Пол Андерсон - Explorations

Wretchedness stared back. "Please," Indigo whispered.

"Shall I break a few bones?" I asked.

"No!" Tamara exclaimed. "Voah, you can't talk that way. You're civilized!"

"He would have let Rero die, wouldn't he?" I retorted.

My wife's arm went around me. Through my sealsuit, I imagined the pressure, and the same desire kindled in us both. How long till we could appease it? I heard the force she must use to stay reasonable as she counselled in our language: "Better we be discreet. Two men killed in a fight, that's condonable. But it wouldn't speak well for us, in human ears, if we injured helpless prisoners."

I subsided. "Correct," I said, "though does he need to know this?"

The spirit had gone out of Indigo anyhow. His aura flickered bluish-dim. He dropped his glance to the floor and mumbled, "Yes, that was the idea. Trying to make the Arvelans break off negotiations because they'd decide our race is too — oh, too unstable to be safe around. It couldn't be done officially, when so many dupes are putting on pressure for a treaty conference."

Maclaren nodded. "We were supposed to think it was the work of a criminal gang," he said. "Which it was indeed. A criminal gang in the Citadel, running the government. When that news

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breaks, I hope to see them not just out of office, but on trial."

"No!" Anguish whipped through Indigo. He raised eyes and hands, he shuddered. "You can't! Not the Protector — the Dynasty — God alive, Maclaren, can't you understand? That's what we've been trying to save. Would you let it crumble? Would you leave us defenseless before a pack of monsters?"

Silence grew until at last Maclaren said, from the bottom of his throat, "You actually believe that, don't you?"

"He does, he does," Tamara cried through tears. "Oh, the poor fool! Don't be too hard on him, Terangi. He was acting out of… out of love… wasn't he?"

Love, for such an object? Rero-and-I shared horror.

"I don't know as how that excuses him," Maclaren said grimly. "Well, we have his admission. Let the courts decide what to do with him and the rest. It won't matter."

He straightened, I saw him easing muscle by muscle, and he said to us: "What does matter is that the plot failed. I suppose there'll have to be a lot of behind-the-scenes bargaining, compromises, pretenses that certain individuals never were involved — political expediency. Not too important. What is important is that we can use the scandal to bring down the whole clique that's wanted to lock us up in a hermit kingdom. We will be leaguing with Arvel." Wonder trembled in his voice. "We truly will."

Truly? passed through Rero-and-me.

"Your doing!" Tamara hugged us both where we stood. "If it hadn't been for your courage—"

"Why, there was no courage," Rero told her. "If we had gone meekly along, one of us would have died. What had we to lose?"

THE WAYS OF LOVE

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The knife that had formed within my soul flashed out of its sheath. "We would have been killed — which ought to have served the purpose reasonably well — if you had not intervened, Terangi Maclaren," I said, as if each word were being cut out of me.

He didn't notice my mood, in his pleasure, as he replied, "What else could I do, after the fighting began?" He hesitated. "It wasn't just your lives, Voah-and-Rero, though of course they meant a great deal. It was realizing that your race might well be provoked into withdrawing from ours. And that would have been about the most terrible loss humanity had ever had. Wouldn't it?"

"Your wife was endangered," I declared.

"I knew that," he said. They gripped hands, those two. Nevertheless he could tell me while she listened and nodded: "We both did. But we had the whole world to think about."

Rero-and-I do recommend making a pact, sharing transporter networks, conducting what trade and cultural exchange are possible. In our opinion, this will bring benefits outweighing any psychic harm of the kind that some fear. We can even suggest precautions to take against troublous influences.

Above all, O people of Arvel, never pity the beings on Earth. If you do, then sorrow will drown you. They know so little of love. They cannot ever know more.

THE VOORTREKKERS

— And he shall see old planets change and alien stars arise—

So swift is resurrection that the words go on which had been in me when last I died. Only after pulsebeats does the strangeness raining through my senses reach my awareness, to make me know that four more decades, and almost nine light-years, have flowed between me and the poet.

Light-years. Light. Everywhere light. Once, a boy, I spent a night camped on a winter mountain-top. Then it entered my bones — and how can anyone who has done likewise ever believe otherwise? — that space is not dark. Maybe this was when the need was born in me, to go up and out into the sky.

I am in the sky now, and of it. Around me stars and stars and jstars are crowding, until there is no room for blackness to be more than a crystal which holds them. They are all the colors of reality, from lightning through gold to the duskiest rose, but each one singingly keen. Nebulae are flung among them like veils and clouds, where great suns have died or new worlds are whirling to birth. The Milky Way is a cool torrent, here cloven by the thunderstorm masses

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of galactic center, there open a-glint toward endlessness. I magnify my vision and trace the spiral of our sister maelstrom, a million and a half light-years hence in Andromeda.

Sol is a small glow on the edge of Hercules. Brightest is Sirius, whose blue-white luminance casts shadows of fittings and housings across my hull. I seek and find its companion.

This is not done by optics. The dwarf is barely coming around the giant, lost in glare. What I see, through different sensors, is the X-radiation; what I snuff is a sharp breath of neutrinos mingled with the gale that streams from the other; I swim in an intricate interplay of force-fields, balancing, thrusting, while they caress me; I listen to the skirls and drones, the murmurs and melodies of a universe.

At first I do not hear Korene. If I was a little slow to leave Kipling for these heavens, so I am to leave them for her. Maybe it's more excusable. I must make certain at once, as much as possible, that we are not in danger. Probably we aren't, or the automatons would have restored us to existence before the scheduled moment. But automatons can only judge what they were designed and programmed to judge, by people nine light-years away from yonder mystery, people most likely dust, even as Korene and Joel are surely dust.

Joel, Joel! Korene calls from within me. Are you there?

I open my interior scanners. Her principal body, the one which houses her principal brain, is in motion, carefully testing every part after forty-three years of death. For the thousandth time, the beauty of this seat of her consciousness strikes me. Its darkly sheening shape is only humanlike in the way that an abstract sculpture might be on far, far Earth — those several arms, for instance, or the

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dragonfly head which is not really a head at all— and only this for functional reasons. But something about the slimness and grace of movement recalls Korene who is dust.

She has not yet made contact with any of the specialized auxiliary bodies around her. Instead she has joined a communication circuit to one of mine.

Hi, I flash, rather shakily, for in spite of studies and experiments and simulations, years of them, it is still too tremendous to comprehend, that we are actually approaching Sirius. How are you?

Fine. Everything okay?

Near's I can tell. Why didn't you use voice?

I did. No answer. I yelled. No answer. So I plugged in.