Across A Billion Years

Jan Mortenson had been standing beside me. Now she said, “I didn’t realize your sister was a TP communicator. How exciting that must be!”

“Especially for someone like her,” I said. I told Jan about you being paralyzed and forced to spend your whole life in a hospital bed. Jan was very sympathetic. She wanted to know why they couldn’t work some kind of Shilamakka-style transplant to put you in a synthetic body that would let you get around. This is the obvious question that everybody asks, and I explained how we investigated that a long time ago and found it was too dangerous to try in your case.

“How long has she been like this?” Jan asked.

“Since she was born. At first they thought they could correct it surgically, but—”

Then she wanted to know how old you were, and I said you were my twin, and Jan turned a very radioactive shade of scarlet and said, “If she’s a TP, and you’re her twin, then you must be a TP too, and you must be reading my mind right this minute!”

So I had to spell it all out: that we’re fraternal twins and not identical twins, obviously, since you’re a girl and I’m not, and that telepathy isn’t necessarily shared by fraternal twin pairs, and that as a matter of fact you’re the only TP in the family. I added that it’s a common error to believe that a TP can read the mind of a non-TP. “They can make contact only with other TP-positive minds,” I said. “Lorie can’t read me. And I can’t read you, or anybody else, but Fat Marge over there can read Lorie if she wants to.”

“How sad for your sister,” Jan said. “To have a twin brother and not to be able to reach him with TP. Especially when she’s shut in and has such a need to know what’s happening outside her room.”

“She’s a brave girl,” I said, which is true. “She copes. Besides, she doesn’t need me. She’s got thousands of TP pals all over the universe. She spends eight hours a day hooked into the commercial telepathic communications link, relaying messages, and then I think she spends the other sixteen hours hooked in just for fun, getting TP gossip from all over. If she ever sleeps I never saw her at it. Life gave her a raw deal, sure, but she has some compensations.”

Jan was very deeply interested in hearing all about you, and I told her a lot more. Which I don’t need to repeat here, since you know all of it anyway. I think I may have underestimated Jan slightly. In the past few days I’ve started to see that her beautiful-but-dim act is only a superficial habit; she’s actually a lot more sensitive and interesting than she seems. I don’t know where I got this idiot notion that pretty girls are always shallow. Not that she’s any blazing genius, but there’s more to her than curves and a ten-kilowatt smile.

At this point most of our miscellaneous registration and checking-in had been accomplished. But we stood around for half an hour more waiting for Saul Shahmoon to get back with our excavation permit. Dr. Schein couldn’t understand what was taking so long. He was afraid that Saul had run into some kind of bureaucratic roadblock that might prevent us from working on this planet altogether. That got Pilazinool so upset that he unscrewed his left arm up to the second elbow.

At last Saul came back. With the excavation permit. Seems he hadn’t had any trouble about that. He had spent forty-five minutes at the PX post office, though, getting a set of Higby V stamps for his collection.

We loaded our gear into a landcrawler and off we went.

Night was falling, fast and hard. Higby V doesn’t have any moons, and it’s the sort of planet where, if you’re close to the equator, as we are, night comes on like a switch was thrown. Zit! and it’s dark. Our driver managed to keep us from going into any craters, though, and in an hour we were at the site.

Dr. Schein, who had been here last year when the discovery was made, had arranged for three bubbleshacks to be blown, one as a laboratory and two for dormitories. In addition a big curving shield of plastic covered the hillside outcropping where the High Ones artifacts had been spotted.

A complex moral thing developed when it came time to assign us to dorm space. I think you’ll enjoy mulling it over.

The problem started from the fact that there are no partitions, and hence no privacy, inside the bubbleshacks. We have two unmarried Earthborn females among us, and according to the old silly tribal taboos it would be immoral and improper to let Jan and Kelly bunk with the boys. (The fact that Kelly couldn’t care less about privacy is irrelevant, since androids claim total equality with flesh-and-blood human beings, including the right to share our neuroses. Kelly has full human-female status, and to treat her otherwise would be to commit racial discrimination. Right?)

What Dr. Schein proposed to do was put all the human males — himself, Leroy Chang, Saul Shahmoon, and myself — into one bubble, and Jan and Kelly into the other. Okay, that got around the elemental decency situation. But —

Jan and Kelly would thereby have to bunk with the aliens, several of whom were males of their species. (Steen Steen and 408b could be excluded from that category, Steen because he/she is of both sexes and 408b because it doesn’t seem to be of either.) I guess some stuffy souls on Earth might get upset that Jan and Kelly would be dressing and undressing in front of males of any sort, even alien males. (They might get upset about Jan, anyway; stuffy types don’t seem to worry much about the living conditions of androids.) However, that wasn’t what troubled Dr. Schein. He knew that Kelly is without inhibitions; and that Jan, while she’s been observing the usual taboos around the four human males, doesn’t really think that Pilazinool or Dr. Horkkk or Mirrik pose any threat to her virtue. He was worried about offending the aliens, though. If Jan observed clothing taboos with us and not with them, couldn’t that be construed as meaning that she regarded them as second-class life-forms? Shouldn’t a girl be modest in front of all intelligent creatures, or else none? Where is the equality of galactic races, of which we hear so much, in such a case?

I can hear you snorting with amused impatience and giving one of your typical common-sense answers. You might have pointed out that none of the aliens wear clothes themselves, or have any kind of privacy taboos, Or even remotely understand why it is that Earthfolk feel they must cover certain parts of their bodies. You might also have noted that galactic equality doesn’t have anything to do with sex — which is at the bottom of our thing about clothes — and that it is perfectly proper for a girl to be modest with males of her own species without at the same time seeming to put down males of some other species. But common sense, Lorie, doesn’t always rule the universe. Dr. Schein had a long huddle with Jan, and then conferred with Saul Shahmoon and Leroy Chang, and finally — very nervously — took the matter to Dr. Horkkk. Who thought it was so wildly fu

And so it was settled. What a bunch of chimpos we Earthers can be about these primitive idiocies!

The four of us got Mirrik the bulldozer for a bunk-mate, since there wasn’t room for him with the others. Jan and Kelly bunked with Dr. Horkkk, Pilazinool, 408b, and Steen Steen. For all I know they had wild orgies over there all night.

I slept poorly. It wasn’t just Mirrik’s fragrance, which I’ll adapt to in time, but the excitement that got to me. Sleeping a hundred meters away from a treasure trove a billion years old, piled high with the artifacts left behind by the mightiest and most advanced race the universe has ever known. What wonders will we find in that hillside?