Poul Anderson - For Love and Glory

Be that as it might—“If you want. Within reason. Not right now, please. I’d like to rest a while.” She escaped to her cabin.

Actually, the encounters afterward weren’t so bad. They were only occasional, and only in the course of a few ship-days. He spoke mildly, often smiling, and indeed tried to shift them into more personal conversation. She found she could divert that by asking him to explain the classical quotations he threw in, whether or not she recognized them. They were apt to be lyrical, even tender. Their authors, historical backgrounds, and whatever else she could get him to tell her about them used up time. He wasn’t a scholar or anything like that; however, his tastes surprised her a little by their depth and frequent delicacy.

What waited for her when she came home scattered all of it into the far corners of her mind.

Coming out of hyperjump and moving inward through the Solar System, Torsten Hebo’s little ship chanced to pass near enough to the Enigma that it showed as a star-twinkle in a viewscreen. He’d heard about this construct, orbited in the asteroid belt a couple of centuries ago. Curious, he magnified the image and amplified the light, until the thing should have been plain to his eyes. It still wasn’t. A bewildering geometry of—what, slender girders and braces, complexly curved?—surrounded a core of ever-changeable, softly opalescent glow. No more identifiable now than it was in pictures he’d seen, taken by other visitors and released on the interstellar communication webs.

Not a secret. Merely incomprehensible. Earth didn’t issue news releases, but the questions of outsiders got polite, if rather brief and formal, answers. This was an instrumentality for fundamental research. That alone had, at first, been startling enough. Weren’t the basic equations of physics written down several hundred years ago? Well, maybe there really was more to be discovered. Unfortunately, said the responses, the principles behind this thing were not explainable, in any meaningful sense of the word, to any organic brain—including unreinforced Earth-human—or any artificial intelligence developed on any other planet. Whatever the results of its investigations, they would be made as public as possible.

The rest was silence.

Well, Hebo thought, I suppose they’re working on it yet, and maybe getting nowhere. And maybe I ought to resent the claim that I and every organic being, human or nonhuman, haven’t the brains to understand what’s going on. But, hell, the universe is full of things I can’t understand, like women or affine geometry or Arzethian politics, and so what? My ego isn’t tied that hard to my intellect.

It is kind of eerie, though, that Earth seems to be the only planet that everybody thinks of as speaking with a single voice, like a single entity.

The Enigma passed from view, and soon into the bottom of his mind. After all, knocking about in space, he’d encountered plenty of different weirdnesses. And ahead of him was no threat but, he hoped, release and renewal.

He turned his attention to the waxing radiance ahead and presently its silvery companion. It seemed to take a long while, and then it seemed to have taken almost no time, before he was there.

Seen from the outside, Earth had changed little since the last few of his visits. The same white-marbled blue beauty shone athwart crystalline darkness, bearing the same heraldry of continents. The polar caps kept their same modest size, a few dun spots of desert remained, no city lights clustered and sprawled across the nighted side. Fewer solar-power collection fields glimmered on the moon, but he’d known about that change. Information did diffuse starward, news, images, borne more by transients than by direct communication, and less and less often, but apparently nothing kept deliberately secret. Apparently. Maybe, he thought again, it was just that nothing much was going on anymore that his kind of people could follow.

Procedures for approach, orbiting, descent, and such-like matters had certainly gotten streamlined. He especially appreciated not having to lie several hours abed while nanoprobes swarmed through him checking for pathogens; now a scanner did the job in about one minute. Nevertheless, the feeling of being moved along in a huge, smooth-running machine was unexpectedly lonesome.

A robotic flitter set him and his meager baggage down at one of the two hostels kept for humans from outside. The rest had gradually been shut down as demand for them dwindled. He’d picked the one on Oahu, mostly because he’d been recalling youthful days—his first youth—sailing a knockabout around among the Islands and beachcombing on them with a delightful young woman.

Whatever became of her? Had he been a fool to lose touch? Or, he wondered, had wistful memory colored those days brighter than they’d really been and put in happenings that never really happened? He couldn’t bring her name to mind.

From the air, he’d seen that Honolulu and the other cities were completely gone. A few low, sleek buildings lay scattered amidst gardens and stands of tropical wildwood. But beyond Diamond Head, Hanauma Bay was about the same as ever and the diving was, if anything, better now when he had it to himself and the coral had been so well rehabilitated. Some congenial company would have been nice, though. He walked back up to the hostel in a mood less happy than the scenery deserved.

It affected an ancient style. That made sense. What its guests chiefly had in common was the history of this world before their forbears—or, in a few cases like his, they themselves—departed. When Hebo came down from his room casually dressed for a drink before dinner, he was shown to a covered deck open to the breezes and the sight of sea and cliffs. A bewildering richness of birds soared, dipped, and cried. He’d heard that some were of native species long extinct, recreated on the basis of records equally old.

The drink was served by an unobtrusive machine. The food, when it came, was good but nothing he recognized; a really first-chop wine came with it. Still, he was glad when another man appeared, and invited him to his table.

Seiichi Okuma spoke no language Hebo could handle. The servitor brought a translator and they were soon in conversation. The other man turned out to be from Akiko, in the Beta Centauri region, which was somewhat off Hebo’s usual beat. He was here as part of a small team of—anthropologists? His fellows were currently scattered over the globe. Their sponsors hoped they could gain a somewhat better understanding of present-day Earth, experiencing its life in more detail and with less predictability than verbals, visuals, and virtuals offered.

“And how’ve you been doing?” Hebo asked.

“None of us are sure yet,” Okuma admitted, “but already it’s rather discouraging. We knew, of course, the human population is down to only about fifty million. That’s anomalous enough. But I, at least, I had not guessed how remote that population has become.”

“People aren’t friendly?”

The question was of more than academic interest to Hebo. He hadn’t yet spoken at any length with anyone but a space traffic control officer, and that was by beamphone and she was modified-human—not ugly, but not his type. Her words had been polite, no more. He’d wondered why she cared to do something so routine, when it could easily and more efficiently be cybered. Maybe fleeting encounters with yokels like him amused her. As for the utility of it, he supposed a live person was meant as a courtesy to newcomers.

Unless, of course, she too was a virtual.

“Oh, those I have sought out have been ready enough to talk, if not very forthcoming,” Okuma said. “Some have actually extended hospitality of an austere sort. But I have never felt their attention was really on me.”