Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years

He stiffened. Harshness came into his voice. “Why not? What else had our dear captain left us, before this came to me out of the dark? It will help fill a little of the emptiness ahead.”

She let go and slipped about to sit down on the bed in front of him. “I wish you could be less bitter toward “Hanno,” she said, troubled. “You and the rest of them.”

“Have we no reason to?”

“Oh, he was high-handed, true. But has he not been punished enough for that? How dare we take for granted that what he’s done is not for the best? It may prove to be what saves us.”

“Easy for you. You want to seek the Alloi.”

“But I don’t want this hateful division between us. I dare BOt give him a friendly word myself, I’m afraid of making matters worse. It makes me wish we’d never received the message. Can’t you see, dear, he is—like a righteous emperor of ancient times—taking on himself the heavy burden Of leadership?”

Again Tu Shan shook his head, but violently. “Nonsense. You are drawn to him—don’t deny—“ , Her tone went calm. “To his spirit, yes. It isn’t tike mine, but it also seeks. And to his person, no doubt, but I’ve honestly not dwelt on that in my mind.” She closed hands upon his knee. “You are the one I am with.”

It mildened him to a degree. Sternness remained. “Well, stop imagining he’s some kind of saint or sage. He’s a scheming, knavish old sailor, who naturally wants to sail. This is his selfishness. He happens to have the power to force it on us.” He slapped the screen down onto the blanket, as if striking with a weapon. “I am only trying to help us outlive the evil.”

She leaned close. Her smile trembled. “That is enough to start.”

Yet another Christmas drew nigh, in the ship’s chronology. It was meaningless to ask whether it did on Earth just then—doubly meaningless, given the physics here and the forgottenness yonder. Hanno came upon Svoboda hang-ing ornaments in the common room. Evergreen boughs from the nanoprocessors were fresh and fragrant, bejeweled with berries of hotly. They seemed as forlorn as the Danish carols from the speakers. She saw him and tautened. He halted, not too close to her. “Hello,” he proffered.

“How do you do,” she said.

He smiled. Her face stayed locked. “What sort of party are you planning this year?” he asked.

She shrugged. “No motif.”

“Oh, I’ll keep out of the way, never fear.” Quickly: “But we can’t go on much longer like this. Well lose skills, including the skills of teamwork. We must start having simulations and practicing in them again.”

“As the captain directs. I suppose, though, you’re aware that Wanderer and I, at least, are doing so. We’ll bring others in presently.”

Hanno made himself meet the blue gaze, and made it stay upon his. “Yes, naturally I know. Good. For you two above aU. A phantom wilderness is better than none, right?”

Svoboda bit her lip. “We could have had the real thing.”

“You will, after we’re through at Tritos. You wanted to go there first yourself. Why don’t you look forward to it?”

“You know why. The cost to my comrades.” She closed a fist and clipped: “Not that we can’t cope. I outlived many bad husbands, dreary decades, tyrants, wars, everything men could wreak. I will outlive this too. We will.”

“Myself among you,” he said, and continued on his way.

It was to no particular goal. He often prowled, mostly at shipnight or through sections where nobody else had occasion to be. An immortal body needed little exercise to keep fit, but he worked regularly at his capabilities and developed new ones. He screened books and shows, listened to music, played with problems on the computers. Frequently, as in the past, when stimuli palled and thought flagged he disengaged his mind and let hours or days flow by, scarcely registering on him. That, however, was in its way as seductive, easily overdone as the dream chamber which he shunned. He could but hope that his crew rationed themselves on illusions.

Today impulse returned him to his stateroom. He sealed himself in, not that anyone would come calling, and settled down before his terminal. “Activate—“ The command fell so flat across silence that he chopped it short. For a while he stared at the ceiling. His fingers drummed the desktop. “Historical persons,” he said.

“Whom do you wish?” inquired the instrumentality.

Hanno’s mouth writhed upward. “You mean, what do I wish?”

What three-dimensional, full-color, changeably expressive, freely moving and speaking wraith? Siddhartha, Socrates, Hillel, Christ — Aeschylus, Vergil, Tu Fu, Firdousi, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mark Twain — Lucretius, Avicenna, Maim on ides, Descartes, Pascal, Hume — Pericles, Alfred, Jefferson — Hatshepsut, Sappho, Murasaki, Rabi’a, Mar-grete I, Jeanne d’Arc, Elizabeth I, Sacajawea, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Isak Dineseri — yes, or if you liked, the great monsters and she-devils — Have your machine take everything history, archaeology, psychology knew of a person and that person’s world, down to the last least scrap, with probabilities assigned to each uncertainty and conjecture; let it model, with subtle and powerful abstract manipulations, the individual whom this matrix could have produced and who would have changed it in precisely those ways that were known; make it write the program, activate; and meet that human creature. The image of the dy was a mere construct, as easily generated as any other; but while the program ran, the mind existed, sensed, thought, reacted, conscious of what it was but seldom troubled thereby, usually enthusiastic, interested, anxious to disOld myths and nightmares have become real,” Svoboda said once, “while old reality slips away from us. On Earth they now raise the dead, but are themselves only half alive.”

“That isn’t strictly true, either side of it,” Hanno had replied. “Take my advice from experience and don’t caU up ‘anybody you ever actually knew. They’re never quite right. Often they’re grotesquely wrong.”

Unless memory failed after centuries. Or unless the past was as uncertain, as flickeringly quantum-variable, as everything else in the universe of physics.

Seated alone, Hanno winced, partly at recollection of a ;time when he sought advice from the electronic revenant of Cardinal Richelieu, partly at recalling how he and Svoboda ; had been together, then. “I don’t want any single companion,” he said to the machine. “Nor a synthetic personality. Give me ... several ancient explorers. A meeting, a coun-can you do that?”

“Certainly. It is a nonstandard interaction, requiring creative preparation. One minute, please.” Sixty billion nanoseconds.

The first of the faces looking out was strong and serene, “I don’t quite know what to say,” Hanno began hesitantly, well-nigh timidly. “You’ve been ... told about the situation here? Well, what do I need? What do you think I should do?”

“You should have taken more thought for your folk,” answered Fridtjof Nansen. The computer translated between them. “But I understand it is too late to change course again. Be patient.”

“Endure,” said Ernest Shackleton. Ice gleamed in his beard. “Never surrender.”

“Think of the others,” Nansen urged. “Yes, you lead, and so you must; but think about how it feels to them.”

“Share your vision,” said Marc Aurel Stein. “I died gladly because it was where I had wanted to go for sixty years. Help them want.”

“Ha, why are they sniveling?” roared Peter Preuchen. “My God, what an adventure! Bring me back to see when you get there, lad!”

“Give me your guidance,” Hanno entreated. “I’ve discovered I’m no Boethius, to console myself with philosophy. Maybe I have made a terrible mistake. Lend me your strength.”