The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  “Why us?” asked Macandal. “I realize—our psyches, our special talents, we and they doing more, becoming more, than either could alone, like a good marriage—but if they’d like human company, why not go on to Earth?”

  “Have you forgotten why?” retorted Hanno grimly.

  Her eyes widened. Fingers touched lips. “How can they be sure?”

  “They aren’t, not absolutely; but from what we’ve described, they can guess with pretty high probability. Earth is going the selfeame way Pegasi did, and the rest that they know about. Ob, we’ll swap messages with it, no doubt. But it’s too far off”—a galactically minuscule four and a third light-centuries—“to make the voyage appear worthwhile. The Alloi would rather help us get established, come really to know us, and finally plan ventures together.”

  Tu Shan gazed upward. “Phaeacia,” he breathed. “Like Earth. Not truly, but ... green leaves, rich soil, clear skies.” He closed his eyes against the sun and let its warmth lave his face. “Most nights we will see stars.”

  Patulcius shifted about on the bench. “This does put quite a different complexion on matters,” he admitted. As much eagerness as his heavy features ever showed danced across them. “The survival of more than simpty us. Of humanity, true humanity.”

  It blazed from Wanderer: “Not just a settlement or nation. A base, a frontier camp. We can be patient, we and the Alloi. We can make the planet ours, raise generations of young, till we’re many and strong. But then we’ll go to space again.”

  “Those of you who wish,” said Tu Shan.

  Macandal’s tone shook. “To learn and grow. To keep life alive.”

  Aliyat spoke through sudden, brief tears. “Yes, take the universe back from the damned machines.”

  “Where are they?”

  The story is that Enrico Fermi first raised the question in the twentieth century, when scientists first dared wonder publicly about such things. If other thinking beings than us existed—how strange and sad if none did, in the entire vast-ness and diversity of creation—why had we on Earth found no trace or track of them? There we were, on the verge of making our own starward leap. Had nobody gone before us?

  Perhaps it was impractical or impossible for flesh and Mood. It certainly was not for machines we knew in principle how to make. They could be our explorers, sending home their findings. Reaching far planets, they could build more like themselves, instilling the same imperative: Discover. (No menace to Me in their proliferation; at any given sun, a few tons of raw material from some barren asteroid or moon would suffice.) Under conservative assumptions, calculation showed that such robots would spread from end to end of the galaxy in about a million years. That was the merest eyeblink of cosmic time. Why, a million years ago our ancestors were approaching full humanness. Had no race anywhere even that much of a head start? All it would take was one.

  Still easier to send were signals. We tried. We listened. Silence, until we thought to try in certain new directions; then, enigma.

  Guesses teemed. The Others were transmitting, but not by means that we yet knew. They had come here, but in the prehistoric past. They were here, but concealed. They destroyed themselves, as we feared we might, before they could send or go. They had no high-technological civilizations among them; ours was unique. They did not exist; we were indeed alone. ...

  Fermi went to his grave, time blew onward through its night, humankind entered upon a new path of evolution. The answer to his question was less found than it was created, by what the children of Earth themselves did; and it proved to be twofold.

  Dispatch your robots. They go forth to marvels and magnificences. Every star is a sun, every planet a world, multifarious, astounding, its secrets not exhaustible in less than many decades. When it bears life, they are inexhaustible forever, because life is not only infinite in its variousness, it never remains the same, it is forever changing. When it is intelligent, this rises to a whole new dimensionality, a different order of being.

  The farther your emissaries range, the faster grows the realm of the unknown. Double the radius, and you roughly octuple the number of stars to ransack. You also double the time of faring and the time for a signal to cross between ship and home.

  Ten or twelve years from departure to arrival, ten years more to receive the first recounting, are reasonable. Fifty years are not unreasonable. But a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years either way? Suns and planets have fallen into classes; they no longer hold revelations. If you know the basic parameters, you can compute their properties. It is pointless to lengthen your list of them.

  Life forms are something else. Yet if you desire to study these, you have a sufficiency on worlds already attained. Indeed, you have overwhelmingly much. Your information-processing capabilities, that part of them devoted to this endeavor, grow saturated.

  The data include data on sapient beings. Those are rare, but they do occur and are fascinating beyond measure. Nevertheless, when the time lag grows much greater than lifetimes of theirs, and moreover your field scientists are machines, how can you truly come to know them? (Those that have been found are primitive and mortal. Science and high technology result from chains of unlikely historical accidents.) Wiser to hold your attention on those near enough that you can to some limited extent follow what the robots do and observe.

  There is no precise limit. There is simply a radius, on the order of a light-century or two, beyond which it is unprofitable to search farther. Having foreseen this, you have never built self-multiplying von Neumann machines.

  Exceptions exist. When your instruments detect the radiations that suggest a civilization at some star, you will send your beams and perhaps your robots; but the span until anything can come of that, if anything does, is multimillennial. At the end, will your race still care?

  Other exceptions are cosmic, astrophysical—extraordinary stars, clouds where stars are coming to birth, recent supernovae, black holes in peculiar circumstances, the monstrosities at the core of the galaxy, and comparable rarities. You will dispatch your observers that far (thirty thousand light-years from Sol to galactic center) and wait.

  All of the few starfaring civilizations will do likewise. Therefore all that have reached these goals will beamcast from them, in hopes of making contact. They will wait.

  All have become entities that can wait.

  Here is the second half of the solution to the riddle.

  It is not sentient organic life that the robots seek to summon. It is other robots.

  Machines do not conquer their mother worlds. They gently, gradually absorb their creators into their systems, at the wish of those beings, whose overmatching physical and intellectual superiors they have become. Then in the course of time, more and more they direct their attention from mere life, toward problems and undertakings they find wormy of themselves.

  When the original thinking animals five on, as happens occasionally, it is because they too have turned their concerns elsewhere, inward, searching for joys and fulfillments or possibly imaginary enlightenments toward which no machine can aid them, realms quite outside the universe of the stars.

  “No,” said Svoboda, “we do wrong if we feel hostile. Postbiotic evolution is nevertheless evolution, reality finding newness in itself.” She colored and laughed. “Oh, but thai sounds pretentious! I only meant that the advanced, independent robots are no threat to us. We’ll continue keeping robots of our own, we have to, but for purposes of our own. Well do what the postbiotics not only don’t care to do any more, they never really could. That’s to deal with life of our kind, the old kind, not by peering and listening, centuries between question and answer, but by being there ourselves, sharing, yes, loving. And so we’ll come to understand what we can’t now imagine.”

  “Those of you who choose to be seekers.” Patulcius’ remark fell doubly dry after her torrenting enthusiasm. “Like Tu Shan, I shall cultivate my garden. I daresay most of our descendants will so prefer.”

  “No doubt,”
Hanno said. “That’s fine. They’ll be our reserve. Peregrine’s right; some will always want more than

  “The Phaeacians won’t settle down into rustic innocence” Macandal predicted. “They can’t. If they aren’t to the way of Earth—and that would make their whole meaningless, wouldn’t it?—they’ll have to find some path for themselves. They’ll have to evolve too.”

  “And those of us in space will, along our own lines,” Wanderer added. “Not in body, in genes; I aim to be around for a mighty long spell. In our minds, our spirits.”

  Yukiko smiled. “The stars and their worlds for our teachers.” Earnestly: “But let us remember what a hard school that will be. Today we count for nothing. Every crew of starfarers the Alloi have any knowledge of—and they are less than a dozen—are like us, leftovers, malcontents, atavisms, outcasts.”

  “I know. I don’t admit we count for nothing, though. We are.”

  “Yes. And if we are wise, if we can humble ourselves enough to hear what the lowliest of living beings have to tell us, at last we will meet the postbiotics as equals. In a million years? I don’t know. But when we are ready, it will be as you said, we will have become something other than what we are now.”

  Hanno nodded. “I wonder if, at the end, we and our allies won’t be more than the equals of the machines.”

  His comrades regarded him, a little puzzled. “I’ve been playing with an, idea,” he explained. “It seems to have worked this way on Earth, and what we’ve seen here and heard from the Alloi suggests it may be a general principle. Most steps in evolution haven’t been triumphal advances. No, the failures of the earlier stages made them, the desperate ones—in Yukiko’s words, the atavisms and outcasts.

  “Why should a fish doing well in the water struggle onto the land? It was those that couldn’t compete that did it, because they had to go somewhere else or die. And the ancestors of title reptiles were forced out of the amphibians’ swamps, the birds forced into the air, and mammals forced to find niches where the dinosaurs weren’t, and certain apes forced out of the trees, and—and we Phoenicians held only a thin strip of territory, so we took to the sea, and hardly anybody went to America or Australia who was comfortable at home in Europe—

  “Well, we’ll see. We’ll see. A million years, you guessed, Yukiko.” He laughed. “Shall we make a date? One million years from this day, we’ll all meet again and remember.”

  “First we must survive,” said Patulcius.

  “Surviving is what we’re good at,” replied Wanderer.

  Macandal sighed. “So far. Let’s not wax overconfident. No guarantees. Never were, never will be. A million years are a lot of days and nights to get through. Can we?”

  “We shall try,” said Tu Shan.

  “Together,” vowed Svoboda.

  “Then we’d better learn,” said Aliyat, “better than before, how to share.”

  34

  The ships departed, Pytheas and friend. For a while, some months, until speeds grew too high, word went between them, imagery, love; rites celebrated the mysteries of community and communion; for everywhere around them thronged suns.

  “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

  Hanno and Svoboda stood in the darkened command center, looking out. Through clasped hands they felt each other’s nearness and warmth. “Is this why we were born?” she whispered.

  “We’ll make it be,” he promised.

  Chronology

  EXCEPT FOR the first, all dates are Anno Domini. Each is the year in which its chapter begins. Occasionally the narrative thereafter moves forward or backward in time.

  I. Thule: 310 B.C.

  II. The Peaches of Forever: 19

  III. The Comrade: 359

  IV. Death in Palmyra: 641

  V. No Man Shuns His Doom: 998

  VI. Encounter: 1050

  VII. The Same Kind: 1072

  VIII. Lady in Waiting: 1221

  IX. Ghosts: 1239

  X. In the Hills: 1570

  XI. The Kitten and the Cardinal: 1640

  XII. The Last Medicine: 1710

  XIII. Follow the Drinking Gourd: 1855

  XIV. Men of Peace: 1872

  XV. Coming Together: 1931

  XVI. Niche: 1938

  XVII. Steel: 1942

  XVIII. Judgment Day: 1975

  XIX. Thule: ?

  Glossary

  Chinese names are transcribed according to the Wade-Giles system. This probably remains somewhat more familiar to Anglophone readers than Pinyin or Yale, and is no more inaccurate a rendition of ancient or regional pronunciations.

  Armorica: Brittany.

  Berytus: Beirut.

  Bravellir: Probably near modern Norrkoping, Sweden.

  Britannia: England and Wales.

  Burdigala: Bordeaux.

  Ch’ang-an: Near modern Sian (Pinyin “Xian”).

  Constantinople: Istanbul.

  Damasek: Damascus.

  Dumnonia: Cornwall and Devon.

  Duranius: The River Dordogne.

  Emesa: Horns.

  Falemia: An area in the region of Naples, anciently noted for its wines.

  Gadeira: Cadiz (Lathi “Gades,” Semitic “Agadir”).

  Gallia: Gaul, France with parts of Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland.

  Gardhariki: Western Russia.

  Garumna: The River Garonne.

  Gauiland: Southern Sweden, apparently between Scania and Lake Vanern.

  Hetan-kyo: Kyoto.

  Hleidhra: Lejre, in Denmark.

  Khalep: Aleppo.

  Kiyiv: Kiev.

  Lakota: Dakota (Sioux).

  Lugdunensis: A province in Gaul, comprising most of north-em and a fair portion of central France.

  Lugdunum: Lyons.

  Makkah: Mecca.

  Massalia: Marseilles (Latin “Massilia”).

  Medinat Rasul Allah: Medina.

  Nidharos: Trondheim, in Norway.

  Pariki: Pawnee.

  Peking: Beijing.

  Poitou: Former French province, now divided into the departments of La Vend6e, Deux-Sevres, and Vienne.

  Pretania: Britain, including Scotland.

  Sor: Tyre.

  Stalingrad: Volgograd.

  Syria: A province of the Roman (later the East Roman or Byzantine) Empire, approximately the same as the modern country.

  Tadmor: Palmyra, in Syria.

  Tartessos: Southwestern Iberia (conjectural).

  Thule: Southern Norway (conjectural).

  Tripolis: Tripoli, in Lebanon, also known anciently as “Tarabulus.”

  Wendiand: A region bordering on the southern Baltic shores.

  Wichita mountains: in southwestern Oklahoma.

  Yathrib: Original name of Medina.

  FB2 document info

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