Robert Silverberg - Across A Billion Years

“No, Tom, please — I’m afraid—”

“PUT IT ON,” I said, and she put it on before anyone could stop her, and I donned my own amplifier again and closed my eyes and felt hardly any pain at all as my mind broke free of my body, and I reached out, and there was Jan.

— Hello, I said.

— Hello, she replied, and our minds met and became one.

And that is how eleven archaeologists set out to dig up some broken old artifacts, and ended by changing the whole nature of human life. Not only human, either. The thought amplifiers work for all organic life-forms, and so for the first time aliens will enter the TP net. There are enough amplifiers on Mirt alone to supply the populations of a dozen worlds. Later, we can manufacture our own.

And so it is the end of secrecy and suspicion, of misunderstanding, of quarrels, of isolation, of flawed communication, of separation. As the amplifiers go into use, anyone will be able to contact anyone else, instantaneously, over a gulf of half the universe if need be, and achieve a full meeting of souls. What has been the special province of a few thousand TPs is now open to everyone, and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

We leave Mirt tomorrow. We may never come back; others may finish what we have begun here, while we go on to other sites. We can’t pretend that we’re doing anything but sightseeing now. For a month we’ve roamed this sphere of miracles, simply staring, making no systematic examination. We can’t. There’s too much here.

We need to go away, to take stock, to gain the long view of what we’ve already found, before we can push on with the job of penetrating the mysteries of the civilization of the Mirt Korp Ahm. Things have happened much too swiftly; we have to regain our balance.

This afternoon Jan and I will make a somber little pilgrimage. It was her idea. “We have to thank them,” she said.

“How can we? They’re beyond any kind of communication.”

“Even so. We owe them so much, Tom.”

“I say we ought to leave them in peace.”

“Are you afraid to go down there?”

“Afraid? No.”

“Then come with me. Because I’m going.”

“I’ll go too, then. After lunch?”

“After lunch, yes.”

Jan will be here soon. We will go down into the depths of Mirt. She’s right: we owe them so much. This sharing of minds, my new ability to reach out to Lorie … so much. One final visit, then, to bid farewell to the Mirt Korp Ahm, and try to thank them for what they have left to us. We’ll stand before a crystal wall and peer at some incredibly ancient High One, lost in its dreams of an era of greatness, and we’ll tell it that we’re the new people, the ones now filling the universe they once owned, the busy little seekers. And I think we’ll ask it to pray for us, if there’s anything that High Ones ever prayed to, because I have a feeling we’re going to make plenty of mistakes before we know how to handle these powers we’ve so strangely acquired.

Jan is here now. Down to the High Ones we go.

End of cube. End of more than that: end of a whole era. We don our amplifiers. We touch minds. I sense the presence of Lorie and say hello to her. She responds warmly.

— Stay in touch, I say. We’ll show you something interesting, in a weird way. We’ll show you the oldest living things in the universe. Our benefactors, but they’ll never know it.

Down we go to say good-bye to the Mirt Korp Ahm.