Poul Anderson - The Long Way Home

“My lord is most gracious,” said Valti. “May I ask why?”

“Never mind why. Get out.”

“My lord, I am a criminal. I confess it. I want a fair trial by a mixed tribunal as provided in Article VIII, Section 4, of the Treaty of Lunar.”

Chanthavar’s eyes were flat and cold. “Get out or I’ll have you thrown out.”

“I demand to be arrested!” shouted Valti. “I insist on my right and privilege of clearing my own conscience. If you won’t book me, I shall complain directly to the Technon.”

“Very well!” Chanthavar spat it out. “I have orders from the Technon itself to let you go scot-free. Why, I don’t know. But it’s an order; it came as soon as I filed report of the situation and of my intention to attack. Are you satisfied?”

“Yes, my lord,” said Valti blandly. “Thank you for your” kindness. Good day, gentlemen.” He bowed clumsily and stumped out.

Chanthavar broke into a laugh. “Insolent old beetle! I didn’t want to tell him, but he’d have learned it anyway in time. Now let him wonder along with the rest of us. The Technon gets mysterious now and then—a brain planning a thousand years ahead has to, I suppose.” He rose and stretched. “Let’s go. Maybe I can still make that concert at Salma tonight.”

Langley blinked at the sunshine outside. The tropics of Earth had gotten still hotter in five thousand years. He saw a group of armed men boarding a military flier, and there was a sudden wrenching in his heart.

“Chanthavar,” he asked, “can I say good-by to Saris?”

“I’m sorry.” The agent shook his head, not without compassion. “I know he’s your friend, but there have been too many risks taken in this business already.”

“Well... will I ever see him again?”

“Perhaps. We aren’t brutes, captain. We don’t intend to mistreat him if he cooperates.” Chanthavar waved to a smaller machine. “I think that’s yours. Good-by, captain. I hope to see you again sometime if I get the chance.” He turned and strode briskly off. The dust scuffed up under his buskins.

Langley and Marin entered the flier. One silent guard went along; he set the autopilot, they rose smoothly, and he sat down in front of them to wait with drilled patience.

The girl was mute for a long while. “How did they find us?” she asked at last.

The spaceman told her.

She didn’t cry this time. There seemed to be no tears left. They said almost nothing during the hour of bulleting homeward flight.

Lora raised over a nighted horizon, like one huge fountain of soaring metal pride. The flier buzzed around, finding a ledge on one of the smaller towers on the north side. The guard nodded. “Your apartment is No. 337, right down the hall, sir,” he stated. “Good evening.”

Langley led the way. When the door opened for him, he saw a layout of four small rooms, comfortable but unostentatious. There was a service robot, but clearly his new position did not include live slaves.

Except—

He faced around to Marin, and stood looking at her for a minute. She returned his gaze steadily, but she was pale and there was a darkness in her eyes. This blanched creature was not Peggy, he thought.

The rage and bitterness rose in his throat like vomit. All over. C’est fini . Here ends the saga. He had tried, and all his hopes had been kicked down, and she was the one who had wrecked them!

“Get out,” he said.

She lifted a hand to her mouth, as if he had struck her, but no words would come.

“You heard me.” He walked over the floor, it yielded ever so little as if it were of rubbery flesh, and stared through the window. “I’m giving you your freedom. You’re not a slave now. Understand?”

She made no reply, not yet.

“Are there any formalities involved?” he asked.

She told him. There was no life in her voice. He dialed the records office and filed notice that he, sole owner of chattel slave No. Such—and-such, was hereby emancipating her. Then he turned, but he couldn’t quite meet the green eyes.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said thickly. There was a thundering in his temples, and his legs wobbled under him. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault, we’re all poor little victims of circumstance, and I’ve had enough of that line. You were just a helpless tool, sure, I’m not condemning you. Nevertheless, I can’t stand having you around any longer. There’s too much failure in you. You have to go.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“So am I,” he said insincerely. “Go on... get out... make something of yourself.” With a barely conscious impulse, he unfastened his purse and threw it at her. “There. Good bit of money in that. Take it—use it to establish yourself.”

She looked at him with a bewilderment which slowly cleared. “Good-bye,” she said. Her back was straight as she walked out. It wasn’t till much later that he noticed she’d left his purse where it fell.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This is the way the world ends.

They were quiet, pleasant men in the university, they had grave good manners but little formality and they were considerate of the man from the past. Langley recalled his own college days—he’d been a graduate assistant for a while and had seen a bit of faculty life. Here there was none of the gossip and small intrigue and hypocritical teas he remembered; but neither was there any spirit of eagerness and intellectual adventure. Everything was known, everything settled and assured, it remained only to fill in the details. Back in the Twenty-first Century, masters” theses about the commas in Shakespeare had still been a subject for humor -today, the equivalent was a matter of course.

The library was magnificent and astonishing: a billion volumes reduced to magnetic patterns, any of them instantly located and copied by pressing a few buttons. The robots would even do your reading for you and make summaries, they would draw conclusions if you wanted them to: logical deductions with no hint of speculative imagination. The professors—they were called by a title which meant, roughly, ‘repository of information’—were mostly of commoner stock, a few petty aristocrats, all selected by tests which made no allowance for birth. The rules of their order kept them strictly out of politics. There were only a few students, some dilettantes and some earnest youngsters intending to become professors in their turn. The sons of Ministers went from private tutors to special academies; the university was a dying vestige of an earlier period, maintained simply because the Technon had not ordered its abolition.

Nevertheless, Langley found these graying, brown-robed men congenial company. There was one historian in particular, a little wizened man with a huge bald head, Jant Mardos, with whom he got quite friendly: the chap had enormous erudition and a refreshingly sardonic viewpoint. They used to spend hours talking, while a recorder took down everything which was said for later evaluation.

For Langley, it was the nights which were worst.

“... The present situation was, of course, inevitable,” said Mardos. “If a society is not to petrify, it must innovate, as yours did; but sooner or later a point is reached at which further innovation becomes impractical, and then petrifaction sets in anyway. For example, the unification of Earth was necessary if man was to survive, but in time that unification destroyed the cultural variety and interplay which had been responsible for much progress up to then.”

“Seems to me you could still make changes,” said the spaceman, “Political changes, at least.”

“What sort? You might as well face it, the Technon is the best possible device for government—if we wrecked it, we’d go back to corruption, incompetence, and internecine strife. We have those already, of course, but they don’t matter very much, since policy is decided by a machine which is able, incorruptible, and immortal.”