Джек Макдевитт - Translations from The Colosian

I was glad to retreat from those bleak tales to Aalish. She must have lived near a coastline: the distant roar of the tide is somehow present throughout her work. One has a sense of the author alone among rocks and breakers and stranded sea creatures, the universe itself reflected on deep water. But her vitality and her laughter (it is difficult to believe that she is not somewhere still alive) reduce the cosmos to a human scale: it is a thing, like an old shell found on the beach, that she turns and examines in her hands.

Her essays maintain everywhere a spirited wit, and an unbending optimism, a sense that, if it all ends in a dark plunge, there is meantime starlight, good wine, good books, good friends.

No wonder Tyr loved her.

And there came, finally, a snowswept evening when I confronted my obligation to share her with the world. But how to do it? What explanation could I possibly give?

I don’t argue that the course I took was the correct one, but I did not know of an alternative, nor can I conceive of one now. I translated one of her more delicate efforts, a treatise on a neglected architectural design, which shaded subtly into an unbearably poignant rumination on the nature of time.

And I put my own name on it.

It appeared in the April issue of Greenstreet's. I felt guilty about it, of course. There was clearly a delicate moral problem involved. But I felt that compromising myself was not too great a sacrifice to give these magnificent essays to the world. There was, of course, little immediate response. But the editors were pleased, and my colleagues offered their congratulations. (I didn’t miss the envy in some of their kudos.)

And I: I knew that George Thorne’s name would one day live alongside those of Montaigne and Lamb and Mark Twain. It was exhilarating.

My second effort was “Sea Star,” which has since become one of the most loved of the entire series. That was also one of the more obvious coastal pieces, and prompted my move to Rockland, Maine, in order to carry off the image.

I rationed the essays carefully, publishing only five or six a year. At one point, I took a two-year hiatus and faked writer’s block. But I’ve pretty well worked my way through Aalish now, and I’d begun wondering whether I didn’t owe the world a few great novels too.

Then the Lenin came back from Lalande 8760, its belly full of photos, artifacts, and tapes, detailed studies of distant worlds, and the history and literature of a nearby (but previously unknown) civilization. Lalande is only about eight light-years from Earth; in the neighborhood, as Klein would have said.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised. But it had not yet occurred to me that Athens might have been only a single stop in Tyr’s itinerary. Or that he might not have traveled alone.

The Lenin brought back three novels that, in translation, I recognized as the work of Sesily Endine. I read them carefully, and concluded reluctantly that, once again, there could be no doubt. At first I was puzzled how such a thing could be. But I think I know: Tyr and Endine traveled together. They went to Athens, and to Lalande, and probably to everywhere else they could reach. And if Tyr yearned to be a playwright, Endine must have wanted to create novels.

Fortunately, the Lalande mission came back before I’d used any of the novels myself. Now I have a good idea why Chaser was so anxious to have the Shakespeare collection. Chaser’s Hamlet: it should play well in the theater in the park, and eventually around his world. And his sonnets should do well too.

But that’s not what concerns me. Sometimes, in the deepest hours of the night, I think about Aalish, and I cannot make myself believe that the two men would not have taken her along.

I wonder who actually wrote the exquisite essays that now bear my name? Four more expeditions are due back over the next three years, and I suspect I will soon have the exact coordinates of the immortal seacoast from which the great essayist stood toe to toe with the universe. And smiled.