Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years

“Not we who are here, no. But those are simple upcoun-try folk. And it is true that not all bodies of water grant the blessing. Many do not, though surely they were tried at some time.”

“That is because—oh—oh, Christ, what’s the use?”

“Water flows from your eyes. Do you invoke?”

“No, I— You have no word. Yes, I invoke the dead, and the loss, and— Wait! Wait!”

“You leap, you raise your arms, you utter noises.”

“I, I have a new thought. Maybe this will serve. I must ask the council. Then I must... must doubtless go to the habitants and ... learn if it feels right to them.” Aliyat turned around to face the Triune.

For days heaven had been almost dear, an iron-hard blue, clouds nowhere but in the west. Heat lightning sometimes nickered yonder, and thunder muttered into windlessness. Now sunset reddened those reaches. Its beams struck through gaps and down valleys until they splashed the new tarn as if with human blood. Trees bulked black against h. More and more, the Ithagene gathered in their hundreds became masses of shadow, a wall around the water. Their singing beat like a heart.

Out of them trod the Eldritch Ones, three couples, for it was known that that was their nature. On their right walked the Foreseers of the City, lanterns aloft on poles to cast many-patterned light; on their left, torches flared and smoked among the Sower Chieftains. These halted at the marge. The six went onward.

Aliyat felt drowned turf crisp beneath her feet. The water lapped around her ankles, knees, loins. Warmth from the day remained in it, but a coolness was rising from below, a pledge to years unborn. “Here’s where we stop,” she said. “The bottom slopes fast. Farther on, we’d soon be over our heads.” She couldn’t fight back a giggle. “That’d make it bard to go about this dignified, wouldn’t it?”

“I am not sure what we should do,” Tu Shan confessed.

“Nothing much. We have our clothes on, after all. They don’t know how we make babies anyway. But we must take our time and—“ A sudden odd shyness: “And get them to see we love each other.”

His arms enfolded her. She pressed herself close. Their mouths met. Vague in the twilight, she glimpsed Patulcius and Macandal, Wanderer and Svoboda. The hymn from the shore reached into her.

A necking party in a pool, she thought craztty. Ridiculous. Absurd as real lovemaking, as everything human, everything alive. We’ve sailed from those stars blinking forth overhead, to stage a Stone Age fertility rite.

But it was working. It consecrated the mere, it kindled the magic. In peace would Minoa await the resurrection of the land.

“Tu Shan,” she whispered, straining against him, “when we get home, I want your child.”

“Joyful is the word that has come to us,” related the Allos whom the humans thought of as Lightfall. “Share it. From rendezvous has it fared, the closest rendezvous, 147 light-years yonder.” Many-branched fingers marked off a part of the sky, then closed on a point within. Made by a shape that looked so frail, limned against naked space as revealed in a transparency of the ship, the gesture became doubly strong.

The direction was well away from Sol, but not toward Pegasi. The Alloi had roved widely from the world that mothered their race.

“Rendezvous,” said Yukiko, perforce aloud and in a language of Earth. She was understood, as she understood what was communicated to her. However, difficulties and failures of comprehension were still many. That was inevitable, when minds could not translate directly what senses perceived, but must pass it through a metalanguage worked out in the course of years. “I do not quite identify your reference.”

“Starfarers have established stations, orbital about chosen suns, to which they report their discoveries and experiences,” Quicksilver explained. “These pass the information on to the rest. So do nodes of knowledge grow, and the beams between them form nets that piece by piece knit together.”

Hanno nodded. He had been aware of this; his explorations with Alloi companions had taken him near the vast gossamer web they had made to circle Tritos, while Yukiko was searching into their arts, philosophies, dreams. “There’s a primitive version in the Solar System,” he reminded her. “Or was, when we left. After they start receiving our ‘casts, they can upgrade it and join the community.”

“If they care to.” She looked out to where stars drowned in the icy cataract of their own numbers, and away again, with a slight shudder. What she and he had learned here gave scant hope of that.

Hanno was less daunted. “What is this news?” he asked avidly.

“A ship came to the rendezvous,” Lightfall told. “All do thus from time to time, that they may take in the fresh data; for the stations cannot well broadcast continuously to those who may be anywhere, at any velocity. Such of. our report on this system as had arrived by then determined the crew on proceeding next to Tritos. We have encountered them before; it is clear to us that the Xenogaians hold special interest and promise for them. May we have an image?”

“Provided,” agreed Star Wing, and activated a projector.

A hulking form sprang forth. Hanno’s immediate thought was of a rhinoceros. Granted, the resemblance was faint and fanciful, like comparing a man to a caterpillar. The body was of minor interest in any case, except insofar as it was the matrix of mind, of spirit.

“Y-yes,” he ventured, “they’re from a big planet too, aren’t they? I daresay they see just enough cultural similarity here to themselves that they may reap a harvest of ideas from the differences.”

Yukiko’s eyes shone. “When will they come?”

“Their message is that they wished to spend a few years at the rendezvous first, studying and thinking about the data,” Lightfall imparted. “That is usual, to take advantage of facilities that no vessel can accommodate. Doubtless they are on their way at this moment. Since they are accustomed to high accelerations, they should arrive just a few months later than their announcement that they have set forth.”

“Several years yet, then.” Yukiko smiled. “Time to prepare a festive reception.”

“Do they travel by the same doctrine as you?” Hanno Inquired.

“Yes,” Lightfall answered, “which we recommend you also adopt.”

“I’m thinking about it. We’d need some basic modifications hi our ship, you know.”

“More in your thoughts.”

“Touche!” Hanno laughed. “Conceded, we are impatient parvenus.”

The Alloi did not boost continuously between stars. They got close to tight speed, then went on free trajectory, using centrifugal weight. The saving in antimatter allowed huge hulls, with everything that that implied. The price was that time dilation became less. A journey that might have been accomplished in ten shipboard years would take perhaps twice as long; and the farther you went, the larger the factor grew. All voyagers were ageless, but none escaped from time.

The practice accounted for observers at Sol never having picked up sign of starcraft. Enormous though the energies were, radiation was only at beginning and end of a passage, a candle-flicker; and starcraft were very few.

“Perhaps you do yourself an injustice,” suggested Volant.

“Perhaps your hastiness will fill a need we older spacegoing races did not know we had. You may go beyond this tiny segment of the galaxy that we have reached, from end to end of it, in less than a million cosmic years. You may be those who weave it together.”

Yukiko’s hands fluttered. “No, no. You honor us far beyond what we deserve,”

“Let us abide the future,” flowed from Star Wing: the patience of ancientness. These beings had left Pegasi fifteen thousand years ago; no individual lifetime of theirs was shorter than half of that. They knew of explorations that had been going on, in other directions, a hundred times as long.