Robert Silverberg: Across A Billion Years

If you ever play this back, Lorie, I hope you appreciate the skill with which I imitate Our Lord And Master’s voice. I get just the right tone of hearty manliness mixed with stuffy hypocrisy, don’t I? No, blot that. Dad’s not really a hypocrite. He’s consistent to his own rules.

We all knew he wasn’t the intellectual type, though I at least always felt that despite his extreme concern with piling up stash and keeping a busy thumb, he had some interest in the finer values. He did get a degree from Fentnor, after all, and even though it was in Business Administration they don’t let you escape from Fentnor illiterate. I also felt that Dad was far from being the kind of reactionary vidj that tries to dictate his son’s professional choice. He always struck me as a live and let live type.

So it hurt when he came down so hard against my going into archaeology.

No secret what he really wants, which is for me to follow him into the real-estate business and eventually to take over from him. But real estate sings no songs to me, and I made that clear to him, didn’t I, by the time I was sixteen? Dad gets his zingers, not to mention much stash, from building his instant slums out of parapithlite sheeting on faraway worlds, and I suppose for him this is a creative thing. I admit some of his projects have been ingenious, such as the chain of floating houses on that gas-giant world in the Capella system, or the high-grav shopping center with interlocking centrifuges that he whipped up for the Muliwomps. Nevertheless I have always lacked a craving for this entire pocket.

Anyway, why should I go into a “useful” or “profitable” line of work, to quote two of Dad’s favorite adjectives? What better justification for his bulging bank accounts than that they allowed his son to dedicate himself to the pursuit of pure knowledge?

Such as the digging up of old odds and ends on miserable cold stormy planets.

Enough. I need not yammer to you about Dad’s obtuseness, since I think you share my feelings and — as, usual — are 100 percent on my side. Dad went his way, I went mine, and perhaps he’ll soften up and forgive me after a while for turning my back on color-change litigation and housing projects, and if not, I will somehow avoid starvation anyway, doing what I most enjoy doing, which is archaeologizing.

Though I will not pretend that I’ve enjoyed this current job so far.

I will take a positive attitude. I will tell myself that we’ll hit the right level any day.

Three-hour intermission there, during which I helped to perform some hard, dull, valuable work.

What we did was get fiber telescopes into the hillside to see what’s in there. These are long strands of glass which transmit an optically undistorted image from end to end, given the right illumination. Getting them into the hillside involved drilling holes, which Kelly took care of with her vacuum equipment; this had to be done with unusual care, since the drill might blunder right into the site we’re looking for and chop it up some.

I may have underestimated Kelly. She handles those corers beautifully.

Kelly perforated the hill for us; then we mounted the fiber telescopes on sprocket wheels and fed them ticklishly into the ground. We put four in altogether, spaced twenty meters apart; Jan and I worked together on one wheel.

Now the telescopes are in place. The big shots are peering into the heart of the mound. Night is falling, and it’s raining again. I’m in the dorm, dictating this. If my voice is a little low, it’s because I don’t want to disturb Saul and Mirrik, who are playing chess. It’s astonishing to watch somebody as huge as Mirrik moving chess pieces around with the tip of a tusk.

Jan is running toward our shack from the dig site. She looks excited. She’s calling something to us, but I can’t hear her through the bubble wall.

One hour later. Night, now. What Jan was trying to say was that they hit paydirt. The telescopes show the location of the High Ones cache. We weren’t more than a dozen meters off course. For some reason we had misinterpreted the survey figures and were coming in on a tilt, but we can correct for that now.

It’s too late to do any digging tonight. First thing in the morning we’ll plot a whole new survey graph so that we have the position down perfectly. Then we’ll finally be ready to start real work, with all of the preliminaries out of the way.

The whole team is over in our dorm right now. Outside it’s pouring again. Everyone’s tense and jumpy. Dr. Horkkk keeps pacing around in that weird precise way of his — a dozen steps, turn, a dozen steps back, turn, mathematically calculated so that he covers the same distance down to the millimeter. Steen Steen and Leroy Chang are following along behind him, having some kind of argument about High Ones linguistics. Pilazinool and Kelly Watchman are playing chess, which as you’ve guessed is our big recreation here. Kelly got very wet coming back from the site and has stripped down to her pretty pink synthetic skin, which has Leroy Chang disturbed; he keeps peering over his shoulder at her. So much for all that elaborate stuff about modesty. Kelly is a handsome wench, of course, but it quonks me how Leroy can get so excited about something that came out of a vat of chemicals. Maybe she’s naked, but she isn’t real, and that takes some of the thrill out of the nakedness. Pilazinool has done his kind of strip routine too: he’s down to head and torso, and one arm to make the moves, while the rest of his body is lying in a mixed-up heap next to his bench. Now and then he screws one of his legs back on, or takes off an antenna, or otherwise fissions around with himself in his nervous way. He’s losing the chess game, incidentally.

Dr. Schein is running scanner tapes of previous High Ones excavations, and is discussing tomorrow’s digging techniques with Mirrik, who has plenty to say. Saul Shahmoon has one of his stamp albums out and is showing his prize specimens to 408b and Jan, who don’t look very interested. And I’m sitting off in one corner talking into a message cube.

The evening seems endless.

Is it ever like this for you, Lorie? Even after all these years I don’t really know how you work inside. I mean, lying there, hardly able to move, getting your food through tubes, no way even to go to the window and see what the weather’s like. Yet I’ve never seen you bored or impatient or even depressed. If you were some kind of mental vegetable, I could understand it. But your mind is active and alert and probably in most ways a better mind than mine. Here I am — here we all are — counting minutes until morning and sick of waiting. And there you are, with nothing to look forward to except another day of the same, keeping cheerful.

Is it the TP that does it? I guess it is. Being able to rove all through the universe in your mind. Talking with friends on a thousand different planets, seeing strange scenes through their eyes, finding out everything about everything without leaving your bed at all. You can’t ever be bored or lonely for long. You just have to tune in on some other TP and you’ve got company and entertainment.

I’ve always felt sorry for you, Lorie. Me being so healthy and active, going everywhere, doing so much, and you tied down to your hospital room, and yet we’re twins, who are supposed to share so much. That’s the ironic part. But tonight I wonder whether I ought to pity you or envy you. I can walk; you can soar from star to star via your TP powers, no limits. Which of us is the real cripple?

Idle thoughts on a long night, nothing else.

Jan is tired of looking at Saul’s stamps. I heard her ask him to go for a walk with her, but he said no, he’s got some cataloging to do. So Jan came over and asked me instead. Second Choice, as usual.