Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years

More gods crowded about, Chushor out of the waves, Dagon out of the plowlands, Aliaan out of the springs and underground waters, Resheph out of the storm, and more and more. Clouds began to part. Distantly gleamed the twin pillars and pure lake before the home of El.

A sunbeam smote the eight who stood on the topheth near the beryl, invisible to priest and acolytes. The gods stared and stiffened. Melqart raised bis club that had smitten the Sea, primordial Chaos, in the dawn of the world. “Who dares betread the holy of holies?” he bellowed.

Hanno trod forward. “Dread ones,” he said calmly, with respect but not abasing himself, looking straight into those eyes, “we are eight from afar in space, time, and strangeness. We too command the powers of heaven, earth, and hell. But fain would we guest you a while and learn the wonders of your reigning. Behold, we bear gifts.” He signalled, and there appeared a treasure of golden ware, gems, precious woods, incense.

Melqart lowered his weapon and stared with a greed that awoke also in the features of Ashtoreth; but her regard was on the men.

One by one, they disengaged. That was a simple matter of removing induction helmets and feedback suits. The web of union between them and the guiding, creating computer had already vanished; the pseudo-experience was at an end. Nonetheless, after they had emerged from their booths into the commonplaceness of the dream chamber, it took them silent minutes to return altogether to themselves. Meanwhile they stood side by side, hand in hand, groping for comfort.

Eventually Patulcius mumbled, “I thought I knew something about the ancient Near East. But that was the most damnable—”

“Horror and wonder,” Macandal said unevenly. “Lust and love. Death and life. Was it really like that, Hanno?”

“I can’t be sure,” the captain answered. “The historical Tyre we visited seemed about right to me.” —in a full-sensory hallucination, where the computer drew on his memories and then let the seekers act and be acted on as they would have in a material world. “Hard to tell, after so long. Besides, you know I’d tried to put it behind me, tried to grow away from what was bad in it. This, though, the Phoenician conceptual universe— No, I don’t believe I ever thought in just that way, even when I was young and supposed I was mortal.”

“No matter authenticity,” Yukiko said. “We want practice in dealing with aliens; and this was amply alien.”

“Too much.” Tu Shan’s burly frame shivered. “Come, dear. I want a time gentle and human, don’t you?” She accompanied him out.

“What society shall we draw on next?” asked Svoboda. Her attention sought Wanderer. “Those you knew must have been at least as foreign to the rest of us.”

“No doubt,” he replied rather grimly. “In due course, yes, we will. But first a setting more ... rational. China, Russia?”

“We have plenty of tune,” Patulcius said. “Better we digest this before we think about anything else. Kyrie eleison, to have witnessed the gods at work!” He tugged at Macandal, “I’m exhausted. A stiff drink, a long sleep, and several days’ idleness.”

“Right.” Her smile was fainter than usual. They left.

Wanderer and Svoboda seemed aroused. Their gazes came aglow. She reddened. His breast rose and fell. They also departed.

Hanno took care not to watch. Aliyat had clasped his hand. Now she let go. He spoke dully. “Well, how was it for you?”

“Terror and ecstasy and—a kind of homecomjng,” she said, barely audible.

He nodded. “Yes, even though you started life as a Christian, it wouldn’t be totally foreign to you. In fact, I suspect the program used some memories of yours as input where mine weren’t sufficient.”

“Weird enough, though.”

He stared beyond her. “A dream within a dream,” he murmured, as if to himself.

“What do you mean?”

“Svoboda would understand. Once she and I imagined what kind of future it might be where we dared reveal what we were.” Hanno shook himself. “Never mind. Goodnight.”

She caught his arm. “No, wait.”

He stopped, lifted his brows, stood alert in a fashion weary and wary. Aliyat grasped his hand again. ‘Take me along,” she said.

“Eh?”

“You’re too lonely. And I am. Let’s come back together, and stay.”

Deliberately, he said, “Are you tired of subsisting on Svoboda’s and Corinne’s leavings?”

For a moment she lost color. She released him. Then she reddened and admitted, “Yes. You and me, we’re neither of us the other’s first pick, are we? And you’ve never forgiven me for Constantinople, not really.”

“Why,” he said, taken aback, “I’ve told you I have. Over and over I’ve told you. I hoped my actions proved—”

“Well, just don’t let it make any difference that counts. What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little? Hanno, I’m offering you what nobody else in this ship will, yet. Maybe they never will. But we are getting back something of what we had. Between us, you and I could help that healing along.” She tossed her head. “If you aren’t game to try, to give in your turn, okay, goodnight and to hell with you.”

“No!” He seized her by the waist. “Aliyat, of course I— I’m overwhelmed—”

“You’re nothing of the sort, you calculating old scoundrel, and well I know it.” She came to him. The embrace went on.

Finally, flushed, disheveled, she said against his shoulder, “Sure, I’m a rogue myself. Always will be, I guess. But—I learned more about you than I’d known, Hanno. It wasn’t a dream while we were there, it was as real to us as—no, more real than these damned crowding walls. You stood up to the gods, outsmarted them, made them take us in, like nobody else alive could have. You are the skipper.”

She raised her face. Tears were on it, but a grin flashed malapert. “They didn’t wear me out. That’s your job. And if we can’t entirely trust each other, if the thing between us won’t quite die away, why, doesn’t that add a pinch of spice?”

Throughout the final months, as Pytheas backed ever more slowly down to destination, the universe again appeared familiar. Strange that a night crowded with unwinking brilliant stars, girded by the frost-road of the galaxy, where nebulae querned forth new suns and worlds while energies raged monstrous around those that had died and light that came from neighbor fire-wheels had left them before humanity was—should feel homelike. Waxing ahead, Tritos had barely more than half the brightness of Sol, a yellow hue that stirred memories of autumns on Earth. Yet it too was a hearth.

Instruments peered across narrowing distance. Ten planets orbited, five of them gas giants. The second inmost swung at somewhat less than one astronomical unit’s radius. It possessed a satellite whose eccentric path indicated the primary mass was slightly over two and a third the terrestrial. Nevertheless that globe, though warmer on the average, was at reasonable temperatures, and its atmospheric spectrum revealed chemical disequilibria such as must be due to life.

Week by week, then day by day, excitement burned higher within the ship. There was no quenching it, and presently even Tu Shan and Patulcius stopped trying. They were committed; magnificent things might wait; and here was, for a while at least, an end of wayfaring.

Hie peace with Hanno that each had made on his or her own terms did not strengthen into the former fellowship. If anything, it thinned, stretched by a new guardedness. What might be want next, and how might someone else react? He had promised that eventually they would go on to Phaeacia; but when would that be, would it ever, could he then betray it? Nobody made accusations, or indeed brooded much on the matter. Conversation was generally free and easy, if not intimate, and he joined again in some recreations—but no more in shared dreams, once their training purpose had been served. He remained half the outsider, in whom none but Aliyat confided, and she little except for her body.