He could not stay seated beneath that mood; he rose to meet it. “What does this imply?”
“Don’t you see? That death isn’t the end. That. . . something lives on afterward.”
“I have always believed that.” Wryness: “I am supposed to.”
“Here, scientific proof — what that could mean to … to everybody!”
He kept himself judicious. “Fascinating. I certainly want to know more. But your inference strikes me as a non sequitur. I think the soul, God, the purpose and meaning of existence, will always be matters of faith.”
“We’ll see,” said defiant enthusiasm.
The crew sat in their common room, in the half-ring of council. Nansen was at the center. Dayan stood before them. At her side, Mokoena with a parleur translated for the Tahirians who waited at the edge. Stars gleamed through night in the viewscreens, Milky Way, nebulae, sister galaxies.
“What we are learning — and learning to wonder about — is marvelous and magnificent and overwhelming,” Dayan said into the hush. “A hundred years would not teach us everything. A thousand years might not. But, with all respect for the biology and astrophysics and whatever else, this newest finding is too important to wait for a regular report.
“I want to emphasize that it is a finding, neither a possibility nor a speculation but a fact. The Holont appears to have made a special effort to explain it to us. I have gone through the mathematics repeatedly, with computer aid, and verified the theorem. I have a feeling that this is what the Holont has really been working toward — because it has had word from the future about what this can mean to the future.”
She heard the susurrus of human and nonhuman breath.
“The Tahirian physicists were wrong,” she told them. “I don’t say they lied. Doubtless they were quick to believe what they wanted to believe, a reason to end starfaring. It doesn’t matter. The truth is, a zero-zero transition is no threat.
“It has zero probability of upsetting the cosmic equilibrium. Or less than zero. You see, the energy transfer actually makes a bond, like the transfers of virtual particles that create the forces holding atoms together. Yes, the effect is quantum-small. But it is finite, it is real. Every voyage brings the universe that much further from the metastable state, toward true stability that can last forever.”
Mokoena’s fingers flickered. Tahirian manes trembled. From Emil wafted a scent like wind off the sea.
Nansen stood up. His look passed over each of them before he said, quite calmly, “Now we must go home.”
CHAPTER 43
No trace remained of Terralina. After Tahirians demolished the buildings, fourteen hundred Tahirian years of weather and growth erased whatever was left. They worked likewise on the site itself. Where a stream had run through a meadow surrounded by forest, a river flowed brown and sluggish across turfland. Trees had become sparse. Their kinds were different, too, low, gnarly, their foliage in darker browns and reds; nor was wildlife the same. Weather hung warm and damp, with frequent wild rain-showers. The planet’s axis was shifting, the polar zones shrinking. Someday they would again march forward.
The humans had scant reason to care. They would only be here a terrestrial month, the span grudgingly granted them — a month of spaciousness, sunlight, wind, romp, rest, not virtual but real, before they embarked for unknown Earth. They erected their temporary shelters and settled in.
It was doubtless as well, though, that the place was altered in all except its isolation. Too many memories could have awakened.
The sky was cloudless when Sundaram and Dayan went for a walk. They moved rather carefully, not entirely reaccustomed to the weight. Heat drew vapor from wet soil, a fog that eddied upward a few centimeters, white above umber, and baked pungencies out of it. Tiny wings glittered by; larger ones cruised overhead. From the river, half a kilometer off, hidden behind reedlike thickets, boomed the call of some animal, over and over.
“Yes,” Sundaram said, “it was enlightening to speak with those linguists.” Segregated though the crew was, occasional scholars visited.
Conversation almost had to be in person if it was to deal with anything but trivia. He smiled rather wistfully. “And good to see dear old Simon again, one last time. Our talk clarified certain points for me. I will have much to think about on the way home.”