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“He shouldn’t be alone,” Griffin said. “Elaine—can you find him?”
“Yes,” I said.
And he: “Go where you have to go.”
So it was not so much trouble to track one of us, when every creature everywhere knew us. And I found Lance sitting on the shore of that huge lake which lies central to our world ... itself a strange place and full of thinking creatures.
“Elaine,” he said.
“They sent me,” I said to him. And he made a place for me beside him.
So we live, Lance and I, in a tower on that shore, a long time in the building, but of time we have no end.
And from one window we look out on that vast lake; and from the other we look toward our Camelot.
Whether we dream, still falling forever, or whether the dream has shaped itself about us, we love ... at least we dream we do.
And whenever the call goes out, echoing clear and brazen through the air, we take up our arms again and go.
VOYAGER IN NIGHT
This book was one of those odd experiments aside from my works of wider appeal. Don and I discussed the outcome of the story—often. We absolutely disagreed on what happened. I find that a wonderful, whimsical kind of situation. Both of us certainly read the same book—well, he edited it and I wrote it—but both of us saw a different story at the end and both of us believed in what we saw.
Think of this as the kind of science fiction some writer might create who lived (or will live) at some time in the next half mille
My job as a science fiction writer is only half about technology, the what-if and the what-next? Homer wrote about traveling beyond the rim of known seas, and meeting strange people. Dante used his science fiction writing for a political medium. Verne explored the future. And I’ve done a bit of each. But throughout all the meeting and the voyaging and the politicking and the imagining—I do the other thing those others did: I hold up a mirror to ourselves.
What would you do if you could live your life over—and over—and over?
What would you be if there were no end in sight?
Ever?
I
1,000,000 rise of terrene hominids
75,000 terrene ice age
35,000 hunter-gatherers
BC 9000 Jericho built
BC 3000 Sumer thriving
BC 1288 Reign of Rameses in Egypt
BC 753 founding of Rome
Trishanamarandu-keptawas, < >’s name, of shape subject to change and configurations of consciousness likewise mutable. But Trishanamarandu-keptawithin-the-shell kept alert against the threat of subversive alterations, for some of the guests aboard were unreliable in disposition and in sanity.
Concerning < >’s own mental stability, < > was reasonably certain. <> had a longer perspective than most and consequently held a different view of events. The chronometers which might, after so many incidents and so frequent transits into jumpspace, be subject to creeping inaccuracies, reported that the voyage had lasted more than 100,000 subjective ship-years thus far. This agreed with < >’s memory. Aberrations in both records were possible, but <> thought otherwise.
AD 1066 Battle of Hastings
AD 1492 Columbus
AD 1790 early Machine Age
AD 1800 Napoleonic Wars
AD 1903 Kitty Hawk
AD 1969 man on the moon
<> never slept. Some of the minds aboard might have seized control, given that opportunity, so <> managed <>’s body constantly, sometimes at a high level of mental activity, sometimes at marginal awareness, but <> never quite slept. Closest analogue to dreamstate, <> felt a slight giddiness during jumpspace transits. That was to be expected in a mind, even after long and frequent experience of such passages. < > leapt interstellar distances with something like sensual pleasure in the experience, whether the feeling came from the unsettling of < >’s mind or < >’s physical substance. Fear, after all, was a potent sensation; and all sensations were precious after so long a span of life.
<> traveled, that was what <> did.
<> set <>’s sights on whatever star was next and pursued it.
Another voyage began. Little Lindymoved up in the immense skeletal clutch of a Fargone loader into the cargo sling of the can-hauler Rightwise, while Rightwise’s lateral and terminal clamps moved slowly to fix Lindyin next to a canister of foodstuffs. She actually massed less than most of the constant-temp canisters Rightwisehad slung under her belly, less than the chemicals and the manufacturing components destined for station use.
She was in fact nothing but a shell with engines, an unlovely, jerry-rigged construction; and the Lukowskis, the Viking-based merchanter family which owned Rightwise, having only moderate larceny in their hearts and a genuine spacers’ sympathy for Lindy’s young owners, settled for the bonus Endeavor Station offered for the delivery of such ships and crews in lieu of Lindy’s freight, and took labor for the passage of the Murray-Gaineses themselves. Rightwisehad muscle to spare, and Lindy’s bonus would clear two percent above the mass charge: the owners were desperate.
So Rightwisechecked Lindy’s mass by Fargone records, double checked the dented, unshielded tanks that they were indeed empty for the haul, grappled her on and took her through jump to Endeavor—unlikely reprieve for that bit of scrap and spit which should long since have been sent to recycling.
AD 3/2⅗5
The Murrays and Paul Gaines arrived at Endeavor with the same hopes as the rest of the out-of-luck spacers incoming. Endeavor was a starstation in the process of building, sited in the current direction of Union expansion, in a rich (if unexportable) aggregation of ores. But trade would come, extending outward to new routes. Combines and companies would grow here. And the desperate and the ambitious flocked in. There were insystem haulers, freighted in on jumpships, among them a pair of moduled giant oreships, hauled in by half a dozen longhaulers in pieces, reassembled at Endeavor, of too great mass to have come in any other way. They were combine ships out of Viking, those two leviathans, and they collected the bulk of the advertised bonus for ships coming to Endeavor. There was a tanker from Cyteen; a freighter from Fargone, major ships—while most of the independent cold-haulers that labored the short station-belt run were far smaller, patched antiquities that gave Endeavor System the eerie ambiance of a hundred-year backstep in time. They were owned by their crews, those ancient craft, some family ships, most the association of non-kin who had gambled all their funds together on war surplus and ingenuity.
And smallest and least came ships like the Murray-Gaineses’ Lindy, an aged pusher-ship once designed for nothing more complex than boosting or slowing down a construction span or sweeping debris from Fargone Station’s peripheries, half a hundred years ago. They had blistered her small hull with longterm lifesupport. A human form jutted out of her portside like a decoration: an EVA-pod made of an old suit. Storage compartments bulged outward at odd angles almost as fanciful as the pod. Tanks were likewise jury-rigged on the ventral surface, and a skein of hazardously exposed conduits led to the war-salvage main engine and the chancy directionals.
No established station would have allowed Lindyregistry even before the alterations. She had been scheduled for junk at Fargone, and so had many of her parts, taken individually. But at Endeavor Lindywas no worse than others of her size. She was rigged for light prospecting in those several rings of ore-laden rock which belted Endeavor System, feeding the refiner-oreships, which would send their recovered materials in girder-form and bulk to Station, where belt ores and ice became structure, decks, machine parts and solar cells, fuel and oxygen. Lindywould haul only between belt and oreship, taking the richest small bits in her sling, tagging any larger finds for abler ships on a one-tenth split. She even had an advantage in her size: she could go gnat-like into stretches of the belt no larger ship would risk and, supplied by those larger ships, attach limpets to boost a worthwhile prize within reach: thatkind of risk was negotiable.