the smoke of the offering. She took the bowl filled with its blood and gave him to drink. Warmth returned, beauty, wakefulness. He saw, he heard how men and women coupled in the grove and across the land in honor of his arising; and he turned to his consort.

  More gods crowded about, Chushor out of the waves, Dagon out of the plowlands, Aliaan out of the springs and underground waters, Resheph out of the storm, and more and more. Clouds began to part. Distantly gleamed the twin pillars and pure lake before the home of El.

  A sunbeam smote the eight who stood on the topheth near the beryl, invisible to priest and acolytes. The gods stared and stiffened. Melqart raised bis club that had smitten the Sea, primordial Chaos, in the dawn of the world. “Who dares betread the holy of holies?” he bellowed.

  Hanno trod forward. “Dread ones,” he said calmly, with respect but not abasing himself, looking straight into those eyes, “we are eight from afar in space, time, and strangeness. We too command the powers of heaven, earth, and hell. But fain would we guest you a while and learn the wonders of your reigning. Behold, we bear gifts.” He signalled, and there appeared a treasure of golden ware, gems, precious woods, incense.

  Melqart lowered his weapon and stared with a greed that awoke also in the features of Ashtoreth; but her regard was on the men.

  27

  One by one, they disengaged. That was a simple matter of removing induction helmets and feedback suits. The web of union between them and the guiding, creating computer had already vanished; the pseudo-experience was at an end. Nonetheless, after they had emerged from their booths into the commonplaceness of the dream chamber, it took them silent minutes to return altogether to themselves. Meanwhile they stood side by side, hand in hand, groping for comfort.

  Eventually Patulcius mumbled, “I thought I knew something about the ancient Near East. But that was the most damnable—”

  “Horror and wonder,” Macandal said unevenly. “Lust and love. Death and life. Was it really like that, Hanno?”

  “I can’t be sure,” the captain answered. “The historical Tyre we visited seemed about right to me.” —in a full-sensory hallucination, where the computer drew on his memories and then let the seekers act and be acted on as they would have in a material world. “Hard to tell, after so long. Besides, you know I’d tried to put it behind me, tried to grow away from what was bad in it. This, though, the Phoenician conceptual universe— No, I don’t believe I ever thought in just that way, even when I was young and supposed I was mortal.”

  “No matter authenticity,” Yukiko said. “We want practice in dealing with aliens; and this was amply alien.”

  “Too much.” Tu Shan’s burly frame shivered. “Come, dear. I want a time gentle and human, don’t you?” She accompanied him out.

  “What society shall we draw on next?” asked Svoboda. Her attention sought Wanderer. “Those you knew must have been at least as foreign to the rest of us.”

  “No doubt,” he replied rather grimly. “In due course, yes, we will. But first a setting more ... rational. China, Russia?”

  “We have plenty of tune,” Patulcius said. “Better we digest this before we think about anything else. Kyrie eleison, to have witnessed the gods at work!” He tugged at Macandal, “I’m exhausted. A stiff drink, a long sleep, and several days’ idleness.”

  “Right.” Her smile was fainter than usual. They left.

  Wanderer and Svoboda seemed aroused. Their gazes came aglow. She reddened. His breast rose and fell. They also departed.

  Hanno took care not to watch. Aliyat had clasped his hand. Now she let go. He spoke dully. “Well, how was it for you?”

  “Terror and ecstasy and—a kind of homecomjng,” she said, barely audible.

  He nodded. “Yes, even though you started life as a Christian, it wouldn’t be totally foreign to you. In fact, I suspect the program used some memories of yours as input where mine weren’t sufficient.”

  “Weird enough, though.”

  He stared beyond her. “A dream within a dream,” he murmured, as if to himself.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Svoboda would understand. Once she and I imagined what kind of future it might be where we dared reveal what we were.” Hanno shook himself. “Never mind. Goodnight.”

  She caught his arm. “No, wait.”

  He stopped, lifted his brows, stood alert in a fashion weary and wary. Aliyat grasped his hand again. ‘Take me along,” she said.

  “Eh?”

  “You’re too lonely. And
I am. Let’s come back together, and stay.”

  Deliberately, he said, “Are you tired of subsisting on Svoboda’s and Corinne’s leavings?”

  For a moment she lost color. She released him. Then she reddened and admitted, “Yes. You and me, we’re neither of us the other’s first pick, are we? And you’ve never forgiven me for Constantinople, not really.”

  “Why,” he said, taken aback, “I’ve told you I have. Over and over I’ve told you. I hoped my actions proved—”

  “Well, just don’t let it make any difference that counts. What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little? Hanno, I’m offering you what nobody else in this ship will, yet. Maybe they never will. But we are getting back something of what we had. Between us, you and I could help that healing along.” She tossed her head. “If you aren’t game to try, to give in your turn, okay, goodnight and to hell with you.”

  “No!” He seized her by the waist. “Aliyat, of course I— I’m overwhelmed—”

  “You’re nothing of the sort, you calculating old scoundrel, and well I know it.” She came to him. The embrace went on.

  Finally, flushed, disheveled, she said against his shoulder, “Sure, I’m a rogue myself. Always will be, I guess. But—I learned more about you than I’d known, Hanno. It wasn’t a dream while we were there, it was as real to us as—no, more real than these damned crowding walls. You stood up to the gods, outsmarted them, made them take us in, like nobody else alive could have. You are the skipper.”

  She raised her face. Tears were on it, but a grin flashed malapert. “They didn’t wear me out. That’s your job. And if we can’t entirely trust each other, if the thing between us won’t quite die away, why, doesn’t that add a pinch of spice?”

  28

  Throughout the final months, as Pytheas backed ever more slowly down to destination, the universe again appeared familiar. Strange that a night crowded with unwinking brilliant stars, girded by the frost-road of the galaxy, where nebulae querned forth new suns and worlds while energies raged monstrous around those that had died and light that came from neighbor fire-wheels had left them before humanity was—should feel homelike. Waxing ahead, Tritos had barely more than half the brightness of Sol, a yellow hue that stirred memories of autumns on Earth. Yet it too was a hearth.

  Instruments peered across narrowing distance. Ten planets orbited, five of them gas giants. The second inmost swung at somewhat less than one astronomical unit’s radius. It possessed a satellite whose eccentric path indicated the primary mass was slightly over two and a third the terrestrial. Nevertheless that globe, though warmer on the average, was at reasonable temperatures, and its atmospheric spectrum revealed chemical disequilibria such as must be due to life.

  Week by week, then day by day, excitement burned higher within the ship. There was no quenching it, and presently even Tu Shan and Patulcius stopped trying. They were committed; magnificent things might wait; and here was, for a while at least, an end of wayfaring.

  Hie peace with Hanno that each had made on his or her own terms did not strengthen into the former fellowship. If anything, it thinned, stretched by a new guardedness. What might be want next, and how might someone else react? He had promised that eventually they would go on to Phaeacia; but when would that be, would it ever, could he then betray it? Nobody made accusations, or indeed brooded much on the matter. Conversation was generally free and easy, if not intimate, and he joined again in some recreations—but no more in shared dreams, once their training purpose had been served. He remained half the outsider, in whom none but Aliyat confided, and she little except for her body.

  He did not attempt to change their attitudes. He knew better; and he knew, as well, how to pass lifetime after mortal lifetime among strangers to his spirit.

  Tritos grew in sight.

  Pytheas cast signals ahead, radio, laser, neutrino. Surely the Allot had detected the ship from afar, roiling the dust and gas of space, braking with a flame out of the furnace engine. Receivers caught no flicker of response. “Have they gone?” Macandal fretted. “Have we come this whole way for nothing?”

  “We’re still many light-hours off,” Wanderer reminded her. Hie hunter’s patience was upon him. “Can’t talk very readily. Not at all by electromagnetic waves, while our drive blazes in front of us. And ... I would scan a newcomer first, before leaving my cover.”

  She shook her head, half angrily. “Forget the Stone Age, John. Anything like war or piracy between the stars isn’t just obscene, it’s absurd.”

  “Can you be absolutely certain? Besides, we could be dangerous to them, or they to us, in ways neither party has managed to imagine.”

  Tritos brightened. Without magnification, simply with the fight stopped down, eyes beheld the disc, spots upon it, flares leaping aloft. Offside stood a bluish-white steady spark that was the second planet. Now spectroscopy gave details of land and water surfaces, air mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The travelers changed course to intercept. The name they bestowed was Xenogaia.

  The hour came when Pytheas called, “Attention! Attention! Coded signals detected.”

  The eight crowded into the command room. That wasn’t physically necessary. They could quite well have perceived and partaken from their separate quarters. It was merely impossible for them not to be side by side, breath mingling with breath.

  The message employed the same basic system as had the robots—a dozen years ago ship’s time, three and a half cosmic centuries—minus relativistic adjustments no longer required. It arrived by UHF radio, from somewhat aft, to avoid ionization that was no longer enormously strong but could still interfere. “The source is a comparatively small object about a million kilometers distant,” Pytheas reported. “It has presumably lain in orbit until we came this near. At present it is accelerating to match our vectors. Radiation is weak, indicating high efficiency.”

  “A boat?” Hanno wondered. “Has it a mother ship?”

  Pytheas assembled the images transmitted. They sprang into vivid existence. First appeared a starscape, then an unmistakable Tritos (you could compare what was in a view-screen), then a dizzying zoom in on ... forms, colors, a thing that swept lopsidedly around a larger. “That must be Xenogaia,” Patulcius said into a thick silence. “It must be where they stay.”

  “I think they are preparing us for what comes next,” Yukiko said.

  The representation vanished. A new form was there.

  They could not, at once, properly see it. The contours, the mathematical dimensionality were too exotic, too far beyond any expectation. Thus had it been for Svoboda and Wanderer when first they glimpsed high mountains—snow-clouds, heaven gone wrinkled, or what? “More art?” Tu Shan puzzled. “They do not make pictures like any that humans ever did. I think they do not sense like us.”

  “No,” Hanno said, “this is likelier a straightforward hologram.” The hair stood up on his arms. “Maybe they don’t know how we see, either, but die reality is die same for all of us ... I hope.”

  The image moved, a stow and careful pirouette revealing it from every angle. It reached out of the scene and brought back a lump of something soft, which it proceeded to mold into a series of geometrical solids, sphere, cube, cone, pyramid, interlinked rings. “It’s telling us it’s intelligent,” Aliyat whispered. Blindly, she crossed herself.

  Vision began to understand. If the image was tire-size, the original stood about one hundred forty centimeters tall. Central was a stalk, a green that glittered and shimmered, supported on two thin limbs mat were flexible or multiply jointed, ending in several bifurcated digits. At the top sprouted two similar arms. These forked, subdivided, sub-subdivided, dendriticaUy, till the watchers were unable to count the last, spidery-delicate “fingers.” From the sides spread a pair of—wings? membranes?—to a span that equaled the height. They looked as if made of nacre and diamond dust, but rippled tike silk.

  After a long time, Tu Shan muttered, “If this is what they are, how
shall we ever know them?”

  ‘The way we knew the spirits, maybe,” Wanderer answered as softly. “I remember kachina dances.”

  “For God’s sake,” Svoboda cried, “what are we waiting for? Let’s show them us!”

  Hanno nodded. “Of course.”

  The spacecraft moved on together toward the living world.

  29

  So Pytheas came to harbor, took orbit about Xenogaia.

  That required special care. There were other bodies to give a wide berth. Foremost was the moon. Scarred and ashen as Earth’s, it had only a tenth the mass, but its path brought it inward to about a third the Lunar distance from its primary, then out again to three-fifths. Some cosmic accident must have caused that, more recent than the impacts that formed the planet.

  A number of artificial satellites wheeled in their own courses. None resembled any in the Solar System. Boats, as Hanno dubbed them, came and went. His folk were unsure how many, for no two seemed alike; only slowly did they realize that form changed according to mission, .and force-fields had more to do with it than crystal or fiber.

  The Allosan mother ship (another human phrasing) orbited well beyond the moon. It appeared to be of fixed shape, a cylindroid almost ten kilometers in length and two in diameter, majestically rotating on its long axis, mother-of-pearl iridescent. Aft (?) was a complex of slender, curved members which might be the drive generator; it put Hanno in mind of interwoven vine patterns he had seen on Nordic mnestones and in Irish Gospels. Forward (?) the hull flared and then came to a point, making Patulcius and Svoboda recall a minaret or a church spire. Yukiko wondered about its age. A million years did not seem unthinkable.

  “They probably live aboard,” Wanderer opined. “Uh, what weight does that spin provide?”

  “Sixty-seven percent of standard terrestrial gravity,” the ship responded.