Across A Billion Years

Saul doesn’t have his eye on her, but that’s her problem. I don’t think he’s very interested in girls. He’s about forty, comes from Beirut, has been working for the last five or six years at Fentnor U. on Venus. Small, dark, intense, single, reputation for good but uninspired work. His big passion in life is collecting stamps. He brought his collection along and it fills up his whole cabin, album after album, going right back to the nineteenth century. He’s had us all in there to look at it. Remember when we were saving stamps? Saul’s got the things we just used to daydream about, the Marsport five-credit with the ultraviolet overprint, the Luna City souvenir sheet perforate and imperforate, the Henry XII coronation set — everything. And all the galactic stamps, stuff from fifty or a hundred planets. Jan’s with him half the time, listening to his lectures on the postal system of Betelgeuse V, or wherever, or helping him get Denebian stamps off their envelopes with acid, and Saul goes on and on and on and never catches a hint. Poor Jan!

Next we have Leroy Chang, who is Associate Professor of Paleoarchaeology at Harvard, and who is very much interested in Jan, or Kelly, or anything else female. I think Leroy would try to make time with Steen Steen if he got hard up enough. Or Mirrik. Leroy says he’s Chinese, but of course his genes are as mixed up as anyone else’s from Earth, and he doesn’t look any more Chinese than I do; he’s got red hair and sort of maroon skin and a deep voice, and would probably have much success with women if he didn’t come on looking so frantically eager. You don’t have to be right out of adolescence to be foolish about that sort of thing, as Leroy proves; he’s in his forties and still goopy. Professionally he’s so-so, I understand. Why this expedition is so full of duds, I can’t imagine.

Our Number One boss is no dud. He’s Dr. Milton Schein of Marsport University, and as you probably are aware he’s the man who excavated the first site of High Ones artifacts near Syrtis Major. That makes him the original paleoarchaeologist — the first man doing anything in billion-year-old sites — and since he practically invented the science, it’s hard to find fault with him. He’s superb, though a little frightening when he begins to talk shop. In person he’s a sweet warm silver-haired type, very lovable except when his professional jealousies start to show. He loathes Dr. Horkkk, and vice versa, I gather because they both have such high reputations in the field. They equally detest our third boss, who is Pilazinool of Shilamak, the big expert on intuitive analysis. Which means the science of jumping to conclusions. He’s good at it.

The Shilamakka, you know, have this thing about turning themselves into machines limb by limb and organ by organ. They start off looking surprisingly humanoid; that is, the right number of heads, legs, arms, and such things. I understand they have different arrangements of joints, more fingers, fewer toes, and a couple likesuch variosities. But then they start tinkering with the basic model. A Shilamakka regards himself as zero if he doesn’t have at least one artificial limb by the time he gets into adolescence. A puberty rite, sort of. And on they go through life, lopping off limbs and putting pretty metal things in their places. The less of the basic you that’s left, the higher caste you are. Pilazinool is a top-rung Shilamakka, prestige maximum, and it’s my guess that he’s a 90 percent transplant, with not much more than his brain still organic. New heart, new lungs, new digestive system, new endocrines, new everything. A walking talking machine-man. He spends a lot of time polishing himself. He worries a lot about getting dust in his gears. I would too, I guess. When he’s nervous or just thinking very hard, he’s got this habit of unfastening a hand or an arm or something and playing with it. Last night in the lounge he was playing polyvalent chess with Dr. Horkkk and in one of the exciting parts Pilazinool unhitched both his legs, his left-hand audio receptor, and his right shoulder. There was this big heap of cast-off Shilamakka parts next to him. Dr. Horkkk had him in double check with a flying rook coming in strong from the side, but Pilazinool got out of it very nicely by levitating his rear right bishop, knighting two pawns, and bringing down his chief justice in one of the sweetest counterpoise moves I’ve ever seen. The game ended in a draw. Pilazinool is like that: chilly, more machine than man, but resourceful.

The last member of our gang is 408b of 1. I’m sorry: that’s his name, or hers, or its. It comes from Bellatrix XIV, where the fashion is to call everything by numbers. “408b” is family and personal designation. “1” is the name of the planet; they’ve got the whole universe numbered, and naturally their own world is Number One. Old 408b is a yellowish-looking vidj with a basically octopoid appearance, round baggy body, five walking tentacles, five grasping tentacles, a row of eyes going all the way around, and a kind of parrot-beak mouth. Its specialty is paleotechnology, and it knows a good deal about the machinery of the High Ones, though so far it hasn’t imparted much of that to us. Unlike the rest of us, it isn’t happy in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, though it breathes it most of the time; three hours each day it goes off into a breathing chamber for a snootful of straight carbon dioxide. Mirrik thinks that 408b must be in symbiosis with some sort of plant life. Maybe so.

On playing this cube back, I’m unhappy about the way I seem to be putting everybody down. After all, I haven’t really seen these people in action yet. I’m going by secondhand report, first impressions, and general cattiness. Maybe this is a top-level archaeological team, or will be when it gets into the field. We’ll see. I don’t know why I’m so sour tonight, unless I’m just getting shiny synapses from being pe

Three days more and the curtain goes up. I can’t wait.

Happy birthday again, Lorie. To you. To me. To us.

TWO

August 16, 2375

Higby V

We are here.

We did our flip-flop from ultradrive to ordinary drive right on schedule, but it wasn’t as interesting as the squirmy business of going in the other direction; and then we went into orbit around Higby V and made a ho-hum landing. And got out fast, and went a little chimpo with joy at emerging from captivity.

It was a wild scene. Higby V doesn’t have a real spaceport, just a big bleak empty stretch of land with some buildings at one end of it, and we came pouring out of the ship and went capering around without having to worry about port regulations. Mirrik ran up and down the field, bellowing and stamping his feet, and I did a crazy kind of dance with Jan Mortenson, and Steen Steen danced all by him/herself, and Dr. Horkkk forgot his dignity and climbed a tree, and so on. Even Kelly Watchman, who as an android doesn’t suffer from a wound-up nervous system, looked relieved to be off that ship. Meanwhile the crewmen stood around tapping their skulls at us and otherwise indicating their scorn for the cargo of chimpo vidjes that they had just finished hauling across ultraspace. I can’t blame them. We must have seemed pretty weird.

Then we got settled in.

Higby V is not a homey, cheering place. Maybe it was, a billion years ago when the High Ones had their outpost here. But, like Mars, which also has gone downhill a bit since the time of the High Ones, Higby V is something less than an ideal resort world today. It’s about the size of Earth, but it has the mass of a Mercury-sized planet, which means low density, low gravity. No heavy elements at all. The atmosphere bled off into space a long time ago, and the oceans evaporated and did the same. There are four continents, with huge basins that once were oceans separating them. During the long spell when the planet had no air, it got a busy bombardment of meteors and other space debris, and so there are craters everywhere, same as on Mars.