Across a Billion Years Read online

  The last member of our gang is 408b of 1. I'm sorry: that's his name, or hers, or its. It comes from Bellatrix XIV, where the fashion is to call everything by numbers. "408b" is family and personal designation. "1" is the name of the planet; they've got the whole universe numbered, and naturally their own world is Number One. Old 408b is a yellowish-looking vidj with a basically octopoid appearance, round baggy body, five walking tentacles, five grasping tentacles, a row of eyes going all the way around, and a kind of parrot-beak mouth. Its specialty is paleotechnology, and it knows a good deal about the machinery of the High Ones, though so far it hasn't imparted much of that to us. Unlike the rest of us, it isn't happy in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, though it breathes it most of the time; three hours each day it goes off into a breathing chamber for a snootful of straight carbon dioxide. Mirrik thinks that 408b must be in symbiosis with some sort of plant life. Maybe so.

  * * *

  On playing this cube back, I'm unhappy about the way I seem to be putting everybody down. After all, I haven't really seen these people in action yet. I'm going by secondhand report, first impressions, and general cattiness. Maybe this is a top-level archaeological team, or will be when it gets into the field. We'll see. I don't know why I'm so sour tonight, unless I'm just getting shiny synapses from being penned up in this ship so long.

  Three days more and the curtain goes up. I can't wait.

  Happy birthday again, Lorie. To you. To me. To us.

  TWO

  August 16, 2375 Higby V

  We are here.

  We did our flip-flop from ultradrive to ordinary drive right on schedule, but it wasn't as interesting as the squirmy business of going in the other direction; and then we went into orbit around Higby V and made a ho-hum landing. And got out fast, and went a little chimpo with joy at emerging from captivity.

  It was a wild scene. Higby V doesn't have a real spaceport, just a big bleak empty stretch of land with some buildings at one end of it, and we came pouring out of the ship and went capering around without having to worry about port regulations. Mirrik ran up and down the field, bellowing and stamping his feet, and I did a crazy kind of dance with Jan Mortenson, and Steen Steen danced all by him/herself, and Dr. Horkkk forgot his dignity and climbed a tree, and so on. Even Kelly Watchman, who as an android doesn't suffer from a wound-up nervous system, looked relieved to be off that ship. Meanwhile the crewmen stood around tapping their skulls at us and otherwise indicating their scorn for the cargo of chimpo vidjes that they had just finished hauling across ultraspace. I can't blame them. We must have seemed pretty weird.

  Then we got settled in.

  Higby V is not a homey, cheering place. Maybe it was, a billion years ago when the High Ones had their outpost here. But, like Mars, which also has gone downhill a bit since the time of the High Ones, Higby V is something less than an ideal resort world today. It's about the size of Earth, but it has the mass of a Mercury-sized planet, which means low density, low gravity. No heavy elements at all. The atmosphere bled off into space a long time ago, and the oceans evaporated and did the same. There are four continents, with huge basins that once were oceans separating them. During the long spell when the planet had no air, it got a busy bombardment of meteors and other space debris, and so there are craters everywhere, same as on Mars.

  A terraforming crew was here seventy years back. They planted atmosphere-generators, and by now there's a decent quantity of air, a little thin, but enough to support life. Unfortunately that causes a wind, which Higby V didn't have previously, and the wind comes sweeping across those barren plains like a knife, scooping up the sand and swirling it around. Plant life is gradually taking hold and will keep the sand down, but not for a while. The current project here is to create a self-sustaining water supply by setting up a standard evaporation-condensation-precipitation cycle, and all along the horizon you can see the hydrolysis pylons turning gas into water day and night. The immediate effect of this is to produce one miserable downpour every five or six hours.

  I shouldn't crank too much however. If it weren't for the erosion that all this rain and wind has caused lately, the High Ones site would never have been uncovered.

  I can imagine a more congenial place to do archaeological field work, though. The temperature here hovers just above freezing all the time; the sky is never anything but gray; the sun is an old and tired one, and doesn't break through the clouds very often; and there are no cities here, no settlements more elaborate than pioneer squatments, no recreation facilities, nothing. You have to be Dedicated to enjoy it out here.

  "What use is this planet to anybody?" Jan Morten-son wanted to know. "Why did they bother terraforming' it?"

  Steen Steen suggested it might have radioactives. Mirrik squashed that stupid idea, pointing out that there were no metals heavier than tin here, and not much even of the lighter ones. Pilazinool believed the place had some strategic importance, maybe as a refueling stop or a monitoring station for the more valuable worlds in the next system over. But Leroy Chang, who has your true Harvard man's knack for being anti-Earth wherever possible, blurted his own explanation for why we had converted this planet to a place fit for Earthmen: politics and greed. We grabbed it, he said, to keep anybody else from having it. Pure and simple imperialism. Dumb imperialism, too, since we've spent a couple billion credits a year since the turn of the century to maintain and develop a place that has no natural resources, no tourist potential, and no other intrinsic value.

  Dr. Schein challenged this interpretation, and off everybody went on a political discussion. Except me. That's one pocket I refuse to climb into.

  While this was going on, Mirrik got bored and wandered away, and began digging up the turf just to have something to do. He tusked up a couple of tons of dirt in a restless way, stopped, peered into the hole he had made, and let out a booming yell. You'd have thought he accidentally had uncovered a cache of High Ones artifacts.

  Well, he hadn't. But he had found a burial ground of Higby V natives. Maybe eighty centimeters down, the extinct inhabitants of this planet had parked about a dozen specimens, complete with weapon points, bone necklaces, and long strings of what looked like teeth. The skeletons were short and squat, with huge hind legs and little grasping paws on top.

  "Cover it up," Dr. Schein ordered.

  Mirrik protested. Since we were waiting around anyway for the military escort that was supposed to convoy us to our real work site, he wanted to amuse himself by digging this stuff. Saul Shahmoon was curious about it too. But Dr. Schein rightly pointed out that we had come here to excavate High Ones artifacts, not to fission around with the remains of minor local civilizations. We had no business disturbing this site; it would be a kind of vandalism if we did, since it rightfully belongs to archaeologists who are specialists in the Higby V native race. If there aren't any such specialists now, there will be someday. Mirrik saw the logic of that and carefully backfilled what he had unearthed.

  Score one for Dr. Schein. I admire professionalism.

  At last our military escort arrived and transported us from the landing area to the collection of bubbleshacks that passes for Higby V's greatest metropolis. There we had a vastness of triviations to take care of. Dr. Schein handled the job of making sure our funds had been transferred into a local account, so we'd be able to get food and supplies at the base PX. Such financial details are supposed to be handled automatically by Galaxy Central, but nobody with a proper reverence for stash ever assumes that Galaxy Central gets anything straight, which is why Dr. Schein checked. Checking involved plugging into the telepath hookup. The TP on duty was a surly vidj named Marge Hotchkiss, and if you ever hook horns with her in the course of your daily work, Lorie, give her a nasty overload for me, will you? This Hotchkiss person was plump and plain, with piggy little gray eyes and a very visible mustache. About thirty-five, I guess. Except for her TP powers she is probably an extraordinarily ordinary person, the kind normally destined for a life of quiet spinsterhood in so
me decayed rooming house; but out here she's one of about fifty women on a planet populated by several thousand men, and that has made her arrogant beyond her station. When Dr. Schein asked her to make the hookup, she gave him a slicy smirk and insisted on his thumbprint first. He explained that he wasn't drawing on his thumb account to make the call, that he was merely requisitioning credit information from Galaxy Central and didn't have to pay. She wanted his thumb on record anyway. So he gave her the print, and then she took her sweet time about making the linkup. "Lots of interference on the line," she told us.

  Completely phony, that's sure. The thing about telepathy that makes it the only practical means of interstellar communication, of course, is that there isn't any interference, no static, no relativistic time-lag, none of the headaches and slowdowns you get in a normal communications channel. (Blot that "normal"! What I mean, of course, is "mechanical.") All that Marge Hotchkiss had to do was reach out, grab the next TP in the relay chain, and send our message heading at instantaneous propagation toward Galaxy Central. It was her pleasure to stall, though. Finally she put the message through, and confirmed that the credit balance transfer had been made.

  Dr. Schein, Dr. Horkkk, and Pilazinool went off to register their thumbprints, or equivalent identifications, so they could draw against the account here. Saul Shahmoon was given the job of picking up our excavation permit from the base headquarters. The rest of us had nothing much to do for a while, and I started to make talk with the Hotchkiss creature.

  "My sister's in the TP network," I said.

  "Oh."

  "Her name's Lorie Rice. She works out of Earth."

  "Oh."

  "I thought maybe you knew her. You TP people generally make contact with each other all over the place. Sooner or later you must come in touch with everyone else in the whole communications net."

  "I don't know her."

  "Lorie Rice," I said. "She's very interesting; I have to say so. I mean, she has this wonderful curiosity about the whole universe, she wants to know everything about everything. That's because she's bedridden, she can't get around anywhere much, and so the TP net sort of serves as eyes and ears for her. She gets to see the whole universe through other people's eyes, via telepathy. And if you'd ever had any contact with her, you'd remember it, because—"

  "Look, I'm busy. Go get sposhed."

  "Is that friendly? I'm just trying to make a little talk. You know, I miss my sister a whole lot, and it doesn't cost you anything if I ask you if you've ever talked to her. I—"

  She brushed me off by rolling her eyeballs up into her head so that only the whites showed. It was her cute way of announcing that she was going into another TP linkup.

  "Cut yourself on your own slice," I muttered, and turned away.

  Jan Mortenson had been standing beside me. Now she said, "I didn't realize your sister was a TP communicator. How exciting that must be!"

  "Especially for someone like her," I said. I told Jan about you being paralyzed and forced to spend your whole life in a hospital bed. Jan was very sympathetic. She wanted to know why they couldn't work some kind of Shilamakka-style transplant to put you in a synthetic body that would let you get around. This is the obvious question that everybody asks, and I explained how we investigated that a long time ago and found it was too dangerous to try in your case.

  "How long has she been like this?" Jan asked.

  "Since she was born. At first they thought they could correct it surgically, but—"

  Then she wanted to know how old you were, and I said you were my twin, and Jan turned a very radioactive shade of scarlet and said, "If she's a TP, and you're her twin, then you must be a TP too, and you must be reading my mind right this minute!”

  So I had to spell it all out: that we're fraternal twins and not identical twins, obviously, since you're a girl and I'm not, and that telepathy isn't necessarily shared by fraternal twin pairs, and that as a matter of fact you're the only TP in the family. I added that it's a common error to believe that a TP can read the mind of a non-TP. "They can make contact only with other TP-positive minds," I said. "Lorie can't read me. And I can't read you, or anybody else, but Fat Marge over there can read Lorie if she wants to."

  "How sad for your sister," Jan said. "To have a twin brother and not to be able to reach him with TP. Especially when she's shut in and has such a need to know what's happening outside her room."

  "She's a brave girl," I said, which is true. "She copes. Besides, she doesn't need me. She's got thousands of TP pals all over the universe. She spends eight hours a day hooked into the commercial telepathic communications link, relaying messages, and then I think she spends the other sixteen hours hooked in just for fun, getting TP gossip from all over. If she ever sleeps I never saw her at it. Life gave her a raw deal, sure, but she has some compensations."

  Jan was very deeply interested in hearing all about you, and I told her a lot more. Which I don't need to repeat here, since you know all of it anyway. I think I may have underestimated Jan slightly. In the past few days I've started to see that her beautiful-but-dim act is only a superficial habit; she's actually a lot more sensitive and interesting than she seems. I don't know where I got this idiot notion that pretty girls are always shallow. Not that she's any blazing genius, but there's more to her than curves and a ten-kilowatt smile.

  At this point most of our miscellaneous registration and checking-in had been accomplished. But we stood around for half an hour more waiting for Saul Shahmoon to get back with our excavation permit. Dr. Schein couldn't understand what was taking so long. He was afraid that Saul had run into some kind of bureaucratic roadblock that might prevent us from working on this planet altogether. That got Pilazinool so upset that he unscrewed his left arm up to the second elbow.

  At last Saul came back. With the excavation permit. Seems he hadn't had any trouble about that. He had spent forty-five minutes at the PX post office, though, getting a set of Higby V stamps for his collection.

  We loaded our gear into a landcrawler and off we went.

  Night was falling, fast and hard. Higby V doesn't have any moons, and it's the sort of planet where, if you're close to the equator, as we are, night comes on like a switch was thrown. Zit! and it's dark. Our driver managed to keep us from going into any craters, though, and in an hour we were at the site.

  Dr. Schein, who had been here last year when the discovery was made, had arranged for three bubbleshacks to be blown, one as a laboratory and two for dormitories. In addition a big curving shield of plastic covered the hillside outcropping where the High Ones artifacts had been spotted.

  A complex moral thing developed when it came time to assign us to dorm space. I think you'll enjoy mulling it over.

  The problem started from the fact that there are no partitions, and hence no privacy, inside the bubbleshacks. We have two unmarried Earthborn females among us, and according to the old silly tribal taboos it would be immoral and improper to let Jan and Kelly bunk with the boys. (The fact that Kelly couldn't care less about privacy is irrelevant, since androids claim total equality with flesh-and-blood human beings, including the right to share our neuroses. Kelly has full human-female status, and to treat her otherwise would be to commit racial discrimination. Right?)

  What Dr. Schein proposed to do was put all the human males—himself, Leroy Chang, Saul Shahmoon, and myself—into one bubble, and Jan and Kelly into the other. Okay, that got around the elemental decency situation. But—

  Jan and Kelly would thereby have to bunk with the aliens, several of whom were males of their species. (Steen Steen and 408b could be excluded from that category, Steen because he/she is of both sexes and 408b because it doesn't seem to be of either.) I guess some stuffy souls on Earth might get upset that Jan and Kelly would be dressing and undressing in front of males of any sort, even alien males. (They might get upset about Jan, anyway; stuffy types don't seem to worry much about the living conditions of androids.) However, that wasn't what troubled Dr. Schein.
He knew that Kelly is without inhibitions; and that Jan, while she's been observing the usual taboos around the four human males, doesn't really think that Pilazinool or Dr. Horkkk or Mirrik pose any threat to her virtue. He was worried about offending the aliens, though. If Jan observed clothing taboos with us and not with them, couldn't that be construed as meaning that she regarded them as second-class life-forms? Shouldn't a girl be modest in front of all intelligent creatures, or else none? Where is the equality of galactic races, of which we hear so much, in such a case?