Poul Anderson - There Will Be Time

“What?” Havig blinked in surprise. “We aren’t.”

“Eh? You rule the roost uptime, don’t you?”

“No. For a while we did, because somebody had to. But we worked together with the wisest people we could find — not exclusively travelers by any means — to end this as soon as might be, and turn the military society into a free republic … and at last into nothing more than a sort of loose guild.”

Fire, springing aloft when she worked the bellows, cast gleams from Leonce’s eyes. “Into nothin’ less than a dream,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” I told them, as frequently this day.

Havig sought words. “Doc,” he said after a bit, “once we’ve left here, you won’t see us again.”

I sat quite quietly. Sunset in the windows was giving way to dusk.

Leonce sped to me, cast arms around my shoulders, kissed my cheek. Her hair was fragrant, with a touch of smokiness from the little chuckling flames. “No, Doc,” she said. “Not ’cause you’ll die soon.”

“I don’t want—” I began.

“Ay-yeh.” Barbarian bluntness spoke. “You said you don’t want to know the date on your tombstone. An’ we’re not about to tell you, either. But damn, I will say you’re good for a fair while yet!”

“The thing is,” Havig explained in his awkward fashion, “we, Leonce and I, we’ll be leaving Earth. I doubt we’ll come back.”

“What was the good of time travel, ever?” he demanded when we could discourse of fundamentals.

“Why, well, uh—” I floundered.

“To control history? You can’t believe a handful of travelers would be able to do that. Walls believed it, but you can’t, I’m certain. Nor do you believe they should.”

“Well … history, archeology, science—”

“Agreed, almost, that there’s no such thing as too much knowledge. Except that fate ought not to be foreknown. That’s the death of hope. And learning is an esthetic experience — or ecstatic — but if we stop there, aren’t we being flat-out selfish? Don’t you feel knowledge should be used?”

“Depends on the end, Jack.”

Leonce, seated beside him, stirred in the yellow glow of a single shaded lamp, the shadow-restless many-hued sparkle from my fireplace. “For us,” she said, “the end is goin’ to the stars. That’s what time travel is good for.”

Havig smiled. His manner was restrained, but the same eagerness vibrated: “Why did you imagine we went on to build the — Phase Two complex — what we ourselves call Polaris House? I told you we don’t care to rule the world. No, Polaris House is for research and development. Its work will be done when the first ships are ready.”

“An’ they will be,” Leonce lilted. “We’ve seen.”

Passion mounted in Havig. He leaned forward, fingers clenched around the glass he had forgotten he grasped, and said:

“I haven’t yet mastered the scientific or engineering details. That’s one reason we must go back uptime. Physicists talk about a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light. They hope to develop a theory which’ll show them a method. Maybe they’ll succeed, maybe they won’t. I know they won’t in Polaris House, but maybe at last, in Earth’s distant future or on a planet circling another sun. But it doesn’t ultimately matter. A ship can go slower than light if people like us are the crew. You follow me? Her voyage might last centuries. But to us, moving uptime while she moves across space, it’s hours or minutes.

“Our children can’t do the same. But they’ll be there. We’ll have started man on his way to infinity.”

I stared past him. In the windows, the constellations were hidden by flamelight. “I see,” I answered softly. “A tremendous vision for sure.”

“A necessary one,” Havig replied. “And without us — and thus, in the long view, without our great enemy — the thing would never have been done. The Maurai might’ve gathered the resources to revive space exploration, at the height of their power. But they did not. Their ban on enormous energy outlays was good at first, yes, vital to saving this planet. At last, though, like most good things, it became a fetish. … Undoubtedly the culture which followed them would not have gone to space.”

“We did,” Leonce exulted. “The Star Masters are our people.”

“And a lifebringer to Earth,” Havig added. “I mean, a civilization which just sat down and stared at its own inwardness — how soon would it become stagnant, caste-ridden, poor, and nasty? You can’t think unless you have something to think about. And this has to come from outside. doesn’t it? The universe is immeasurably larger than any mind.”

“I’ve gathered,” I said, my words covering awe, “that that future society welcomes the starfarers.”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes. More for their ideas than for material goods. Ideas, arts, experience, insights born on a thousand different worlds, out of a thousand different kinds of being — and Earth gives a fair return. It is well to have those mystics and philosophers. They think and feel, they search out meanings, they ask disturbing questions—” Havig’s voice lifted. “I don’t know where the communion between them and us will lead. Maybe to a higher state of the soul? I do believe the end will be good, and this is the purpose we time travelers are born for.”

Leonce brought us partway back to our bodies. “Mainly,” she laughed, “we ’spec’ to have a hooraw o’ fun. Climb down off your prophetic broomstick, Jack, honeybee, an’ pay attention to your drink.”

“You two intend, then, to be among the early explorers?” I asked redundantly.

“We’ve earned the right,” she said.

“Uh-pardon me, none of my business, but if your children cannot inherit your gift—”

Wistfulness touched her. “Maybe we’ll find a New Earth to raise them on. We’re not too old.” She regarded her man’s sharp-edged profile. “Or maybe we’ll wander the universe till we die. That’d be enough.”

Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river.

The doorbell pealed. I left my chair to open up for a glimpse of Aquila. Three small figures were on the stoop, a clown, a bear, an astronaut. They held out paper bags. “Trick or treat!” they chanted. “Trick or treat!”

A year has fled since Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn bade me farewell. I often think about them. Mostly, of course, dailiness fills my days. But I often find an hour to think about them.

At any moment they may be somewhere on our planet, desperate or triumphant in that saga I already know. But we will not meet. The end of their lives reaches untellably far beyond mine.

Well, so does the life of man. Of Earth and the cosmos.

I wish … I wish many things. That they’d felt free to spend part of their stay in this summer which is past. We could have gone sailing. However, they naturally wanted to see Eleanor, his mother, in one of the few intervals they had been able to make sure were safe, and tell her — what? She has not told me.

I wish they or I had thought to raise a question which has lately haunted me.

How did the race of time travelers come to be?

We supposed, the three of us, that we knew the “why.” But we did not ask who, or what, felt the need and responded.

Meaningless accidental mutation? Then curious that none like Havig seem to have been born futureward of the Eyrie — of, anyhow, Polaris House. In truth it would probably not be good to have them and their foreknowledge about, once the purpose has been served of freeing man to roam and discover forever. But who decided this? Who shaped the reality?

I have been reading about recent work in experimental genetics. Apparently a virus can be made to carry genes from one host to the next; and the hosts need not be of the same species. Nature may have done this already, may always be doing it. Quite likely we bear in our cells and bequeath to our children bits of heritage from animals which were never among our forebears. That is well, if true. I am glad to think we may be so close to the whole living world.