Poul Anderson: The Long Night

She tilted her head and waited with that relaxed alertness he liked to see. He wondered how foolish the grin was on his face. Attempting to recover dignity, he embarked on a roundabout introduction.

“You wondered why I insisted on exploring the cluster center, and in such detail. Probably I ought to have explained myself from the beginning. But I was afraid of raising false hopes. I’d no guarantee that things would turn out to be the way I’d guessed. Failure, I thought, would be too horrible for you, if you knew what success would mean. But I was working on your behalf, nothing else.

“You see, because my civilization is founded on individualism, it makes property rights quite basic. In particular, if there aren’t any inhabitants or something like that, discoverers can claim ownership within extremely broad limits.

“Well, we… you… our expedition has met the requirements of discovery as far as those planets are concerned. We’ve been there, we’ve proven what they’re like, we’ve located them as well as might be without beacons—”

He saw how she struggled not to be too sanguine. “That isn’t a true location,” she said. “I can’t imagine how we will ever lead anybody back to precisely those stars.”

“Nor can I,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter. Because, well, we took an adequate sample. We can be sure now that practically every star in the cluster heart has planets that are made of heavy elements. So it isn’t , necessary, for their exploitation, to go to any particular system. In addition, we’ve learned about hazards and so forth, gotten information that’ll be essential to other people. And therefore”—he chuckled—“I guess we can’t file a claim on your entire Cloud Universe. But any court will award you… us… a fair share. Not specific planets, since they can’t be found right away. Instead, a share of everything. Your crew will draw royalties on the richest mines in the galaxy. On millions of them.”

She responded with thoughtfulness rather than enthusiasm. “Indeed? We did wonder, on Makt, if you might not be hoping to find abundant metals. But we decided that couldn’t be For why would anyone come here for them? Can they not be had more easily, closer to home?”

Slightly dashed, he said, “No. Especially when most worlds in this frontier are comparatively metal-poor. They do have some veins of ore, yes. And the colonists can extract anything from the oceans, as on Serieve. But there’s a natural limit to such a process. In time, carried out on the scale that’d be required when population has grown… it’s be releasing so much heat that planetary temperature would be affected.”

“That sounds farfetched.”

“No. A simple calculation will prove it. According to historical records, Earth herself ran into the problem, and not terribly long after the industrial era began. However, quite aside from remote prospects, people will want to mine these cluster worlds immediately. True, it’s a long haul, and operations will have to be totally, automated. But the heavy elements that are rare elsewhere are so abundant here as to more than make up for those extra costs.” He smiled. “I’m afraid you can’t escape your fate. You’re going to be… not wealthy. To call you ‘wealthy’ would be like calling a supernova ‘luminous.’ You’ll command more resources than many whole civilizations have done.”

Her look upon him remained grave. “You did this for us? You should not have. What use would riches be to us if we lost you?”

He remembered that he couldn’t have expected her to carol about this. In her culture, money was not unwelcome, but neither was it an important goal. So what she had just’said meant less than if a girl of the Commonalty had spoken. Nevertheless, joy kindled in him. She sensed that, laid her hand across his, and murmured, “But your thought was noble.”

He couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He laughed aloud. “Noble?” he cried. “I’d call it clever. Fiendishly clever. Don’t you see? I’ve given you Kirkasant back!”

She gasped.

He jumped up and paced exuberant before her. “You could wait a few years till your cash reserves grow astronomical and buy as big a fleet as you want to search the cluster. But it isn’t needful. When word gets out, the miners will come swarming. They’ll plant beacons, they’ll have to. The grid will be functioning within one year, I’ll bet. As soon as you can navigate, identify where you are and where you’ve been, you can’t help finding your home—in weeks!”

She joined him, then, casting herself into his arms, laughing and weeping. He had known of emotional depth in her, beneath the schooled reserve. But never before now had he found as much warmth as was hers.

Long, long afterward, air locks linked and she bade him good night. “Until tomorrow,” she said.

“Many tomorrows, I hope.”

“And I hope. I promise.”

He watched the way she had gone until the locks closed again and the ships parted company. A little drunkenly, not with alcohol, he returned to the saloon for a nightcap.

“Turn off that color thing,” he said. “Give me an outside view.”

The ship obeyed. In the screen appeared stars, and the cloud from which stars were being born. “Her sky,” Laure said. He flopped on to the couch and admired.

“I might as well start getting used to it,” he said. “I expect I’ll spend a lot of vacation time, at least, on Kirkasant.”

“Daven,” said Jaccavrie.

She was not in the habit of addressing him thus, and so gently. He started. “Yes?”

“I have been—” Silence hummed for a second. “I have been wondering how to tell you. Any phrasing, any inflection, could strike you as something I computed to produce an effect. I am only a machine.”

Though unease prickled him, he leaned forward to touch a bulkhead. It trembled a little with her engine energy. “And I, old girl,” he said. “Or else you also are an organism. Were both people.”

“Thank you,” said the ship, almost too low to be heard.

Laure braced himself. “What did you have to tell me?” She forgot about keeping her voice humanized. The words clipped forth: “I finished the chromosome analysis some time ago. Thereafter I tried to discourage certain tendencies I noticed in you. But now I have no way to avoid giving you the plain truth. They are not human on that planet.”

“What?” he yelled. The glass slipped from his hand and splashed red wine across the deck. “You’re crazy! Records, traditions, artifacts, appearance, behavior—”

The ship’s voice came striding across his. “Yes, they are human descended. But their ancestors had to make an enormous adaptation. The loss of night vision is merely indicative. The fact that they can, for example, ingest heavy metals like arsenic unharmed might be interpreted as simple immunity. But you will recall that they find unarsenated food tasteless. Did that never suggest to you that they have developed a metabolic requirement for the element? And you should have drawn a conclusion from their high tolerance for ionizing radiation. It cannot be due to their having stronger proteins, can it? No, it must be because they have evolved a capacity for extremely rapid and error-free repair of chemical damage from that source. This in turn is another measure of how different their enzyme system is from yours.

“Now the enzymes, of course, are governed by the DNA of the cells, which is the molecule of heredity—”

“Stop,” Laure said. His speech was as flat as hers. “I see what you’re at. You are about to report that your chromosome study proved the matter. My kind of people and hers can’t reproduce with each other.”

“Correct,” Jaccavrie said.