“We lost three people. But otherwise, Captain, believe me, the news we bear is all wonderful. Besides being anxious to get home-you will understand that-we can hardly wait to spread our story through the Union.”
“Did you-” Archer paused, as if half afraid to utter the rest. Quite possibly he was. Joelle heard him draw breath before he plunged: “Did you find the Others?”
“No. What we did find was an advanced civilization, nonhuman but friendly, in contact with scores of inhabited worlds. They’re eager to establish close relations with us, too; they offer what my crew and I think are some fantastically good deals. No, they know nothing more about the Others than we do, except for the additional gates they’ve learned how to use. But we, the next several generations of man will have as much as we can do to assimilate what the Betans will give.
“Now I’m sorry, Captain, I realize you’d love to hear everything, but that would take days, and anyhow, we have orders not to linger. The Council of the World Union commissioned us and requires we report first to it. That is reasonable, no? Accordingly, we request clearance to proceed straight on to the Solar System.”
Again Archer was mute a while. Was something more than surprise at work in him? On impulse, Joelle called on the ship’s exoinstrumental circuits. An immediate inrush of data lured her. It wasn’t a full perception, but still, as far as possible, how easy and how blessed to comprehend yonder cosmos as a whole and become one with it! Resisting, she concentrated solely on radar and navigational information. In a split pulsebeat, she calculated how to bring Faraday onto her viewscreen.
There was no particular reason for that. She knew what the watchcraft looked like: a tapered gray cylinder so as to be capable of planetfall, missile launcher and ray projector recessed into the sleekness-wholly foreign to the huge, equipment-bristling, fragile sphere which was Emissary. When the picture changed, she didn’t magnify and amplify to make the vessel visible across a thousand kilometers. Instead, the sight of two dully glowing globes, red and green, coming into the scanner field, against the stars, snatched at her. Those were markers around the T machine. The Others had placed them. Her augmented senses told her that a third likewise happened to be visible on the receiver; it was colored ultraviolet.
Vaguely she heard Archer: “-quarantine?” and Langendijk: `Well, if they insist, but we walked on Beta, again and again for eight years, and we have a Betan native with us, and nobody’s caught any diseases. Pinski and de Carvalho, our biologists, studied the subject and tell me cross-infection is impossible.
Biochemistries are too unlike.”
Caught up in the beacons, she quite stopped listening. Oh, surely someday, she, holothete, could speak mind to mind with their makers, if ever she found them.
Though what would they make of her, perhaps in more than one meaning of the phrase? Even physical appearance might conceivably not be altogether irrelevant to them. It was an odd thing to do in these circumstances, but for the first time in almost a decade Joelle Ky briefly considered her body as flesh, not machinery.
At fifty-eight Earth-years of age, her hundred and seventy-five centimeters remained slim, verging on gaunt, her skin clear and pale and only lightly lined. In that and the high cheekbones her genes kept a bit of the history, which her name also remembered. She had been born in North America, in what was left of the old United States before it federated with Canada. Her features were delicate, her eyes large and dark. Hair once sable, bobbed Side 3
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
immediately below the ears, was the hue of iron. Clad now in the working uniform of the ship, a coverall with abundant pockets and snaploops, she seldom wore anything very much more stylish at home.
A smile flickered. How silly can I get? If one thing is certain about the Others, it is that none of them will come courting me! Could it be the thought of Dan, yonder on Demeter? Additional nonsense. Why, at Beta I became eight years his senior.