The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  “Yeah, they look as if they come from that kind of environment. It means—let’s see, you told us Xenogaian pull equals one point four times Earth’s, so for them—no, no, let me show off,” Wanderer laughed. “It’s twice what they’re used to. Can they take it?”

  “We could, if we had to,” Macandal said. “But the Al-k)i do seem fragile.” She hesitated. “Like crystal, or a bare tree iced over on a clear winter day. They are quite beautiful, once you learn how to look at them.”

  “I think we shall have to,” declared Tu Shan harshly. “I mean, bear an added forty kilos on each hundred.” Their gazes followed his to that viewscreen in the common room which held an image of Xenogaia. They were passing the day side, the planet nearly full. It was brighter than Earth, for it was more clouded. Whiteness swirled and billowed, thinly marbled with the blue of oceans, spotted with greenish-brown glimpses of land. Though the axis tilted a full thirty-one degrees, neither pole bore a cap; snow gleamed rarely on the tallest mountains.

  Aliyat shivered. The motion loosened her hold on a table edge and sent her slowly off through the air. Hanno caught her. She clung to his hand. “Go down there?” she asked. “Must we?”

  “You know we can’t stay healthy in weightlessness,” he reminded her. “We can for longer than mortals born, and we’ve got medications that help, but finally our muscles and bones will shrink too, and our immune systems fail.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. But yondert”

  “We need a minimum weight. This ship isn’t big enough to spin for that by itself. Too much radial variation, too much Coriolis force.”

  She glared through tears. “I am not an idiot. I have not forgotten. Nor have I f-f-forgotten the robots can fix that.”

  “Yes, separate the payload and engine sections, hitch a long cable between, then spin them. The trouble is, that immobilizes Pytheas till it’s reassembled. I think you’ll all agree we’d better hang on to its capabilities, as well as the boats’, at least till we know a lot more.”

  “Shall we shelter on the first planet?” Tu Shan.asked. “A seared hell. The third isn’t this large either, but a frozen, barren waste; and likewise every outer moon or asteroid.”

  Svoboda looked still toward Xenogaia. “Here is life,” she said. “Forty percent additional weight won’t harm us,” given our innate hardiness. “We will grow used to it.”

  “We grew used to heavier burdens in the past,” Macandal observed quietly.

  “But what I’m trying to say, if you’ll let me,” Aliyat yelled, “is, can’t the Alloi do something for us?”

  By this time considerable information exchange had taken place, diagrams, interior views of vessels, whatever the non-humans chose to offer and the humans thought to. It included sounds. From the Alloi, those were notes high and coldly sweet that might be speech or might be music or might be something incomprehensible. It seemed likely that they were going about establishing communication in systematic wise; but the naive newcomers had not yet fathomed the system. They dared hope that the first, most basic message had gotten through on both sides and was mutually honest: “Our will is good, we want to be your friends.”

  Hanno frowned. “Do you imagine they can control gravitation? What about that, Pytheas?”

  “They give no indication of any such technology,” answered the ship, “and it is incompatible with known physics.”

  “Uh-huh. If it did exist, if they could do it, I expect they’d have so many other powers they wouldn’t bother with the kind of stuff we’ve met.” Hanno rubbed his chin. “But they could build a spinnable orbital station to our specs.”

  “A nice little artificial environment, for us to sit in and turn to lard, the way we were doing here?” exploded from Wanderer. “No, by God! Not when we’ve got a world to walk on!”

  Svoboda uttered a cheer. Tu Shan beamed. Patulcius nodded vigorously. “Right,” said Macandal after a moment.

  “That is provided we can survive there,” Yukiko pointed out. “Chemistry, biology—it may be lethal to us.”

  “Or maybe not,” Wanderer said. “Let’s get busy and find out.”

  The ship and its robots commenced that task. In the beginning humans were hardly more than eager spectators. Instruments searched, sampled, analyzed; computers pondered. Boats entered atmosphere. After several sorties had provided knowledge of surface conditions, they landed. The mtelligent machines that debarked transmitted back their findings. Then as the humans gained familiarity, they became increasingly a part of the team, first suggesting, later directing and deciding. They were not scientific specialists, nor need they be. The ship had ample information and logic power, the robots abundant skills. The travelers were the embodied curiosity, desire, will of the whole.

  Hanno was barely peripheral. His concern was with the Alloi. Likewise did Yukiko’s become. He longed most for what they might tell him about themselves and their tarings among the stars; she thought of arts, philosophies, transcendence. Both had a gift for dealing with the foreign, an intuition that often overleaped jumbled, fragmentary data to reach a scheme that gave meaning. Thus had Newton, Planck, Einstein gone straight to insights that, inexplicably, proved to explain and predict. So had Darwin, de Vries, Oparin. And so, perhaps, had Gautama Buddha.

  When explorers on Earth encountered peoples totally foreign to them—Europeans in America, for instance—the parties soon groped their way to understanding each other’s languages. Nothing like that happened at Tritos. Here the sundering was not of culture and history, nor of species, phylum, kingdom. Two entire evolutions stood confronted. The beings not only did not think alike, they could not.

  Compare just the human hand and its Allosan equivalent. The latter had less strength, although the grip was not negligible when all digits laid hold on something. It had vastly more sensitivity, especially in the fine outer branchlets: a lower threshold of perception and a wider, better coordinated field of it. The hairlike ultimate ends clung by molecular wringing, and the organism felt how they did. Thus the subjective world was tactilely richer than ours by orders of magnitude.

  Was it optically poorer? Impossible to say, quite likely meaningless to ask. The Allosan “wings” were partly regulators of body temperature, partly excretors of vaporous waste, mainly networks (?) of sensors. These included organs responsive to light, simpler than eyes but, in their numbers and diversity, perhaps capable of equal precision. Whether this was so or not depended on how the brain processed their input; and there did not seem to be any single structure corresponding to a brain.

  Enough. It would probably take Hanno and Yukiko years to learn the anatomy; it would certainly take them longer to interpret it. For the moment, they understood—borrowing terrestrial concepts, grotesquely inappropriate—they were dealing not only with software unlike their own, but hardware. It was not to be expected that they would readily master its kind of language. Perhaps, beyond some kind of rudiments, they never would.

  Presumably the Alloi had had earlier practice among aliens, and had developed various paradigms. The pair found themselves acquiring facility as they worked, not simply struggling to comprehend but making contributions to the effort. More and more, intent clarified. A primitive code took shape. Material contacts began, cautious to start with, bolder as confidence grew.

  The fear was not of violence, or, for that matter— “under these circumstances,” said Hanno, grinning—chicanery. It was of surprises that might lurk in a universe where life seemed to be incidental and intelligence accidental. What condition taken for granted by one race might harm the other? What innocuous or necessary microbes might elsewhere brew death?

  Robots met in space. They traded samples that they took to shielded laboratories for study. (At any rate, it happened aboard Pytheas.) Nanotech and biotech gave quick responses. While the chemistries were similar, even to most arnino acids, the deviations were such as to bar cross-infection. Yes, the specimens sent by the Alloi had things in them that probably corresponded somewhat to virus
es; but the fundamental life-stuff resembled DNA no more than a file does a saw.

  After repeated experiments of that general sort, robots paid visits to ships. The Allosan machines were graceful, multi-tentacular, a pleasure to watch swooping about. Within the Allosan vessel, the air was thin, dry, but humanly breathable. Temperatures went through cycles, as they did in Pytheas, the range being from cool to chilly. Light was tinged like that from Tritos, less bright than outside but adequate. Centrifugal weight was as predicted, two-thirds of a gee, also sufficient.

  As for what else the great hull bore—

  Work on Xenogaia proceeded more straightforwardly. Planetology was a mature discipline, a set of techniques, formulas, and computer models. This globe fitted the pattern. Meteorology and climatology were less exact; some predictions could never be made with certainty, for chaos inhered in the equations. However, the overall picture soon emerged.

  A strong greenhouse effect overcompensated a high albedo; other things being equal, every clime was hotter than at the same latitude on Earth. Of course, things seldom were equal. Thus the tropics had their pleasant islands as well as their steaming continental swamps or blistering deserts. Axial tilt and rotation rate, once around in slightly more than twenty-one hours, made for powerful cyclonic wind patterns, but the heavy atmosphere and warm polar regions moderated weather almost everywhere. Though conditions were unstable compared to the terrestrial, subject to swifter and often unforeseeable change, dangerous storms were no commoner than on Earth before control. In composition the air was familiar: higher humidity, rather more carbon dioxide, several percent less oxygen. For humans, the latter was more than made up by the sea-level pressure, twice their standard. It was air they could safely inhale, and uncorrupted.

  Life covered, filled, drenched the planet. Its chemistry was akin to the terrestrial and Allosan, with its own uniquenesses. Given considerations of energy, followed by the scores of cases robots had reported to Earth, that was expected. As always, the astonishments sprang from the details, the infinite versatility of protein and inventiveness of nature.

  On the prosaic side, humans could eat most things, though probably few would taste very good, some would be poisonous, and none would provide complete nutrition. Probably they would be safe from every predator microbe and virus; mutation might eventually change that, but modern biomedicine should handily cope. For the Survivors, with their peculiar immune and regenerative systems, the hazard would almost be nonexistent. They couki grow terrestrial crops if they chose, and then animals to feed on the grass and grain.

  This was not virgin Earth given back to them. It was not Phaeacia of their dreams. Yet here they could make a home.

  Here they would have neighbors.

  “—and he’s been so lonely,” Macandal said to Patulcius. “She and Hanno—no, no monkey business between them. Might be better if there were. It’s just that they’re both wrapped up in their research till it’s as if nothing and nobody else quite exists for them. Aliyat’s complained to me. I can’t do much for her, but I’ve gotten an idea about Tu Shan.”

  She singled out others and gave them the same thought, privately, in words she deemed suited to each. Nobody objected. On the chosen evening, after she had done the poor best that could be done to produce a feast in weightlessness, she called for a vote, and Tu Shan received his surprise.

  A spaceboat descended. Assisted by two robots, because initial problems with gravity were unavoidable after this long in orbit, he stepped forth, the first human being on Xenogaia. He had left off his shoes. The soil lay warm and moist. Its odors enriched his breath. He wept.

  Shortly afterward, Hanno and Yukiko returned from the Allosan ship. The visit had been their first. The six aboard Pytheas gathered around them in the common room. All floated watchful as pikes in a hike. A mural, enlarged from “Falaise d Varengeville”—sea, sky, cliff, its shadow on the water, brush golden with sunlight—seemed more remote in time and space than Monet himself.

  “No, I cannot tell you what we saw,” Yukiko said, almost like one who speaks in sleep. “We haven’t the words, not even for the images they’ve sent here. But ... somehow, that interior is alive.”

  “Not just dead metal and electronic trickery,” Hanno added. He was altogether awake, ablaze. “Oh, they’ve £ much to teach us! And I do believe we’ll have news for them, once we’ve found how to tell it. But it seems they can’t come to us in person. We don’t know why, what’s wrong with our environment, but I think that if they were able to, they would.”

  “Then they doubtless have the same handicap on the planet,” Wanderer said slowly. “We can do what their machines never can. They must be glad we came.”

  “They are, they are,” Yukiko exulted. “They sang to to us—”

  “They want us to come live with them!” Hanno cried.

  A kind of gasp went around1 the room. “Are you sure?” Svoboda’s question was half demand.

  “Yes, I am. We’ve achieved some communication, and it’s a simple message, after all.” The words tumbled from Hanno. “How better can we get to really know each other and work together? They showed us the section we can have. It’s plenty big and we’re free to bring over whatever we want, make whatever we like. The weight’s enough to keep us fit. The air, the general conditions are no worse than in mountains we remember. We’ll get used to that; and we can set up cozy retreats. Besides, we’ll spend a lot of time in space, exploring, discovering, maybe building—”

  “No,” said Wanderer.

  The single sound was a hammerfall. Silence echoed behind it. Eyes sought eyes. One by one, faces stiffened.

  “I’m sorry,” Wanderer went on. “This is marvelous. I’m tempted. But we’ve sailed too many years with the Flying Dutchman. Now there’s a world for us, and we’re going to take it.”

  “Wait, wait,” Yukiko protested. “Of course we mean to study Xenogaia. Mainly it, in fact. It, the sapients, they must be why the Alloi have lingered. We’ll establish bases, work out of them—”

  Tu Shan shook his heavy head. “We will build homes,” he answered.

  “It is decided,” Patulcius said. “We will cooperate with the Alloi when we have seen to our needs. I daresay we can investigate the planet better, living on it, than in a series of ... of junkets. Be that as it may—“ he smiled coldly—“je suis, je reste.”

  “Hold on,” Hanno argued. “You talk as though you mean to stay on permanently. You know that was never the idea. Xenogaia may be habitable, but it’s far from what we had in mind. Eventually we’ll take on fresh antimatter. I think the Alloi have a production facility near the sun, but in any case, they’ll help us. We’ll go to Phaeacia as we intended.”

  “When?” challenged Macandal.

  “When we’re finished here.”

  “How long will that take? Decades, at least. Centuries, possibly. You two will enjoy them. And the rest of us, sure, we’ll be fascinated, we’ll help whenever we can. But meanwhile and mainly, we have our own lives and rights. And our children’s.”

  “If in the end we leave,” Svoboda said low, “it will not be the first home any of us forsook; and first we will have had a home.”

  Hanno captured her gaze. “You wanted to explore,” he recalled.

  “And I shall, in a living land. Also ... we need every pair of hands. I cannot desert my comrades.”

  “You’re outvoted,” Aliyat said, “and this time you can’t do anything about it.” She reached to stroke fingers over Hanno’s cheek. Her smile quivered. “There are seas down there for you to sail on.”

  “Since when were you a bold pioneer?” he taunted.

  She flushed. “Yes, I’m a city girl, but I can learn. Do you suppose I liked lolling useless? I thought better of you. Well, in the past I crossed deserts, mountains, oceans, I survived in alleys, through wars and plagues and famines. Go to hell.”

  “No, please, we must not quarrel,” Yukiko pleaded.

  “Right,” Wanderer agreed. “We�
��ll take our time, think, talk this over like friends.”

  Hanno straightened, so that he floated upright before the cliff and the sky. “If you want,” he said bleakly. “But I can tell you now, in the teeth of your old tribal hope for a consensus, we won’t reach any. You’re bound and determined to strike roots on the planet. And I, I will not throw away this opportunity the AUoi have offered. I cannot. Instead of fighting, let’s plan how we can make the best of what’s to be.”

  Tu Shan’s countenance twisted. “Yukiko?” he croaked.

  She flew to his arms. He held her close. What she gulped forth was, “Forgive me.”

  30

  “I think you should go,” Macandal said. “It seems to be something you’d understand best among us.”

  “No, really,” Aliyat began, “you’ve always—”

  Macandal smiled. “You’ve gotten too shy, honey. Think back. Way back, like to New York.”

  Still Aliyat hesitated. She wasn’t simply unsure whether she could deal with the Ithagene in. what was clearly a critical situation. As a matter of fact, she had gotten more grasp of their language and ways—in some aspects, at least—than anybody else. (Had her earlier life made her quick to catch nuances?) But Tu Shan could ill spare her help, nursing the fields through this season of a drought year; and in spare moments, she was collating the mass of data and writing up the significant experiences that Wanderer and Svoboda sent back from their exploration of the northern woodlands. “I’d have to stay in touch with you anyway,” she said.

  “Well, that’s wise,” the other woman replied, “but you’ll be on the spot and the only one really qualified to make decisions. I’ll support you. We all will.”

  She was not the boss at Hestia, nobody was, yet it had tacitly come to pass that her word carried the most weight in the councils of the six. More lay behind that than finding the advice was sound. Wanderer had remarked once, “I think we, with our science and high technology, four and a third light-centuries from Earth, are discovering old truths again: spirit, mana, call it what you will. Maybe, even, God.”