Poul Anderson - The Boat of a Million Years

Yukiko shook her head. “They do not expect we can or win remain. Certainly our numbers could only grow slowly, and never become large, on Xenogaia; and therefore what we, humans in space, were able to do, or at last cared to do, would be hopelessly limited.”

“You six—no, we eight have been like the English Puritans on Earth,” Hanno said. “Looking for a home, they meant to settle in Virginia, but weather drove them north and they ended in New England. It wasn’t what they’d hoped for, but they made the best of it, and that’s how the Yankees came to be. Suppose New England had been all there ever was for them. Think of such a country, stagnant, poor, narrow and narrow-minded. Do you want that for yourselves and your children?”

“The Yankees put down strong roots,” Tu Shan responded. “They did have America beyond.”

“We have nothing like that,” Macandal said. “Xenogaia belongs to its people. We have no right to anything but this Ktde patch they gave us. If we took more, God ought to strike us down.”

Wanderer nodded.

“So you have often said, dear,” Patulcius demurred, “and I have tried to point out that as a practical matter—”

“Yes, we have our investment here,” Svoboda interrupted, “sweat and tears and dreams. It will hurt to scrap that. But I always believed, myself, that someday we must.” Her voice clanged. “And now we’ve been given this opportunity!”

“That’s it,” Hanno chimed in. “Phaeacia has no natives for us to harm. It seems to be almost a reborn Earth. Seems. Maybe it’s a death trap. We can’t know till we’ve tried. We understood the risk of failure, extinction. Well, with the Altoi at our backs, that won’t happen. United, we can over-pHtpo anything. You see, they want us to live, to Sourish. They want humans among the stars.”

“Why us?” asked Macandal. “I realize—our psyches, our special talents, we and they doing more, becoming more, than either could alone, like a good marriage—but if they’d like human company, why not go on to Earth?”

“Have you forgotten why?” retorted Hanno grimly.

Her eyes widened. Fingers touched lips. “How can they be sure?”

“They aren’t, not absolutely; but from what we’ve described, they can guess with pretty high probability. Earth is going the selfeame way Pegasi did, and the rest that they know about. Ob, we’ll swap messages with it, no doubt. But it’s too far off”—a galactically minuscule four and a third light-centuries—“to make the voyage appear worthwhile. The Alloi would rather help us get established, come really to know us, and finally plan ventures together.”

Tu Shan gazed upward. “Phaeacia,” he breathed. “Like Earth. Not truly, but ... green leaves, rich soil, clear skies.” He closed his eyes against the sun and let its warmth lave his face. “Most nights we will see stars.”

Patulcius shifted about on the bench. “This does put quite a different complexion on matters,” he admitted. As much eagerness as his heavy features ever showed danced across them. “The survival of more than simpty us. Of humanity, true humanity.”

It blazed from Wanderer: “Not just a settlement or nation. A base, a frontier camp. We can be patient, we and the Alloi. We can make the planet ours, raise generations of young, till we’re many and strong. But then we’ll go to space again.”

“Those of you who wish,” said Tu Shan.

Macandal’s tone shook. “To learn and grow. To keep life alive.”

Aliyat spoke through sudden, brief tears. “Yes, take the universe back from the damned machines.”

“Where are they?”

The story is that Enrico Fermi first raised the question in the twentieth century, when scientists first dared wonder publicly about such things. If other thinking beings than us existed—how strange and sad if none did, in the entire vast-ness and diversity of creation—why had we on Earth found no trace or track of them? There we were, on the verge of making our own starward leap. Had nobody gone before us?

Perhaps it was impractical or impossible for flesh and Mood. It certainly was not for machines we knew in principle how to make. They could be our explorers, sending home their findings. Reaching far planets, they could build more like themselves, instilling the same imperative: Discover. (No menace to Me in their proliferation; at any given sun, a few tons of raw material from some barren asteroid or moon would suffice.) Under conservative assumptions, calculation showed that such robots would spread from end to end of the galaxy in about a million years. That was the merest eyeblink of cosmic time. Why, a million years ago our ancestors were approaching full humanness. Had no race anywhere even that much of a head start? All it would take was one.

Still easier to send were signals. We tried. We listened. Silence, until we thought to try in certain new directions; then, enigma.

Guesses teemed. The Others were transmitting, but not by means that we yet knew. They had come here, but in the prehistoric past. They were here, but concealed. They destroyed themselves, as we feared we might, before they could send or go. They had no high-technological civilizations among them; ours was unique. They did not exist; we were indeed alone. ...

Fermi went to his grave, time blew onward through its night, humankind entered upon a new path of evolution. The answer to his question was less found than it was created, by what the children of Earth themselves did; and it proved to be twofold.

Dispatch your robots. They go forth to marvels and magnificences. Every star is a sun, every planet a world, multifarious, astounding, its secrets not exhaustible in less than many decades. When it bears life, they are inexhaustible forever, because life is not only infinite in its variousness, it never remains the same, it is forever changing. When it is intelligent, this rises to a whole new dimensionality, a different order of being.

The farther your emissaries range, the faster grows the realm of the unknown. Double the radius, and you roughly octuple the number of stars to ransack. You also double the time of faring and the time for a signal to cross between ship and home.

Ten or twelve years from departure to arrival, ten years more to receive the first recounting, are reasonable. Fifty years are not unreasonable. But a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years either way? Suns and planets have fallen into classes; they no longer hold revelations. If you know the basic parameters, you can compute their properties. It is pointless to lengthen your list of them.

Life forms are something else. Yet if you desire to study these, you have a sufficiency on worlds already attained. Indeed, you have overwhelmingly much. Your information-processing capabilities, that part of them devoted to this endeavor, grow saturated.

The data include data on sapient beings. Those are rare, but they do occur and are fascinating beyond measure. Nevertheless, when the time lag grows much greater than lifetimes of theirs, and moreover your field scientists are machines, how can you truly come to know them? (Those that have been found are primitive and mortal. Science and high technology result from chains of unlikely historical accidents.) Wiser to hold your attention on those near enough that you can to some limited extent follow what the robots do and observe.

There is no precise limit. There is simply a radius, on the order of a light-century or two, beyond which it is unprofitable to search farther. Having foreseen this, you have never built self-multiplying von Neumann machines.

Exceptions exist. When your instruments detect the radiations that suggest a civilization at some star, you will send your beams and perhaps your robots; but the span until anything can come of that, if anything does, is multimillennial. At the end, will your race still care?