Robert Silverberg: Across A Billion Years

August 11, 2375

Somewhere in Ultraspace

Lorie, I can’t even guess when you’ll get to hear this letter. If ever. I mean, I might just decide to blank the message cube when I finish talking into it. Or maybe I’ll forget about giving it to you when I come home from all this.

It isn’t just that I’m an unstable sort of vidj, which of course I am. By the time I’m able to get any letters into your hands, though, a couple of years will have gone by, and what I have to tell you now may not seem very important or interesting. But I have these message cubes anyway. And right now it seems like a good idea to put it all down for you, to make a record of what I’m doing and what’s happening to me out here.

I guess the proper thing to do tonight is to call you up on the galaxy-wide telepath hookup and wish us a happy birthday, we being twenty-two years of age this day. (Doesn’t that sound ancient? We’re turning into fossils!) A guy really ought to keep in touch with his twin sister on their birthday, even if she’s home on Earth and he’s bimpty-bump light-years away.

But it costs about a billion credits to make a live realtime skull-to-skull call. Well, maybe not that much; but whatever it costs, it’s more stash than I’ve got in my thumb account. And I don’t dare call collect, even though Our Lord And Master wouldn’t suffer much from the charge. Considering the way things were between Dad and me when I took off on this jaunt, I just don’t have the slice to try it. He’d split a wavelength when he saw the bill.

Will this do, then? — Happy Birthday, Sister Mine, from your unique and irreplaceable brother Tom, far, far away. I send you, via message cube and a couple of years after the fact, a chaste and brotherly kiss.

Exactly where I am now is anybody’s guess. We are supposed to land on Higby V in three Earth-standard-time days, and Higby V is — what? sixty, eighty, ninety light-years from Earth? — but as you may know there isn’t any one-to-one correlation between time spent in ultradrive travel and distance covered. On a journey of ten light-years, say, the ship can spend two months going a quarter of the distance, then cover the rest of the way in an hour and a half. It has something to do with the space-time manifold, and when they explained it to us laymen we were urged to visualize a needle plunging through a bunched-up sheet and sometimes going through a lot of layers at once. Higher physics of this sort has never been my pocket, exactly, and I’m not going to try to load my mind with it now. The more useless stuff from other sciences that I attempt to learn, the more archaeology I’m going to forget, and the archaeology is more important.

It’s like Professor Steuben, the Assyriologist, used to say. All semester long he called me Mr. Barley, which I thought was his idea of a joke, until I found out he really believed that that was my name. So I said my name was Rice, and the next day he called me Mr. Oats. I said my name was Rice, again. He drew himself up to about three meters high and said, “Mr. Rice, do you realize that every time I memorize one student’s name, I forget one irregular verb? One must establish priorities!” He went back to calling me Barley, but he gave me an A, so I won’t crank about him too much.

Professor Steuben ought to see me now, about to dig in at the galaxy’s top archaeological site. I feel like the curtain’s going up for me at last. You remember how we used to talk about how growing up is a kind of overture, and then Act One starts when you’re out on your own? So here I am standing in the wings, listening to the last chords of the overture, hoping I don’t muff my lines when the big moment comes.

Not that I mean to boost my own heat. I know and you know and we all know that I’m a very minor part of this expedition, that I’m going to get out of it more than I can possibly give to it, that I’m lucky to be here and no great asset to the enterprise. Does that fulfill my Modesty Quota for the epoch? But I mean it. I am humble on this jog, because I know I have a great deal to be humble about.

I’ll feed you the data on the voyage so far first, and then I’ll scan you the cast of characters as I read it up to here.

Voyage so far: zero. I wish I could paint you a thrilling vivid picture of an ultradrive voyage, Lorie, to add to your collection of vicarious experiences. Blot that, but completely. The fact that you will never travel by ultradrive is absolutely no cause for regret. The ship has no windows, no scanner plates, no viewscreens, no access to the outside environment whatever. There is no sensation of motion. The temperature never varies, the lights don’t flicker, it rains not in here, neither does it snow. What this trip is like is like spending a couple of months inside one very long and low hotel that is locked up tight in every way. Outside us, they tell me, is a gray, featureless murk that doesn’t change at all, ever. Ultraspace is a universe having a foggy day as long as infinity. Therefore the ship designers don’t risk structural weakness by putting in windows. The only excitement of the voyage came on the third day, when we were just outside the orbit of Mars and making the shift from ordinary space into ultraspace. For about thirty seconds I felt as if someone had stuck a hand down my gullet and pulled me inside out in one swift yank. This is not exactly a delightful sensation. But it’s a measure of how boring things have been since then that I’m looking forward eagerly to feeling it again when we phase out of ultradrive tomorrow or the next day. I guess it’ll be the reverse: like getting undisemboweled.

That long dumb silent place on the message cube is where I stopped talking for a while, Lorie, while I debated whether to go back and erase what I just said. I mean, the part about the voyage being so dull because we can’t see anything or do anything or escape from captivity.

It’s a bit cloddish for me to crank about that to you. It holds me up all spoiled and petulant, with my miserable few months stuck in the same place, compared with what you’ve had to put up with for practically your whole life. All right, so I’m a clod. I don’t know how you manage it, Lorie, except maybe being a telepath helps to get your mind off things. I’d have gone crazy in your place long before I was house-broken.

Still, you are you and I am I, and please make allowances for my faults, which are maximum. I don’t have your saintly patience, and I’m quietly going crazy in this ship, and feel free to scorn me for having such a low tolerance for boredom.

I’ll leave all of this on the cube. I want to give you the whole picture, everything I’m feeling, and devil take trying to look like a noble soul. I couldn’t fool you anyway.

Now for the cast of characters. And I do mean characters.

There are eleven archaeologists on this trip. Three of us are apprentices, newly outslipped from college, and archaeologists more by courtesy than by merit. On the other hand, our three bosses are utter tops in the line, each one of them deemed a major authority on the High Ones, and naturally they hate each other to a high-frequency zing. The remaining five are medium sorts, all pros but nothing special, the kind of hacks you find in any operation. They’ve been around, they know their stuff, they do what they’re told. But they don’t have much spark.

As you might expect we’re a racially mixed outfit. The liberals must have their way. And so the quota system has been imposed on us: we include six Earth-men, counting one android, and five selected representatives of five of the other intelligent galactic races. Now, you know I’m no bigot, Lorie. I don’t care how many eyes, tentacles, eating orifices, or antennae an organism happens to have, so long as it knows its stuff. What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance.