No!
Let me out!—and I flee down endless echoful corridors. Fear howls at my heels. It is myself that pursues.
She was alone, save for the medical machine that watched over her. For a while she merely shuddered. The breath sawed in her throat. Her sweat stank.
Terror faded. The sense of unspeakable loss that followed went deeper and lasted longer. Only as that too drained from her did she gain the strength to weep.
I’m sorry, Phyltis, Faunus, Nils, everybody, she called into the empty room. You meant so well. I wanted to belong, I wanted to find meaning in this world of yours. I cannot. To me, becoming what I must become would be to destroy all I am, the whole of the centuries and the folk forgotten by everyone else and the comradeship in secret that formed me. I was born too soon for you. It is now too late for me. Can you understand, and forgive?
THEY MET in reality. You cannot embrace an image. Fortune favored them. They were able to use a visitor house at Lake Mapourika control reserve, on the South Island of what Hanno to this day thought of as New Zealand.
The weather was as lovely as the setting. They gathered around a picnic table. He remembered another such board beneath another sky, long and long ago. Here a greensward sloped down to still waters in which forest and the white mountains behind stood mirrored. Woodland fragrances arose with the climbing of the sun. From high overhead drifted birdsong.
The eight matched the quietness of the morning. Yesterday passions had stormed and clamored. At the head of the table, Hanno said:
“I probably needn’t speak. We seem to be pretty well agreed. Just the same, it’s wise to talk this over calmly before making any final decision.
“We have no more home, anywhere on Earth. We’ve tried in our different ways to fit in, and people have tried to help us, but we finally face the fact that we can’t and never shall. We’re dinosaurs, left over in the age of the mammals.”
Aliyat shook her head. “No, we’re left-over humans,” she declared bitterly. “The last alive.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Macandal replied. “They are changing, more and faster than we can match, but I wouldn’t take it on myself to define what is human.”
“Ironic,” Svoboda sighed. “Should we have foreseen? A world where we could, at last, come forth would necessarily be a world altogether unlike any that ever was before.”
“Self-satisfied,” Wanderer said. “Turned inward.”
“You’re being unfair too,” Macandal told him. “Tremendous things are going on. They simply aren’t for us. The creativity, the discovery, has moved to—what? Inner space.”
“Perhaps,” Yukiko whispered. “But what does it find there? Emptiness. Meaninglessness.”
”From your viewpoint,” Patulcius replied. “I admit that I too am unhappy, for my own reasons. Still, when the Chinese stopped their seafaring under the Ming, they did not stop being artists.”
“But they sailed no more,” Tu Shan said. “The robots tell us of countless new worlds among the stars; and nobody cares.”
“Earth is pretty special, as we should have expected all along,” Hanno reminded him needlessly. “The nearest planet reported where humans might be able to live in natural surroundings is almost fifty light-years from here. Why mount an enormous effort to send a handful of colonists that far, possibly to their doom, when everybody’s doing well at home?”
“So they truly could live their—our own kind of lives again, on our own land,” Tu Shan said.
“A community,” Patulcius chimed in.
“If we failed, we could seek elsewhere.” Svoboda’s voice rang. “If nothing else, we would be human beings out yonder, doing and daring for ourselves.”
Her look challenged Hanno. The rest likewise turned toward him. Although until now he had barely hinted at his intentions, it was no great surprise when he spoke. Yet somehow the words came before them like a suddenly drawn sword.
“I think I can get us a ship.”
10
THE CONFERENCE was not a meeting of persons, nor even their images. That is, Hanno’s representation went around the globe, and faces appeared shiftingly before his eyes; but this was mere supplement, a minute additional data input. Some of yonder minds were computer-linked, or in direct touch with each other, from time to time or all the time. Others were electronic. He thought of them not by names, though names were known to him, but by function; and the same function often spoke with differing voices. What he confronted, what enveloped him, were the ruling intellects of the world.