Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years

He did not attempt to change their attitudes. He knew better; and he knew, as well, how to pass lifetime after mortal lifetime among strangers to his spirit.

Tritos grew in sight.

Pytheas cast signals ahead, radio, laser, neutrino. Surely the Allot had detected the ship from afar, roiling the dust and gas of space, braking with a flame out of the furnace engine. Receivers caught no flicker of response. “Have they gone?” Macandal fretted. “Have we come this whole way for nothing?”

“We’re still many light-hours off,” Wanderer reminded her. Hie hunter’s patience was upon him. “Can’t talk very readily. Not at all by electromagnetic waves, while our drive blazes in front of us. And ... I would scan a newcomer first, before leaving my cover.”

She shook her head, half angrily. “Forget the Stone Age, John. Anything like war or piracy between the stars isn’t just obscene, it’s absurd.”

“Can you be absolutely certain? Besides, we could be dangerous to them, or they to us, in ways neither party has managed to imagine.”

Tritos brightened. Without magnification, simply with the fight stopped down, eyes beheld the disc, spots upon it, flares leaping aloft. Offside stood a bluish-white steady spark that was the second planet. Now spectroscopy gave details of land and water surfaces, air mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The travelers changed course to intercept. The name they bestowed was Xenogaia.

The hour came when Pytheas called, “Attention! Attention! Coded signals detected.”

The eight crowded into the command room. That wasn’t physically necessary. They could quite well have perceived and partaken from their separate quarters. It was merely impossible for them not to be side by side, breath mingling with breath.

The message employed the same basic system as had the robots—a dozen years ago ship’s time, three and a half cosmic centuries—minus relativistic adjustments no longer required. It arrived by UHF radio, from somewhat aft, to avoid ionization that was no longer enormously strong but could still interfere. “The source is a comparatively small object about a million kilometers distant,” Pytheas reported. “It has presumably lain in orbit until we came this near. At present it is accelerating to match our vectors. Radiation is weak, indicating high efficiency.”

“A boat?” Hanno wondered. “Has it a mother ship?”

Pytheas assembled the images transmitted. They sprang into vivid existence. First appeared a starscape, then an unmistakable Tritos (you could compare what was in a view-screen), then a dizzying zoom in on ... forms, colors, a thing that swept lopsidedly around a larger. “That must be Xenogaia,” Patulcius said into a thick silence. “It must be where they stay.”

“I think they are preparing us for what comes next,” Yukiko said.

The representation vanished. A new form was there.

They could not, at once, properly see it. The contours, the mathematical dimensionality were too exotic, too far beyond any expectation. Thus had it been for Svoboda and Wanderer when first they glimpsed high mountains—snow-clouds, heaven gone wrinkled, or what? “More art?” Tu Shan puzzled. “They do not make pictures like any that humans ever did. I think they do not sense like us.”

“No,” Hanno said, “this is likelier a straightforward hologram.” The hair stood up on his arms. “Maybe they don’t know how we see, either, but die reality is die same for all of us ... I hope.”

The image moved, a stow and careful pirouette revealing it from every angle. It reached out of the scene and brought back a lump of something soft, which it proceeded to mold into a series of geometrical solids, sphere, cube, cone, pyramid, interlinked rings. “It’s telling us it’s intelligent,” Aliyat whispered. Blindly, she crossed herself.

Vision began to understand. If the image was tire-size, the original stood about one hundred forty centimeters tall. Central was a stalk, a green that glittered and shimmered, supported on two thin limbs mat were flexible or multiply jointed, ending in several bifurcated digits. At the top sprouted two similar arms. These forked, subdivided, sub-subdivided, dendriticaUy, till the watchers were unable to count the last, spidery-delicate “fingers.” From the sides spread a pair of—wings? membranes?—to a span that equaled the height. They looked as if made of nacre and diamond dust, but rippled tike silk.

After a long time, Tu Shan muttered, “If this is what they are, how shall we ever know them?”

‘The way we knew the spirits, maybe,” Wanderer answered as softly. “I remember kachina dances.”

“For God’s sake,” Svoboda cried, “what are we waiting for? Let’s show them us!”

Hanno nodded. “Of course.”

The spacecraft moved on together toward the living world.

So Pytheas came to harbor, took orbit about Xenogaia.

That required special care. There were other bodies to give a wide berth. Foremost was the moon. Scarred and ashen as Earth’s, it had only a tenth the mass, but its path brought it inward to about a third the Lunar distance from its primary, then out again to three-fifths. Some cosmic accident must have caused that, more recent than the impacts that formed the planet.

A number of artificial satellites wheeled in their own courses. None resembled any in the Solar System. Boats, as Hanno dubbed them, came and went. His folk were unsure how many, for no two seemed alike; only slowly did they realize that form changed according to mission, .and force-fields had more to do with it than crystal or fiber.

The Allosan mother ship (another human phrasing) orbited well beyond the moon. It appeared to be of fixed shape, a cylindroid almost ten kilometers in length and two in diameter, majestically rotating on its long axis, mother-of-pearl iridescent. Aft (?) was a complex of slender, curved members which might be the drive generator; it put Hanno in mind of interwoven vine patterns he had seen on Nordic mnestones and in Irish Gospels. Forward (?) the hull flared and then came to a point, making Patulcius and Svoboda recall a minaret or a church spire. Yukiko wondered about its age. A million years did not seem unthinkable.

“They probably live aboard,” Wanderer opined. “Uh, what weight does that spin provide?”

“Sixty-seven percent of standard terrestrial gravity,” the ship responded.

“Yeah, they look as if they come from that kind of environment. It means—let’s see, you told us Xenogaian pull equals one point four times Earth’s, so for them—no, no, let me show off,” Wanderer laughed. “It’s twice what they’re used to. Can they take it?”

“We could, if we had to,” Macandal said. “But the Al-k)i do seem fragile.” She hesitated. “Like crystal, or a bare tree iced over on a clear winter day. They are quite beautiful, once you learn how to look at them.”

“I think we shall have to,” declared Tu Shan harshly. “I mean, bear an added forty kilos on each hundred.” Their gazes followed his to that viewscreen in the common room which held an image of Xenogaia. They were passing the day side, the planet nearly full. It was brighter than Earth, for it was more clouded. Whiteness swirled and billowed, thinly marbled with the blue of oceans, spotted with greenish-brown glimpses of land. Though the axis tilted a full thirty-one degrees, neither pole bore a cap; snow gleamed rarely on the tallest mountains.

Aliyat shivered. The motion loosened her hold on a table edge and sent her slowly off through the air. Hanno caught her. She clung to his hand. “Go down there?” she asked. “Must we?”

“You know we can’t stay healthy in weightlessness,” he reminded her. “We can for longer than mortals born, and we’ve got medications that help, but finally our muscles and bones will shrink too, and our immune systems fail.”