“Not so easily answered,” he said. “Adventure, maybe. That, at least in part. And I wanted to see Earth. Couldn’t afford to come in a pod. Now—well, I’ve enough to keep me the rest of my life. I can go back to New Earth as a passenger in a month instead of forty years—be frozen in no more time than the wink of an eye, put in my adiabatic pod, linked in to the next sailing ship, and wake up home again while some other fool does the sailing.”
Helen nodded. She did not bother to tell him that she knew all this. She had been investigating sailing ships since meeting the sailor.
“Out where you sail among the stars,” she said, “can you tell me—can you possibly tell me anything of what it’s like out there?”
His face looked inward on his soul and afterward his voice came as from an immense distance.
“There are moments—or is it weeks—you can’t really tell in the sail ship—when it seems worthwhile. You feel…your nerve endings reach out until they touch the stars. You feel enormous, somehow.” Gradually he came back to her. “It’s trite to say, of course, but you’re never the same afterward. I don’t mean just the obvious physical thing, but—you find yourself—or maybe you lose yourself. That’s why,” he continued, gesturing toward New Madrid, out of sight behind the sand dune, “I can’t stand this. New Earth, well, it’s like Earth must have been in the old days, I guess. There’s something fresh about it. Here…”
“I know,” said Helen America, and she did. The slightly decadent, slightly corrupt, too comfortable air of Earth must have had a stifling effect on the man from beyond the stars.
“There,” he said, “you won’t believe this, but sometimes the ocean’s too cold to swim in. We have music that doesn’t come from machines, and pleasures that come from inside our own bodies without being put there. I have to get back to New Earth.”
Helen said nothing for a little while, concentrating on stilling the pain in her heart.
“I…I…” she began.
“I know,” he said fiercely, almost savagely turning on her. “But I can’t take you. I can’t! You’re too young, you’ve got a life to live and I’ve thrown away a quarter of mine. No, that’s not right. I didn’t throw it away. I wouldn’t trade it back because it’s given me something inside I never had before. And it’s given me you.”
“But, if—” she started again to argue.
“No. Don’t spoil it. I’m going next week to be frozen in my pod to wait for the next sail ship. I can’t stand much more of this, and I might weaken. That would be a terrible mistake. But we have this time together now, and we have our separate lifetimes to remember in. Don’t think of anything else. There’s nothing, nothing we can do.”
Helen did not tell him—then or ever—of the child she had started to hope for, the child they would now never have. Oh, she could have used the child. She could have tied him to her, for he was an honorable man and would have married her had she told him. But Helen’s love, even then in her youth, was such that she could not use this means. She wanted him to come to her of his own free will, marrying her because he could not live without her. To that marriage their child would have been an additional blessing.
There was the other alternative, of course. She could have borne the child without naming the father. But she was no Mona Muggeridge. She knew too well the terrors and insecurity and loneliness of being Helen America ever to be responsible for the creation of another. And for the course she had laid out there was no place for a child. So she did the only thing she could. At the end of their time in New Madrid, she let him say a real goodbye. Wordless and without tears, she left. Then she went up to an arctic city, a pleasure city where such things are well-known, and amidst shame, worry, and a driving sense of regret she appealed to a confidential medical service which eliminated the unborn child. Then she went back to Cambridge and confirmed her place as the first woman to sail a ship to the stars.
VI
The presiding Lord of the Instrumentality at that time was a man named Wait. Wait was not cruel but he was never noted for tenderness of spirit or for a high regard for the adventuresome proclivities of young people. His aide said to him, “This girl wants to sail a ship to New Earth. Are you going to let her?”
“Why not?” said Wait. “A person is a person. She is well-bred, well-educated. If she fails, we will find out something eighty years from now when the ship comes back. If she succeeds, it will shut up some of these women who have been complaining.” The Lord leaned over his desk: “If she qualifies, and if she goes, though, don’t give her any convicts. Convicts are too good and too valuable as settlers to be sent along on a fool trip like that. You can send her on something of a gamble. Give her all religious fanatics. We have more than enough. Don’t you have twenty or thirty thousand who are waiting?”
He said, “Yes, sir, twenty-six thousand two hundred. Not counting recent additions.”
“Very well,” said the Lord of the Instrumentality. “Give her the whole lot of them and give her that new ship. Have we named it?”
“No, sir,” said the aide.
“Name it then.”
The aide looked blank.
A contemptuous wise smile crossed the face of the senior bureaucrat. He said, “Take that ship now and name it. Name it The Soul and let The Soul fly to the stars. And let Helen America be an angel if she wants to. Poor thing, she has not got much of a life to live on this Earth, not the way she was born, and the way she was brought up. And it’s no use to try and reform her, to transform her personality, when it’s a lively, rich personality. It does not do any good. We don’t have to punish her for being herself. Let her go. Let her have it.”
Wait sat up and stared at his aide and then repeated very firmly:
“Let her have it, only if she qualifies.”
VII
Helen America did qualify.
The doctors and the experts tried to warn her against it.
One technician said: “Don’t you realize what this is going to mean? Forty years will pour out of your life in a single month. You leave here a girl. You will get there a woman of sixty. Well, you will probably still have a hundred years to live after that. And it’s painful. You will have all these people, thousands and thousands of them. You will have some Earth cargo. There will be about thirty thousand pods strung on sixteen lines behind you. Then you will have the control cabin to live in. We will give you as many robots as you need, probably a dozen. You will have a mainsail and a foresail and you will have to keep the two of them.”
“I know. I have read the book,” said Helen America. “And I sail the ship with light, and if the infrared touches that sail—I go, if I get radio interference, I pull the sails in. And if the sails fail, I wait as long as I live.”
The technician looked a little cross. “There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting a large amount of Earth property. You can drown in water right here, or jump into a volcano like the Japanese in the old books. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.
“Now this is the way that the foresail works. That sail will be twenty thousand miles at the wide part. It tapers down and the total length will be just under eighty-thousand miles. It will be retracted or extended by small servo-robots. The servo-robots are radio-controlled. You had better use your radio sparingly, because after all these batteries, even though they are atomic, have to last forty years. They have got to keep you alive.”
“Yes, sir,” said Helen America very contritely.
“You’ve got to remember what your job is. You’re going because you are cheap. You are going because a sailor takes a lot less weight than a machine. There is no all-purpose computer built that weighs as little as a hundred and fifty
pounds. You do. You go simply because you are expendable. Anyone that goes out to the stars takes one chance in three of never getting there But you are not going because you are a leader, you are going because you are young. You have a life to give and a life to spare. Because your nerves are good. You understand that?”
“Yes, sir, I knew that.”
“Furthermore, you are going because you’ll make the trip in forty years. If we send automatic devices and have them manage the sails, they would get there—possibly. But it would take them from a hundred years to a hundred-and-twenty or more, and by that time the adiabatic pods would have spoiled, most of the human cargo would not be fit for revival, and the leakage of heat, no matter how we face it, would be enough to ruin the entire expedition. So remember that the tragedy and the trouble you face is mostly work. Work, and that’s all it is. That is your big job.”
Helen smiled. She was a short girl with rich dark hair, brown eyes, and very pronounced eyebrows, but when Helen smiled she was almost a child again, and a rather charming one. She said: “My job is work. I understand that, sir.”
VIII
In the preparation area, the make-ready was fast but not hurried. Twice the technicians urged her to take a holiday before she reported for final training. She did not accept their advice. She wanted to go forth; she knew that they knew she wanted to leave Earth forever, and she also knew they knew she was not merely her mother’s daughter. She was trying, somehow, to be herself. She knew the world did not believe, but the world did not matter.
The third time they suggested a vacation, the suggestion was mandatory. She had a gloomy two months which she ended up enjoying a little bit on the wonderful islands of the Hesperides, islands which were raised when the weight of the Earthports caused a new group of small archipelagos to form below Bermuda.
She reported back, fit, healthy, and ready to go.
The senior medical officer was very blunt.
“Do you really know what we are going to do to you? We are going to make you live forty years out of your life in one month.”
She nodded, white of face, and he went on, “Now to give you those forty years we’ve got to slow down your bodily processes. After all, the sheer biological task of breathing forty years’ worth of air in one month involves a factor of about five hundred to one. No lungs could stand it. Your body must circulate water. It must take in food. Most of this is going to be protein. There will be some kind of a hydrate. You’ll need vitamins.
“Now, what we are going to do is to slow the brain down, very much indeed, so that the brain will be working at about that five-hundred-to-one ratio. We don’t want you incapable of working. Somebody has got to manage the sails.
“Therefore, if you hesitate or you start to think, a thought or two is going to take several weeks. Meanwhile your body can be slowed down some. But the different parts can’t be slowed down at the same rate. Water, for example, we brought down to about eighty to one. Food, to about three hundred to one.
“You won’t have time to drink forty years’ worth of water. We circulate it, get it through, purify it, and get it back in your system, unless you break your link-up.
“So what you face is a month of being absolutely wide awake, on an operating table and being operated on without anesthetic, while doing some of the hardest work that mankind has ever found.
“You’ll have to take observations, you’ll have to watch your lines with the pods of people and cargo behind you, you’ll have to adjust the sails. If there is anybody surviving at destination point, they will come out and meet you.
“At least that happens most of the times.
“I am not going to assure you you will get the ship in. If they don’t meet you, take an orbit beyond the farthest planet and either let yourself die or try to save yourself. You can’t get thirty thousand people down on a planet single-handedly.
“Meanwhile, though, you’ve got a real job. We are going to have to build these controls right into your body. We’ll start by putting valves in your chest arteries. Then we go on, catheterizing your water. We are going to make an artificial colostomy that will go forward here just in front of your hip joint. Your water intake has a certain psychological value so that about one five-hundredth of your water we are going to leave you to drink out of a cup. The rest of it is going to go directly into your bloodstream. Again about a tenth of your food will go that way. You understand that?”
“You mean,” said Helen, “I eat one-tenth, and the rest goes in intravenously?”
“That’s right,” said the medical technician. “We will pump it into you. The concentrates are there. The reconstitutor is there. Now these lines have a double connection. One set of connections runs into the maintenance machine. That will become the logistic support for your body. And these lines are the umbilical cord for a human being alone among the stars. They are your life.
“And now if they should break or if you should fall, you might faint for a year or two. If that happens, your local system takes over: that’s the pack on your back.
“On Earth, it weighs as much as you do. You have already been drilled with the model pack. You know how easy it is to handle in space. That’ll keep you going for a subjective period of about two hours. No one has ever worked out a clock yet that would match the human mind, so instead of giving you a clock we are giving you an odometer attached to your own pulse and we mark it off in grades. If you watch it in terms of tens of thousands of pulse beats, you may get some information out of it.
“I don’t know what kind of information, but you may find it helpful somehow.” He looked at her sharply and then turned back to his tools, picking up a shining needle with a disk on the end.
“Now, let’s get back to this. We are going to have to get right into your mind. That’s chemical too.”
Helen interrupted, “You said you were not going to operate on my head.”
“Only the needle. That’s the only way we can get to the mind. Slow it down enough so that you will have this subjective mind operating at a rate that will make the forty years pass in a month.” He smiled grimly, but the grimness changed to momentary tenderness as he took in her brave obstinate stance, her girlish, admirable, pitiable determination.
“I won’t argue it,” she said. “This is as bad as a marriage and the stars are my bridegroom.” The image of the sailor went across her mind, but she said nothing of him.
The technician went on. “Now, we have already built in psychotic elements. You can’t even expect to remain sane. So you’d better not worry about it. You’ll have to be insane to manage the sails and to survive utterly alone and be out there even a month. And the trouble is, in that month you are going to know it’s really forty years. There is not a mirror in the place, but you’ll probably find shiny surfaces to look at yourself.
“You won’t look so good. You will see yourself aging, every time you slow down to look. I don’t know what the problem is going to be on that score. It’s been bad enough on men.
“Your hair problem is going to be easier than men’s. The sailors we sent out, we simply had to kill all the hair roots. Otherwise the men would have been swamped in their own beards. And a tremendous amount of the nutrient would be wasted if it went into raising of hair on the face which no machine in the world could cut off fast enough to keep a man working. I think what we will do is inhibit hair on the top of your head. Whether it conies out in the same color or not is something you will find for yourself later. Did you ever meet the sailor that came in?”
The doctor knew she had met him. He did not know that it was the sailor from beyond the stars who called her. Helen managed to remain composed as she smiled at him to say: “Yes, you gave him new hair. Your technician planted a new scalp on his head, remember. Somebody on your staff did. The hair came out black and he got the nickname of Mr. Grey-no-more.”
“If you are ready next Tuesday, we’ll be ready too. Do you think you can make it by then, my lady?”
He
len felt odd seeing this old, serious man refer to her as “lady,” but she knew he was paying respect to a profession and not just to an individual.
“Tuesday is time enough.” She felt complimented that he was an old-fashioned enough person to know the ancient names of the days of the week and to use them. That was a sign that he had not only learned the essentials at the University but that he had picked up the elegant inconsequentialities as well.
IX
Two weeks later was twenty-one years later by the chronometers in the cabin. Helen turned for the ten-thousand-times-ten-thousandth time to scan the sails.
Her back ached with a violent throb.
She could feel the steady roar of her heart like a fast vibrator as it ticked against the time-span of her awareness. She could look down at the meter on her wrist and see the hands on the watchlike dials indicate tens of thousands of pulses very slowly.
She heard the steady whistle of air in her throat as her lungs seemed shuddering with sheer speed.
And she felt the throbbing pain of a large tube feeding an immense quantity of mushy water directly into the artery of her neck.
On her abdomen, she felt as if someone had built a fire. The evacuation tube operated automatically but it burnt as if a coal had been held to her skin, and a catheter, which connected her bladder to another tube, stung as savagely as the prod of a scalding-hot needle. Her head ached and her vision blurred.
But she could still see the instruments and she still could watch the sails. Now and then she could glimpse, faint as a tracery of dust, the immense skein of people and cargo that lay behind them.
She could not sit down. It hurt too much.
The only way that she could be comfortable for resting was to lean against the instrument panel, her lower ribs against the panel, her tired forehead against the meters.
Once she rested that way and realized that it was two and a half months before she got up. She knew that rest had no meaning, and she could see her face moving, a distorted image of her own face growing old in the reflections from the glass face of the “apparent weight” dial. She could look at her arms with blurring vision, note the skin tightening, loosening, and tightening again, as changes in temperatures affected it.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 16
