Robert Silverberg - Across A Billion Years

“More dead than alive,” Dr. Schein said. “And yet they live on.”

“It is no favor to them,” muttered Dr. Horkkk. “This death-in-life is an indecency! Their time is over. Let them rest.”

Yes, let them rest, I say.

And so a billion years of greatness comes down to this: empty creatures rotting in crystal cages, while bustling robots thrive and multiply and eagerly serve. Our quest is over. We have found the High Ones, we have intruded on what should have been private, we have peered into the nightmare of the galaxy’s loftiest race in extreme old age.

I wish we had never been allowed to see this.

I pray that Earth in its old age, a million or a billion years from now, will die the quick and clean death that planets as well as people deserve, and that no strangers will come spanning the stars to stare at the dismal, dilapidated, deathless heirs to all our magnificence.

We left this underworld of suspended lives and cheated deaths, and returned to the glowing surface of Mirt, and we thought our tour of wonders was at its end.

We were wrong, for Mirt had one amazement left for us, the one which has so enormously transformed the existence of every being in the galaxy and thrust us into a new and strange and exciting era.

Dihn Ruuu led us to a long vaulted room piled deep with the bewildering devices of the High Ones, and as we passed through it I noticed familiar objects on a shelf.

“Look,” I said. “Commemorative plaques!”

Half a dozen of the bright metal disks were stacked there, identical to those that had been excavated so frequently in the ancient sites of the High Ones. None of the others showed much interest in what I had found; they sped onward to some kind of sculpture made of many thin spokes bent and bunched in curious patterns. But I called Dihn Ruuu over and asked the robot about the plaques. The robot scooped them up, spread them on one huge hand, and said, “They are activators.”

“Activators of what?”

By way of answer he reached into the shelf and tugged forward a circular band of smooth white metal, pierced by three slots.

“The thought amplifier,” Dihn Ruuu said. “Which permits communication between mind and mind.”

“Can you show me how it works?”

“The activators must be inserted in the slots. Then one places the amplifier on the head—”

I snatched the disks and the band from Dihn Ruuu and with trembling fingers shoved the activators into place. Dihn Ruuu made no comment. At the far end of the hall, Dr. Schein turned, looked back at me, and called, “What are you doing, Tom?”

“Nothing,” I said, and lifted the thought amplifier to my head.

I knew the risks were tremendous, but I refused to think about such things. All my life had been only a prologue to this moment, all the years of being incomplete, isolated, cut off. Now I saw a chance to become complete after all.

I brought the thought amplifier down until it encircled my temples.

I felt as though a spike had been hammered through my skull. I reeled; perhaps I fell; I could no longer see. Tongues of fire danced in my brain. My mind fled from my body, roaming the long room at will-Encountering another mind-Contact!

A silent voice said —

— Who’s there? Who’s calling?

— Tom Rice, I replied.

— But you’re not a TP!

— Now I am.

I knew that my mind was touching that of Davis, the Pride of Space’s TP man. I felt closer to this stranger than I had ever been to anyone. Our minds met and could have merged; and I let out such a whoop of excitement at my new power that Davis recoiled, stunned, in pain, and sealed his mind off from me. No matter. I was no longer aware of pain myself. I moved away from Davis’ mind — outward-Out into space.

How easy it was to leap across the light-years! In wonder and awe my mind roved the galaxy. I felt impulses of thought rising toward me here, there, bright glints of light lancing through the darkness as other TPs wondered who this stranger was. I touched the mind of Nachman Ben-Dov, the Israeli Buddhist, on Higby V. Who’s that? he demanded. What’s your signal? Who are you?

— Tom Rice, I told him.

— But how — ?

I opened my mind and let him see how, and our minds touched, and I felt the strength of him, that rock-steady man. I sensed another mind near his, and probed, and it was that of Marge Hotchkiss; and somehow that unpleasant woman did not seem unpleasant now, for I saw beyond her irritability, her laziness, her selfishness, to the — well, call it the soul — beneath. From Marge I moved to the mind of Ron Santangelo, who greeted me in surprise and amazement, and then a whole chorus of TPs erupted, voices out of every corner of the universe, asking how it was that someone not born to the TP power was able to touch minds to them, and for one breathtaking moment I was in contact with thousands of TPs at once; I was plugged into the entire TP net.

And then I picked up the voice I had been waiting for.

— Tom, how wonderful! I never thought this would happen!

— Neither did I, Lorie. Neither did I.

My mind went forth fully to my sister, and hers to me, and the other TPs dropped away, enclosing us in a sphere of silence, leaving the two of us in undisturbed contact. We opened our minds to one another, and there came pouring out of Lorie across hundreds of light-years such a flood of love and warmth that I nearly had to break contact to keep from drowning in it; and then she moderated her output, and we adjusted frequencies as I was learning moment by moment to do, and our minds merged.

Merged. Totally.

In that instant of union we learned all that there was to learn from one another. She drew from me every detail that has gone onto these message cubes, everything from the boredom of the ultradrive voyage to Higby V through the finding of Dihn Ruuu to the moment when I had donned the thought amplifier. Lorie will not have to play the cubes; she knows the whole story of my adventures.

And I drew from her, in that first excited burst of contact, the essence of the paralyzed girl who is my sister, and I realized that I had never really known her before. It had been foolish of me to pity her and coddle her, to try to shield her from my own happinesses so she would suffer no envy. She is anything but pitiful, anything but envious. She is strong, perhaps the strongest person in the universe, and her paralysis means nothing to her, for she has friends everywhere and envies no one, least of all me. In the meeting of our minds I discovered that it was I, deprived of the TP power, who had been the real cripple. Lorie had pitied me even while I had pitied her, and her pity had been far more intense and with much better reason. There was an end to pity now. — This is Jan, I said, and transmitted an image. — She’s beautiful, Tom. I know you’ll be happy together. But why don’t you give her the amplifier too?

— Yes. Yes, I will. Right — now —

But I felt a fierce wrenching sensation, and my contact with Lorie broke, and I was alone, terribly alone, once more locked into my skull.

“He’s coming out of it!” Dr. Schein’s voice said. “He’s all right!”

I opened my eyes. I lay sprawled on the cold stone floor of the long room. Everyone stood clustered anxiously about me. Saul had taken the amplifier from my head. Jan, frightened, clung to Pilazinool. I tried to get up, swayed dizzily, and made it on my second try.

“Give that to me!” I yelled, reaching for the amplifier.

Saul held it back. Dr. Schein said, “Tom, that thing can be dangerous! You don’t know—”

“You don’t know,” I shouted, and lunged at Saul, who yielded the amplifier. I suppose I must have seemed like a madman to the others. They backed away, frightened. I gestured at Dihn Ruuu and ordered the robot to get me a second amplifier. The robot obeyed, inserting the activator plaques itself. “Here,” I said to Jan. “Put it on your head!”